Marxist Debates on the Origin of Capitalism Explored Based on an Althusserian Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines Marxist debates surrounding the origins of capitalism, focusing on the “primitive accumulation of capital” as posited by Karl Marx and its implications for understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Through an Althusserian lens emphasizing “overdetermination”, the article examines three theories involved in two major intra-Marxist debates: the Brenner-Wallerstein controversy, and the Wallerstein-Frank exchange. This analysis contends that Wallerstein’s framework adheres more closely to historical materialism, despite its one concept related to empiricism (the concept of “World-System”). Both Brenner’s and Frank’s frameworks devolve into empiricist analysis—Brenner into humanism and Frank into historicism—making their theories on the origin of capitalism completely wrong. The article asserts that a proper understanding of capitalism’s origins must account for the “overdetermination”, meaning the dominant relation of production defining the “totality of the relations of production” during a specific historical period. Such an understanding would lead to considering the social role of colonialism in the development of capitalism as a mode of production. Ultimately, the article argues that while Wallerstein’s theory is the most accurate in its historical materialist approach, its “World-System” conceptualization blurs essential Marxist principles, necessitating a return to the orthodox framework of the “mode of production”.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".