Banaji’s
overview of trading relationships in Europe is at times breath-taking. He
paints a rich picture of trading colonies and wholesale markets from the 12th
century onwards and concludes that ‘the history of commerce is thus a rich
tapestry of trading colonies that spanned the entire globe, wherever this was
accessible’ (P.15).
Particular
importance is attached to the role of the state, and the competition of
capitals is linked to particular forms of state, starting with Byzantium in the
12th century – ‘it was the greatest commercial center of the eastern
Mediterranean, with a population by then not far short of half a million’
(P.30) – via Genoa and Venice to Portugal, the Netherlands and ultimately
Britain. State power inevitably underpinned trade expansion. ‘Britain’s
occupation of Egypt ushered in the “heyday of cosmopolitan Alexandria”, the
palmy years from 1882 to 1936, when the size of the cotton harvest more than
doubled in the years before the outbreak of the war’ (P.82).
As
impressive as Banaji’s overview of trading history however is, the book also
reveals the weaknesses of ‘commercial capitalism’. First, Banaji’s analysis is
surprisingly ahistoric. History from the 12th century to today
follows a similar path with one state-capitalist complex being replaced by
another. Structural changes such as the industrial revolution go completely
unnoticed in this narrative. It is even not clear why we should start in the 12th
century with our historical overview. If trading relations are capitalist, then
we have had capitalism in other trading empires much earlier and elsewhere. Second,
as a colleague in our Nottingham based Marxism Reading group pointed out, his
account is rather apolitical. Whether in the work by Marx himself or in the
work of Marxists, the dynamics and consequences of capitalist exploitation in
its different forms is always at the forefront of analysis implicitly and often
also explicitly calling for action. Nothing of this criticism can be found in A
Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. A critique of capitalism is missing!
Most
importantly, however, and this is also reflected in Banaji’s other work, he has
no way of explaining why capitalism is driven by this relentless pressure
towards outward expansion (see Modes of
Production and Forms of Exploitation: Understanding Capitalism). Similar to the
world-systems approach, Banaji’s definition of commercial capitalism emphasises
the production of goods for a sale on markets with the main objective of
maximising profits. Hence, the focus is on exchange, not on production and the
social relations within which production is organised. Nevertheless, this definition of capitalism
based on a commercialisation model of market exchange relations assumes that
the outward expansion of capitalism arises from individual greed (Teschke 2003: 140),
very similar to how neo-classical, liberal theorists would understand it.
The
social property relations approach by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood,
on the other hand, emphasises the particular way of how production is organised
in capitalism. As a result of production being based on wage labour and the
private ownership of the means of production, capitalism is enormously dynamic
with capitalists constantly attempting to outcompete each other. At the same
time, this results in periodic moments of crisis of overaccumulation, when
surplus capital and surplus labour can no longer be brought together
fruitfully. Hence, this relentless structuring pressure of outward expansion in
search for new markets and cheaper labour to overcome crisis, only to encounter
eventually another crisis (Bieler and Morton
2018: 38-41).
Banaji’s
discussion of the putting-out system comes closest to such a production based
understanding. Here, workers still owned their own means of production, but
depended on merchants for their actual work. ‘The workers were wage earners
working with their own tools in their own workshops and homes’ (P.88).
Formally, these workers had not yet been expropriated from their means of
production, but in practice they were wage labourers as were the workers in a
big factory. What Banaji’s fails to grasp, however, is the rather specific way
of profit-making in the putting-out system, completely different from making a
profit through trade, buying cheap in one place and selling dear in another.
Undoubtedly,
Banaji’s book is a major scholarly achievement, but it is also rather
frustrating considering its inability to provide us with opportunities of
understanding capitalist dynamics. It, thus, does not allow us to comprehend where
we are in the current conjuncture of global capitalism and how we can overcome
exploitation. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism reveals all the
shortcomings of commercial definitions of capitalism.
Andreas Bieler
Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net
11 March 2022
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