Subsumption of Labor, Class Struggle, and Uneven Development," Review of Radical Political Economics 44(2).
Finally, whether or not capitalism exists is not a matter of academic squabbling. The concept of what is present determines what needs to be absented (to use the terminology of the radical philosopher Roy Bhaskar). To say that a social formation is decidedly capitalist has a different political implication than the contrary view that it is not capitalist (enough), or that it is capitalist here and there but not everywhere. If a country is dominantly semi-feudal or not capitalist enough, then the radical strategy is seen by many as one which is to be directed against semi-feudal exploiters or at the promotion of advanced capitalism. This strategy licenses an indefinite wait for the fight for socialism (abolition of class relations) to start. But if what is present is already capitalism, albeit one that is not very progressive and that is unlikely to be very progressive for a very long time, the nature of class politics must be seen in a radically different manner.This is almost nostalgic; it was the core of the debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism between the "lecture" and "farmer-labor" schools of Japanese Marxists in the 20s-30s, over the seemingly ephemeral distinction between whether what resulted from the Meiji Restoration was a capitalist state characterized by economic underdeveloped and authoritarianism or else an "absolutist" (i.e. essentially feudal) state that was promoting limited capitalist industrialization. Toyama Shigeki, writing in the 50s and 60s, pointed out that really the analytical distance between the two positions was not that great. It was so intense because it was at heart a political argument: over whether what was needed was to "complete" the establishment of liberal bourgeois democracy or else to begin mobilizing for socialism directly. The subtext of Toyama's reassessment and synthesis was that since the political debate was essentially moot, it was possible to look at the intellectual question with a more objective eye. What's so old school about this passage is that the author seems to be still operating with the same political categories that motivated the debate over Japanese capitalism. The article is oddly thin on discussion of the why he adopts the definition of capitalism he does and why the cases he considers conforms to it. In the end, I think the real motivation is the issue raised in this paragraph: it is necessary to define whatever is there as capitalism in order to justify struggling against it and not for the establishment of capitalism. But this is a non-sequitur: if there is an alternative way to organize economic development to the establishment of capitalism, then let's hear it. On the other hand, the fundamental problem to which "establish capitalism" is supposed to be a solution is that in a non-dynamic agrarian economy there isn't much social surplus to fight over; higher wages and lower wages make a difference, but in the long-run only productivity improvements will seriously change the standard of living. And he gives no response to this, and in fact, though he seems to want to suggest that it is successful demands for higher wages and lower rents that compels greater investment in machinery, his examples don't really show that very consistently.
The reason to prefer a theory of capitalist that includes productivity improvements as a necessary consequence or at least strong tendency is that this is something that historically clearly marks out the capitalist epoch. Lots of other things are much more universal: tenancy, usury, wage labor, exploitation, market exchange, inequality, and so on. A concept of capitalism that is based on elements like those would cover a wider swath of space and time in human society, but it would be consequently less interesting because it would simply push the question of economic dynamism one step back--what kind of capitalist economy displays the characteristic patterns of economic development?
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