Colonial America and the Debate about Transition to Capitalism Author(s): Robert E.

Mutch Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov., 1980), pp. 847-863 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656804 . Accessed: 10/01/2011 14:19
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847

THE CUTTING EDGE

Colonial America and the Debate About Transition to Capitalism

ROBERT E. MUTCH

The uniqueness of eighteenth-centuryAmerican society and politics is a historiographicalcommonplace of long standing; perhaps because it is a commonplaceit is not generallyregardedas an interestingproblem in social theory. In contrast to European social theory, which developed partly through attempts to explain the long transitionfrom feudalismto capitalism, American social theory lacks this conceptual focus. Indeed, American historiography has seized upon the absence of a feudal past as a major explanatorypremise.1 This negative conceptualizationhas led in turn to the assumptionthat America, unique in never having been feudal, is unique also in always having been bourgeois. The belief that even early America can be characterized as bourgeois is widely held. Both mainstream and marxist scholars are in general agreement on this point, though not on the precise terminology to describe early Americansocial relations. Some even describe the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as capitalist, while others merely point to an entrepreneurialspirit and profit-seeking,marketoriented activity. Another widely accepted point concerns the relatively undramatic political transformations on this side of the Atlantic. Even before the Warfor IndependenceAmericansenjoyed a broad suffrage(at least in the North) and popularly-electedlegislative assemblies. Thus the social theories that inform historical accounts tend to be those that each scholar thinks best illuminatebourgeoisdemocracy. To be sure, the absenceof a feudal past means that social relationsin America were unlike anything in the experience of Europeancountries. Yet the wellknown differencesbetween the Old and New worldshave obscuredthe degree to which they pose similar problems for the historian. If historiansare still debating the roles of the aristocracyand the bourgeoisiein the transitionto captialismin Europe,then America,too, may have a more debatablepast. By
Washington, D.C.

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the eighteenth century, even the northern colonies were not yet bourgeois, for they did not yet have market-dominatedeconomies. There was a transition to capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic, but only in America did "bourgeois" democracy develop before capitalism. The key to understanding this peculiar kind of politics is an analysis of the prevailingsocial relations. The first section of this essay briefly summarizesthe literatureon the early American economy. In section two attention shifts to recent marxist contributionsto the field, as a criticalstudy of the concept of simple commodity production, which is the model most commonly used by marxist writers to explain the economy of the period. Section three examines a number of recent marxist analyses of early American society and politics. This essay concentrates on the northern colonies because it was there that Americancapitalismwould first flourish. The northerncolonies of British Americain the mid-eighteenthcentury were characterizedby small-scaleagriculture.There were some large estates and some tenancy, but there was not an upper class defined by a monopolization of land, or by claimsupon rent or the surpluslabor of a rurallandlessclass. In general,those who tilled the soil also owned it; the family farmwas the basis of both society and economy. It was even the basis of the urban economy. tradein were entrepotsin a transatlantic Boston, New York, and Philadelphia agricultural produce. This is not to say that agriculturewas oriented toward the foreignmarket,though, for most farmswere operatedwith a view to their owners' consumption.2 Most students of the northern ruraleconomy would agree that the classic works on the subject are those of Percy Bidwell.3 His writing was essentially descriptive and based upon extensive researchinto pioneer farming,the majorcrops and the methods and tools employedin their cultivation, livestock, household manufacturesand trade. The picture of the rural economy that emerges from Bidwell's presentation is one of "selfsufficient farming": "The farm family produced for themselves food, clothing, house furnishings,farm implements, in fact practicallyeverything they needed."4.The reason that "self-sufficient," or subsistence, farming predominatedin the colonial era was the lack of a marketfor farmproduce. There was some consumer demand for foodstuffs in the coastal towns, but Bidwell estimates that people engagedin strictly non-agricultural occupations amounted to only 7-8% of the total population.S Some produce was exported to Europe,but the majorforeignmarketwas the West Indies,which specializedin the commercialproduction of sugarand imported much of its food.6 Yet what was shipped to these marketswas a surplus:the majorityof farm families did not produce primarilyfor sale but for consumption, to provide for their own subsistence. Since there was such a small market for farm produce, and thus very little sales revenue with which to purchasethe

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necessities of life, people in ruralcommunitiesfound it necessaryto combine farming with non-agriculturaltrades and to pool resources in cooperative work.7 This meant that the blacksmith, the tavernkeeperand the owners of the general store and of the saw and grist mills were all farmers,and that other farmers also had to know something about stonemasonry,carpentry, leatherworking,etc.8
In inland towns [the farmer] often plied some trade or other and was classedas an artisanas well as a farmer.Every farmerdid a multitudeof odd jobs for himself .... he performedsome of these tasksfor a neighbor,who eitherhad not the Occasionally requisiteskill or was too busy with strictly agricultural operations.Such servicewas more often repaidin kind than in currency.9 In the eighteenth century,as in the seventeenth,the northernfarmerrelied chiefly on his own labor and that of this family. The cooperationof severalfamilygroups,a relic of pioneerdays, was frequentin harvesting, etc.'? corn-husking, barn-raising,

Individualfamilies could not be self-sufficient, but villageswere nearly so by means of an exchange of local services. This "lack of a divisionof labor," as Bidwell termed it, was directly attributableto the lack of markets.Yet there was some trade. Perhapsmore important in terms of volume than the large surplusesproduced by farmersnear seaports or on navigablewater were the small surpluses the majority of farmers brought to their village stores to exchange for European and West Indian goods -cloth, ribbons, iron, salt, molasses, and sugar.~ Tradewas not of primaryimportanceto most villagers, but it did provide some necessities, and this was the connection between seaportand hinterland,merchantand yeoman. Bidwell's work is the foundation for a tradition of American economic history which still has respected proponents.n2Yet the post-waryears have also seen the appearanceof a new interpretationvery differentin spirit from its predecessor.The theme of the new school is self-aggrandizement rather than self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is found to be untenable on two grounds:first, that colonial farmerswere not "content with a subsistenceway of life" and "felt free to pursue wealth with an avidity dangerouslyclose to avarice";13 second, that farmersdid in fact producesurplusesfor a "market" even if that market was found only in the village store.14Thus the very idea of self-sufficiency is undermined. Bidwell is chided for romanticizingthe eighteenth-centuryfarmer as a Robinson Crusoe and for failing to reconcile the inconsistency in his own writings between subsistence farmingand the purchasesof manufacturedgoods.15 As RichardL. Bushmanhas noted, even "the hardiest frontiersman needed somethingto barter,and few were content with mere subsistence."16 Nonetheless, low consumer demand for farm produce meant that most farmerswould not get much more than subsistence

850

from their land. Since one cannot produce for a market that does not exist, this presents a dilemma for the profit-maximizing farmerspostulated by the liberal school. The liberal interpretershave tried to resolve the dilemma by that the farmersengagedin additionalsorts of work. Manyvillagers suggesting "supplementedtheir farmingincomes by engagingin various nonagricultural enterprises."17Bushman comments, "All of the traditional crafts provided opportunitiesfor profitable sidelines. Each town had its artisans."'18 He also lists other sources of income: e.g., bounties on rattlesnakes,distilling,ownership of a saw or grist mill. If the quest for profit could not be fulfilled throughfarmingalone, then other sourceswould be sought. Both Bidwell and those writers I have called "liberals"here looked at the northernruraleconomy and identified the same featuresas important- low market demand, small agriculturalsurplus, and low occupational specialization. Their explanations of this economy differed, however: Bidwell saw a "lack of a division of labor" enforced by the lack of a market,the liberalsan energeticsearch for ever more sourcesof profit spurredon by the inability to make large profits in farming. Bidwell's argumentis structural;low market demandfor farm produce meant that farmerscould not use sales revenuesto purchasegoods and services,and made it necessaryfor them to providethese for themselves through an exchange of local services. The liberals look at this same complex of featuresand explain the early farmers'versatilitynot as a structural component of a weak market system, but as the behavioral imperativeof a search for profit. Curiously,both sides base their interpretations on the classicalliberal presuppositionof an innate propensity to truck and barter - Bidwell explains the farmers'behavior as a response to their inabilityto truck and barter,the liberalssee it as itself a kind of truckingand bartering. The distinction is important, for it' identifies two different assumptionsabout economic behavior in precapitalistsocieties we will be encounteragain. The. first assumptionis that the structureof societies with weakmarketsis qualitativelydifferent than that of societies with strong ones; the second that societies with either kind of market differ only in degree.In this paper I shall argue for the first, and note that many marxist interpretations of precapitalistsociety tend to be closer to the second. At root, the controversyconcerns the nature rather than the size of markets, and to specifythe nature of the marketrequiresexaminingthe role of the merchant. It has already been noted that trade was of secondary importance in the economyof the ruralvillage.19It follows that merchants,the class of traders, werealso marginalto the lives of the rural majority. However,it does not followthat they were of little importanceat the level of the whole economy. Atthat level, the middleman,ratherthan the producer,must be the subject ofanalysis.

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Marx observedthat commercialcapital is the dominant form of capitalonly where, as in the northern colonies, the primary goal of production is consumption rather than trade.20 In such economies, where production is not capitalized,goods do not have a ready-mademarket and those productsthat do enter the marketdo so only becauseof the merchant.In a sense, tradewas a service offered by the merchant.Only the merchantcould provide,through a network of agents in foreign and American ports, buyers for village produce. The local general store by itself did not constitute a market, for village retailers were themselves dependent upon the import-exportbusiness of the seaport merchantfor their suppliesof goods. Thus the merchantwas a marginalfigure in the lives of the yeomanry because commodities or goods acquiredthrough purchasewere a smallproportionof the items consumedin the ruralcommunity. Yet in that system of small-scale, decentralizedproduction the merchant was also a central figure because trade was the only unifying force in the economy. Businesscapitalin this period did not control production.However,it made possible the concentrationand accumulationin marketable quantities of small surpluses set aside by thousands of farm families; these in turn bought those families the products of West Indian slaves and British cottagers. There is another reason to stress the merchant's significance:the tendency for governmentand trade to be conducted in the same place and by the same people. Although the leadingmen in the political life of the northern colonies were more diversein their social originsthan the planter gentry who governed the south, there was a predominance of merchantsand lawyers, at least in the capitals.Politics and governments were as decentralized as the economy and villages were nearly self-governing. Provincial legislatures imposed property and excise taxes, but villagers,in town meetings or through elected local councils, apportionedthe tax burden among themselves. They also imposed taxes on themselves to build roads, churches, bridges, school, and hire schoolmasters and ministers; that is, villagersthemselvesmade most of the decisions that affected their own lives. There is a parallel to the economy here in that as merchants had little influence on farmers' production decisions, so, too, merchant-dominated legislatures exercised little influence over government decisions of farmerdominatedlocal councils. By a curious contradiction,bourgeoismarginalityin both of the above senses allowed that class to dominate central governments.In some New England provinces, for example, where suffrage was broad, farmerswere a majority in provinciallegislatures,yet most of the businessconducted by those bodies was in the hands of a minority of merchants. The fact that this pattern changed with so little resistancein the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests that the bourgeoisie achieved a dominant position in

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colonial legislatures because the rural majority did not compete for it. Farmerswere not socialized into acceptance of bourgeois rule, but of their own. Just as the merchants'economic importanceoriginatedin the farmer's independence in production, their political influence depended upon a popular indifference born of the knowledge that most important decisions were made at the local level.21 The problem vexing students of modern capitalismis reversedin such a society. Insteadof a capitalistclass exercising hegemony on the basis of its capital and its manipulation of government officials, colonial Americahad a wealthy and prestigiousbourgeoisiestaffing the governmentelite from its own ranks, yet lacking a social and economic base for hegemony. To understandthis, an adequateconceptualizationof the economy is essential. Perhapsa marxist interpretationcan bringsome clarity to these issues. Marxist scholars have recently shown increased interest in early America, and the concept most widely used by them to define the economy is simple commodity production(SCP). eighteenth-century Simple commodity production - also known as small, petty, and independent commodity production - is only one of the many terms applied by marxists to economies where the means of production are owned by individual producerswho do not employ wage labor and do not receive a capitalist profit. Reproduction of the family production unit is achieved through the sale of commodities.22At this point in the definition, questions emerge.Can SCPbe a mode of productionin itself? Is it capableof sustaining itself without dependingupon another, dominant mode? Or can it never be more than a marginalphenomenonwithin other modes of production?Is SCP a stage in economic developmentor only a heuristic device used by Marxin his analysis of the capitalist mode of production (CMP)? SCP has not attracted much attention in its own right because it is usually considered only in the context of the history of capitalist development.Most presentday marxists, like Marx himself, have been interestedmainly in capitalism, not in any of its predecessors.23 (Marxists agree that SCP precedes CMP; whether this precedenceis historical or only theoretical remainsa matter of dispute.) But because some marxistshave venturedto describethe eighteenthcentury Americaneconomy in terms of SCP we must know more about it.24 Two highly respectedcontemporarymarxiststake differentapproachesto the study of SCP:ErnestMandelsees it as a historicalstage in the developmentof capitalism, and Ronald Meek maintains that Marx created SCP as a onedimensionalabstractionin orderto discussthe law of value.25Both agreethat SCP has existed as a minor phenomenon within other, dominant modes of production, but only Mandel believes that SCP itself has been a dominant mode.26 Meek appearsto believe that SCP by itself is only an abstraction.

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Despite this difference, both writers agree that in the centralfeatureof SCP, commodities are directly exchanged amongproducersand exchangedat their values;27that is, there is no profit, for each producergets in returnthe full value of the labor embodied in the product. Up to a point the concept of a simple commodity mode of production accounts for the observablefacts of the northem colonial economy. Most people were producers who owned their own means of production - land for farmers, a shop and tools for of the ruralvillage.Most artisans,both land and shop for the farmer-artisans farmersand artisansdid their own work, without the aid of bonded or wage labor. Also, most exchangetook place directly amongproducerswho realized no profit from the transaction.However, the usefulness of the SCP concept may be reduced by the fact, stressedby Bidwell and admittedby the liberals, that most products were consumedby those who producedthem. If the term "commodity" refers to "goods produced for a market by individuals or groups who carry on their productiveactivities more or less separatelyfrom one another," then most products of the northern colonies do not fit this description.28 Not only were most of these products consumed by those who produced them, but also most goods not so consumed were exchanged within the village;that is, where the kinds and amounts of articlesproduced were determined by community need rather than market price, and where exchange did not entail profit. Most people were producersof use-valuesfor themselves and for their neighbors, not of exchange-valuesto be realized through purchase.Moreover,production for the market means reproduction through the market rather than through direct exchange among producers; yet reproduction of the colonial production unit was secured through the family's own resources and those of the community of which they were members, not through the purchase of goods on the market. The poor.fit suggests that there are assumptionsin the SCP model which are violated in the case of eighteenth-century America. Central to the concept of a mode of production are the relations of production, the mannerin which surpluslabor is appropriatedand the ways in which this conditions and is conditioned by the social distributionof the means of production, exchange, and consumption.29In SCP, the producers themselves appropriate the full product of their labor in their capacity as owners of the means of production. Because SCP includes commodities,this appropriationis made individually,not collectively: "producers. . . are free from any subordinationto a collective social organization.Eachproducer. . . can produce as much as he likes. These producersare no longer producing use-values for the consumption of a closed community; they are now producingcommoditiesfor a market."30Exchange,then, is marketexchange, regulatednot directly by the social needs of a community but indirectly by the law of value. This, in turn, affects consumption and reproduction.

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Because these owner-workers purchaseas commoditiesthe goods they require for reproduction,their capacity to reproduceis determinedby the value of the commodities they sell. If they are not producing use-values for a community, then there is no community producinguse-valuesfor them. In SCP, people "sell in order to buy": one sells "one's own productsin orderto buy products whose use-valueone realizes."31Moreover,this is supposed to be an exchange of equivalentssince there is no capitalist profit.32 Relations of production are not antagonistic,as there is no separationof labor from the meansof production. The problem with SCP arises with the attempt to reconcile these nonantagonistic relations of production with the market supposed to be central to that economy. Since the basic unit of productionis the family, the division of labor is still based upon sex and age, criteriawhich have more to do with biology and traditionthan with the productiveprocessitself. Even though we are dealing here with an economy in which production is intended for and reproductionis secured through the market, the methods of production,the kinds of cooperation of labor that are involved, are still determinedby noneconomic factors. If a production unit is producingfor a market, then the operationof that marketdeterminesthe conditionsof that unit'sexistence. But family is a kinshipunit as well as a productionunit. The conditions of its existence are social, not economic. Familymembersare more than laborersto one another: their numbercannot be increasedor decreasedto adapt to market fluctuations.33Postulatingthe family as the productionunit in a commodity mode in which the market must be the central institution succeeds only in postulating a productionunit which is insensitiveto the conditions of its own existence. Indeed, this insensitivityis centralto many discussionsof SCP.The argumentrunsas follows: in orderto survivethe competition with other commodity producers, the family finds it necessary to reduce labor costs. Since labor and capital are combined in the household, this means that the ownerworkers must increase production and/or cut back on their own consumption. Not all families will survive:some will become capitalists,but most will be reduced to the position of wage workers.34This argumentderives from Marx's discussion, in the first volume of Theories of Surplus Value, of the plight of artisansand peasantswithin a dominantCMP,where competition is between capitalists and family producers, not solely among families.35The market that transformshousehold producersinto so many sellers of laborpower does so in the normal course of reorganizingproduction through registeringthe effects upon exchange rates of the varyingamounts of labor embodied in commodities. The market acts to incorporateoutsiders into its sphere, and these outsidersexperience this as a qualitativechange from one set of production relations to another.But this is true only for outsiders.For those alreadyenmeshed in capitalist production relations, the rise and fall of

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factories are only occurrences within these relations: capitalist society is predictablyanarchic. But the argument about the effects of the market on the small commodity mode of productiondefines as a consequenceof the normaloperationsof the market the destruction of that very mode and its replacementby another. of productionrelationswithin SCP,only That is, there are no rearrangements its transformationinto CMP.It is one thing to acknowledgecontradictions, but quite another to build into the concept of one mode of production the concept of its designated successor in a predetermined hierarchy of developmentalstages. We are back to the originalproblem - the incompatibility of non-antagonisticfamily relations of production with a commodity market. People who are primarilycommodity producers must be primarily commodity consumers;yet "it is only on the basis of capitalist production, and hence of the capitalist division of labor within the workshop, that all produce necessarily assumes the form of the commodity and hence all producers are necessarily commodity producers."36The market advanced into the concept of SCP appearsto be an anachronism, importedfrom CMP Equally serious is the absence of merchants from the concept of SCP. The most likely explanation for this lack is that SCPis usuallymentioned only in the context of the historical development of capitalism. Such analyses emphasizeproduction rather than circulation.Nevertheless,the exclusion of merchants is also necessaryto make tenable the central feature of SCP:the exchange of commodities at their value. In the description of SCP, direct exchange appearsbecause of the absence of commercialprofit. To introduce merchants as the mediators of trade means also to introduce this sort of profit. Since commercial profit is extracted by buying low aridselling high, exchange is not of "valuefor value".37Direct exchangeamongproducerscan take place without third-partymediation as long as it is confined to the local level, but commodity trade at the level of a whole economy requiresa class of tradersto effect transactions.It may be easier for those scholarswho direct their attention to early modern Europe to exclude this class from their concept of SCP because in those societies merchants appear as interstitial figures. They were parasites on production rather than participants. But it is unwise to dismiss merchants when dealing with eighteenth-century America, where they were prominent socially and politically. Nonetheless, this is what most treatmentsof early Americatend to do. Some of the most interesting marxist studies of early America appeared around the time of the Bicentennial. In a 1975 article, James O'Connor pointed out that what is unique about Americais not, as many would have it, that it has been bourgeois from the beginning,but, as Marxrecognized,

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that capitalismhad great difficulty "in building firm foundations".38This was because the tillers of the soil were also its owners and could not be expelled to form a proletariat.Yet his conceptualization of these farmerartisansis unclear. He refersto them as "independentcommodity producers" both in the 1975 piece and in a reply to criticismthe following year. In that latter article, however, O'Connor wrote both that "the independent commodity production unit is a subsistence unit" and that independent commodity production "was the transition between subsistenceproduction and capitalist commodity production."39Part of the difficulty may be that one is often unsure to what historical period O'Connoris referring.His topic is all of Americanhistory, but his primary concern is the development of andit is neverclearwhether "independentcommodity production" capitalism is meant to mean pre-capitalistsubsistence farming,a transition to CMP,or non-capitalized commodity productionwithin a dominantCMP.Nonetheless, there appears to be in O'Connor'saccount a recognition that there was in America a pre-capitalist, subsistence mode of production deserving of attentionin its own right. The same cannot be said of Robert Sherry, who criticized O'Connor for treatingindependent commodity production as a separatemode. Beginning with what I take to be a position similarto one taken above, he makes the general point that if "the aim of productionis the exchangeof commodities," then its dynamic is basically capitalist, even if not all production is capitalized.40 Sherry sees household producers as engaged in a competitive for survivalagainst capitalistsand other households, a strugglewhich struggle will end with most independent family producers transformed into wage laborers.Unfortunately, he does not go on from there to ask whether early Americanfarmerswere commodity producers. He merely asserts that they were,that they were petty bourgeois would-be capitalists,and that CMPhas alwaysbeen dominant in America.4?Given this opinion it is understandable that Sherry makes no attempt to distinguish between different historical periods.Writingon the northern colonies, MargitMayer and MargaretFay offera similaranalysis. They claim that "the class of independent farmers," whom they, too, describe as commodity producers, was, "in effect the creature of merchant capital."42So they would have been, had they in fact beencommodity producers.Mayer and Fay make the same error described above: assuming that the presence of a market of any kind means the presenceof features characteristic of a well-developed capitalist market. Commodity producerscould be someone'screatures,but independentsurplus could not. Moreover,the precondition for the existence of comproducers modity producers is a developed market, which in turn implies that the "merchant" whose creaturesthose commodity producerswere was no mere

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trader,but a directorof social production.The statementmade by Mayerand Fay about eighteenth-centuryfarmersnot only asserts a particularkind of relation between them and merchants, but implies, as conditions for the existence of that relation, a host of others: among farmersthemselves(no longer members of a cooperative community of producers, but of the anarchic community of commodities); between farmers and others (the commodity consumers who make up the market for the farmers'produce); and among those others (who, as consumersof commodities rathertharn of their own products, also must be producers of commodities). The relations implied by Mayer and Fay are those of a market-dominated society, and they do not demonstrate or even arguefor the existenceof such a society, but allow it to remainas an unstated assumption.The liberalsbase their interpretation upon the same assumption;the difference between the two camps lies only in their differingattitudes towardcapitalism. The most insightful of recent marxist interpretations of early America is who suggestedthat the northernruraleconomy exemplified MichaelMerrill's, a "householdmode of production"(HMP).43 Merrillcriticizesthe liberalsfor their stressupon the smallamountof marketproduction,but his most notable departure from previous interpretations is an emphasis on reproduction. Centralto Merrill'sconcept of HMPis reproductionthroughnon-commodity exchangewithin the village:
In the "householdmode of production"... the labor of the individualproducing units was directly coordinated,in a decentralized way, and the exchangeof products between these units was controlled by need ratherthan price. Exchange-value as a social category,a form of relationsamonglaborsand products,did not exist in the HMP,even thoughtherewas exchange.44

This explains how farm familiessecuredthe productsof many different kinds of labor without either having to engage in all of these kinds of labor themselvesor being requiredto purchasethose products with proceedsfrom the sale of commodities. Merrilldevelops his argumentthrough a discussion of the concept of the commodity and the presentation of data drawn from researchinto records of Kingston, New York. His analysis displays a theoretical sophistication all but absent from other American historical writing, and it challengesthe main ideas of liberaland much marxistthinking about early America. WhileBidwell implicitly and the liberalsexplicitly see subsistencefarmingas a response to obstacles blocking the path of economic development(meaning the growth of capitalism),Merrillinterpretsthe subsistencefarmeconomy in a positive, rather than a negative, way. Subsistence farming should be explained "by more than just the absence of conditions favorable to

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[commercial] farming;it would be explained by the presence of traditions, secure in their own 'rationality',which resisteda commercialorientation.,,4s In contrast to those who portray early Americanfarmersas would-be entrepreneurs waiting for the market to "arrive"and rescue them from their stagnation, Merrill presents us with villagers intent upon keeping market society at bay in order to preservetheir culture and traditions. The HMPis a more comprehensiveconceptualizationthan any yet examined here. Like previous interpretations, it recognizes the family-owned farm, worked without outside labor, as the basic production unit. Unlike other models, it explicitly integratesthe family into the village, which is seen as a network of social and economic relationships.HMP confronts the fact that most production was for consumptionratherthan for sale. It assertsthat reproduction was securedboth throughthe family'sown labor and throughan exchangeof services with other villagers.Finally, the villageis seen as the basis of a culture which places a high value on reciprocity and exchange. Subsistence farming is seen not as a grudgingaccomodationto outside forces but as the economic basis for a way of life not only commercial but even to some degree hostileto the valuesof marketsociety. However, while Merrill recognizes the independence of the household he misses the significanceof the merchant.His erroris conceptual, producers, for he appearsto believe that the whole of northern society and economy wereonly Kingston, New York writ large, that trade and the class of traders were as insignificant at the level of the whole economy as they were at the villagelevel. It is a peculiarity of that mode of production that, having locateda community which is typical in the sense of representing the kind of life led by the majority of people, one has not located a microcosm of the society. This is so because one does not see those non-villagerswho specializedin an activity, trade, which began only where the village ended, yet which constituted virtually the only force linking villagesto one another andinto the largereconomy. Farmerand merchantdependedon one another for their very existence, but it is necessaryto understandthe nature of this and to distinguishit from relationscharacteristic dependence of early puttingout systems or of even later forms of capitalizedproduction.The merchantas trader needed the farmeronly as surplusproducer;make the farmeranything elseand the merchant,too, becomes somethingelse. The farmer,as a member of a cooperative community of subsistence producers, needs the merchant only as an agent for the exchange of surplus. Transformthat surplus into commoditiesand the farmer-merchant relation is also transformed.46 Some writers err in interpretingthe merchant-farmer relationas one between capital andlabor, others err in ignoring it altogether. Perhapsbecause merchants havealways been recognizedas marginalfigures, too often they have figured onlymarginallyin economic and social analysis ratherthan being integrated

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into analysisas marginalactors. This is a consequence both of a focus upon production to the exclusion of circulation and of a focus upon economics to the exclusion of politics. This is especially misleadingin the Americancase. In early modern Europe, merchantswere the "middle"class, a denotation of both their social status and their economic function. In the northerncolonies during the eighteenth century, merchantswere the upper class despite their mediator role in the economy. They were politically dominant in that they monopolized provincial government office; local government, however, tended to be controlled by local residents. The Progressivehistorians and their heirs saw early America as a battleground between the "elite" of merchants and lawyers and the "people". An older variant of marxism adopted this interpretation,contributing only an unfamiliarterminology.47 In the postwar years, an interpretation of American history based upon "consensus"became prominent. In this view, class was virtuallynonexistent, conflicts fleeting and circumstantial,and all Americans were united in a common "culturaland political tradition"which was "fiercely individualistic and capitalistic".48The consensus interpretationof political history fit well with the economic historical postulate of universal entrepreneurialism. Recent marxist interpretations based upon SCP have tended to produce analyses which bear a strikingresemblanceto those of the consensusschool. This is not the place to begin an essay on early Americanpolitics, or on the vast literature on that subject, but we should note how interpretationsof American political history are influenced by one's choice of economic models. The marxist conception of class in CMP is based upon ownership or nonownershipof the means of production. This concept, once it is workedinto analyses of a pre-captialisteconomy in which the predominantproduction unit was the family-ownedfarm, becomes the theoreticalbasis for presenting early America as a classless society. Those who proceed from this basis, whether liberal or radical, draw remarkablysimilar portraits of eighteenthcentury society.
From its first days, and setting aside those enslaved, America was a land of enterprisers - small or large farmers, artisans or petty manufacturers, domestic or foreign traders, low or high financiers. It was a capitalist society from birth.49 Virtually everyone, including the nascent industrial worker, has the mentality of an independent entrepreneur .... The mass of the people, in other words, are bound to be capitalistic.5o [T] he vast majority of white people shared and supported the very basis of rulingclass power - private commodity-producing property.51

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[W]ho would be the new capitalist ruling class? The answer, of course, is the white northern European settler.52

Whathas tended to replace class as an organizingconcept is race. Americais seen as a "white settler" democracy,as though whites either sharedequally in the exploitation of non-whites or as though none were exploited themselves. Americansocial and political structureswere unlike those in Europe,but we will not know what they were like without an adequate model of the prevailingmode of production.53Merchantsmonopolized provincialgovernment office, but they could not determine the context of state action without a base in production. They were necessary to the economy as a whole, but they were also marginalto the lives of the individualproducers who made up a majorityof the population.These producerslived in a culture which was separatefrom that of the bourgeoisie.In addition to being economicallyand socially independent,they were also self-governing at the village level. The contradictionof this society was that those who controlledproduction possessedneither capital nor political power, while those who possessed both capitaland political influencedid not controlproduction.Furtherinvestigationinto the originand manifestationsof this contradictionmightilluminate some of the confusing features of early nineteenth-centurypolitics in the north;e.g., the decline of merchant dominance, rampant factionalism,and the rise of political parties as mere electoral machines rather than as the organized expression of the interests of social classes, which, indeed, were at this time still in the process of formation. Such a study should add to our understanding by identifying the elements of Americanuniqueness. NOTES
1. This approach is best exemplified in the work of Louis Hartz; see his The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), and The Founding of New Societies (1964). Hartz developed the idea of "fragmentsocieties," new countries founded by fragments of Europeanones, and taking their characteristics as whole countries from those of the fragments. America was founded by the English middle class, and the absence of feudal constraints in the New World allowed the founders to flower into a society allof whose members were possessed of the liberal, aggressive, entrepreneurial spirit characteristicof the bourgeoisie. This betrays a presupposition that "America" was not really a society at all, but the embodiment of a specific interest, and one within Britishsociety. For a radical version of this thesis, see Douglas Dowd, TheTwisted Dream(1974). 2. For a fuller discussion see my "Yeoman and Merchant in Preindustrial America: Eighteenth-centuryMassachusetts as a Case Study," Societas (1977), pp. 279-303. 3. Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (1925 and 1941). Since Bidwellwrote the half of the book covering the period 1620-1840, he will be referred to as sole author. An economist, he began this work at the University of Wisconsin, and it is regarded as the first major work in the field of American agricultural history. For a

861
retrospective on Bidwell, see Wayne D. Rasmussen, "History of Agriculture in the

Nothern United States, 1620-1860 Revisited," Argicultural History (1972), pp. 9-19. See also Bidwell's "Rural Economy in New England at the Beginningof the NineteenthCentury,"Connecticut Academyof Arts and Sciences Transactions (1916), pp. 241-399. 4. Bidwell,p. 126. 5. Ibid.,p. 132. 6. Ibid., p. 135. See also RichardPares,YankeesandCreoles(1956), esp. pp. 37-46. 7. "Voluntarycooperationof groupsof settlersin heavy tasks . . . in the eighteenth century became a significantfeature of colonial agriculturein the North."Ibid., p. 34. 8. See Bidwell,"RuralEconomy,"pp. 266-68, 275;History of Agriculture, pp. 13033. 9. Ibid., pp. 130-31. 10. Ibid., p. 116. 11. Ibid., p. 133; "RuralEconomy,"pp. 258-59. 12. For example, JacksonTurnerMain,The Social Structure America of Revolutionary (1965), esp. pp. 7-44. JamesA. Henretta,once of the liberalschool himself, has written a criticismof them based upon Bidwell'sinterpretation: see his "Families and Farms:Mentalite in Pre-industrial America,"William& MaryQuarterly,3rd series(1968), pp. 3-32. 13. CharlesS. Grant, Democracyin the ConnecticutFrontier Town of Kent (1961), From Puritanto Yankee(1967), p. x. p. 29; RichardL. Bushman, 14. This argumentwas first made by Rodney C. Loehrin his "Self-sufficiency on the Farm,"Agricultural History (1952), pp. 37-42; but see also JamesT. Lemon,The Best Poor Man'sCountry(1972), pp. 6, 9. 15. See esp. Loehr,"Self-sufficiency," passim. 16. Bushman, p. 26. 17. Grant,p. 40; see also Bushman, p. 108. 18. Ibid. 19. Trade will be defined as exchangemediatedby money and by third personswho link producer and consumer. Direct exchange among producers will not be consideredtrade.Market is definedas the realmof trade,not of directexchange,and refersto activitieswhich go on at the level of the whole economy, not within the village. "Whole economy" here refers to all people who are linked by market and townspeople. i.e., both villagers relations; 20. KarlMarx,Capital(1967), III, chapter20. 21. This point can be illustratedby examples from Massachusetts, the provincewith which I am most familiar. One of the most striking manifestationsof rural indifferenceto the activitiesof the provincial wasthe decisionof many government to the Massachusetts villagesto send no representative a body in which legislature, farmerswere nonethelessa majority.In the legislativeyear1750-1751 more than one-thirdof the rural population of Suffolk County, the most urbanizedcounty in the province,whose county seat was Boston, wasunrepresentedin the House of Representatives. The Journalsof the House of Representatives of Massachusetts (1751) lists all membersand all towns not sendingrepresentatives. The proportion of the ruralpopulationunrepresentedwas determinedfrom EvartsB. Greeneand VirginiaD. Harrington,AmericanPopulation Before the FederalCensusof 1790 (1966), p. 22-23. The proportionof the ruralpopulationnot sendingdelegatesto the House was usually lower, about 20-25%, but this is still considerable. One observerestimatedthat in 1755 more than one-thirdof the towns in contemporary the entire province declinedto elect representatives to the legislature(Robert J. Massachusetts in theRevolution(1967), p. 34). The proportionwas Taylor,Western higherin the west, reachingas high as 40%in Hampshire County, but only because of the added factor of distance(pp. 34-35). The farmers of Suffolk did more than

862 - they also tried throughoutthe eighteenth decide againstelecting representatives century to get county lines redrawnin orderto exclude Boston and make one of the country towns into the county seat. (For the movement in the 1720s and 1730s, see George Kuhn Clarke,Historyof Needham,Massachusetts, 1711-1911 (1912), p. 164;JohnGould Curtis,Historyof the Townof Brookline,Massachusetts (1933), p. 88; and Clarence W. Fearing, Weymouth Town Government,its and Development(1941), p. 26.) Beginning RonaldMeek,Studiesin the LabourTheoryof Value(1956), pp. 155-56; Ernest Mandel,MarxistEconomic Theory,I (1968), p. 66; Judith Ennew, Paul Q. Hirst, and Keith Tribe, '"Peasantry'as an Economic Category,"Journal of Peasant Studies (1977), p. 309; MichaelMerrill, is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and "Cash Exchangein the Rural Economy of the United States," Radical History Review (Winter, 1977), pp. 62-64; Scott Cook, "Value, Price and Simple Commodity and G. Production,"Journal of Peasant Studies (1976), p. 398; M. Morishima Problem'?"The Economic Catephores,"Is There an 'HistoricalTransformation Journal(1975), p. 313. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, "Introduction"to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1964), p. 43. James O'Connor,"The Twisted Dream,"in Monthly Review (March, 1975), pp. "A 41-55, a reviewof DouglasDowd's book of the same title; also by O'Connor, Note on IndependentCommodityProductionand Petty Capitalism," Ibid. (May, 1976), pp. 60-63; Robert Sherry, "Commentson O'Connor'sReview of The TwistedDream,"Ibid. pp. 52-60; HarryChotiner,"TheAmerican Revolutionand the AmericanLeft," Socialist Revolution (April-June, 1976), pp. 6-29; Margit Mayer and MargaretFay, "The Formation of the American Nation-State," Kapitalstate(Fall, 1977), pp. 43-45; this also is the approachtaken by Heide a Germanhistorianwhose work was favorablyreviewedby Hugh Gerstenberger, Moselyin Politics& Society (1976), pp. 105-16. Mandel, pp. 65-68, 79-82; Meek,p. 198. Mandel, p. 15. Ibid., p. 158; Meek,p. 155; Cook, p. 403. Meek,pp. 37-38, emphasisin original. Modes of Production(1975), pp. BarryHindessand Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist 9-10; Meek,pp. 152-53. Mandel, p. 68. Ibid., p. 81; Meekp. 155n; Cook, pp. 400-401. Mandel, pp. 80-82. Lest it be objected that familiesdid act consciouslyto control their size (by late birth control,etc.), it shouldbe pointedout that these methods,if seen as marriage, The responsesto market pressures,are so extremely sluggishas to be irrational. reasoningbehind such behaviorhas more to do with long-rangeexpectations of of the market. scarcitythanwith vagaries For variationsof this argument,see Robert Brenner,"The Originsof Capitalist New Left Reivew (1977), Development:A Critiqueof Neo-SmithianMarxism," "TwistedDream" p. 52n; Merrill,pp. 62-63; and, on the United States,O'Connor, (Review),pp. 51-52. KarlMarx,Theories of SurplusValue,I (1969), pp. 407-409. Marx,Capital,I (1976), p. 951. Mandel, pp. 67-68. O'Connor, "Twisted Dream" (Review), pp. 50-51; for Marx's comments see I, pp. 931-40. Capital, O'Connor,"Note on IndependentCommodity Production,"pp. 61, 62; See also commenton O'Connor's Merrill's analysis,p. 61. Sherry,pp. 55-57.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

863 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. Ibid., pp. 52-53. Mayerand Fay, p. 44. Merrill, passim. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 46 (emphasis added). The point hereis that most agricultural producethat becamecommoditieswere not as commodities,but as surplus.Therewere some commercial produced farmers who regularly producedlarge surplusesfor urban and foreignmarkets,but these rural were a marginalphenomenonin northernagriculture.For genuine entrepreneurs commodity producerswe must go to the artisansof the largerseaports,whose livelihoodsdepended on the sale of their products.They were simple commodity but they, too, were a marginal producers, phenomenonwithina dominantmode of These artisanswere vulnerable agriculture. not only to competition non-capitalized fromother artisans,but to fluctuations in the trade of agricultural produce,for theseaffected the lives of rich and poor in the port towns. Thesetowns, it should be remembered,were centers of transaction, not of production.Most of those in thetiny labor marketwere hired to move commodities,not to manufacture them, andthey were subordinateto merchant capital,which was itself very sensitiveto thefortunes of subsistenceagricultural producers. Thusthe profitsand wagesupon whichurbancommodityproducers dependedfor theirlivelihoodwere derivedfrom invested in circulation,not production.This situation was not unique to capital America:see John Merrington, "Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism," New Left Review (1975), pp. 84-87. 47. See, for example, HerbertAptheker,The Colonial Era: A Historyof the American People (1966). 48. RichardHofstadter,The AmericanPolitical Tradition(1948), p. x. This book was oneof the first major works of the consensusschool reactionagainstProgressive historiography. 49. Dowd, pp. 46-47. 50. Hartz,p. 89. 51. Chotiner,p. 18. 52.O'Connor, "TwistedDream"(Review),p. 52. 53. The nature of early Americansociety has begun to be reexaminedfrom several of view. For an excellent reviewand bibliography, points see Edwin G. Burrows, "The Transition Questionin EarlyAmerican History:A Checklistof Recent Books, Articles and Dissertations,"Radical History Review (Fall, 1978), pp. 173-90.

Acknowledgments
For their helpful commentson earlierversionsof this article,I wish tothankToby Ditz, Burrows, Ted and SharonZukin.

Theory Society 9(1980) 847-836. Printedin the Netherlands and 1980 ElsevierScientificPublishing Company 0304-2421/80/0000-0000/$02.25 ?