Robert Brenner on political accumulation and the transition to capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is an immanent critique of Robert Brenner's writings on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The concept "immanent" is defined as a logic of implication, according to which a text or theory is evaluated within the terms that it sets for itself, to determine whether its objectives and assumptions are true in the way they are said to be true. Using this method of critique, the paper shows how Brenner's concept of "political accumulation" undermines his own initial claim that the balance of class forces between lords and peasants determined the long-term trends of preindustrial Europe, in that this concept points toward intralord struggles dominated by military interests. The paper also discusses why Brenner's account of France's tax/office state seriously weakens his postulate that "surplus extracting relations" were the "fundamental" relation of fuedalism, on the grounds that office-holding reflected an unequal distribution of property based upon status. Finally, the paper draws out the theoretical implications of these contradictory instances, to delineate ways in which Brenner's basic theory may be sublated within a more comprehensive account.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".