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The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive
revolutionary road to capitalist modernity
Jamie C. Allinson/Alexander Anievas
In this article, we examine the utility of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of
passive revolution and its relation to Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven
and combined development in analysing the transformational effects of
world economy and international relations on ‘late-developing’
societies’ transition to capitalism. Although Gramsci never explicitly
linked passive revolution to uneven and combined development, we argue
that Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit assumptions present in the
Prison Notebooks, but never fully thematised. In turn, we demonstrate
that incorporating passive revolution into Trotsky’s theory further
illuminates the ontology of class agencies that is often lacking in
structuralist approaches to bourgeois revolutions. In illustrating these
arguments, we examine the case of Japan’s modern state-formation
process, demonstrating how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be
conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging within the context of
the uneven and combined process of social development activated and
generalised through the rise of the capitalist world economy.
---
That's the abstract of an Oct. 2010 Capital and Class article (hat tip
to Sebastian Budgen on FB). I am not exactly sure about Allison but
Alexander Anievas and his writing partner Kerm Nisancioglu are outspoken
critics of the Brenner thesis.
When I first began getting a handle on the Brenner thesis 15 years ago,
the first thing that came to mind was Trotsky's theory of combined and
uneven development and how the Junkers state and the Meiji Restoration
constitute alternative interpretations of how capitalism arose through a
combination of markets and coercion.
Here's excerpts from the first thing I wrote:
All in all, Brenner's problem seems to be one of understanding
transition. His schema seems to owe much to the sort of "stagism" that
characterizes the intellectual milieu of the Analytical Marxism school,
to which he has had a loose affiliation. Although Brenner, who is around
sixty years old, has been involved with the American socialist formation
Solidarity, it appears that he was not part of the Draperite current
that helped to initiate it. Hal Draper, who broke with Max Shachtman,
retained many ideas from the Trotskyist movement that Shachtman once
belonged to. A key element of Trotskyist thought is combined and uneven
development, which first appeared in Trotsky's analysis of the coming
Russian Revolution.
As opposed to the narrow "stagist" conceptions of much of the Russian
social democracy, Trotsky believed that Russian capitalism and
precapitalist forms had a dialectical relationship to each other. Rather
than seeing a revolutionary bourgeoisie in a life-and-death struggle
against Czarist absolutism, Trotsky regarded the two as mutually
reinforcing elements of a total system. That is why it would be a
mistake to search for elements in the bourgeois parties that could
reproduce the 1789 revolution Russian-style. It would be up to the
peasants and workers to break with the feudal and capitalist past and
create the only conditions for modernization and progress--the socialist
revolution.
Turning to Japan, the question of whether capitalist agriculture is a
requirement for the advent of capitalism in general becomes even more
problematic. Japanese Marxist scholarship has been the site of intense
debates inspired by the Sweezy-Dobbs exchange. The Meiji restoration of
the late 19th century is widely seen as the advent of the contemporary
economic system, but there is scant evidence of bourgeois transformation
of agriculture.
In "The Meiji Landlord: Good or Bad" (Journal of Asian Studies, May
'59), R.P. Dore dates the controversy as arising in the 1930s, long
before Dobbs, Sweezy and Brenner stepped into the ring. The Iwanami
Symposium on the
Development of Japanese Capitalism, held in 1932, marks the starting
point of a sustained effort to date the transformation of Japan from a
feudal to a capitalist society. Especially problematic was the role of
class relations in the countryside, which never went through the radical
restructuring of Brenner's 16th century England.
Referring to Hirano Yoshitarö's "The Structure of Japanese Capitalism"
Dore writes:
"Hirano's work contains a good deal of original research concerning the
economic facts of the agrarian structure of the early Meiji, and the
creation of a highly dependent class of tenant farmers. The landlords of
Hirano, for example, preserved the semi-feudal social relations of the
countryside which provided the necessary groundbase for the peculiarly
distorted form of capitalism which developed in Japan. The high rents,
maintained by semi-feudal extra-economic pressures, not only helped to
preserve this semi-feudal base intact (by making capitalist agriculture
unprofitable) they also contributed to the rapid process of primitive
capital accumulation which accounted for the speed of industrial
development. Thus the landlords were to blame for the two major special
characteristics of Japanese capitalist development--its rapidity and its
distorted nature."
Gosh, this is enough to make your head spin. Here we have a situation in
which, according to one of the deans of Japanese Marxist scholarship,
semi-feudal relations in the countryside served to accelerate Japanese
capitalist development. Just the opposite of what Brenner alleges to be
the secret of English hyper-capitalist success. Something doesn't add up
here, does it?
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