Henry Heller,The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First Century Perspective

Reviewed by: Willie Thompson, South Shields, UK

One of the first texts in the publishers’ series ‘The Future of World Capitalism’, Heller's volume is a strikingly impressive achievement, not least on account of the amount of theoretical ground it covers effectively in its 305 pages. As the title suggests, it is not a historical narrative of how capitalism came to be established between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the dominant mode of production, but a discussion and evaluation of the leading explanations by Marxist scholars of the reasons for its emergence.

There is no disagreement among these theorists that capitalism was predatory from the start of this process, and that it grew and flourished on the basis of intense and often brutally coercive labour exploitation. They all totally reject the arguments of capitalism's apologists that its ferocity and ruthlessness have been greatly exaggerated or that its world-transformative achievements were obtained at minimal social cost. The Marxists’ controversies concern the precise nature of the economic mechanisms and forms of exploitation which produced the historical outcome.

The debate was initiated over sixty years ago with the publication in 1946 of Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism, a work of great depth and insight, which in the words of one commentator ‘pushed economic history beyond economics’ in an interpretation which endeavoured to explain the emergence of capitalism in England out of the pre-existing feudal economy, concentrating on the class relationships involved. The specifics of Dobb's approach were contested by the American Marxist Paul Sweezy, who argued that his interpretation was insufficiently attentive to the significance of long-distance trade as a solvent of feudal relations and economic basis for capitalist growth. Sweezy also argued that rather than feudalism crumbling under its own contradictions, instead it was overwhelmed by its more dynamic and economically effective capitalist rival.

The debate, with growing sophistication and more extensive research, has continued down to the present, with the principal contenders on the respective sides being Robert Brenner, who largely endorses Dobb's approach, and Immanuel Wallerstein who favours an interpretation with greater attention to the world systems of production and exchange relations. Brenner's co-thinker, Ellen Meiksins Wood, in addition focuses on a part of the specifically English agricultural economy as the starting motor for world capitalism, namely tenant farmers obliged by economic necessity to ‘set in train a new dynamic of self-sustaining growth with no historical precedent’.

In exploring this controversy, Heller's range of reference and depth of perception is most remarkable. He makes no bones about his own Marxist affiliation and his conviction that the purpose of this discussion is not simply academic enlightenment but making a contribution to the socialist revolution which he hopes is still in prospect. The opening of one chapter begins, ‘This chapter expounds the classic Marxist view of the English and French Revolutions as bourgeois and capitalist’ (104), and lays emphasis on the role of the state, which he suggests Brenner underestimates.

Heller expounds the divergent viewpoints very clearly and effectively and in impressive detail, and is balanced and fair in his judgements of their respective strengths and weaknesses (some of the latter he attributes to disillusionment with the revolutionary hopes of the 1970s). On the whole he inclines more to the Wallerstein position, while acknowledging that its theoretical opponents have also made invaluable contributions to our understanding.

Heller also deals with the vexed issue, which has come increasingly to the forefront in recent decades, of whether the fact that modern capitalism developed in western Europe was due to its intrinsic capacity for doing so in that region of the globe, or whether it might equally have done so in some other part of the world, so that the western precedence was purely contingent and accidental. He acknowledges that up to the eighteenth century, possibly as late as 1800, Asia, particularly the Chinese Empire, was ahead of Europe both economically and technologically, but points out that thereafter there was a process of ‘rapid coming from behind and leaping ahead … it was the very backwardness of the West that gave it an advantage’ (167). Postcolonial theory, he suggests, in its dismissal of Marxism as being Eurocentric, is the child of neoliberalism.

If one shares the author's basic theoretical outlook and political sentiments then, leaving aside any scepticism regarding his hopes for the future, there is not much to criticize in this volume. One reservation, however, might be that, though the author does not ignore it, he does not sufficiently stress the importance of the admittedly slow development of artificial power sources in place of the natural ones of wind, water and muscle. It was the ability, beginning in the late eighteenth century, of western technology to release the energies locked up in fossil fuels which set capitalism on a different course from the one it started with and gave us, for better or worse, the world we inhabit today.

However, that hardly detracts from the merits of this volume and it is one to be thoroughly recommended.