Guan Feng: Pros and Cons of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “Political Marxism
March 2017, Source: Journal of Nanjing University: Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences
Author: Prof. and tutor in the School of Marxism, South China Normal University
“Political Marxism” is an important academic school of contemporary foreign Marxism, which has a significant influence in the British and American academic circles. Its main representatives include Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, George Comninel, Hannes Lacher, Benno Teschke, etc. Wood and Brenner are jointly known as the flag bearers of “political Marxism” and are recognized as Marxist theorists and political scientists around the world. “Political Marxism” was formed in the 1970s. After more than 40 years of development, three generations of academic communities have been formed . The first generation includes Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiskens Wood, Neal Wood, George Cominaire, Charles Post, Harvey Kaye, and others. The second generation includes Hannes Rachel, Beno Tasca, Michael A. Zmolek Samuel Knafo, Geoff Kennedy. The third generation includes Xavier Lafrance, Eren Duzgun, and others.
Ellen Meiksins Wood has made a penetrating critique of post-Marxists represented by Laclau and Mouffe with her brilliant words such as “retreat from class” and “historical change without history”, and is well-known in the international left-wing thought circle. Ellen Meiksins Wood has tried her best to defend the contemporary timeliness of the core concepts of historical materialism such as class struggle and mode of production and has fought against the turbulent tide of post-structuralism and postmodernism, willing to be an “unfashionable alternative”, so that some people say that she holds a “fundamentalist belief” in Marxism.
Strictly speaking, this judgment is full of misunderstandings and far from fair.
Wood is by no means a dogmatic Marxist. In fact, she fights on two fronts. She not only adheres to the basic position of Marxism and vigorously refutes the discourse politics of post-Marxism, but also resolutely draws a clear line with the Second International and Stalinism, and mercilessly criticizes technological determinism and linear universal historical views, and then “reconstructs historical materialism.” Wood’s adherence to and unique interpretation of the importance of the concept of mode of production is the most fundamental support behind this two-front battle and “reconstruction”.
Therefore, in-depth research on Wood’s “reconstruction” of historical materialism has at least three meanings:
First, Wood’s own academic level, influence and her adherence to the basic position of Marxism deserve our attention and respect.
Secondly, Wood’s “reconstruction” not only has original new construction and unique interpretation, but also has its own origins, continues a certain academic tradition, and has the significance of “academic community”. Research on Wood is not only a personal study, but also a study of the logic of academic inheritance.
Thirdly, more importantly, Wood deeply touches on the basic concepts and core propositions of historical materialism. The gains and losses, rights and wrongs are of great reference, reference and reflection value to us.
Unfortunately, although the China’s academic community has paid more and more attention to Wood, there is still a lack of research based on or highlighting the second and third meanings I have mentioned above.
1. The Mode of Production and the Reinterpretation of Historical Materialism: Thompson and Brenner
As we all know, the mode of production is the core concept of historical materialism. It is a symbolic term of Marxist historical epistemology, widely known and which is far-reaching. Baudrillard specifically pointed out that the mode of production is “the fundamental concept of Marxist analysis”, which implements “the logic of material production and the historical dialectics of the mode of production”;
Kolakowski is convinced that in Marxism, the mode of production is not only the basic tool for dividing historical periods, but also the basic tool for understanding history as a single whole; and Hobsbawm asserts that “the mode of production is the basis of our human social changes and human social relations and understanding of the historical dynamics of human society”.
Botomore and others argue that “this term mode of production has been formulated as a core element of a systematic explanation of history since Marx used it, that is, history is considered to be a continuous process composed of different modes of production”.
And Balibar further said that Marx’s “special object of the evolutionary diagram is the history of the ‘social structure’ that is considered to be determined by its own ‘mode of production'”; Rigby argued that mode of production “plays a key role in the Marxist explanation of social structure and historical change”.
However, as Bottomore and others have said, “Marx did not use this term in any simple and consistent sense.” In Marx’s historical materialism texts, the mode of production does have multiple meanings. Cohen believes that there are three meanings, namely the material mode or technical mode of production, the social mode, and the mixed mode (including both the material mode and the social mode). This point has been recognized by many people. Such an important core concept, with such rich and complex connotations, is prone to different interpretations and explanations.
The concept of mode of production has therefore become an important starting point and basic entry point for successors to reinterpret or reconstruct historical materialism. This is very obvious in British and American Marxist historiography. Among them, Edward Thompson and Robert Brenner, who had a direct influence on Wood and were regarded as her peers, are very typical.
British cultural Marxism
Edward Thompson was a famous British historian and left-wing social activist. Edward Thompson is well-known for his status as the main standard-bearer of British cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism, also known as cultural materialism, is a reflection and criticism of the Second International’s economic-technological determinism and economic materialism. Cultural Marxism advocates the importance and relative independence of social consciousness such as culture, and then re-understands, re-interprets Marxism and historical materialism. Among British cultural materialists, it is generally recognized that Thompson has worked the hardest and achieved remarkable results.
Thompson believes that Marxism has great superiority and rationality in analyzing and explaining history with the help of the core concept of the mode of production; moreover, “theoretical creation based on the concept of the mode of production may be done very badly or very well”, for example, Balibar did very poorly, while Simon Clarke did very well and put forward a clear and concise new explanation, which is quite helpful. Thompson clearly emphasized: “I think the problem is not the central position of the mode of production for any materialist in understanding history, but the understanding of later generations”.
They “make the mistake of confusing the important concept of the mode of production with the narrow economy”, “use economic terms to describe the mode of production”, and then regard the “norms, culture and key concepts embedded in it and constituting the mode of production as secondary things” and determined, and the materialist conception of history is degraded into economic or technological determinism; and “capitalist society cannot be described without power and control relations, concepts of use rights or private ownership, cultural recognition patterns and the unique needs of the mode of production in cultural composition”.
Therefore, Thompson proposed “when we talk about the capitalist mode of production, we are also indicating the core of a special relationship between people, that is, the relationship of exploitation, domination and acquisition that is inseparable from production”. Thompson proposed that to correctly understand the materialist conception of history, we must “turn to the full meaning of the mode of production”.
Thompson’s Views
There are three key points: First, we must fully realize that once we talk about the mode of production, “it also brings us the production relations that men and women are born with (which is also a relationship of control and obedience)”, and the production relations are its core, not the productive forces or technology that the Second International believes.
Second, we must determine that production relations are not equivalent to economic relations. It involves cultural, political, moral and other factors. “Production relations are also relations between people; they are relations of oppression or cooperation; there is a moral logic, just as there is an economic logic that arises from these relations.”
In the eyes of Thompson Clarke deserves recognition because Clarke recognizes that “the production relations that are the basis for these different modes of production… can be manifested in various specific economic, ideological and political forms.”
Thirdly, we must keep in mind that production relations are inseparable from class struggle. They manifest themselves as class struggle and production relations are replaced and changed through class struggle. “In modern society, production relations manifest themselves as class structure and class struggle (sometimes equilibrium)”, and new “power relations, forms of domination and forms of social organization are always the result of struggle.” Therefore, the mode of production itself is not automatically changed by productive forces or technology as orthodox Marxists believes, nor can it automatically determine the change of social forms.
Kaye pointed out that for Thompson, whether the historical development of a mode of production is repetition or change ultimately depends on the result of class struggle. Class struggle plays a decisive role in the change of social forms. Robert Brenner was the director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Social Theory and History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Robert Brenner’s ideas were influenced by British Marxist historians, especially Hilton, and economist Dobb. His lecture “Marxist Social and Historical Theory” is very popular among students.
According to Perry Anderson, Brenner “creates his works from the perspective of a historian in the Marxist tradition”, “but this is an original Marxism, which has little in common with the past orthodox Marxism derived from Capital .” Brenner also admitted that his research on history benefited directly from the pioneering work of Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton and others.
“It was through Dobb that I began to discover that the origins of the new economic development model must be sought in the emerging production relations. This means that when studying the transition from feudal society to capitalist society, we cannot simply start from the perspective of the linear self-development of productive forces (especially technology), but must start from the real root behind this phenomenon, that is… from the contradictory relationship between the feudal landlord class’s appropriation of surplus products by extra-economic means and the peasant class’s limited use of the means of production. … The real reason must be found in the political community behind the economic phenomenon and the complex social production relations system it has constructed.” (Brenner)
Its core proposition is that for historical evolution, “it is crucial to analyze the specific class structure, especially the relatively autonomous process of the construction of property or surplus exploitation relations, and the specific class conflicts it has caused (or not caused). Brenner believes that this analytical approach is very different from that of the Second International, and the key reason is that the two have very different understandings of the core concept of the mode of production. Brenner clearly emphasized: “Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’ has been seriously misused by Marxists in the later Second and Third Internationals, and has a tendency towards technological determinism that should not have been there.”
In the eyes of Brenner, specifically, their problems are: first, although they emphasize that the mode of production is the unity of productive forces and production relations, when analyzing the replacement of social forms and historical evolution based on the mode of production, they overemphasize the decisive role of productive forces and ignore the importance of production relations, making the concept of mode of production productive and technological. In fact, production relations are the core and key of the mode of production.
Secondly, they regard ownership relations, such as distribution, exchange, and consumption relations, as the main content of production relations, and tend to understand production relations in a narrow economic sense, which downplays or weakens the more important class relations. The essence of production relations is the class struggle, conflict, balance (even cooperation) relations formed around production. It is these relations that determine the development of production, the development of productive forces, and the change of social forms.
In order to distinguish, Brenner deliberately created the concept of “social property relations” to replace the usual production relations. Brenner also deliberately pointed out that “capitalist property relations may have appeared before there was a newer production technology than that used by producers under the feudal system”, which means that the so-called “production technology” that people are familiar with that promotes the arrival of capitalism is precisely the continuous development after the emergence of capitalist social property relations;
In the eyes of Brenner “in the view of orthodox Marxism, it is technological innovation, the continuous emergence of new technologies and the corresponding development of productive forces that have prompted the old feudal production relations to withdraw from the stage of history and be replaced by new capitalist production relations. In fact, “social property relations determine the rules of reproduction. People can only engage in a certain form of reproduction under the framework of established social property relations, thus giving rise to different development models with the characteristics of the times. In short, social property relations are both historically specific and politically reproductive. In this way, the causal chain of tracing the history and theory of social development has shifted from the search for some iron laws or rules to the examination of specific, historical and political social property relations.” (Brenner)
Brenner proposed that it is necessary to clarify that “the rise of capitalist property relations is the unconscious result of the reproduction law of pre-capitalist individual production actors and pre-capitalist class conflicts”. The property relations in capitalist society were born out of the class struggle between landlords and peasants in feudal society, or in other words, this struggle led to the disintegration of the property relations in feudal society. Class struggle determined Britain’s transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production in both a fundamental and direct sense. Specifically, the reason why British feudal society withdrew from the stage of history was that the original “political community” – mainly referring to the feudal aristocracy as a whole – could not continue its existence and activities. Faced with the decreasing number of peasants or those who were re-enslaved, as well as their active resistance or passive non-cooperation, the feudal aristocracy could no longer directly strengthen exploitation through political power as before, and could not maintain its original mode of exploitation and class relations. The “political reproduction” of the feudal aristocracy was destroyed, so feudal aristocracy had to take the initiative to adopt the employment system and transform itself into the emerging bourgeoisie. In this sense, the feudal aristocracy and the landlord class themselves became the main promoters of anti-feudalism.
Brenner believes that “the emerging bourgeoisie did not emerge outside the landlords as Dobb saw, due to low production efficiency, which drove the continuous changes in the means of production and working methods. “
Dobb regarded the emerging bourgeoisie as ‘originating from production itself’: a class of free small producers, peasants and handicraftsmen – in the cracks of feudal society – produced a class of industrial and agricultural capitalists, who established hegemony in the bourgeois revolution. In this regard, Dobb also underestimated the key role played by British lords in hindering and weakening small peasant production and thus providing conditions for the development of capitalism through their commercial tenants.” In the eyes of Brenner Dobb gave too much concession to the traditional Marxist productive forces determinism.
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