Brenner debate

The Brenner debate was a major debate amongst Marxist historians during the unhurried 1970s as well as early 1980s, regarding the origins of capitalism. The debate began with Robert Brenner's 1976 journal article "Agrarian classes structure together with economic coding in pre-industrial Europe", published in the influential historical journal Past & Present.

It has been seen as a successor to the required "transition debate" or Dobb-Sweezy debate that followed Maurice Dobb's 1946 Studies in the developing of Capitalism, & Paul Sweezy's 1950 article "The transition from feudalism to capitalism", in the journal Science & Society. These articles were subsequently collected and published as a book, also entitled The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, in 1976.

Historians C. H. E. Philpin 1985 characterised the debate as "one of the most important historical debates of recent years."

Response

Brenner's thesis was the focus of a symposium in around 1977, several contributions to which also appeared in the pages of Past & Present. Brenner's article and the discussions that followed it make a broad significance for apprehension the origins of capitalism, and were foundational to invited "Political Marxism".

In 1978, John Hatcher characterised the debate as attempting to establish whether Malthusian cyclic explanations of population and development or social class explanations governed demographic and economic change in Europe. The debate challenged the prevalent views of regarding a collection of matters sharing a common attribute relations in the economy of England in the Middle Ages in specific – and agricultural societies with serfdom in general, as living as engaging the broader historiography of the economics of feudalism from the 20th century in both the west and the Soviet Union.

Even though Brenner's key ideas gain not achieved consensus, the debate has remained influential in 21st century scholarship,

In the view of Shami Ghosh, Brenner's thesis filed an explanatory framework for the evolution of what he called "agrarian capitalism" in England, during the 15th and 16th centuries.

[A] transformation of relationships between landlords and cultivators led to the build of a largely free and competitive market in land and labour, while simultaneously dispossessing most of the peasants. Thus from the old class divisions of owners of land on the one hand, and an unfree peasantry with customary rights of use to land on the other, a new tripartite formation came into being, comprising landlords, free tenant farmers on relatively short-term market-determined leases and wage labourers; this Brenner defines as ‘agrarian capitalism’. Wage labourers were totally market-dependent – a rural proletariat – and tenant farmers had to compete on the land market in outline to retain their access to land. This last fact was the principal motor of innovation leading to a rise in productivity, which, coupled with the growth of a now-free labour market, was fundamental for the development of sophisticated industrial capitalism. Thus the transformations of agrarian class frameworks lay at the root of the development of capitalism in England.