The SAGE Handbook of Marxism

Beverley Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano, Svenja Bromberg, Beverley Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano, Svenja Bromberg

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526455727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today.

The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today's Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century. A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike.

Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy

Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle

Part 3: Political perspectives

Part 4: Philosophical dimensions

Part 5: Land and existence

Part 6: Domains

Part 7: Inquiries and debates

Part I Reworking the Critique of Political Economy

1 Merchant Capitalism

Jairus Banaji

‘Merchant's or trading capital', as Marx (1981: 379ff.) refers to it as the start of the sequence of chapters where this is discussed in Capital Volume 3,¹ was largely marginal to Marx's understanding of the capitalist mode of production, which, of course, was embodied in the dynamics (the laws of motion) of industrial capital and personified by the industrial capitalist. In fact, in its leading form, viz. as commercial capital, it was simply a transmuted form of industrial capital itself, a circulation of the commodity capital of the industrialist, ‘for ever penned into [industrial] capital's circulation sphere'. Merchant capitalists do figure in Volume 3 but they do so strictly as agents of industrial capital.

I shall argue that it was perfectly consistent for Marx to argue in this way, since he saw the accumulation of industrial capital as the driving force behind the capitalist mode of production and his interest lay in analysing the accumulation process of a total capital dominated by large-scale industry. However, this conception will not work historically when Marxists have to deal with periods of history where industrial capitalism (the capitalist mode of production in Marx's sense) was largely embryonic or even completely absent. The reason why most Marxists tend not to be troubled by this is that the centuries of early capitalism have on the whole been framed either in terms of a historically nebulous ‘age of primitive accumulation’ (Dobb) or, from the 1950s on, as a prolonged transition from feudalism to (industrial) capitalism with its implied ‘coexistence’ of modes of production. But a major upshot of this conceptual indifference has been the abdication of this whole field of history to historians working largely outside a strictly Marxist tradition, even if at least some of those historians, notably Fernand Braudel, were influenced by Marx.

This chapter will begin with the way Marx understands merchant's capital, underscoring both the methodological nature of his discussion and the conflation it generates when abstracted from its methodological context. It will then turn to the radical divergence within the later Marxist tradition on the issue of merchant capitalism. The remainder of the chapter mobilizes the rich historiography that allows us to reinstate a notion of merchant capitalism as a perfectly valid category consistent with Marx's own ideas about capital. This integration of history into theory is absolutely crucial to any future progress in the way Marxists debate and understand capitalism.

Marx on Merchant's Capital

The two strongest features of Marx's discussion of merchant's capital in Volume 3 relate, first, to the distinction he draws at the very start of Part Four when defining this type of capital (that is, his opening sentence in Chapter 16), and, second, to his repeated reference to the merchant as a capitalist and his frequent references therefore to both ‘merchant capitalists’ and ‘commercial capitalists’ (Marx, 1981: 391, 403, 406, 407, 411, etc.). The second of these features should make it plain that ‘merchant’ in this chapter of the Handbook stands for the more powerful groups of merchants connected with the import/export trades and the money-markets, and not for the mass of traders, which, in most countries even today, consists of the smaller retail businesses and petty traders straddling the middle class and the mass of wage-labourers.

‘Merchant's or trading capital is divided into two forms or sub-species, commercial capital and money-dealing capital', writes Marx at the start of Chapter 16. Under ‘money-dealing capital’ Marx includes money-changing and the bullion trade, and notes that money-dealing in either form ‘first develops out of international trade’ (Marx, 1981: 435, 433). In its most developed form, money-dealing, Marx says, includes the ‘functions of lending and borrowing, and trade on credit', though these are discussed in the chapters on interest-bearing capital (Marx, 1981: 436). Thus, the distinction drawn as Chapter 16 opens is basic and opens the way to a more expansive discussion of the origins of capitalism since finance and the money-markets become integral to our topic. Second, the same chapter describes the merchant as ‘a particular species of capitalist', making it clear that we are dealing here with capitalists (Marx, 1981: 382).

The ‘specific nature’ of commercial capital, Marx claims, relates to its function in facilitating the circulation of industrial capital through the transformation of commodity capital into money. The money capital advanced by the merchant does this ‘through perpetually buying and selling commodities'. ‘This is its exclusive operation', the ‘exclusive function of the money capital with which the merchant operates'. Thus, commercial capital or the money capital advanced by merchants ‘remains for ever penned into capital's circulation sphere’ (Marx, 1981: 386). The buying and selling of the commodities that make up the commodity capital produced by the industrialist are ‘functions peculiar to commercial capital’ (Marx, 1981: 379), although in reality, Marx acknowledges, commercial capital can also be found involved in businesses such as the transport, storage and dispersal of goods. A crucial step in the analysis claims that a ‘theoretical definition’ of commercial capital and thus of merchant's capital as a whole has to abstract from those ‘real functions'. ‘For our purpose, where what matters is to define the specific difference of this special form of capital, we can therefore ignore these functions … We only have [the] pure form once those functions are discarded and removed’ (Marx, 1981: 380, emphasis added). Buying in order to sell is commercial capital's ‘true function’ because the merchant's role is to act as a circulation agent of industrial capital.

To repeat, the ‘theoretical definition’ of commercial capital commits Marx to the view that buying and selling is the sole function of the merchant or of commercial capital. The meaning of ‘sole’ here is strictly contingent on the methodological context in which it occurs. Of course, in reality – that is, viewed historically – things were quite different. The bigger merchants did a great deal besides buying and selling. They transported goods, ‘organized and financed voyages’ (Brenner, 1993: 79), owned or controlled shipping, organized household producers into putting-out networks (co-ordinated production as a whole), financed and managed plantation industries as well as owned plantations, invested in the production of new designs (Poni, 1997; Sewell, 2010), invested in metal and mining enterprises (Morgan, 1993: 102) and so on. And all this in addition to their involvement in the money-market, in royal/government/plantation finance, marine insurance, the financing of trade through bills of exchange (hence merchant banks), investments in tax farming, etc. Thus, Marx's conception of buying and selling as the sole function of commercial capital is a simplifying assumption, as Henryk Grossman (2021) called these methodological abstractions in Capital, an assumption peculiar to the circulation of industrial capital as Marx analyses this in Volume 2. When Marx writes ‘we can therefore ignore these (real) functions', he makes it clear that he is simplifying the description of the role of merchant's capital in its actual or historical existence, reducing it to the sole aspect that matters for him. The ...