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Neil Davidson's take on Political Marxism: I've only just seen this conversation, but here's
my tuppence worth. I think the negative PM critique of actual Smithian Marxism
is valid, but they then accuse everyone who disagrees with their positive claims as
either being a Smithian Marxist or of being a 'productive-force determinist'.
Now, you can argue for the importance of the productive forces at certain points in history
without being a determinist - the actual outcome (the dominance of the capitalist
mode of production, in this case) is still dependent on several other factors,
including the class struggle, the power of the existing state, the availability of
revolutionary ideologies, and so on: its allows a certain set of alternative
possibilities, in other words, not an inevitable outcome.
Essentially, I think the PMs have a surreptitious theory of human nature which simply
inverts Smith's 'propensity to truck and barter' by asserting the very opposite capitalism is so alien to humanity that no-one would willingly adopt it unless
forced by 'market compulsion'.
At the very least this involves a rather unfeasably roseate view of what feudalism was
actually like (think happy Hobbits frolicking in the Shire untroubled by warmongering exploitative lords).
This why Brenner isn't as interested in the class struggle as everyone seems to think he is what he needs are a set of unintentional mechanisms which will bring about
something that, for him, would otherwise not happen - the emergence of
capitalism.
These can involve the indeterminate outcome of the class struggle, as in England, but also
environmental pressures, as in the Netherlands, spots on the sun, whatever. The
parallels with Althusserianism are actually very strong - both in relation to modes
of production as self-contained, non-contradictory eternities, and in the evocation
of conjunctures'/contingency as the only means of transition from one to another.
I disagree with Henry Heller that PM is a form of economism - in fact, its the precise
opposite: it abstracts the socio-economic from everything else in a way that
utterly abandons any notion of totality.
The hobbling effect this has on PM politics was demonstrated by Chibber at HM last week.
(I'm trying to rise above the various attacks he made on me when I wasn't
actually in the room.) The most effective rebuttal of post-colonial arguments
would be to demonstrate that capitalist productive relations, far from being
'European', also developed in the Chinese, Mughal. Ottoman and Persian
Empires at various times, but that these states proved too strong for the emergent
capitalist classes to take power - in other words it was very European

backwardness, and 'Eastern'' development that allowed the possibility - certainly

not the inevitability - of capitalism emerging in the former area.
But VC is unable to make this argument because of his PM obsession with England as the
only point of capitalist origin. Finally - does anyone really think that capitalist
laws of motion can be reduced to 'market compulsion' - where (for one thing)
does that leave capitalist competition conducted at the level of the state, i.e. intercapitalist war? The logic is that WW1 and WW2 were caused yt the dominance of
pre-capitalist relations.
John Game The points above are Neil Davidson's. Not mine. I think its a nice rounded critique
though.
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