The 'Articulation' of Modes of Production
Karl Marx’s Economic History contributed a few useful concepts, this was one ..
1) Karl Marx wrote:
Historical Material on Merchant's Capital
The development of trade and commercial capital always gives production a growing orientation towards exchange-value, expands its scope, diversifies it and renders it cosmopolitan, developing money into world money. Trade always has, to a greater or lesser degree, a solvent effect on the pre-existing organizations of production, which in all their various forms are principally oriented to use-value. But how far it leads to the dissolution of the old mode of production depends first and foremost on the solidity and inner articulation of this mode of production itself. And what comes out of this process of dissolution, i.e. what new mode of production arises in place of the old, does not depend on trade, but rather on the character of the old mode of production itself. In the ancient world, the influence of trade and the development of commercial capital always produced the result of a slave economy; or, given a different point of departure, it also meant the transformation of a patriarchal slave system oriented towards the production of the direct means of subsistence into one oriented towards the production of surplus value. In the modern world, on the other hand, its outcome is the capitalist mode of production. It follows that this result is itself conditioned by quite other circumstances than the development of commercial capital
There can be no doubt - and this very fact has led to false conceptions - that the great revolutions that took place in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with the geographical discoveries of that epoch, and which rapidly advanced the development of commercial capital, were a major moment in promoting the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. The sudden expansion of the world market, the multiplication of commodities in circulation, the competition among the European nations for the seizure of Asiatic products and American treasures, the colonial system, all made a fundamental contribution towards shattering the feudal barriers to production. And yet the modern mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages. Compare Holland with Portugal, for example. And whereas in the sixteenth century, and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode, this happened in reverse on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, once it had been created. The world market itself forms the basis for this mode of production. On the other hand, the immanent need that this has to produce on an ever greater scale drives it to the constant expansion of the world market, so that now it is not trade that revolutionizes industry, but rather industry that constantly revolutionizes trade. Moreover, commercial supremacy is now linked with the greater or lesser prevalence of the conditions for large-scale industry. Compare England and Holland, for example. The history of Holland's decline as the dominant trading nation is the history of the subordination of commercial capital to industrial capital. The obstacles that the internal solidity and articulation of pre-capitalist national modes of production oppose to the solvent effect of trade are strikingly apparent in the English commerce with India and China. There the broad basis of the mode of production is formed by the union between small-scale agriculture and domestic industry, on top of which we have in the Indian case the form of village communities based on common property in the soil, which was also the original form in China. In India, moreover, the English applied their direct political and economic power, as masters and landlords, to destroying these small economic communities. In so far as English trade has had a revolutionary effect on the mode of production in India, this is simply to the extent that it has destroyed spinning and weaving, which form an age-old and integral part of this unity of industrial and agricultural production, through the low price of English commodities. In this way it has torn the community to pieces. Even here, their work of dissolution is succeeding only very gradually. These effects are felt still less in China, where no assistance is provided by direct political force. The great economy and saving of time that results from the direct connection of agriculture and manufacture presents a very stubborn resistance here to the products of large scale industry, whose prices include the faux frais [overhead expenses] of the circulation process with which they are every where perforated. In contrast to English trade, Russian trade leaves the economic basis of Asiatic production quite untouched.
The transition from the feudal mode of production takes place in two different ways. The producer may become a merchant and capitalist, in contrast to the agricultural natural economy and the guild-bound handicraft of medieval urban industry. This is the really revolutionary way. Alternatively, however, the merchant may take direct control of production himself. But however frequently this occurs as a historical transition — for example the English clothier of the seventeenth century, who brought weavers who were formerly independent under his control, selling them their wool and buying up their cloth — it cannot bring about the overthrow of the old mode of production by itself, but rather preserves and retains it as its own precondition. Right up to the middle of this century, for example, the manufacturer in the French silk industry, and the English hosiery and lace industries too, was a manufacturer only in name. In reality he was simply a merchant, who kept the weavers working in their old fragmented manner and exercised only control as a merchant; it was a merchant they were really working for. This method always stands in the way of the genuine capitalist mode of production and disappears with its development. Without revolutionizing the mode of production, it simply worsens the conditions of the direct producers, transforms them into mere wage-labourers and proletarians under worse conditions than those directly subsumed by capital, appropriating their surplus labour on the basis of the old mode of production. Somewhat modified, the same relationships are to be found in the manufacture of furniture in London, which is partly carried out on a handicraft basis. This is particularly the case in Tower Hamlets. The whole of furniture production is divided into very many separate branches. One firm just makes chairs, another tables, a third chests and so on. But these firms themselves are conducted more or less on a handicraft basis, by one master with a few journeymen. Despite this, production is on too large a scale to work directly for private clients.
The buyers are the proprietors of furniture stores. On Saturday the master goes to these stores and sells his products, with as much haggling over the price as there is in the pawnshop over an advance on some item or other. These masters need their weekly sale simply to buy more raw material for the coming week and to pay wages. Under these conditions they are really only middlemen between the merchant and their own workers. The merchant is the real capitalist and pockets the greater part of the surplus-value. Things are similar in the transition to manufacture from branches that were formerly pursued as handicrafts or as sidelines to rural industry. The transition to large-scale industry depends on the technical development of the small owner-operated establishment, whether it already employs machines that admit of a handicraft-like operation. Instead of by hand, the machine is now driven by steam, as has been happening recently in the English hosiery trade, for example.
The transition can thus take three forms. First, the merchant becomes an industrialist directly; this is the case with crafts that are founded on trade, such as those in the luxury industries, where the merchants import both raw materials and workers from abroad, as they were imported into Italy from Constantinople in the fifteenth century. Second, the merchant makes the small masters into his middlemen, or even buys directly from the independent producer; he leaves him nominally independent and leaves his mode of production unchanged. Third, the industrialist becomes a merchant and produces directly on a large scale for the market.
In the Middle Ages, the merchant was simply someone who 'transferred' commodities … whether these were produced by guilds or by peasants. The merchant becomes an industrialist, or at least has craftsmen in his employment, and particularly small rural producers. Alternatively, the producer becomes a merchant. Whereas before the master-weaver gradually received his wool from the merchant in small portions and worked along with his journeymen for the merchant, now the weaver buys wool or yarn himself, and sells the merchant his cloth. The elements of production go into the production process as commodities that he has himself bought. And instead of producing for the individual merchant or for particular customers, the weaver now produces for the entire world of commerce. The producer is his own merchant. Commercial capital now simply performs the circulation process. At first, trade is the precondition for the transformation of guild and rural domestic crafts into capitalist businesses, not to mention feudal agriculture. It develops the product into a commodity, partly by creating a market for it, partly by supplying new commodity equivalents and new raw and ancillary materials for production, and thereby opening new branches of production that are based on trade from the very beginning - both on production for the market and world market, and on conditions of production that derive from the world market. As soon as manufacture becomes somewhat stronger, and still more so large-scale industry, it creates a market for itself and uses its commodities to conquer it. Trade now becomes the servant of industrial production, for which the constant expansion of the market is a condition of existence. An ever-increasing mass production swamps the existing market and thus works steadily towards its expansion, breaking through its barriers. What restricts this mass production is not trade (in as much as this only expresses existing demand), but rather the scale of the capital functioning and the productivity of labour so far developed. The industrial capitalist is constantly faced with the world market; he compares and must compare his own cost prices not only with domestic market prices, but with those of the whole world. Previously, this comparison was almost exclusively the task of merchants and ensured commercial capital its mastery over industrial.
The first theoretical treatment of the modern mode of production — mercantilism — necessarily proceeded from the superficial phenomena of the circulation process, as these acquire autonomy in the movement of commercial capital. Hence it only grasped the semblance of things. This was partly because commercial capital is the first independent mode of existence of capital in general. And partly on account of the overwhelming influence that commercial capital exercised in the period when feudal production was first overthrown, the period of the rise of modern production. The genuine science of modern economics begins only when theoretical discussion moves from the circulation process to the production process.
ADDENDUM:
2) Tom Bottomore et al. wrote:
Marxism and the Third World
Present-day Marxists concerned with predominantly small peasant societies (which they consider pre-capitalist), as in parts of Africa, find that the development of capitalism instead of dissolving such pre-capitalist peasant societies, appears to conserve them and to subordinate them to its needs. The peasant societies are markets for industrial production, and become producers of certain commodities for the market; above all, they are reproducers of cheap migrant labour power for employment in large capitalist enterprises. Instead of the dissolution of pre-capitalist modes, it is argued, in Third World societies where capitalism does not develop from within the societies but is imposed from the outside, it has the effect of 'conservation-dissolution' of pre-capitalist peasant societies. This theory of (symbiotic) “articulation of modes of production” now enjoys a wide measure of acceptance.
An alternative conception which challenges the articulation concept as functionalist and voluntaristic, abandoning a central conception in historical materialism (namely, the idea of contradiction between modes of production which is the hinge of history), is the view that pre-capitalist structures have in fact been dissolved in the Third World and what exists there is capitalism. It rejects the view that social relations of production on the land are any longer feudal. Likewise it is argued that present-day peasant societies are no longer able to reproduce themselves in the manner of pre-capitalist societies, as they did before the colonial transformation. Having been drawn into the circuit of generalized commodity production of the capitalist economy they can no longer subsist on the basis of localized self-sufficiency as before.
The Sources:
1) Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, translated by David Fernbach, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review [1981] 1991 [pp. 449-455]
2) Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband et al., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell, [1983] [1991] 2001 [p. 352]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.