Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

British Marxist History • 349
ing to reductionism. The answer articulated by political Marxism, as I have
suggested elsewhere in this volume, is that properly understood, and when
synthesised with the work of Robert Brenner, Thompson’s approach offers
a powerful basis both from which to comprehend the past and upon which
to found a contemporary revolutionary politics. Conversely, Alex Callinicos,
Neil Davidson, Chris Harman and Brian Manning70 have recently argued that
attempts by political Marxists to conceptualise the English Revolution speci� -
cally, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism more generally, without
reference to changes in the forces of production has resulted in an inadequate
model of the formation of the modern world. For example, Manning criticised
Neal and Ellen Wood’s study of political ideas in the seventeenth century
thus:
Viewing the aristocracy as already a capitalist class before the revolution
is too simple. It diverts attention from where capitalism was actually
developing among large farmers and elements in manufacturing and how
that relates to the revolution. And it leaves little room for assessing the
ways in which the revolution actually did facilitate the development of
capitalism. 71
Similarly, he criticised Brenner’s account of the Revolution both for ignoring
the growth of industry in the decades that led up to 1640, and for overemphasising
the growth of capitalist farming amongst the aristocracy before in the
same period. Interestingly, Manning did write that Brenner’s empirical � ndings,
relating to the role of merchants within the revolution, cohered with his
own much more classical thesis that it was the ‘middling-sort’ who drove the
revolution. He suggested that the growing importance of this group should
be related to the development of industry; and because Dobb stressed this
development, his model was better able than Brenner’s to explain why ‘industrial
districts – not all of them – provided a main base for the parliamentarian
and revolutionary parties’. 72 Following Dobb, therefore, Manning argued that
70 Harman 1998; Callinicos 1995; Davidson 2005; Manning 1994.
71 Manning 1997, p. 29.
72 Manning 1994, pp. 84–6; Manning 1999, p. 50.