ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to outline Karl Marx’s views about the transition to capitalism and its subsequent development. It explores in more detail the notions of articulation and combined and uneven development that are implicit in his later writings. The chapter considers what he might have thought about the structures of contemporary capitalism and their relations to the modern nation-state. Industrial capitalist societies and the capitalist mode of production developed out of earlier social formations and tributary modes of production of which the feudal mode of production is one variant. The transition from feudalism to capitalism took place on a world scale beginning in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. It was firmly set in place by the rise of industrial capitalist in Northwestern Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century. Marx’s discussion of the primitive accumulation of capital is an analysis of the transformation of one kind of tributary society into a capitalist society rooted in industrial capitalism.
