Jairus Banaji - Theory as History: Essays on modes of production & exploitation

Jairus Banaji's Theory as History is a 2010 collection of essays that together are designed to encourage and stimulate a return to serious Marxist approaches to history - both in a theoretical sense and in a the sense of studying specific periods of history. Banaji is an important and long standing scholar whose determination to use Marxism as a historical tool is only matched by his refusal to let dogma go unchallenged. Unafraid of challenging existing Marxists his writing can, at times, be blunt. But nonetheless it is full of insight:

To take modes of production first, these, for Marx, comprised the 'relations of production in their totality' (as he says in Wage Labour and Capital), a nuance completely missd by Marxists who simple reduce them to historically dominant forms of exploitation or forms of labour, for example, positing a slave mode of production wherever slave-labour is used or ruling out cappitalism if 'free' labour is absent. The underlying assumpotion here is that Marx means by relations of production the relations of the immediate process of production, or what, in a perfectly nebulous expression, some Marxists call the 'method of surplus-appropriation'.

Some of the most useful parts of this collection are when Banaji challenges specific academic interpretations of historical eras in order to draw out the real relations of production by deep diving into historical times. This often displays an amazing understanding of source documents - as displayed for instance on the essays about land relations and ownership in colonial India.

While some of the essays display this "deep dive" into particular eras and geographical locations. Others are more theoretical, while being rooted in evidence. One of particular importance and insight is Banaji's writings on the Tributary modes of production, something that many Marxists have grappled with over the years. Take also his conclusins around modern slave society in North America:

The slave-plantations were capitalist enterprises of a patriarchal and feudal character producing absolute surplus-value on the basis of slave-labour and a monopoly in land. This heterogeneous and, as it appears, disarticulated nature of the slave-plantation generated a series of contradictory images when the early Marxist tradition, not equipped with the same abundance of material available today, attempted its first characteristations.

Here Banaji demonstrates two characteristics of his writing - his desire to neither deny that Marx made mistakes or didn't have full insights on occasion, and his commit to updating this. This is particularly noticeable in his writing on wage labour, which is, he says "not a product of capitalism specifically, unless there is a sense in which class itself is peculiar to capitalism, so that workers before capitalism fail to constitute a class in the same sense as workers under capitalism". He then continues:

Wage-labour strikes as a peculiarly modern institution, because the ancient world, indeed all periods of history before capitalism, are seen as intrinsically impervious to any of the institutions that characterise capitalism.

Then:

Labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity, indeed did, even when free labourers are scarce or non-existent. Appian [95-165] CE tells us that a major reason why the rich who had monopolised the public land and carved huge estates out of it preferred the employment of lsaves was that the peasantry was subject to conscription and the supply of labour unstable.

He concludes:

The point of these remarks is not to deny the centrality of 'free labour' to the accumulation of capital in the modern economy... but to undermine the particular way Marx attempts to constue the link between wage-labour and captial. 

Over the half dozen or so pages that cover this argument, Banaji explores multiple theoreticians 'approaches to wage-labour, capital and ancient/modern society, while clearing out a distinctive position of his own. It shows a remarkable command of the material, both sources and contemporary and a deep knowledge of Marx's own work.

However Banaji doesn't simply dismiss others claiming only he has the right line. His discussion of Chris Wickham's work is a case in point. He is both incredibly generous in praise of Wickham's historical writing and, on occasion, quite critical. But it is done with nuance and clarity. There's not a few Marxists who could learn from this.

All in all Theory as History is a remarkable work. But it is hard work. Some chapters were opaque because I had no wider knowledge of the period they covered. Other sections required repeated re-reading. But this is a serious work, that rewarded close reading and I'll undoubtably return.

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