The Theory of Pre-market (Pre-capitalist) Economies and the Study of Archaization Processes in Contemporary Russian Society: The Potential of Marxist Methodology

The article is devoted to the methodological questions involved in investigating pre-market (pre-capitalist) economies, and to demonstrating the impressive heuristic potential of Marxist methodology for the study both of pre-capitalist societies in the proper sense, and also of present-day peripheral capitalist societies that are marked by a revival of various “archaic” economic relations. The author distinguishes the main approaches (formalist, substantivist and Marxist) that are employed in the study of precapitalist economies, while analysing certain key theoretical questions: the applicability of the principles of historical materialism to pre-bourgeois societies; the “embeddedness” of economies in social institutions (K. Polanyi); the peculiarities of the “Asiatic mode of production” (K. Marx); the nature of “power-property” (L.S. Vasilyev); “all-class private property” and politarism” (Yu. K. Semenov); state coercion; and others. Emphasis is placed on the outstanding contribution made by the contemporary Russian Marxist historian, ethnologist and methodologist Yu. I. Semenov to elaborating the theory of pre-market (pre-capitalist) economies, to developing the global-formational approach to history, to the theory of the Asiatic mode of production (“politarism”), and finally, to researching the economic and political development of Russia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries