Reorienting the Critique of the Capitalist World System beyond the Dichotomy between Trade vs. Production Relations

Hae-Yung Song

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2015.533

Abstract

The question of 'capitalist transition' has been one of the central themes of Marxist scholarship including world-system analysis, 1 and much effort has been made to identify how the capitalist mode of production came into being at a particular time in a particular location , and what historical conditions gave rise to it. The debate between Andre Gunder Frank and more broadly world-system analysis and Robert Brenner in the 1970s constitutes one of the key instances of this debate. Since Brenner called world-system analysis 'neo-Smithian ' and criticized it for confusing the generic concept of market economy with capitalism (namely, capitalist social relations), the debate over capitalist transition has often been described as a contention over whether trade or production should be given primacy in explaining the emergence of capitalism: has the expansion of the market through intensifying trade linkages, or the establishment of social relations of production caused the rise of capitalism (see Bergeson 1984)? Furthermore, as Bergesen points out in his essay, the debate between Frank (and Immanuel Wallerstein) and Brenner also reflects their different views on the concept of 'capitalist society , ' particularly in terms of its boundary. While the former takes the totality of the world-economy as the unit of analysis and brings to the fore questions of global inequality and the unequal distribution of wealth , the so-called core-periphery relations, Brenner emphasises 'internal ' social relations of production and class struggle, thereby projecting the notion that society in the capitalist mode of production is a nationally contained entity. Bergesen (2015) detects an irreconcilable tension between world-system analysis and more traditional Marxists such as Brenner , stating that [m]ode of production and world-economy, then, are two different economic systems, and there is no way to move theoretically from relations between whole zones of the world to relations between classes within a zone. The apparent irreconcilability between world-system analysis and Marxist analyses that are implicitly based on a form of methodological nationalism seems obvious enough. Brenner and his followers emphasize, time and again, the historical specificity of capitalism as distinct from previous modes of production in relation to class relations based on wage labour and the ways in which the dominated get access to the means of subsistence. It is implied in this approach that capitalist transition is assessed by the degree to which forced

Highlights

" ... the expansion of foreign trade, the basis of the capitalist mode of production in its infancy, has become its own product, with the further progress of the capitalist mode of production, through the innate necessity of this mode of production, its need for an ever-expanding market."
Since Brenner called world-system analysis 'neo-Smithian ' and criticized it for confusing the generic concept of market economy with capitalism, the debate over capitalist transition has often been described as a contention over whether trade or production should be given primacy in explaining the emergence of capitalism: has the expansion of the market through intensifying trade linkages, or the establishment of social relations of production caused the rise of capitalism? as Bergesen points out in his essay, the debate between Frank and Brenner reflects their different views on the concept of 'capitalist society, ' in terms of its boundary
In search of what Bergesen (2015) describes as "the essential operational logic of the world-trade-economy away from the historically contingent, and always changing, world-economy based upon the capitalist mode of production," Frank finds in multilateral trade linkages the constant aspects of the political economy of the world-system

Summary

Introduction

" ... the expansion of foreign trade, the basis of the capitalist mode of production in its infancy, has become its own product, with the further progress of the capitalist mode of production, through the innate necessity of this mode of production, its need for an ever-expanding market.". While the former takes the totality of the world-economy as the unit of analysis and brings to the fore questions of global inequality and the unequal distribution of wealth , the so-called core-periphery relations, Brenner emphasises 'internal ' social relations of production and class struggle, thereby projecting the notion that society in the capitalist mode of production is a nationally contained entity.

Results

Conclusion