ABSTRACT
Marxist scholars have often fallen into exactly the same trap. If we take modes of payment of agricultural labor and contrast a ‘feudal’ mode wherein the laborer is permitted to retain for subsistence a part of his agricultural production with a ‘capitalist’ mode wherein the same laborer turns over the totality of his production to the landowner, receiving part of it back in the form of wages, we may then see these two modes as ‘stages’ of a development. We may talk of the interests of ‘feudal’ landowners in preventing the conversion of their mode of payment to a system of wages. We may then explain the fact that in the twentieth century a partial entity, say a state in Latin America, has not yet industrialized as the consequence of its being dominated by such landlords. If we take each of these successive steps, all of which are false steps, we will end up with the misleading concept of a ‘state dominated by feudal elements’, as though such a thing could possibly exist in a capitalist world-economy. But, as André Gunder Frank has clearly spelled out, such a myth dominated for a
NOTHING ILLUSTRATES THE DISTORTIONS of ahistorical models of social change better than the dilemmas to which the concept of stages gives rise. If we are to deal with social transformations over long historical time (Braudel’s ‘the long term’), and if we are to give an explanation of both continuity and transformation, then we must logically divide the long term into segments in order to observe the structural changes from time A to time B. These segments are however not discrete but continuous in reality; ergo they are ‘stages’ in the ‘development’ of a social structure, a development which we determine however not a priori but a posteriori. That is, we cannot predict the future concretely, but we can predict the past.
