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David Brion Davis? I thought that was Orlando
Patterson.
Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 7:08 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:11951] Re: A reply to
Ellen Meiksins Wood
On the same day I got from library Blaut's book on
Eurocentric Historians I
also got Robin Blackburn's The Making of New
World Slavery, with its pretty
cogent portrait of the great tragedy of the
modern system plus balanced
treatment of the primitive accumulation
issues, and perhaps the point of
Blaut's objections, which are obviously
valid in one sense, this is not a
stage of development but an aberration.
Therefore we have one major fact
contradicting the overly reified
view that feudalism and capitalism are two
successive stages, by
necessity. The confusion arises from mixing of modes
between the
abstract transformation of 'modernism' and the content
transformed,
and this could never follow the same path twice in successive
waves.
I
think Blaut is simply reflecting this obvious fact. [I certainly couldn't
speak for Blaut, and he might even have thought me a Eurocentric, tho I am
not] Still, now the world is determined to force every one to pass through
the 'necessary' phase of capitalism. One big mess will be the
result. As to
the claims the European 'breakthrough' was an isolated stage
of future
imitation, one should reflect on the fate of Africa, after
reading "King
Leopold's Ghost". This was not an excusable incident of
necessary capital
accumulation. There is a good chance that in the end the
'world system' will
get so tired of this idiocy, it will revert to the 'no
growth economy of
beggars', because it has no proper future in this form.
It may well persist
in an improper future, but that is hopelessness made
theoretical, the end of
history indeed.
Anyway the issue of the
rise of the modern stage can never, to invoke my
'eonic approach', be the
object of a deterministic theory. There is a macro
and a micro system, and
they intersect just here, scrambling most major forms
of explanation.
Beside Blackburn's book, one has David B. Davis' Slavery and
Human Progress, with its gruelling treatment of the idea of progress,
and
also its puzzled query, why did the whole system change gears suddenly
at the
end of the eighteenth century?
Eonic bullseye.
John Landon
author
World History and the Eonic Effect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://eonix.8m.com
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