Labour Monthly
Source : Labour Monthly January 1947 pages 29-30
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML : Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.
Maurice Dobb has demonstrated in a most striking way the superiority of the Marxist approach to historical problems over the bourgeois eclecticism which nowadays passes as a substitute for proper analysis. Hitherto he has been known primarily as a Marxist critic of contemporary capitalist economy. In this book he reveals himself as a historian. With a wealth of detail drawn both from primary and secondary sources, he has analysed the amazing intricacies and contradictions at the root of capitalist development from the end of the middle ages until the present day. Not only at succeeding stages in the development of capitalism has he shown the effects of changes of technique on relations of production, but he has also indicated the political consequences of these changes. And, giving the lie to those critics who equate Marxism with a mechanical determinism, he shows the counter-action of class and ideology on the development of economic practices.
The main points of concentration in the book are on the new factors growing up in a decaying feudal economy which were to smash feudal social relationships; the striking contradictions in early capitalist society between those capitalists whose profit was gained by commercial manipulation and those whose profit was gained from capitalist production as such; the techniques and relations of production during the industrial revolution; and the growth of monopoly and economic crisis in the era of imperialism.
On the decline of feudalism, a subject still wrapt in obscurity — partly because of the small amount of research done on it, but even more so because hitherto the majority of economic historians have not analysed what evidence there is from the correct standpoint — Dobb shows how the problem must be approached from the point of view of the most fundamental of social relationships, namely, the relationship between exploiters and exploited. Having thus defined the essence of feudal economy, he makes a penetrating and many-sided examination of the problems involved in the decline of that economy. The crisis of labour supply, the alternative solutions presenting themselves to the increasingly bankrupt feudal ruling class, the growth of a rural “kulak” class, are all discussed, not only from a full knowledge of the latest work on the subject by English historians, but with the illumination of European and especially Russian parallels.
While the growth of small scale urban industry, of local and eventually international trade is shown in considerable detail as contributing to the dissolution of feudalism and to the beginnings of a capitalist economy and a capitalist class, Dobb warns against the pre-dating of true capitalism. Merchant capital, concerned only in profit derived from adventitious price differences or from usury, is by no means incompatible with feudalism. The early merchant fortunes made in this way were not, in fact, the beginnings of the primitive accumulation of capital. In the 14th century the superprofits of moneylenders and war-contractors either vanished like snow in the sunshine in unproductive expenditure, or went to establish their owners in the ranks of the feudal ruling class — the de la Poles of Hull being the classic example.
On the primitive accumulation of capital, Dobb shows its operation in two phases. During the first phase, the bourgeoisie acquires cheap assets, which it realises in a later phase by sale at high prices, investing the proceeds in cheap capital goods and badly paid proletarian labour, the prerequisites of industrialisation. The principal asset thus acquired was land, the source of the economic and political power of the feudal aristocracy: the bourgeoisie made on the deal not only in the economic, but also in the political bankruptcy of its class enemy.
In the seventeenth century developments, mercantile monopoly, interested only in the “terms of trade,” is shown to be identified with political reaction, and the industrial bourgeoisie with the progressive elements during and after the English Revolution. But the real victory of industrial capitalism does not occur until the end of the eighteenth century as a result of the coincidence of a number of necessary factors — a coincidence never since repeated, nor (as is convincingly demonstrated) ever likely to be repeated.
There are treasures of analysis in this remarkable book, If the case for a historical and Marxist outlook as the “essential foundation for any realistic system of economics” (the original aim of these studies), is proved up to the hilt, the work has also proved that a Marxist approach is the only possible one for the solution to historical problems. It is to be hoped that both historians and economists learn the appropriate lesson.
RODNEY HILTON.