W.G.

Runciman

The ‘Triumph’ of Capitalism as a

Topic in the Theory of
Social Selection

By ‘capitalism’ I mean a mode of production in which formally free labour is

recruited for regular employment by ongoing enterprises competing in the
market for profit.* This is an evidently Weberian definition: it takes up more
or less directly Weber’s account of the rise of bürgerlicher Betriebskapitalismus
with its ‘rational’ organization of free labour. But it needs to be divorced
from any presupposition about a predetermined process of ‘rationalization’.
Not only is there nothing inevitable about such a process, but it is in any case
debatable, pace Weber, how far either rational calculation in the form of
double-entry bookkeeping or formal legal rules are necessary to it. At the
same time, the ownership of the means of production is left open.
‘Capitalism’, as here defined, does not entail the private entrepreneur or
owner-manager as the employer of the vendors of their labour. There must
of course be an employer of one kind or another, and it is an interesting
historical observation that states—or, to put it more accurately, the
incumbents of governmental roles and their subordinate agents—have
33
seldom been significant employers of wage-labourers in place of kinsmen,
clients, conscripts, vassals, or slaves. But it can still be a ‘capitalist’ mode
of production if the equity of the particular Betrieb is held by a consortium
or a bank or a cooperative or a pension fund or even by the state. What
matters is the existence of a fully-functioning market in which competing
employers bid for workers who are legally entitled to refuse the wages and
conditions which are offered to them, however disadvantageous their
bargaining position in practice.

Capitalism as a mode of production is compatible with a number of

different modes of both persuasion and coercion. Although there is
undoubtedly some sort of ‘elective affinity’ between a capitalist mode of
production, a liberal mode of persuasion, and a democratic mode of
coercion, it is a question to be settled empirically just how many other
modes of persuasion and coercion may be compatible with it. It is, for
example, possible to conceive of a capitalist mode of production
combined with a theocratic mode of persuasion (on the model, say, of
present-day Iran) or a socialist mode of coercion (on the model, say, of
present-day China). No more can be said by way of generalization than
that in all societies, the modes of production, persuasion and coercion
reciprocally influence one another.

The term ‘mode of production’ itself, however, does carry the implication
that one mode can, in Marx’s well-known phrase, reside in the pores of
another. It is a familiar sociological fact that formally free labour can
coexist with slavery, serfdom, debt-peonage, or reliance on the labour of
kinsfolk. But the non-servile building-labourers of ancient Rome, the
seasonal grape-pickers of medieval France, the casually-employed
squatters on the haciendas of colonial Mexico, or the hired porters of pre-
colonial West Africa were all marginal to the central economic
institutions of their societies. However difficult it may be to say precisely
when the transition to a capitalist mode of production occurs in any given
society, it is only complete when it can be agreed by observers of all
theoretical persuasions that formally free wage-labour is dominant in the
economy as a whole.

Finally, although there is an important distinction to be drawn between

agricultural and industrial capitalism, there is no necessary connection
between the dominance of free labour and the process of industrialization.
It is true that ‘feudal industrialism’ is almost a contradiction in terms. In a
feudal mode of production, the role of the dependent cultivators (who
may, but do not have to, be enserfed) is a necessary corollary of the
autonomy of the landholding magnates, whereas the factory-based
production of manufactured goods normally implies (as Weber also
emphasized) the separation of the workplace from the home. But factory

* This article is a slightly revised version of the thematic paper of the plenary
session on ‘Social Change and the Updating of Sociological Knowledge’ at the Thirteenth
World Congress of Sociology held at Bielefeld, Germany on 21 July
1994, at which the discussants were Immanuel Wallerstein and Orlando Lentini.
My thanks are due not only to my two discussants but to Perry Anderson and
Chris Wickham who commented on the original text and to John Iliffe who gave
me useful guidance on the literature on African capitalism.

34
workers can be slaves, or indentured apprentices, or prisoners, or directed
labourers within a command economy, or immigrant Gastarbeiter liable to
deportation on the expiry of their short-term contracts. It can even be
argued that serfdom is not incompatible with industrialization to the
extent that manufacture can be so sited as to take advantage of families
glebae adscripti who commute labour service on the land to labour service
in the factory. But this is practicable only on a scale too limited to bring
about the industrialization of a whole economy. Although miners can
more readily be serfs (as they were, for example, in Scotland throughout
the seventeenth century),1 factory workers who are not formally free will
almost always be tied to their employment in other ways.

The Selection of Practices

Next, a few words about my chosen title. ‘Triumph’ is in inverted

commas for two reasons: first, because the displacement by capitalism of
other modes of production is in no sense predetermined; and second,
because where such displacement does occur, there is no implication that
it is irreversible. It is a contingent matter whose explanation is to be
sought in the competitive advantage which capitalist practices confer on
the roles which carry them.

This way of putting it does, however, presuppose that evolution from one
mode of production (or persuasion, or coercion) to another comes about
through a process analogous but not reducible to natural selection, in
which the objects of selection are the practices defining the roles
constitutive of the institutions which in turn define the mode.2 Although
individuals, groups, classes, and indeed societies may all be competing
with one another, they are not themselves the units of selection. Marx was
as mistaken in identifying classes as ‘the’ protagonists in social evolution
as Spencer was in identifying individuals. Only practices are genuine
replicators whose survival or extinction, and thereby the survival or
extinction of the mode of production, persuasion, or coercion whose
constitutive roles they define, depends on the net selective value of their
phenotypic effects. I cannot here expound the implications of this
formulation in any detail. But two points may be worth making in order
to avoid possible misunderstanding.

The first point is that explanation of any chosen evolutionary sequence

does not, in the theory of social any more than in the theory of natural
selection, rest on identifying features of the existing environment which
currently favour the persistence of whatever characteristic of the society is
to be explained. What matters is the context in which mutant or
recombinant practices emerge and the sequence of events which causes
them to survive and be propagated to the point of constituting the
1
T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, London 1969, p. 168.
2
This proposition was first advanced in my Radcliffe-Brown Lecture for 1986:
‘On the Tendency of Human Societies to Form Varieties’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 72, 1986. A more detailed exposition is given in A Treatise on Social
Theory. Volume II. Substantive Social Theory, Cambridge 1989. See also the review
article by Chris Wickham, ‘Systactic Structures: Social Theory for Historians’,
Past and Present 132, 1991.

35
society’s mode of production, persuasion or coercion as the case may be.
As in the theory of natural selection, rival hypotheses have to be quasi-
experimentally tested with the benefit of hindsight in order to demon-
strate what difference to the evolution of the society would have been
made if the characteristics of the environment favouring the carriers of
the mutant or recombinant practices had not been present.

The second point is that in the theory of social selection the plans and
purposes of rulers and policy-makers (and of their opponents) are treated
as random inputs into the process of social evolution. This implies neither
that those plans and purposes are unreal nor that they are uncaused, but
simply that even where mutant or recombinant practices are the products
of conscious design, the hopes or fears of the designer are irrelevant to the
explanation of their effect on the evolution of the institutions and societies
within which they emerge. What matters is their phenotypic effects and
the competitive advantages conferred thereby on the roles which carry
them. It makes no more difference to a sociologist studying the evolution
of the various societies of sub-Saharan Africa what caused a particular
European deliberately to introduce capitalist farming into Natal or the
Cape than it does to a biologist studying the evolution of the flora and
fauna of Australia what caused a particular European deliberately to
introduce rabbits into New South Wales.

As those examples show, there is still a distinction to be drawn in social as

in natural selection between endogenous evolution and evolution
resulting from the exogenous introduction of a mutation which would
never have occurred from within. Thus, the ‘triumph’ of capitalism in
Europe is clearly a different kind of story from its ‘triumph’ in America,
where the roles and institutions of the indigenous societies showed, so far
as we know, no sign of evolving in that direction if left to themselves. But
the form of explanation called for is the same. It is still a matter of
establishing with the benefit of hindsight what features of the total
environment—institutional, demographic, and ecological—conferred
what advantage on what roles carrying capitalistic practices. This is no
less difficult in the study of sociological than of biological evolution.
There is not only the problem of assigning relative importance to
economic, ideological, and coercive pressures in the institutional
environment, but that of assigning relative importance to demographic
and ecological pressures as against institutional. On any theory, the
‘triumph’ of capitalism has been influenced at least in part by the birth and
death rates of the labouring population (consider, for example, slave-
breeding, the Black Death, or the epidemiology of New Spain) and by the
work which it is required to do (consider, for example, the implications of
making a profit out of sheep as opposed to grain, tobacco as opposed to
cocoa, or iron as opposed to gold). And in addition, there is the further
complication that the societies in which capitalism becomes the mode of
production (or doesn’t) are themselves interacting with others, so that its
‘triumph’ (or otherwise) may depend also on the competitive advantage
conferred by practices defining the roles of alien merchants, missionaries,
colonists, convicts, raiders, invaders, lenders, investors, and directors and
agents of multinational corporations whose activities cut across both
territorial and cultural frontiers.
36
Rome: Wage-Labour Retarded

That said, I can do no more in this paper than select a handful of historical
examples from the perspective which I have outlined and suggest the
conclusions which seem to me to follow from them. But it is just as
important to identify the selective pressures which retard as those which
accelerate the diffusion of capitalist practices in societies of different kinds.
For this reason, the most instructive example to start from is the economy
of ancient Rome. Rome’s mode of production was capitalist in every
respect except the dominance of a formally free labour force.3 It was, as
nobody disputes, an economy which rested instead on slave labour. But to
say this is not to explain the evolution of Rome’s mode of production but
merely to state what needs to be explained: why did slavery ‘triumph’ over
wage-labour?

For a start, there were significant numbers of wage-workers in the Roman

economy, including not only building-labourers but miners, carpenters,
stevedores, fullers, weavers, potters, painters, and musicians. Nor was
there lacking a prospective supply: many of the peasantry lived on
holdings too small to employ all their families all year round, and many of
the urban poor were dependent on hand-outs either from private patrons
or from the state. There were substantial funds available to be deployed in
mining, property development, shipowning, pottery, arms manufacture,
vineyards, and market gardens as well as agricultural land. There was a
vigorous market in urban as well as rural property. There was an
established legal tradition suitable to private transactions between freely
consenting parties. Only at times of crisis was there a serious shortage of
coin. Free labourers were even held (by Varro, at any rate)4 to be preferable
to slaves for some kinds of farm work. So is it not surprising that Rome
failed to evolve into a fully capitalist society with a large proletariat and a
small propertied ruling class on the classical Marxist model?

The answer, following my earlier remarks, is not to be found simply by

pointing to the profits accruing to economically rational slaveowners.
Profitable as the use of slave labour could no doubt be, it might have been
better for the productivity of the Roman economy as a whole if prisoners
of war had either been killed outright or disarmed and returned to their
homes and the free poor employed—as they were later to be—as
dependent tenants. Alternatively, able-bodied male slaves might have
been used in the army, as in Islamic societies, and the free poor left to
work the land. But such possibilities ceased to be relevant once the
practice of auctioning captives sub hasta after a victorious battle or siege
had, for whatever reasons, been adopted. From the early fourth century
BC, Rome’s relentless expansion by force of arms fed back a steady supply
of slaves at the same time that the soldiers who fought the campaigns
3
W.G. Runciman, ‘Capitalism without Classes: the Case of Classical Rome’,
British Journal of Sociology, vol. 34, no. 2, 1983.
4
De Re Rustica I.xvii.3. The passage is particularly interesting in that Varro
explicitly cites the advantages which the hiring of free labourers offers the
employer: they can be chosen for their physical suitability for the work; they can
be restricted to the right age-group; and they can be interviewed about their
experience with their previous employer.

37
which yielded them were for that reason taken away from the land for
increasingly long periods. The consequent replacement of family-worked
smallholdings by slave-worked large estates was observed and deplored
by contemporary observers, whose testimony is not significantly disputed
by modern historians.5 This was a society organized primarily for war. Its
mode of coercion was based on a military-cum-political oligarchy
commanding citizen soldiers who were available to them not only for
foreign campaigns of conquest but for domestic violence against one
another. Its mode of persuasion was based on an ideology of patriotism
and military glory handed down within the families who constituted the
oligarchy. The institutional environment was, accordingly, exceptionally
favourable to the practice of enslavement of prisoners of war (supple-
mented, to some degree, by purchase and breeding). There was no
inhibition against slavery as such. The advantage to the oligarchs was not
only personal glory (culminating, for the fortunate, in a real triumph) but
the ability to reward their own troops with booty. In the mode of
production as it therefore evolved, the practice of wage-labour was never
a serious competitor.
It might still be asked whether wage-labour could not have come to
dominate the urban economy, since the use of enslaved captives as
agricultural labour in place of free tenants or allodialists need not preclude
the employment of free men (or women) in manufacturing. But here, the
critical practice—which, like enslavement itself, had been adopted for
reasons we do not know by the beginning of the expansion by conquest—
was manumission. Coupled with the practice of peculium, whereby
property which legally belonged to the slaveowner was for all practical
purposes that of the slave,6 it created a class whose members directly
controlled significant means of production. But their enterprises tended
to be small-scale and their subordinate workers to be servile. What is
more, they continued after they had bought their freedom to rank far
below the members of the senatorial and equestrian orders in social status.
To the extent that there emerged an entrepreneurial ‘bourgeoisie’, it
consisted of freedmen and provincials. Sons of high-ranking families who
were, as Ovid said of himself, wholly without political ambition (‘fugax
ambitionis’), might become poets, rentiers, and men-about-town; they
might lend out money at high rates of interest, invest in profit-making
enterprises managed by others, and market surplus produce from their
slave-worked estates; but they did not take up business as a career. The
urban free citizenry were either engaged in artisan production for their
own account or irregular wage-labour without any notion of lifetime
contractual employment, or else supported themselves as hangers-on of
noble households. In such an institutional environment, there was as little
prospect of an evolution to capitalism in the urban as in the rural sector of
the economy.
North versus South in America
But what happens when capitalism is introduced from outside, whether
peacefully or by force, into a society whose mode of production is of a
5
Cf. e.g. Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge 1978, chapter 1.
6
M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, London 1973, pp. 64–5.

38
different kind? The most obviously instructive example of this is the
Americas, where, as I have already remarked, there was no sign of an
incipient endogenous evolution towards capitalism but where conquer-
ors and colonists from societies in which formally free wage-labour was
already established to a greater or lesser degree were able, thanks to an
overwhelming superiority in the means of coercion, to impose, at least
initially, whatever mode of production they chose.

In Hispanic America, as is well known, the conquerors initially sought to

adapt the institutions which they found to their own purposes. The
practices defining the encomienda were closer to the indigenous systems of
corvée labour than were those defining the subsequent repartimiento. But
even though the Indian workers made available for repartimiento received
payment in cash before they were returned to their own communities, it
was still an institution very obviously remote from a free market in
labour. Perhaps, in a different mode of coercion, selective pressures might
have favoured contractual wage-labour to the point that the adult male
populations of the Indian communities would have become a formally
free proletariat selling their labour on such terms as they could get to the
owners of mines, farms, and plantations. But it was in the role of
conquerors, not entrepreneurs, that the Spaniards had arrived in the first
place; and the mode of production evolved instead in the direction of
debt-peonage and the hacienda, with the Indian communities retaining
varying proportions of their ancestral lands and a Spanish merchant class
dominating the economy of the towns.

The debate over the supposedly ‘feudal’ character of the hacienda does not,
fortunately, affect my argument one way or the other. More to the point is
that all the various mutations of practices which defined the mode of
production during the colonial period functioned to retard rather than
accelerate the extension of a free labour market. Debt-peonage was by no
means pervasive (and it might in any case be the hacendados who were in
debt rather than the peones).7 But the rent-paying arrendatarios and the
small-holding rancheros, although they might hire in seasonal wage-
workers to supplement the labour of their families (and perhaps hire out
members of their families to others on the same basis) were neither
homologues nor analogues of capitalist farmers on the north-west
European model, any more than the hacendados were. Surplus produce
was, as from the manorial estates of sixteenth-century Poland,8 marketed
for urban consumption and (in coastal areas) for export, and land often
passed into the hands of more innovative and profit-conscious owners by
purchase from the less industrious and efficient. But this did not bring a
free labour market into being. On the contrary, the fluctuations in supply
and demand which created the opportunities for such purchases turned
increasing numbers of both tenants and smallholders into share-croppers;
and although the Indians in their village communities became involved in
an increasingly monetarized network of economic transactions, it was
7
D.W. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio: Léon 1700–1860,
Cambridge 1978, p. 26.
8
Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish
Economy 1500–1800, London 1976.

39
largely through a mutation of the practices of the repartimiento into
repartimientos de comercio—that is, compulsory advances of credit by urban
merchants. Selective pressures were indeed at work which significantly
altered the mode of production. But the practices which they selected
defined forms of labour relations which, novel as they might be, were
variants within a range across which free mobility of labour and
permanent wage-contracts remained exceptional.

When this state of affairs is contrasted with that in North America, the
most obvious difference is that the indigenous inhabitants of North
America were never incorporated into the colonists’ labour force on any
terms whatever. The explanation of the evolution away from peaceful
coexistence towards protracted and near-continuous warfare is outside
the scope of this paper. But the result was an environment in which the
colonists’ needs for labour had to be satisfied by other means; and the
practice which could most readily be adapted for the purpose was
indenture. It has been calculated that in Virginia in the seventeenth
century, an initial population of 15,000 was augmented by 70,000
immigrants of whom three-quarters were indentured servants.9 But the
role was not what it was in England, where it functioned as an analogous
mutation of apprenticeship, or for that matter New England, where the
relations between master and servant were much more closely supervised
by the Puritan community. In Virginia, and to a yet greater degree in the
Caribbean islands, indentured servants were treated more and more like
the slaves who in due course replaced them. Only a small minority both
survived and stayed on to become, on the one hand, farmers, overseers, or
self-employed artisans or, on the other, wage-labourers. It was not simply
that neither the farmers and artisans nor the ex-convicts and vagabonds
wished to become wage-labourers. It was that the owners of the cotton
and sugar plantations were able to import black slaves as readily as white
servants and it was more advantageous to them to do so. Slaves could be
more easily coerced; they could be worked not merely for a term of years
but for life; they were less able to invoke the ideological sanctions against
their treatment which were available to Christian whites; and they were in
abundant supply from Africa. The evolution of slavery in the Southern
States is a familiar story which I do not need to summarize. The point to
note is the extent to which the selective pressures acting on the Southern
economy had been and remained unfavourable to wage-labour.

In the North, by contrast, there evolved an economy which by the time of

Adam Smith was celebrated for the high wages paid to its labourers, who
not only earned more in New York than they would in London but paid
less for their provisions.10 But the original New Englanders, who
envisaged a godly commonwealth in which land would be farmed in
common, prices would be controlled, and families would largely provide
for their own, were actively hostile to the prospect of an expanding
market in labour and commodities where men would be free to seek profit
at the expense of their brethren. Theirs was not, it may be objected, a
9
This estimate is taken from James Lang, Conquest and Commerce, New York 1975,
p. 120, drawing on Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: The Seventeenth-
Century Virginian, Charlottesville 1971.
10
The Wealth of Nations (ed. Cannan), London 1961, vol. 1, p. 78.

40
sustainable ideal. But as landholdings grew in size, manufactures became
more specialized, and debtor-creditor networks expanded between rural
producers and urban merchants, it was by no means obvious that wage-
labour was the solution to the mounting need for hands. As Downing
wrote to Winthrop in 1645, ‘I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee
get into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business’, since ‘our
servants will still desire freedome to plant for themselves, and not stay but
for verie great wages’.11 This ‘freedome to plant for themselves’ was a
much more meaningful prospect for immigrants to New England than it
was for the indentured servants of the South. Small plots of land sufficient
to support a family were available at prices which young able-bodied
males could reasonably hope to accumulate out of their savings during an
interim period of wage-labour; and they could not in practice be replaced
by slaves, given the constraints imposed in north-east America by ecology
and ideology alike. ‘The planting of sugar and tobacco’, said Adam
Smith, ‘can afford the expence of slave cultivation’,12 but not the growing
of corn. Productivity, therefore, had to be sufficient to enable the
employers to find the ‘verie great wages’ which they had no option but to
pay since neither slaves, serfs, corvée labourers, debt-peons, captive
Indians, nor indentured servants were available to them. Furthermore,
there had to be a sufficient supply of new entrants into the labour market
to replace those who moved out of wage-labour, and this (as Adam Smith
also recognized) meant that immigration had to be supplemented by early
marriage and a high birth rate. Both these necessary conditions were, for
different reasons, met. But it is entirely plausible to picture a North
American economy in which, under not very different initial conditions,
westward migration was halted by Indian resistance, birth rates were
falling, immigration had slowed, technology was static, and the labour
force was largely divided between autarkic homesteading families on the
frontier and smallholding or artisan producers financed by credit
extended by merchant capitalists in the towns. The eventual dominance of
free labour in a high-growth, high-technology, high-productivity, high-
mobility, high-wage economy was neither as predictable nor even as
likely as it is sometimes made to appear.

Africa: Wage-Labour Constrained

‘Colonial’ penetration is, on the other hand, a very different matter in the
case of the African as opposed to the American continent. By the time that
European settlers were introducing the economic practices of their
societies of origin into the different parts of Africa on a significant scale,
those practices included neither slavery nor indenture, while the settlers
had both the means and the motives to transform the pattern of roles and
their defining practices which they found in the indigenous economies. It
might therefore seem plausible to expect that there would be both
potential owners and managers of profit-making enterprises on the one
hand and potential wage-labourers on the other who between them
11
Quoted by Winthrop D. Jordan, While over Black, Chapel Hill, NC 1968, p. 69.
12
The Wealth of Nations, p. 412. Cf. the comment of Fernand Braudel, La
Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd edition, Paris 1966,
p. 142 on sugar: ‘Et finalement, c’est lui qui a imposé la solution de la main-d’oeuvre servile
...’

41
would be the carriers of the practices constitutive of a triumphant
capitalism. But analysis of the institutional environment into which those
practices were imported, or within which they began to emerge, reveals
selective pressures which were much less favourable to the ‘triumph’ of
capitalism than might have been supposed.13

During the colonial period, these pressures were both endogenous and
exogenous. The exogenous pressures were readily visible: neither the
colonial governments nor the metropolitan corporations were likely to
benefit from promoting a strong native capitalist class, and the native
carriers of capitalistic practices were confronted by policies which
explicitly favoured metropolitan and/or settler interests. There were of
course differences between West, East and Southern Africa, as there were
between Anglophone and Francophone societies. But in the case where a
few thousand native capitalists were perhaps most successfully employing
significant numbers of wage-labourers by the end of the nineteenth
century—the Cape and to a lesser extent Natal—they were effectively
eliminated by white competitors who commanded the necessary political
backing to secure the passing of (in particular) the Natives Land Act of
1913.14 Elsewhere, as in Kenya, infrastructural investments, protective
tariffs, and financial services were directed towards settler rather than
indigenous landowners, or, as in the Ivory Coast, scarce labour was
requisitioned for the benefit of French planters at the expense of African
farmers. In general, European employers preferred casual and migrant
workers to permanent wage-labourers. Native capitalists wishing to
operate on a scale requiring a significant number of subordinate
employees outside of their own kin found it far more difficult than
Europeans to raise the necessary loans from European-controlled banks,
and this placed them at a further disadvantage if they hoped to establish
themselves in an industry such as mining, where the ability to invest in
machinery was essential to profits. It is true that sometimes, as in Sierra
Leone, local elites were enabled or even encouraged to develop their own
business interests. But they then tended to rely on their customary rights
to rents, taxes and tributary labour rather than to create a free market in
wage-labour.

In any case, selective pressures already present in the structure and culture
of African societies worked against the evolution of continuing
enterprises employing wage-labourers. Slaves, sharecroppers, clients,
kinsfolk, pawns, or domestic outworkers were much more frequent
sources of labour, and partible inheritance inhibited the transmission of
ownership of profitable business enterprises beyond the generation of the
founders. The most notable exceptions (so far as I know) are in those areas
where Islamic carriers of inherited commercial practices have been able to
maintain continuity of ownership; but their relations with their
workforce still tend to be of a clientelistic kind. Moreover, it was not only
under the influence of Islam that both economic and ideological pressures
were unfavourable to the practice of wage-labour: in Angola, for
13
John Iliffe, The Emergence of African Capitalism, London 1983; Paul Kennedy,
African Capitalism: The Struggle for Ascendancy, London 1988.
14
Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, London 1979, p.
239.

42
example, even after slavery had been abolished, unfree libertos, serviçais or
contratados were employed on the coffee plantations, not free wage-
labourers. In Kenya, Kikuyu elders would reward juniors who worked
for them with stock or bridewealth rather than wages; in Buganda, where
local elites relied on the labour of clients or slaves, missionaries who
introduced wage-payment were told to buy their servants instead; in the
Ivory Coast, it was considered demeaning to work as a wage-labourer on
home territory for another African, with the result that young men would
do so only in regions other than their own; and in South Africa, where
massive investment in mining, in particular, generated a corresponding
demand for labour, it was met by the recruitment of Africans who were
either migrants from neighbouring protectorates and homelands or
residents whose formal freedom was explicitly restricted by the
institutions of what came to be called apartheid. Nowhere in sub-Saharan
Africa was there a society likely to evolve into a triumphant capitalist
mode. For all the differences between them, in none did the practice of
wage-labour confer sufficient advantage on the roles of workers and/or
their employers for it to come to pervade the economy as a whole.

After decolonization, when political power had passed from the

incumbents of metropolitan roles to indigenous rulers and their agents, it
might have been expected that the removal of exogenous constraints and
a deliberate pursuit of economic growth would have encouraged the
emergence of a class of entrepreneurs competing for a growing number of
available wage-labourers. But this is not what happened. Not only did the
indigenous pressures which tended to select out the practice of wage-
labour continue to operate, but governments themselves, whether or not
in the name of ‘socialism’, acted in ways which limited the capacity of
prospective employers of wage-labourers to build up a capitalist
economy. This may be attributable in part to the rulers’ fears of bringing
into being not only a privileged bourgeoisie which might acquire
countervailing political power but an underprivileged proletariat whose
discontent might be channelled into political protest. But in any event, the
newly independent states created, or inherited from their colonial past,
bureaucracies whose constituent roles were doubly unfavourable to the
spread of capitalism. Not only did the incumbents of bureaucratic roles
have an interest in preserving the power attaching to them at the expense
of the power which might attach to entrepreneurial roles, but the
bureaucracy itself offered the prospect of more rewarding careers than
entrepreneurship. In this context, the selective pressures at work
favoured the evolution of something closer to a tributary than a capitalist
mode of production. By this I mean an economy in which a dominant
public sector is financed by taxation of primary producers, monopsony by
parastatal marketing agencies, and levies extracted from foreign con-
cessionaires, while the indigenous private sector is restricted to transport,
retail trading, and small-scale industrial production by firms dependent
on the labour of families and kin.

This, of course, is only one out of a range of sociological possibilities. It is

equally possible to envisage a mode of production in which indigenous
entrepreneurs are actively supported by government (as they have been in
both Nigeria and Kenya), loan facilities (perhaps from the World Bank)
43
are available for investment in fixed assets, children of families which have
accumulated significant wealth are increasingly attracted to business
careers, and wage-labourers of whom a higher proportion are now urban-
born are available for recruitment into full-time employment by large-
scale, privately-owned industrial enterprises. But even if the institutional
context were to change to this degree, and even if the ideological
environment across sub-Saharan Africa as a whole were to be more
favourable to capitalism than hitherto,15 selective pressures unfavourable
to the spread of capitalist practices might persist. Private investors might
favour finance, commerce and real estate over industry; entrepreneurs
seeking to build up ongoing enterprises might have to yield to the
redistributive demands of their kinfolk; employers might hire relations,
apprentices, journeymen and subcontractors rather than permanent
wage-labourers and the prospective wage-labourers might prefer to be so
hired; local ties might continue to interfere with a free-functioning labour
market; urban bourgeoisies might consistently prefer bureaucratic to
entrepreneurial careers; and the rise of an increasingly powerful class of
capitalist employers might indeed provoke a political reaction which
would once again superimpose bureaucratic on entrepreneurial practices
and roles.

Alternative Prospects for Russia

My last example, for obvious reasons, is Russia. The collapse of

communism in the Soviet Union has led some observers to conclude not
only that its mode of production has therefore been shown to be
unworkable but that a capitalist mode of production is bound to replace
it. But neither of these propositions is self-evident. The mode of
production collapsed because the mode of coercion which had sustained it
collapsed. The institutions of a command economy in which labour is
directed and the means of production are owned directly by the state can
reproduce themselves perfectly well if the rulers and their agents have
recourse, as in the Soviet Union from its inception, to the means of
coercion which they control through the apparatus of the single party. It
follows not only that the carriers of the practice of wage-labour have no
inherent competitive advantage over the carriers of the practices which
define a command economy, but that a capitalist mode of production
might start to emerge in the former Soviet Union only to be suppressed
once again by the evolution of a mode of coercion either inconsistent with
or actively inimical to a free market in which ongoing enterprises compete
for profit.

In any case, it is not as if tsarist Russia had evolved more than part of the
way to a capitalist mode of production as here defined. In the decades
following the abolition of serfdom, much of the growing demand for
wage-labourers was filled by otkhodniki—the estimated six million
15
The change of policy of Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe with
regard to the encouragement of private enterprise and the removal of exchange
controls is particularly interesting in this context (personal interview with Acting
Finance Minister Emmerson Munangagwa, Harare, 9 November 1994).

44
peasants across European Russia16 who migrated to the towns to take up
factory employment. They were not ‘migrant labourers’ in the sense in
which the role is usually defined. They had to have passports; they
remained subject to the control of their village communes as well as of the
state; and they were required to remit their earnings to their families for
the payment of tax on pain of forcible return and corporal punishment.
No doubt this system would have been modified in one way or another as
industrialization and urbanization gathered pace. But at the outbreak of
the First World War, the majority of the working population of Russia
was still outside the organized wage-labour sector of the economy, and a
majority even of factory workers was still partly engaged in agriculture.
What is more, it seems to be agreed among historians of all schools that a
strong anti-capitalist ethos was pervasive throughout the society as a
whole; and although this, too, might have changed in parallel with the
evolution of the mode of production, it would be unwise to discount
altogether the possible independent influence of the mode of persuasion.
Just as, in Africa, selective pressures unfavourable to a free market in
wage-labour predated the colonial period and persisted after indepen-
dence, so in Russia did selective pressures predating the Bolshevik seizure
of power persist—reinforced by aspects of the Soviet ideology—in the
decades following it.

It is too soon to see what modes of production, persuasion, and coercion

may be evolving in the societies which formerly constituted the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. In any case, even if more evidence were
available, it is fundamental to the theory of social selection that only with
hindsight is it ever possible to say conclusively what exactly the practices
selected in the course of a society’s evolution have been selected for. It is,
however, already apparent that the large ongoing industrial enterprises of
the former Soviet Union have been strongly resistant to the development
of a free market in wage-labour. Nor is it difficult to see why this should be
so. It is no more to the advantage of the managers of these enterprises,
who see the power attaching to their roles being diminished in
consequence, than it is to their employees, who see themselves threatened
by the prospect of short-term, and perhaps even long-term, unemploy-
ment. In an institutional environment where the managers can best
preserve their position by what are, in effect, barter deals between each
other, and employees can best preserve theirs by looking to the enterprise
for both security and welfare, there is no reason to suppose that the
dismantling of a command economy will quickly usher in the practices
and roles of industrial capitalism on the West European and North
American model.

Even if a direct reversion to the Soviet mode of production is dismissed as

a possibility, there are others in which competitive advantage might
accrue to the carriers of practices very different from those constitutive of
a triumphant capitalism. It is, for example, possible to envisage an
16
Jeffrey Burds, ‘The Social Control of Peasant Labour in Russia: The Response
of Village Communities to Labour Migration in the Central Industrial Region,
1861–1905’, in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds, Peasant Economy,
Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921, Princeton 1991, p. 55. I owe this
reference to Orlando Figes.

45
economy in which the means of production are controlled by entrepre-
neurs who at the same time control enough of the means of coercion to
offer employees recruited on a clientelistic basis protection against
intimidation or extortion by their competitors. Indeed, this may to some
extent have happened already.17 If the loss of an effective monopoly of the
means of coercion by the state were to lead to a fusion of the roles of
industrial entrepreneur and paramilitary gang leader, then although
ongoing enterprises might be competing with one another for profit there
could hardly develop a labour market within which wage-earners moved
freely from one employer to another and recruitment was determined by
price.

A Bush, Not a Ladder

At this point, I am aware not only that my argument has become

increasingly speculative but that I have not even mentioned societies
(including, for example, India and Japan) whose evolution towards their
own distinctive sub-type of a capitalist mode of production is of obvious
relevance to it. But I hope that I have said enough, with the help of my
chosen examples, to undermine any suggestion that capitalism is the
mode of production into which all societies are bound to evolve.
Moreover, I hope also that I have said enough to lend support to one
further general proposition with which I should like to conclude. It is a
proposition which ought, in my view, to be by now uncontroversial
among sociologists. But I know very well that it is not, and that it is not
only Marxists still committed to the presupposition of a necessary
unilinear sequence from feudalism through capitalism to socialism who
will disagree with me.

The proposition is that social, like natural, evolution proceeds not from
stage to stage but from byway to byway. To borrow a metaphor used by
Stephen Jay Gould for biological evolution, it must be seen not as a ladder
but as a branching bush. It is true that there is a sequence of
distinguishable modes of production, persuasion and coercion, but it is
not true that the sequence is in any sense progressive. Likewise, it is true
that history never repeats itself, but it is not true that social evolution only
goes in one direction. The process of social selection not only permits but
requires that modes of production, persuasion and coercion will not
succeed each other in a uniform manner across the globe. It may still be
that capitalism is going to triumph, however diverse the sub-types in, and
periods for, which it does so. But it would be both premature to claim that
it has and unwarranted to predict that it will.

* * *

In the discussion, Professor Wallerstein made five points by way of criticism: first,
that capitalism is better defined in terms of accumulation of capital than of free
labour recruited by enterprises competing for profit; second, that my explanatory
framework is insufficiently systematic; third, that different types of practice can
coexist within a given mode of production; fourth, that I make insufficient
17
Federico Varese, ‘Is Sicily the Future of Russia? Private Protection and the Rise
of the Russian Mafia’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 35, no. 2, 1994.

46
allowance for contradictions within a given mode of production; and fifth, that
the collapse of the Soviet Union should be attributed to international capitalism
rather than to the breakdown of its mode of coercion. To these, my answers are
first, that to define capitalism in terms of accumulation of capital makes not only
Ancient Rome but the Soviet Union ‘capitalist’; second, that since all systems are
by definition sets of interacting variables, the difference between us is that he gives
more importance than I do in the divergent evolution of modern societies to
relative economic advantage within the global system; third, that I explicitly allow
for the coexistence of different practices but emphasize the need to analyse their
significance in terms of their relative pervasiveness and critical mass; fourth, that I
hold the contradictions which account for social change to be between conflicting
practices rather than between forces and social relations of production; and fifth,
that although the United States made the nuclear arms race too expensive for the
Soviet economy to sustain, I do not see why the Soviet Union need have collapsed
if the apparatus of coercion had been kept in place and a modest proportion of its
arms budget transferred to consumer goods.

47