The American Path of Bourgeois Development Revisited

Abstract

Charles Post's recent collection of essays, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877, was greeted with enthusiasm in Marxist circles. Post's essays are an attempt to apply the so-called “Brenner thesis” (according to which the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the result of the self-transformation of the English landowners) to American historical development. Since in the United States there was no class of feudal landlords to act as prime movers of an “agrarian” capitalist development, Post makes the merchant-turned-land speculator the demiurge of American capitalism, asserting, against all historical evidence, that this class was able to “impose a social monopoly on land” shortly after the American Revolution. The rest of Post's theses are just elaborations of this fundamentally mistaken interpretation. However, The American Road to Capitalism does provide a welcome opportunity to discuss the classical Marxist analysis of “the American path of bourgeois development,” which remains the foundation of any materialist analysis of American history.