Finding space in the modes of production debate: The value of Latin America

Abstract

This article is inspired by several recent scholarly developments. First, there has been renewed interest in debates surrounding the concept ‘mode of production’. Second, there has been a passionate debate about how we understand core–periphery relations in relation to the broader question of capitalist development. Finally, it has been argued that, beyond opposition to neoliberal development, there has also been a revival of Marxist theoretical perspectives and praxis in Latin America. However, despite some diverse work engaging with debates that use the concept ‘mode of production’ in the Latin American context, there has been no systematic attempt to look at major Latin America Marxist thinkers and their contribution to this debate. This article seeks to correct for this by looking at the key work of René Zavaleta and José Carlos Mariátegui as two of the continent’s most original Marxist thinkers. By doing so, I offer three distinct contributions. First I remove the mode of production debate from its relatively narrow, Eurocentric preoccupations, and second, I displace the largely temporal concerns of the debate (when was capitalism?) to give it a more spatial rendering (where is capitalism?). This opens the possibilities of thinking about co-existing differential spaces within a social formation. Finally, this method of analysis is therefore able to give a realistic assessment of the social forces involved in contemporary struggles by specifying what social antagonisms exist and where alliances can be constructed. I conclude that an analysis grounded in modes of production is thus attentive to specificity, and this provides a basis for thinking about transformative possibilities in and beyond Latin America.

Introduction

This article is inspired by several recent scholarly developments. First, there has been renewed interest in debates surrounding the concept ‘mode of production’ (see inter alia Banaji, 2011; Bieler and Morton, 2018, 2021; Burns, 2021, 2022; Pal, 2020; Rioux, 2013; Wark, 2021). Second, there has been a passionate debate about how we understand core–periphery relations in relation to the broader question of capitalist development (Anderson, 2010; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015, 2017; Bhambra, 2011; Chakrabarty, 2000; Chibber, 2014; Nilsen, 2017). Finally, it has been argued that, beyond opposition to neoliberal development, there has also been a ‘revival of Marxist theoretical perspectives and political practices’ in Latin America (Baker et al., 2019: 1). However, despite some diverse recent work engaging with debates that use the concept of ‘mode of production’ in the Latin American context (e.g. Fusaro, 2019; Gudynas, 2018; Hesketh, 2016, 2017), there has been no direct attempt to look at major Latin American Marxist thinkers and their contribution to the modes of production (MOP) debate (which in turn is able to speak originally to the question of core–periphery relations). This article seeks to correct for this neglect by looking at the key work of René Zavaleta and José Carlos Mariátegui as two of the continent’s most original Marxist thinkers. I also seek to explicitly give the mode of production debate a more spatial rendering through an examination of their contribution. At present, I contend that debates around the concept of mode production are often dominated by temporal concerns. That is to say, they are chiefly concerned with locating the historical origins of capital (Anderson, 1974: 18). This is often then answered with a historical debate about the precise nature of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England or other countries (Banaji, 2011; Brenner, 1977, 1982; Wood, 2002). However, instead of asking, when was capitalism? I believe a more politicised understanding can be gained from asking, where is capitalism?

An issue for Historical Materialism has always been to think through the dialectic of oppression and social change, as Marx’s (2000b) 11th thesis on Feuerbach aptly illustrates. It is in this vein that capitalism is seen by many Marxists as an ultimately progressive social force. However, this leads to the question of whether heightened forms of exploitation (including colonialism) are but a path to greater freedom. There is much evidence that Marx, in his mature writings, significantly rethought this problem (Anderson, 2010; Jani, 2002). Such a progressive view of history also raises the question of why revolution has largely broken out in countries that could best be described as on the periphery of global capitalism. Here the notion of uneven and combined development was utilised to stress the importance of conceptualising the contradictions of capitalism in terms of a global totality, as well as providing arguments about launching socialism via alternative collective social forms (Shanin, 1984). Nonetheless, there remained fierce debate about what role an urban proletariat had to play as the vanguard of any such change (e.g. Trotsky, 1962). Fast forward to contemporary debates regarding social change and concerns of exclusion and intersectionality are of prime importance. Where, for example, do women, ethnic minorities, first peoples, informal workers and so on. fit within a sociological theory of change? Does this render traditional Marxist theory irrelevant? I place the work of Mariátegui and Zavaleta into this debate to show not only how they widen debates concerning MOPs, but, in addition, how they speak to contemporary notions of seeking a heterogeneous collective subject for social change.

The article sets out the argument in the following stages. First, I introduce why the MOP debate matters for Historical Materialist enquiry and what some of the key debates have been around this concept. I argue a way of breaking the impasse in the debate is to consider the importance of space or spatial concerns. Second, I highlight the place of Latin America within this debate in relation to historical discussions surrounding core–periphery relations within global capitalism introduced via dependency theory. I show that while dependency theory sought to grapple with the issue of space, it ultimately did so in an unsatisfactory manner with respect to value production. Finally, in bringing both space and value together, I examine the ideas of two major Marxist thinkers René Zavaleta and José Carlos Mariátegui to show how their work helps provide a nuanced spatial rendering of the MOP debate but in doing so also moves the primary concerns of this debate beyond a largely historical academic preoccupation to one grounded in the reality of subaltern struggles in the present. The latter is especially important in the contemporary period where the right have returned to power in parts of Latin America and the institutional left have often had a dubious record in altering productive relations to transform space within the region. The place that the continent occupies within a broader global division of labour has thus remained unaltered. To analyse the potential of social forces in the current conjuncture, I argue we need concepts that can accurately delineate antagonistic relations. In my view this is the chief failing of the currently fashionable decolonial school of thought as well as dependency theory. Both succumb to a pan-capitalist thesis that offers an imprecise and unwieldy definition of what capitalism is and when it was. As a result, they are able to offer little by way of a role in transforming space in Latin America. This article shows that, in contrast to the asinine charge that Historical Materialist scholarship is too reductive in its analysis, it is in fact Historical Materialism that is more attentive to specificity. It is therefore well placed to provide a basis for thinking about transformative possibilities in and beyond Latin America. In short, I contend that we need to both value space in our analysis and, in turn, examine how specific spaces produce value.

The value of the MOP debate

Let us start with a brief introduction to the key terminology. What are MOPs, what the major points of debate and why does this concept matter? In other words, what is the problem that the MOP debate seeks to engage with and what are the key fault lines of disagreement in this debate? My intention here is not necessarily to adjudicate between competing claims and arguments. Rather it is to offer an overview of some of the contours and controversies that the concept of MOP has thrown up within Historical Materialist scholarship. Etienne Balibar (2009: 225) stakes out in clear terms the importance of the concept of MOP for Historical Materialism’s broader contribution to the social sciences, arguing that,

Marx’s construction of the central concept of the ‘mode of production’ has the function of an epistemological break with respect to the whole tradition of the philosophy of history. For in its generality it is absolutely incompatible with the principles of idealism, whether dogmatic or empiricist, and it progressively revolutionizes the whole problematic of society and history.

The term MOP is unmistakably Marxist in origin. Marx and Engels (2000) first lay the groundwork for thinking about MOPs in The German Ideology. In this text, they not only identify varying historical types of MOP (Tribal, Ancient Communal, Feudal, Capitalist), but they also highlight how humans (re)produce themselves through particular MOPs. Finally, they also submit that the differences between MOPs provide the basis for relations among nations within a broader international division of labour. Elaborating on this point Benno Teschke (2002: 7) highlights how ‘property relations explain not only variations in political regimes and geopolitical systems, they generate historically bounded and antagonistic strategies of action within and between political actors that govern international relations’. ¹ This is an important point to return to later when considering Latin America and how to characterise its colonial society.

Eric Wolf (1997: 76) usefully suggests that the concept of MOP has utility in ‘its capacity to underlie the strategic relations involved in the deployment of social labour by human pluralities’. Haldon (2015: 207) meanwhile has argued that the main benefit of the term MOP is to distinguish the ways in which ‘surplus wealth is generated and appropriated’. Essentially a major point that Marx advanced was that all societies organise themselves to produce surplus output (e.g. over and above what they will immediately consume). However, they differ in how they go about this production of surplus and by what technical means (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 2). This arrangement is what we can refer to as a MOP. Importantly this does not preclude the fact that a society may have more than one MOP at any one time, a point to be returned to later.

Differentiated forms of production furthermore, correspond to legal relations and forms of government (Marx, 1973: 88). In Capital Vol. 3, Marx (1981: 927) offers a crucial passage detailing the political importance of the concept of MOP, outlining how the social relations of production link to the broader, political form of the state:

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of economic development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of the state.

Of course, it was specifically the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production that largely animated Marx’s writings, notably in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1996) and over the course of the different volumes of Capital. ² For Marx (1981: 1019–1021), the capitalist MOP could be defined by the following elements: generalised commodity production by formally free wage labourers; surplus value as the ‘object and decisive motive of production’ and competition between individual capitals, leading to a continual investment in the means of production to expand output. A key focus for Marx (and others since, who are working within this tradition) is on the differentia specifica of capitalism and, thus, how the capitalist mode of production altered the dynamics of social life. This is captured in the famous quotation from the Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned (Marx and Engels, 1996: 828).

The dynamics and points of antagonism within a MOP, therefore, provide the basis for varieties of class struggles over the surplus that are the motor force of history. The delineation of class structures and these very points of conflict thus became a vital task of Historical Materialist scholarship. While Marx and Engels (1996) noted that the battle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat was the central one under capitalist relations of production, this by no means meant that other classes were absent from their analysis. This is demonstrated in Marx’s (2000a) key historical writings, and indeed all further Historical Materialist scholarship that has sought to provide concrete assessment of the prospects for radical change (see inter alia de Janvry, 1981; Gramsci, 1978; Lenin, 2009).

What then are the key points of debate around MOPs? As noted in the introduction, temporal concerns dominate much of the scholarship on the specifically capitalist MOP. The rationale for this can be found in the work of Brenner (1977: 26–27, emphasis added) who argues, ‘the analysis of capitalist economic development requires an understanding, in the first place, of the manner in which the capitalist social-productive relations underpinning the accumulation of capital on an extended scale originated’. Owing to the basic postulates about the transformative (and indeed revolutionary role) of the capitalist MOP on social life, there has been numerous debates about the origins of capitalism. Ellen Meiksins Wood, in a landmark text on this issue, highlights the importance for human life with the shift to the capitalist mode of production. Arguing that is it a qualitative break not simply a quantitative increase in production, she highlights that capitalist transformation came about when ‘Material life and social reproduction . . . are universally mediated by the market’ (Wood, 2002: 7). The most important issue here being when the market imperative seized hold of food production which is a necessity of life (Wood, 2002: 81). A major argument of Political Marxism has thus focused on the transformation in social property relations in the English countryside and how this unique development propelled the origins of capitalist development (Brenner, 1977, 1982). Specifically, the argument is that increased agricultural productivity, facilitated by moving away from direct coercion or ‘political accumulation’ to economic coercion, could now support a larger population working off the land. This process, at the same time, also helped undermine peasant property, forcing a larger section of the population to move off the land into manufacturing. This further spread capitalist development to industry (Brenner, 1977: 77–78). At its heart, this debate looked to examine different societies and sought to locate the origins of capitalist production, or conversely whether at a specific temporal juncture, certain societies should be considered capitalist or not (Wood, 1997, 2002).

However, contained within Marx’s formulation of the capitalist MOP is not just a view of how a single society develops internally, but how relations across societies are formed. It is an inherently spatial theory (Hesketh, 2017). Key to this is understanding the expansive dynamics of capital accumulation, understood in two interrelated senses. First, capital is expansive in the sense of creating increases in production linked to the extraction of surplus value and reinvestment into the means of production to amplify output. The effect of this greater productivity creates a pressure on competing sectors to adopt the same techniques to keep up or risk ruin. The result of this competitive environment is increased accumulation. Second, capital is also expansive in the sense of seeking out new opportunities for investment which cause it to spread beyond its existing boundaries. These two internally related dynamics of the capitalist MOP cause the geographical spread of capitalist social relations (Harvey, 2006: 427). However, this led to some classical Marxists adopting a stadial view, whereby all countries would simply mirror the transition found in England. ³ This elides the crucial difference between colonising countries and colonised countries and the manner in which they became integrated into the capitalist MOP (Hall, 2021 (1980) 210). In turn, this has inspired a more recent wave of scholarship taking some analyses grounded in MOPs to task for ignoring the realities of colonialism as being integral to (and not simply an adjunct of) the origins of capitalism (Bhambra, 2020; Hesketh, 2017: 31–32). Some have also questioned whether Political Marxism’s conceptualisation of capitalism relies too much on an ideal-type methodology that separates theory from history and offers a ‘formal-abstractionist approach’ (Bieler and Morton, 2021: 1755; Rioux, 2013: 95). Such an approach therefore omits colonial violence, racialisation and gendered oppression as integral to capitalism. This has led Banaji (2011: 5–11) to press the claim that MOPs cannot be reduced to forms of exploitation. Capitalism in his view can accommodate a variety of labour systems as it is chiefly concerned with the self-expansion of value. For him the most important factor in determining whether a society is capitalist is the ultimate ‘law of motion’ to which a society is subjected. Finally, there is also an argument about whether the MOP debate is in fact too rigid, and fails to acknowledge the reality of diverse economies made up of multiple social forms (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, 2006b).

Without wishing to appear to be sitting on the fence in this debate, I would argue the important thing to consider is what the purpose of one’s social theory ultimately is. To my mind this debate falls somewhat into what David Singer (1961) referred to as the ‘levels of analysis problem’ in International Relations. That is to say, are the authors in question primarily debating the wider scalar issues of power and political economy or the realities of everyday life? The different focus of their level of analysis yields quite different answers about MOPs, and produces quite different forms of knowledge. This is where I think the value of a spatial analysis can be of use. I mean this in two interrelated senses: first, to look at how spatial interlinkages are formed from the specific dynamics of an MOP, and second, a move to analyse distinct social spaces to examine whether value production is taking place. The latter was identified by Marx (1973: 256) as being crucial in the transition from simple circulation to capitalist production in terms of a shift ‘leading towards value-producing labour’. However, Marx (1973) also recognised that capitalist production never developed in a pure form, but struggles – sometimes more and sometimes less – with the ‘survival of earlier economic conditions with which it is amalgamated’ (p. 275). Indeed, this forms the entire basis of his discussion of capitalist transition in England in relation to landed property. Rather than asking the dominant temporal question, when was capitalism? I think it is more fruitful to task ask therefore, where is capitalism? This, I believe, opens the possibility of thinking about incompleteness, the existence of difference within a social formation, and crucially possibilities of resistance. It thus shifts the focus from a largely historical debate to one that is both politicised and contemporary.

Perhaps the most widely known spatial theorist, Henri Lefebvre (1991: 51) argued that all MOPs produced different spatial patterns. Phrased differently, every society or MOP produces its own distinct space or rhythm of life (see also Jameson, 1991: 364). As noted in the earlier quote from the Manifesto, capitalist space is thus distinct from feudal space. A distinct element of feudal space was the ‘parcellization of sovereignty’ (Anderson, 1974: 148) and the overt use of coercion. Drawing from the type of social relations involved in the MOP, class relations were highly legible during feudalism and the social space was ‘imbued with social meaning’ (Smith, 2008: 107). In other words, no one could observe the Hacienda or Lordly estate and not understand the social relations involved. Summarising feudal space, Lefebvre (1991: 53) noted that ‘the feudal mode of production, with its variants and local peculiarities – created its own space . . . Manors, monasteries, cathedrals – these were the strong points anchoring the network of lanes and main roads to a landscape transformed by peasant communities’. However, changes in the MOP clearly changed the production of space. The geography of capitalism, therefore, entails, ‘the increasing displacement of inherited pre-capitalist landscapes with specifically capitalist sociospatial configurations’ (Brenner, 2004: 33–34). Thus, feudal space, dominated by monasteries, cathedrals, manor houses/ haciendas, and landscapes dotted with peasant communities gives way to a space, ‘founded on vast networks of banks, business centres and major productive entities . . . also on motorways, airports and information centres’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 53). However, it must be emphasised, that while this is indeed a trend, it is both uneven and the object of struggle. There is no unilinear and mechanical process to it (Hesketh, 2017). As Milton Santos (1977: 5) has argued, ‘A mode of production is expressed through a struggle and interaction between the new, which dominates, and the old. The new seeks to dominate everywhere, but without being able to do so completely’. It is this notion of incompleteness and difference that I am interested in. This issue is thrown into sharper focus once we consider the wider picture of core–periphery relations within global capitalism. How do the global dynamics of expanding capitalism, discussed above, transform space and how do struggles linked to other forms of social relations retain relevance? How does this affect the political form and the content of social struggles? To answer these questions, let us now turn to the case of Latin America. This reveals an important debate on MOPs in terms of how geographical difference is theorised.

Latin America and global capitalism

Historically, Latin America has been a crucial site both as a vantage point for assessing the MOP debate and, in turn, becoming a site to reflect and offer an original contribution to it (see Assadourian et al., 1973). Importantly, this debate went beyond the ivory tower concerns of detached academic dispute. Rather, it concerned the practical realities of the continent’s development and what strategies were necessary for political intervention. This varied from an institutional analysis provided by the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) that sought a reformist approach to structural inequalities, to more radical approaches to underdevelopment (Henfrey, 1981: 17, Slater, 2004: 119). MOPs were at the core of this debate: namely whether Latin American political economies could be considered capitalist or not and whether the solution to underdevelopment was capitalism or socialism (Assadourian, 1973: 47, Ruccio, 2011). Seminal in this regard was the work of dependency theory. Scholars such as Dos Santos (1970) and Andre Gunder Frank (2000) challenged the dominant assumptions shared by neo-classical economists (in the guise of modernisation theory) and the orthodox communist parties of the time. Both these schools of thought argued that Latin America had a dualistic economy whereby a modern, capitalist sector co-existed side by side with a backward, feudal sector. Despite the seeming difference of these traditions, both argued that capitalism was a necessary stage of development. The political task, therefore, was to transform space, meaning the backward, feudal sectors of the economy would be transformed into capitalist ones. More market integration was therefore necessary to achieve this. For the neo-classical thinkers, this represented the pinnacle of economic evolution, whereas for the communist parties it represented a regrettable but necessary stage in the move towards socialism (Castañeda, 1993: 72, Laclau, 1971: 19, Ruccio, 2011a: 113). In other words, history would unfold in every individual country in a linear succession of MOPs. It was this argument that dependency theory took issue with (Henfrey, 1981: 18). Rejecting the prevailing wisdom, dependency theorists argued that capitalism had to be conceptualised as a singular global process (Dos Santos, 1970: 231). Rejecting the so-called ‘dual-society’ thesis whereby there existed pristine, untouched feudal forms of social relations, Gunder Frank (2000: 4–5) argued that the capitalist MOP dominated the spatial totality. What appeared at first glance to be backwards, feudal relations pertaining to Latin America were not original, untouched spaces, but rather have been spaces that had been produced through their interaction with capitalism. In Gunder Frank’s terms, these were not ‘undeveloped’ spaces but rather spaces that had been produced via the ‘development of underdevelopment’. Power relations between core and periphery thus actively constructed this form of social space. Latin America was therefore a constituent, if peripheral part of the capitalist MOP.

It is important to stress that this dependency analysis was a directly political intervention that sought to change political praxis. The dependency view implied that it was precisely the links established with the global market since the time of capitalist colonisation and continuing into the present via the extraction of wealth, that created subordination. This was the exact opposite position of orthodox communist parties and modernisation theory who argued that the reason for the backwards nature of the productive forces in Latin America came from a lack of integration and capitalist social relations. Therefore, according to the dependency position, the political solution to the problem of underdevelopment was to delink from the global capitalist system as it was this very system that prevented development from occurring. Evidence showed that the greatest economic development occurred when ties to the metropolis were at their weakest (Gunder and Frank, 2000: 10). Dependency analysis, situating the development of the periphery within the broader totality of the capitalist MOP dominating the world market, spurred a wave of radical thinking about development in Latin America (see inter alia Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Galeano, 2008; Marini, 1973).

However, dependency theory was subject to a range of important critiques. I will limit myself to just two of these here. The first objection was whether the conception of capitalism found in dependency theory accurately reflected Latin America societies. The second concerned what the theory of dependency offered in terms of political praxis. With regard to the former, Ernesto Laclau (1971) challenged the view that Latin American societies could simply be labelled as capitalist arguing that dependency theory mistook the broader economic system in which the continent was embedded with specific MOPs that pertained within countries. It was claimed that Gunder Frank’s definition of capitalism was far too loose, and conflated relations of exchange with relations of production and surplus extraction (Knight, 2002: 196). Carlos Sempat Assadourian (1973: 50) meanwhile argued that Gunder Frank’s focus on circulation involved a move away from the issue of production and the question of how surplus value is produced. Indeed, he notes that Gunder Frank does not actually use the term MOP.

For Laclau (1971: 24), defining the relationship of exploitation became a hallmark for understanding an MOP. As extra-economic coercion remained in much of Latin America, Laclau concluded that various MOPs were articulated simultaneously, yet within a wider economic system in which they interacted and were reinforced. Echoing such a view Eric Wolf (1997: 79) has postulated that capitalism as an MOP has always

exhibited a dual character: an ability to develop internally and branch out, implanting its strategic nexus of relations across the face of the globe; and an ability to enter into temporary and shifting relations of symbiosis and competition with other modes. These relations with other modes constitute part of its history and development.

Thus, while it might be true that the capitalist world market was providing a ‘law of motion’ to which Latin America was subject in terms of producing specific goods (Banaji, 2011: 60–62), how well does such an analysis capture the rhythm of everyday life and forms of social antagonism contained therein? Using Mexico as his example, Alan Knight (2002: 200) concludes

the character of colonial society was formed, above all, by the economic structures which underpinned it, by the labour systems which it engendered and by the forms whereby surplus was extracted from the producers, be they miners, or artisans, peasants, peons or slaves.

Recalling the point made earlier about the level of analysis taken and the purpose of social theory, Foster-Carter (1978: 49) notes that dependency theory encountered a difficulty in translating a general macro framework into a micro analysis. If we take seriously the view that space is formed from a dominant MOP then, as Knight shows, this surely provides a problem in claiming that colonial Latin American society was indeed capitalist. Summarising the problem from an Historical Materialist perspective, Assadourian (1973: 67) argues the major issue at stake is one of method. To arrive at a general abstraction, we need to investigate particularity. Without such investigation, we construct an imaginary abstraction (not grounded in reality). This, he claims is the fallacy of Gunder Frank in what he charges is a lack of attention to specificity and instead a presentation of undifferentiated capitalism.

As well as its conceptualisation of capitalism, dependency theory was also critiqued for its political project. Lazarus (2002: 50) pinpoints the political danger in the vocabulary of dependency theory, arguing the change ‘from “class” to “nation” and “capitalist” social relations to “core/periphery” or “First World/Third World” social relations, which characterize these problematics, had as their inevitable consequence the reconceptualization of the agency and geopolitical vectors of imperialism’. Unpacking this idea in perhaps the best-known critique of dependency theory, Brenner (1977: 91–92) argued that the dependency position, in identifying the main problem of development being in unequal exchange and not the logic of capitalism as an exploitative system of production per se, undermines the basis for interdependence among revolutionary movements. Instead it provides the logic of autarky (rather than socialism). Foster-Carter (1978: 50) thus characterises dependency theory as ‘the unhappy progeny of vague Marxist ideas coupled with Latin American bourgeois nationalism’.

Such a critique is surely too harsh and ignores the plurality of views within the school (Reis and de Oliveira, 2021). In the dismissal of dependency theory, we lose the important contribution that capitalism as an MOP produces development and underdevelopment and a critique of linear historiography (Fusaro, 2019: 3–4, Kvangraven, 2021). As Slater (2004) points out, dependency analysis remains vital for a geopolitics of memory and counter representation. The work of more overtly Marxist dependency theorists like Ray Mauro Marini (1973), meanwhile, provides an invaluable resource to study the specific characteristics of Latin American capitalism, rooted in super-exploitation. However, Marini does not (like Gunder Frank) treat colonialism and dependency as the same thing. Furthermore, he explicitly sets his project against looking at the survival of prior economic forms or the mode of transition to capitalism. Rather his main intellectual focus concerns the specific model of capitalism implanted in Latin America and what the developmental consequences of this are.

There remains a gap therefore to (1) identify with accuracy Latin America’s relationship to colonial societies vis-à-vis the dominant MOP, (2) to theorise how, since that time, spatial transformations have occurred across the continent and, finally, (3) to reflect how such an analysis can provide tools for thinking about radical possibilities in the present. It is my contention that the work of Mariátegui and Zavaleta can be highly fruitful here. I will also show how they are able to offer more nuanced perspectives than dependency theory and decolonial theory and offer a unique contribution to the MOP debate more broadly.

Revisiting Latin American Marxist contributions

Historically Latin America has been a site from which important theoretical developments were generated regarding MOPs and debate surrounding the term became one of the most important topics in Latin American Marxism (Assadourian et al., 1973; Zavaleta Mercado, 1974: 15). To provide some brief examples, this has included discussions about state autonomy (Hamilton, 1982), the role of the state in creating communal class processes linked to revolutionary change (Ruccio, 2011b) and the nature of super-exploitation (Marini, 1973). The influence of Althusser and Balibar, as well as Antonio Gramsci, made Latin America a prime site for debating issues relating to MOPs. This debate centred especially on moving away from economic determinism and evolutionism and towards a focus on praxis (Henfrey, 1981: 18). Nevertheless, while this debate about MOPs became important in the 1960s and 1970s, it had almost disappeared from intellectual discussions by the 1990s (Gudynas, 2018: 390). An important critique that has been levelled at this debate is that it failed to focus sufficiently on the agency of popular forces (Henfrey, 1981: 32).

I will now argue that the writings of José Carlos Mariátegui and René Zavaleta, through the nuanced incorporation of space into their theories, provide three major contributions to the MOP debate. First, they situate colonial and postcolonial state formation within the wider totality of social relations but do not succumb to a pan-capitalist thesis. Second, in doing so, they do not dismiss the geographical specificity of concrete social formations, showing how Latin American societies are constituted by multiple MOPs that are intrinsically linked to the contradictions of colonisation and the world market. Finally, they provide a more nuanced account of agency that is resultant from the heterogeneous make-up of the societies they study. Crucially this integrates a core racial component in the form of Indigenous social forces. ⁴ Although often using key universal categories found within Marxist vocabulary, these are developed via their encounter with local reality (Vanden and Becker, 2011: 20). Furthermore, their work on the production of space prefigures that of well-known European social theorists.

The colonial character of Latin America

The introduction to this article highlighted why an MOP analysis is important as a counter-position to the current fashionable analysis of decolonial theory that often jettisons such vocabulary. A useful example of the problems of the latter theory is in their analysis of colonialism and what this inherently was. This succumbs to the same problem of dependency theory in subscribing to what can be called a ‘pan-capitalist thesis, essentially the notion that capitalism has always been present within colonial relations’ (Morton, 2011: 75). Exemplifying this, Ciccariello-Maher (2017: 153) states that ‘global capitalism and coloniality emerged so jointly as to be nearly synonymous’. Furthermore, in decolonial theory, Spanish colonisation is frequently tied to notions of modernity. Enrique Dussell (1993), for example, dates the birth of modernity to 1492, while Maldonado-Torres (2007: 243) links capitalism to the beginnings of colonisation in Latin America. An examination carefully based on a MOP analysis would refute both assumptions of capitalism and modernity being associated with colonisation. In terms of the European colonising powers, the work of Wood (1997) problematises any necessary link between capitalism and modernity. Teschke (2002) meanwhile, convincingly demonstrates that most European societies of the era in question remained tied to pre-modern practices and that the European impulse for territorial acquisition came from the contradictions of the pre-capitalist MOP. What then is the contribution of the earlier Latin American Marxists to such debates?

Mariátegui and Zavaleta both note in their writings that colonisation overturned an Indigenous social order and subjected Latin America to the influences of the metropole (Mariátegui, 1971: 3, 36). However, the transformations they note are far more nuanced than any simplistic narratives about the imposition of capitalism and modernity. Mariátegui (1971: 80), for example, stresses the feudal character of Spain and therefore the backwards nature of Spanish colonialism. He specifically juxtaposes colonisation in Latin America with colonisation in North America, arguing that the Spaniard bought ‘the effects and methods of an already declining spirit and economy that belonged to the past’. Far from implanting a revolutionary MOP in Latin America, ‘Spain’ he laments, ‘sent us practically nothing but nobles, priests and adventurers’ (Mariátegui, 1971: 40). As noted earlier, there is a tendency in decolonial scholarship to equate colonialism with modernity. However, as Zavaleta Mercado (1974: 19) notes, modern sovereignty is precisely what colonial state formation did not bring in terms of state unity (and an end to parcelised territorial claims). Far from the capitalist MOP transforming space in Latin America, a rather different social logic could be discerned. Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 26–28) famously argued that two distinct spatial projects were created in Bolivia from the time of colonialism onwards. These were ‘seigniorial space’ (dominated by hacienda owners with localist views of territory that were to be held for private gain) and, conversely, ‘Andean space’ (dominated by Indigenous conceptions of collectively held land, in which community, production and the sacred co-existed). What was not present was a fully developed project of ‘national space’ consonant with modern state formation. To be clear, the transformative effects of capitalism did come to be recognised later, especially in terms of production of goods for the world market. The important role of Latin American space within global capitalism was also highlighted by both Mariátegui and Zavaleta. However, in contrast to decolonial and dependency theory, the situation was not one in which social relations became dictated by capitalist imperatives with concomitant transformations in space. Rather, countries such as Peru and Bolivia were a storehouse of materials that helped construct capitalist social relations elsewhere (Mariátegui, 1971: 70). In other words, Latin America was present in the construction of capitalism without its space necessarily becoming capitalist in terms of new rhythms of life. Unpacking this point further, Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 113–115) argues this related to a broader lack of intellectual reform in Latin America and the continued focus on territorial acquisition as the primary basis of wealth. Mariátegui (1929b, emphasis added) thus concludes, that the Indigenous population ‘continued to be at the mercy of a ruthless feudalism that destroyed the Inca society and economy, without replacing it with an order capable of progressively organising production’. It should be noted that this relational geography of capitalism being constructed in one place by drawing upon a differentiated set of social relations elsewhere, is fully consistent with Marx’s (1973: 705, 711) own view where he forcefully argued that, ‘the treasures captured outside of Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother country and were turned into capital’; thus, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery, pure and simple in the new world’. ⁵ A more nuanced spatial analysis of social relations is thus provided by Mariátegui and Zavaleta, as opposed to a blunt instrument of undifferentiated global capitalism.

It should also be noted that within their analysis of colonial exploitation was a crucial racial component. ⁶ For both Mariátegui and Zavaleta, the idea of the ‘national’ was a chimeric idea so long as the Indigenous populations remained excluded from full participation in political life. Indeed, the search for the national-popular based on the inclusion of the Indigenous populations was a central motif of their work. Colonial states, were after all, societies ‘constructed against the Indians’ (Zavaleta Mercado, 2018: 204). Mariátegui (1929a), furthermore, explains how the colonial system, built on racist exclusions, impeded the introduction of the capitalist MOP arguing, ‘Capitalism, as an economic and political system, appears incapable in Latin America of building an economy free of feudal burdens. The preconception of the inferiority of the Indigenous race allows the maximum exploitation of the workers of this race’. Rather than the formation of free wage labour, what remained in both countries under discussion were widespread relations of servitude. However, foreign capital was able to take advantage of this in its imperialist expansion. Indeed, it was the desire of foreign capital, anxious to undermine Spain’s monopoly of commerce, that served as the driving force of independence in Latin America, not Indigenous social forces (Mariátegui, 1971: 7). Incipient Indigenous hegemonic projects that sought to overturn colonial cartography were crushed (Hesketh, 2020: 569). The analysis of Mariátegui and Zavaleta thus at once provide a nuanced treated of the relational geography between Latin America and the global political economy, exploring how the rise of capitalism in one place, still reproduced the relations of feudal subservience and exploitation in others, mediated by the extraction of resources, but not leading to transformation in value production. In doing so, they also importantly pre-date influential work on the very meaning of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983).

Postcolonial social formations

The second key point to come from Mariátegui and Zavaleta is their focus on multiple MOPs as the basis of Latin American reality. This entails thinking of societies as not being reducible to a singular, all-encompassing MOP (as dependency and decolonial theory postulate), but rather as a social formation. ⁷ As Marta Harnecker (1980: 26, emphasis added) explains,

the concept of mode of production refers to an abstract social totality (capitalist, feudal, slave etc). The concept of social formation refers to a concrete social totality. This is not a combination of modes of production, of abstract ideal social totalities; it is a concrete, historically determined reality, structured beginning with the form in which the different relations of production which co-exist at the level of the economic structure are combined.

This idea of multiplicity is present within Marx, and is crucially theorised in his distinction between formal and real subsumption within broader capitalist transformations. Formal subsumption implies that the markets and labour processes are under the broad influence of capital. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily imply any major changes in the immediate relations of production. Real subsumption, however, implies a transformation in social relations, making it possible to expand the previously limited surplus value that could be obtained by moving towards the extraction of relative surplus value by making the worker more productive (Marx, 1973: 313, 478). As Balibar (2009: 265) explains, ‘the difference between formal subsumption and “real” subsumption indicates the existence of a chronological dislocation in the formation of the different elements of the structure: capital as a “social relation”’. This in and of itself implies that capitalism is always about a process of open-ended transition. This notion of transition is important as it ‘reflects the coexistence of two (or more) modes of production in a single “simultaneity”, and the dominance of one of them over the other’ (Balibar, 2009: 344). In other words, it shows the importance of an analysis couched within a broader social formation (Burns, 2022; Santos, 1977). As noted above, the term ‘social formation’ is a tool for thinking about the social whole which might include a variety of MOPs. However, as da Graca and Zingarelli (2015a: 14) clarify, the term implies ‘a hierarchical totality rather than a simple combination’. It allows us to think through the geographical specificity of countries while recognising the wider power relations in which they are enmeshed. This is what Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 110) referred to as ‘patters of articulation and irradiation’.

In the cases of Bolivia and Peru that are the main empirical focus of Zavaleta and Mariátegui respectively, we noted above in their analysis of colonialism that they identified the important role of formal subsumption to capitalism. However, this does not imply real subsumption that removes the influence of traditional forms of production and social relations (Zavaleta Mercado, 2018: 241). Drawing from Marx (1973: 256, emphasis added) we can we surmise, ‘The organization of domestic production is already modified by circulation and exchange value, but it has not yet been completely invaded by them, either over the surface or in depth’. Rather, Mariátegui and Zavaleta note the existence of three MOPs within a broader socioeconomic formation. These are the non-capitalist communitarian, the feudal and the capitalist (Mariátegui, 1971: 16; Zavaleta Mercado, 2009 [1983]: 214–216). While recognising the development of capitalism in Peru, for example, Mariátegui (1971: 32, 53) noted that a genuinely bourgeois-capitalist class failed to develop. Rather it was the old feudal class that largely retained power. This meant that in the liberal period (post-independence), feudal property remained largely intact, while it was Indigenous communal property that was undermined. This has important implication for a political analysis as, following Gramsci, Zavaleta theorised that this lack of real subsumption also translated into a lack of firm hegemony (Lagos-Rojas, 2019: 138a).

While the notion of multiple MOPs is very much present within the work of Mariátegui, it finds an important new conceptual vocabulary in the work of Zavaleta who uses the term ‘abigarrada’ or ‘abigarramiento’ to refer to this multiplicity within a single national territory (Freeland, 2019b: 275; Zavaleta Mercado, 2009 [1983]). ⁸ The mutual co-existence of MOPs is thus the material basis of the societies they were writing about (Lagos-Rojas, 2019: 139). As Luis Tapia (2010: 100) explains, the notion of abigarrada places the emphasis not on how various MOPs, notions of time, conceptions of the world, and cultures become articulated within a capitalist structure but rather, how they remain disarticulated. Such diversity matters, because, as was noted in the introduction, Marx stressed that character of the state is derived from the way surplus is extracted in society. With the existence of multiple modes of surplus extraction (albeit with capitalism becoming dominant), this gives a peculiar form to the state in Bolivia and Peru (and other Latin American societies by extension).

Unpacking this in more detail, Zavaleta gives a more explicit spatial rendering to the Marxian notion of the state as a form of social relations, noting that the state is where the relation between ‘the population, territory and political power is located, that is to say, the state is that relation’ (Zavaleta Mercado, 1974: 95). Whereas the modern state seeks to homogenise space and claim sovereignty over it, this was simply not possible in the contexts in which Mariátegui and Zavaleta were writing. Zavaleta Mercado (2009 (1983)) thus notes that particularism remained a vital feature of space and territory in Bolivia ‘because here every valley is a nation’ in which diverse languages and customs remain. For such communities, the state form was simply not at the heart of their political structures which sprang instead form the communitarian organisation of production (Tapia, 2007: 52–53). The result of this meant that the state was not an integral state as theorised by Gramsci (1971: 260), but rather an ‘apparent state’ (Zavaleta Mercado, 2009 (1967)). What this means is that, owing to the disarticulated existence of multiple MOPs, state space remains fractured and not fully socially incorporated. The state, while claiming to be a national state, only was apparent and lacking in popular support. In reality, therefore, its social base was minimal and other forms of authority, linked to diverse productive relations, existed throughout the country (Tapia, 2010: 101–102). Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 36) thus asks to ‘distinguish between the cartographic area and the state’s legitimacy in a territory’. Hallmarks of modern capitalist state formation such as representative democracy – key to capitalism’s discourse of formal equality before the law, therefore did not pertain in many countries in Latin America during the time they were writing (Lagos-Rojas, 2019: 141).

The revolutionary subject

The existence of multiple MOPs is also key to retaining a sense of local history and agency. First, Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 7) provides an important rejection of the notion often found within some variants of dependency theory that place the primary emphasis on external causality, arguing ‘it is clear if we adhere strictly to this principle, we would have to understand history as a closed circle in which the dependent could produce nothing but dependency, there would be no national histories’. This is not to say that external constraints and pressures are ignored. Rather, he argued all societies contained a world element to their history, ‘What is important is to define the degree of self-determination [autodeterminación] that a national history can have, the conditions in which a self-determining process is produced’ (Mercado Zavaleta, 1982). Second, in contrast to the view, espoused by scholars such as Luxemburg (2003), non-capitalist spaces are theorised not simply as functional for capitalist expansion, but rather as the sites of potential resistance.

The above discussion of the contradictory character of the state, derived from the existence of multiple MOPs finally provides for crucial insights on the agents for transformative action. Zavaleta Mercado (2009 [1983]: 212, 2018: 15) places emphasis on how the existence of a heterogeneous and unequal society such as Bolivia impedes the effectiveness of representative democracy so essential to the usual functioning of capitalist hegemony. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense of the term remained relatively weak as, from the time of colonialism onwards the state was built upon the exclusion of Indigenous peoples. As Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 208) therefore concludes, ‘When a ruling class produces ideas that cannot be metabolized by its own civil society, the state necessarily exists in a relation of non-belonging to its very object or end which is precisely, society’. Unpacking this further Luis Tapia (2007: 48) calls this a ‘crisis of correspondence’ between the authority claimed by the state and the lived reality of many communities in Bolivia, in terms of self-organised, autonomous Indigenous territories which had been excluded by the state since the time of colonisation.

In the case of Bolivia, following the 1952 Revolution, the weakness of the state was briefly masked by revolutionary-nationalist ideology. Rather than an expansive class-based hegemony however, this could more accurately be described as a condition of minimal hegemony within passive revolution (Morton, 2011: 56–58). Zavaleta Mercado (2009 [1983]: 228) argues that hegemony in the context of Bolivia was never deeply embedded within Bolivian society and the limited hegemony that was established, ‘aged’ (see also Hesketh and Morton, 2014).

This lack of social incorporation is also then exposed at times of crisis. For Zavaleta the notion of crisis is used to explain the processes whereby the weakness of the state is revealed and how this can simultaneously have a nationalising effect, creating new forms of popular struggles from new-found constitutive moments of unity and possibility. It is through crisis that new political subjects are formed:

The crisis, therefore, not only reveals what is national in Bolivia, but is itself a nationalizing event. The diverse times are altered by its irruption. You belong to one mode of production and I to another, but neither you nor I are the same after the battle of Nanawa; Nanawa is what is common between you and me. This is the principle of intersubjectivity (Zavaleta Mercado, 2009 [1983]: 216). ⁹

As Lagos-Rojas (2019: 146) unpacks, the fact of abigarramiento provides the basis of radical hetero-temporality during periods of crisis. It is simultaneously the condition that prevents the full realisation of capitalist development and the possibility for broader subaltern class alliances. This should not be read as a simple form of romanticism. As Freeland (2019a: 114) clarifies, although there are radical possibilities from this hegemonic outside, there remain a risk of co-optation via policies of multiculturalism and the language of inclusion. Here the role of Indigenous subjectivity comes to the fore. A major Latin Americanisation of Marxism achieved by Mariátegui and Zavaleta was the inclusion of Indigenous subjectivities as a key point of reference for social change (Friggeri, 2022: 56). They explicitly rejected liberal notions of incorporation. As Mariátegui (1971: 31) states, ‘We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land’. Cultural struggles thus have a clearly material substratum.

Crucially, a major contribution of both Mariátegui and Zavaleta involves a recognition of the internal relation between race and class, with both thinkers providing a major focus on the Indigenous population as vital to any process of change. This again, bears a difference to decolonial theory that often elides a class component to their analysis of oppression (e.g. Lugones, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Quijano, 1970). The Marxism of Mariátegui and Zavaleta is thus one purged of abstract class essentialism but one that bases itself on the complex antagonisms of contemporary reality (Munck et al., 2022: 4). Reflecting on the heterogeneous nature of the societies from which they came, there was no emergence of a homogeneous revolutionary subject in the form of an urban proletariat. Rather the revolutionary subject would need to be constructed from a worker/peasant/Indigenous alliance (Friggeri, 2022: 55–56).

Conclusion

There is a puzzle to solve. Frequently people refer abstractly to problems of ‘global capitalism’. Without pushing the argument too far, there is a claim for similitude here. But as Foster-Carter (1978: 65–66) argues, ‘this must be complemented by analysis at the level of social formations and their interrelationships’. It is this endeavour that I have argued Mariátegui and Zavaleta provides the resources to undertake. At the same time, Marxist approaches that place emphasis on the analysis of global capitalism have been charged with having a capitalocentric view that overlooks the existence of a multiplicity of existing social-productive forms and renders these all subordinate to capital (Gibson-Graham, 2006a: 41). However, the approach of Gibson-Graham, while helpful in moving our intellectual horizons to the political economy of difference, arguably places too much emphasis on a politics of language and too little importance on the creation of a revolutionary subject of change at a wider scale. Mariátegui and Zavaleta I submit provide a more nuanced approach. They recognise the plurality of existing social forms and the incomplete nature of capitalist hegemony. However, this also implies the need, as discussed above, to create a collective political subject, grounded in the unity of the diverse forms of subaltern exploitation found within Latin America.

At the beginnings of the 21st century, Latin America was emerging as a beacon for hope. Not only was resistance to capitalism in its neoliberal guise being enacted, talk of the possibilities of 21st-century socialism abounded too. However, it is fair to say this optimism has waned. Instead the last few decades have seen the continent become home to the largest volume of extractive conflicts anywhere in the world. Governments of both a right-wing and progressive orientation have similarly converged around the model of resource extraction as a form of development, in turn reinvigorating paradigms of dependency theory. Concomitantly, we have also seen a major upsurge in Indigenous activism and political visibility. Nonetheless, despite this visibility the reality has often involved defeat or compromising with institutional power without a realisation of many major demands, namely, that of autonomy (Hesketh, 2020; Jassir, 2022: 85–87). This entails a need to think about contemporary modes of exploitation, where the major points of antagonism exist and what radical possibilities for alliance formation exist. Rather than simply uncovering an interesting historical past, I believe Mariátegui and Zavaleta can be read as vital contemporary sources for today (see also Munck et al., 2022: 4). Theirs is an approach grounded in the broad language of Marxism but developed and given meaning through the geographical specificity of their own realities. Mariátegui (1928) famously remarked that,

We certainly don’t want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation. We have to give life, with our own reality, in our own language to Indo-American socialism. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.

While we can hope that some of the darker clouds of fascism in Latin America have now been vanquished, this mission to create an inclusive, Indo-American socialism remains a vital task ahead.