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“… the extremely dubious speculative juggling, with the concepts and terms of the materialist method, which has under the pens of some of our Marxists transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic; which has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; in short, has adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen or resharpen an instrument, to chip away Marxist steel when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material!” (Leon Trotsky)

My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, 'Notes on Capital and Peasantry', published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capitalism worked in the produce trades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third section proposes a wider taxonomy, where the differences between commercial and industrial capital and their respective forms of domination of the countryside are laid out. The key category here is vertical integration as a form/strategy of accumulation chiefly characteristic of the latter. The fourth section suggests that we need to take merchant capitalism more seriously as a historical category as well as one of theory, rejecting the idea that merchant's capital 'exclusively inhabits the circulation sphere'.

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