[PEN-L:11381] why do we care?
Matthew: I agree with you totally. A longer and more detailed piece by Ron Bailey: "Africa, the slave trade, and the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States: A bibliographic review." AMERICAN HISTORY: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW 2(1986)1-91. Jim B
[PEN-L:11384] Progressive Nationalism
PB: c) a "progressive nationalism" (again, a PEN-L phrase) which, in advocating WB/IMF defunding, takes heart and strength and knowledge from the potential unity of the variety of particularistic struggles against local forms of structural adjustment,malevolent "development" projects and Bretton Woods interference in social policies . . . MBS: Question: do you think there can be progressive nationalism for the U.S., and if so, what might it look like? PB: Do you not have a couple of extremely good examples just North and Northwest of you, Max, in the Nader offices and Preamble Center? MBS: They are both progressive in their own ways and do invaluable work, but for them the 'nationalism' descriptor seems gratuitous. I don't know the SF group you mention. To me 'nationalism' connotes some kind of conscious notion of collective self-interest. Progressive nationalism (PN) suggests some kind of novel departure from the conventional ideas of what is progressive or nationalistic. The only reason to use the term national is to open the door to some kind of collaboration between the working class and others, where the terms of alliance reflect disparate interests and not merely the absorption of non-working class groups into a socialist formation. I was wondering if you contemplated any such formation in the U.S. (as I do). CC suggests PN would be seen as isolationist, which I think is true but only a small part of the picture. CB suggests, perhaps facetiously, that PN would entail recognition of busted treaties with native Americans. I think it would, but this too is a small piece of the puzzle. It is also an ethical premise that lacks an underlying idea of material self-interest, at least at first blush. To me PN connotes a modernized populism -- something I've been thinking about -- but I was really probing to see how you saw it. I'll ventilate on my own take some other time. mbs
[PEN-L:11390] Re: Person work hours at the dawn of capitalism
Jim Devine: No, its not "yes and no" regarding the importance of slave production and slavery. It is "yes." You forget that the slave plantation system was generating profitss from 1600 (Brazil) and more so from 1650 (Barbados, Jamaica). The flaw in your argument is this: At that period there was no capitalism of the sort you describe. There was hardly any proletariat in Europe although wage work was general. There was hardly any manufacture in which to employ proletarians. You shouldn't generalize to the slave plantaTION system as a whole from the very late and unique form it took in the US South, essentially in the 19th century. At the time cotton-producing plantations were flourishing in the US, slavery wass being abolished in the British colonies. Apples and oranges. 17th-18th century slave production -- very late 18th-20th century non-slave industrial production. And there were great numbers of wage workers involved in the accumulation of capital by plantation owners (in Europe as well as in the colonies). Many free laborers in the mills, and as overseers. Sailors bringing the stuff to England -- and in the triangular trade. Workers in the godowns and refineries in Europe. And then add the European soldiers kept in the colonies to put down slave revolts. It would be a mistake to think of the slave plantation system as something involving strictly slave labor. I'm inclined to think that capitalism in its first, crude stage (after gaining power over labor in Europe and power to seize slaves in Africa and work slaves in the colonies) could not exploit wage workers efficiently enough so that they would be able to survive and reproduce themselves. So the main industrial capitalist enterprises were in the colonies, exploiting mainly slave labor. (Slaves did not reproduce themselves -- the average life expectancy of a slavbe in 17th-century Brazil was 8 years -- and this happened because they were worked to death: it was cheaper to do that and then buy more slaves in their place).After the system got developed somewhat, and the capitalist could make a profit back home by exploiting the working class only to the level where the class could reproduce itself -- at that point industrial capitalism became centrated in western Europe. This is only a hypothesis. Probably wrong. Jim Blaut
[PEN-L:11391] Re: more Postlethwayt
Response to Rod on agriculture: Rod: " A growing capitalist labour force has to be fed and England did that many from its home production until the 19th century. Freeing labour from agriculture requires an increase in agricultural productivity. This came about mainly from new forms of organization of agriculture, i.e., wage labour, enclosures, etc. And only secondarily from new technology. "None of this is to say that the colonies were not important, but that the relative importance was much less than that of agriculture." I take it that the first paragraph above is your point about the agricultural revolution. The second para evidently describes it as an independent -- and, as you said previously, crucial -- cause of the industrial revolution and I suppose modernization (in Britain). It seems to me that the new forms of organization, wage labor, enclosures, etc., were not really new. Obviously available techniques (social as well as material) were used in more efficient ways as that period (1500-1800?) progressed. But all of this can be explained as a response to (1) demand and (2) increased profit opportunities, both of which I would view as mainly results, not causes, of change. Productivity indeed increased, and more food was produced with somewhat fewer (in absolute numbers -- though a much lower percentage of the population) workers in agriculture. But a number of economic historians working on British agriculture maintain that there was a lof slack in the utilization of the factors of production, and productivty increased without any real structural change; hence there was no agricultural revolution and agricultural development did not play an important causal role in overall development. Jim B Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archives http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/ __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com --- Internet Header Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: from galaxy.csuchico.edu (galaxy.CSUChico.EDU [132.241.82.21]) by spamgaaa.compuserve.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/SUN-1.6) with ESMTP id OAA07922; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 14:55:29 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by galaxy.csuchico.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA19475; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 10:47:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from hotmail.com (f204.hotmail.com [207.82.251.95]) by galaxy.csuchico.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA19456 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 10:47:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 25643 invoked by uid 0); 20 Sep 1999 17:39:26 - Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: from 209.183.131.147 by www.hotmail.com with HTTP; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 10:39:25 PDT X-Originating-IP: [209.183.131.147] From: "Rod Hay" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:11333] Re: more Postlethwayt Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 10:39:25 PDT Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2.08 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN
[PEN-L:11398] Re: Re: Response to Darity
G'day Jim, Terrific thread! Surely nobody here is talking 'superiority'? I'm going back to residue of high school history here (I really shouldn't be in this thread but I'm keen to get a grasp), but is it not true that the Chinese invented/discovered gunpowder? Does this make their culture 'superior'? It took Europeans to see in a powder contemporarily efficacious only for spectacular ritual celebration (fireworks) a potential for projecting missiles in belligerent settings. Does this make them superior? Maybe it just points to a difference in experience. More than a hundred years of war (from 1337 to 1453) in the heart of Europe (yeah, I've been watching Joan of Arc), might do that to a culture! Anyway, the CBS Joan of Arc page (I quote only unimpeachable sources) tells me that the French hung on to the inferior crossbow (against the demonstrably vastly superior longbow deployed by the Poms) because it cost too much money to train longbow archers. The new powder would be quick to become 'gun'powder in such a political economic setting, eh? Anyway, more unqualified speculation below ... Catholicism was part of the jingoistic drive in Europe. It at once accorded its adherents a sense of superiority over and a sense of responsibility for the 'souls' of their heathen brothers and sisters (just look at how the church treated the Gnostics up to this time - horrid death visited upon dissentors, not just 'for' Mother Church, but also, by this logic, 'for' the souls of the tortured and the killed). It also controlled distribution throughout its sphere of influence. Imperialism might be seen as the aggregated response of individuals to Catholic hegemony - whereby the individual at once enjoys the blessings of Mother Church (taking the Word to the heathen) and a way of acquiring wealth outside so constrained a system (bringing the wealth produced outside theocratic control into the core). Add to that James Burke's techno-determinist thesis (a status we need not accord it here) that a painter in Bologna invented the grid to allow representation of perspective, and that this grid quickly found applications in everything from plotting the trajectory of projectiles to plotting location and progress without earthly reference points (both damned handy at getting a bloke to thinking about travel and conquest), and you have an instrumentally superior technology, spawned within a habitually belligerent culture which validates itself with reference to a religion that rewards conquest whilst constraining development at home (eg. whilst 'indulgences' are commodified, rewarding earthly wealth with eternal ecstacy, a host of research and development is squashed, and paths to differential wealth and power within Europe are blocked as a consequence). Also, the likes of Portugal are very wary of the likes of the English, and needs both a larger navy and more wealth with which to build that navy. War encourages innovation and risk-taking but destroys life (and didn't Weber take Hobbes's 'war of all against all' as the model for the new economics of his - our - day?). No superior culture here then, just one that's as good at kicking arse abroad as it is at home. If I may wax Weberian (and I don't mind a bit if I'm forthrightly put right), belligerence breeds instrumentalism, and instrumentalism breeds a concern for efficiencies that might just contribute to specialisation in production, and the gradual eclipse of merely commercialised surplus product to commodification (and the attendant wage relation, and hence the birth of surplus value). Yours stretching the longbow to its very limit, Rob.
[PEN-L:11401] Reporting from East Timor - a feminist perspective?
Courage under fire Do women behave differently to men in war zones? Victoria Brittain talks to fellow correspondent, Irene Slegt, one of the last three journalists who stayed to report the violence that has erupted since the referendum in East Timor The Guardian, Monday September 20, 1999 Was it chance that the last three journalists left in the United Nations compound in the East Timor capital of Dili were women? Irene Slegt, a Dutch journalist, photographer and longtime BBC stringer, became the voice to the outside world of 1,500 desperate Timorese who had taken refuge in the compound and faced certain death if the UN plans to abandon them had been carried out. Her two companions were the Dutch writer Minka Nijhuis and Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times. All three had distinguished records of bravery already, but their collective role in Timor was one for women to be proud of and goes to the heart of some key differences between men and women. As one of Irene's friends put it: "She's the kind of woman who is prepared to feel an emotional sympathy for the people she's working among, where a man would override that in the interest of commonsense." As Irene herself puts it: "We all had the motivation to stay with the people and we operated as a team. We shared information, had companionship... with a man there it would have been more difficult." In the intensity of war even outsiders find themselves uncomfortably revealed, shorn of the props and mannerisms which allow most people, men in particular, to mask themselves most of the time. Men's response to fear is usually bravado, and in war some male journalists do the same: they become obsessed with weapons and start identifying with the military as role models, in the hope of feeling stronger and braver themselves. Women's response is to identify with the people whose intimate lives are shattered. Irene has no hesitation in saying about women journalists what many of us would hesitate to put into words: "We are more courageous... you see men losing it quicker." It is true that none of my women friends who have worked, or still do, in war zones would choose a male photographer or companion for a dangerous trip and neither would I. You can never count on men not to come over macho at a tense moment and put the whole team in danger. Journalists used to be self-reliant loners, as the great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote recently, but new technology and the demands of corporate ownership has turned them, he argued, into something quite different. Kapuscinski would be at home with Irene and Minka - down-to-earth, hard-working, knowledgeable, and without a trace of self-dramatisation. Before East Timor, both women had specialised, unfashionably, in working in closed countries, such as Burma and Tibet. "It's difficult - I don't go officially and because I'm a freelance I don't have to bother with editors who would not want to send someone in case of endangering relations with some government or because of having repercussions on a bureau somewhere." None of the repression they have seen in Tibet or Burma compared with what has happened in East Timor in the last weeks, according to Irene. "In Tibet, for instance, the countryside still has its culture; in Timor the Indonesians have taken the culture and the religion by targeting priests, nuns, churches. The social fabric is gone with people completely scattered - the UN was the last safe haven. "When you look into old people's eyes you see them completely withdrawn. When you speak to them, they literally can not speak. Maybe the young people will have the resilience to start again." Both Dutch women were already in Dili to write books, and committed to staying on after the independence referendum, albeit under no illusions about how violent it was to become. "In fact, everyone in the UN knew what was likely to happen but they made a big, big miscalculation about what the Indonesians would do," says Irene. The women watched first the television networks pull out their teams, for security reasons, then the news agencies. "I can't remember any big story ever where the agencies pulled out," says Irene. Minka's newspaper put pressure on her to leave with the others, but she continued to file and eventually the editor called to congratulate her on her work. "The Indonesians got what they wanted. In a week 480 out of 500 journalists left." The women resisted going into the UN compound for as long as possi ble, until the military came to their hotel looking for them. Once there, they still travelled into town whenever they could, driven by an acute sense of responsibility to tell the world about the deepening catastrophe. Despite the danger, Irene is cool. "I wasn't that scared - you just have to plan carefully, and go in the morning when the militias are not drunk." Each day, their Timorese resistance friends rang to tell them to leave, or to make for the mountains where
[PEN-L:11404] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
Engels' position is that the laws of motion of nature and society assert themselves amidst a welter of accidents, in the dialectic of chance and necessity ( See _Anti-Duhring_ and _The Dialectics of Nature_). As far as applying probability logic to the revolution in the mode of production in Europe that we call the origin or genesis of capitalism, we might look at the global context rather than only internally to Europe. In other words, look at "internal"Europe in relation to its total or whole world context- the part and the whole. Most of the recent previous revolutions in the modes of production in the world occurred outside of Europe; and the leading area in the globe for "feudalism" had been China (as discussed on this thread( and even the Moslem, and African kingdoms before that. Anyway the probability logic developed by Elman Service in _Evolution and Culture_ ( it may have been based some of Trotsky's and Lenin's reasoning as to Russia as the weakest link in the chain of Europe being the site of socialist revolution) was the law of evolutionary potential such that the cultural area that was least developed or advanced in a given mode has the MOST potential to make the leap or have the revolution to the next mode. Thus, Europe, by this theory, had the most revolutionary (evolutionary) potential in the period in question. The common sense logic being the most backward makes one the most dissatisfied with the status quo and more receptive to change. Thus, the Europeans were due, in terms of probabilities looking at the larger system. So, in a way , I am disagreeing with Barkley that we look only internally to Europe and saying that we must look at Europe in the context of world history (look at the part and whole) . But I am agreeing with Barkley that it was not a random accident, but rather that the odds were that this leap would occur in Europe because of it was due for its "turn" so to speak. This logic ,by the way, explains why socialist revolution is occurring first more outside of Europe (Asia) and the West (Russia and Eastern Europe). Europe has been the most advanced in the capitalist mode, but it has the least revolutionary potential for the leap to the next mode, socialism. Charles Brown Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/20/99 06:49PM "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote: If they were so, it was because of something going on inside of Europe, not some random accident. Barkley, Yoshie has posted lately (perhaps on lbo) in reference to the role of contingency in human history (echoing Gould's arguments on the role of contingency in biological evolution). Do you reject out of hand the possibility of random accident? The possibility does not of course mean that in any given case it was a matter of contingency. Carrol
[PEN-L:11406] FW: 'DIPITY A Joke
The LAPD, the FBI, the CIA are all trying to prove that they are the best at apprehending criminals. The President decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and each of them has to catch it. The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist. The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit and they make no apologies. The rabbit had it coming. The LAPD goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is crying, "Okay, okay! I'm a rabbit, I'm a rabbit."
[PEN-L:11407] Re: Re: Response to Darity
Fostater, You must admit that Darity - in what you cite below - is all over the place, shifting his analysis from the slave trade, to the colonial trade, to total foreign trade, and back to the slave trade - presumably hoping that one of his arguments will hit the right target. I will try very hard not to promote flaming or nastiness. I don't enjoy that and Michael P. is clear about this issue. So please do not take what is contained here as an attempt to flame. But let me begin by saying that I don't think this is a very adequate response, Ricardo, and I think it does smack a bit of an attempt at rhetorical bullying. As an aside, I assume you think my name is "Fostater" as you have repeatedly referred to me in that way, but my name is "Forstater" with an "r" or simply "Mat." Ricardo, what you call "all over the place" I call taking all the relevant and related material into consideration. Anyone who takes the time to read your words "from the slave trade, to the colonial trade, to total foreign trade, and back to the slave trade" and understands the meaning of the words will immediately know that these are all closely related phenomena if not simply different levels of generality of the term "trade" for the period with which we are dealing. Presumably one hopes that one's arguments hit on target, and why should Darity be any different? And, in his case, the arguments do all hit on target. We are still waiting for you to actually name one and state where you differ, and on what grounds. Your dismissiveness may suffice in some circles, but not here. Substance is what you must address, and what your replies must possess. I think I can argue that not even *total* foreign trade of Europe (or even England) was *the major cause* of the industrial revolution, never mind the colonial, or the statistically insignificant slave trade! But let's look, for now, at what Darity has to say against O'Brien. You can *think* you may argue many things, but until you actually make an argument, addressing substance, your words dissolve into air. You must address substance and your responses must actually possess substance. Considering how long you made us wait for your reply, I hope you will *actually* argue something, as opposed to considering out loud what you "think" you could argue (and then never actually arguing that or anything else). Is thinking out loud what you might argue the only way you can sneak the phrase "statistically insignificant slave trade" into your post? Still waiting...(for substance)... The best-developed application of Engerman's small ratios argument to the period of the industrial revolution is Patrick O'Brien's (1982) attempt to dismiss the importance of trade with the entire periphery (Asia, Africa, and the Americas ) for European economic development. Mistake #1: O'Brien does not "dismiss" the colonial trade. As I have said, what he questions is the idea that this trade was *the* major source of capital in Europe's industrialization. Yes, he also does *not* think it was *a* major source, but he does say it was significant, though his numbers may suggest it was not even that. However, O'Brien is well aware that his "small ratios" cannot be taken alone, which is why he also examines the connection of the colonial trade to the cotton industry and the effects of this industry - as the first mechanized industry - upon other industries. Sorry, Ricardo. Perhaps you believe that we cannot tell the difference the phrase "importance of" makes in the sentence you have quoted. It means that Darity is not guilty of committing the error you claim. Do you think the meaning implied by your statement "O'Brien does not "dismiss" the colonial trade" correctly conveys the meaning of the sentence you are supposedly addressing, about O'Brien's "attempt to dismiss *the importance* of trade"? Your quoting of the single word "dismiss" instead of the full phrase is unfortunate, as it makes irrelevant much of your complaint. Of course, not matter how many times I say that no serious scholar "dismisses" the colonial trade, the true believer will keep repeating this, since for the believer there is only 'either-or'. This, for example, means nothing now that it is clear that Darity has correctly specified what is at issue: "the IMPORTANCE OF TRADE WITH THE PERIPHERY." O'Brien marshalls estimates of the shares of foreign trade in overall economic activity for all of the eighteenth-century Europe to show that the numbers are too small to give credence to the importance of trade of any sort as a critical engine of economic expansion. Presumably, European economic development was predominantly an internal affair that would have proceeded if the rest of the world had not existed from the eighteenth century onward. Mistake #2: That the sources of Europe's economic development were *primarily* internal, does not mean it would have developed without the existence of the rest of the world, or
[PEN-L:11408] Re: Re: Response to Darity
"Rod Hay" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 09:42AM Jim and Mathew: I am certainly not saying that Europeans were "better, brighter, bolder" than any one else. There is no doubt that the Chinese (and many others as well) had a very highly developed societies. But something sparked the Europeans to act in ways that these other societies did not. So unless you are putting up an argument that the Europeans were greedier, more vicious, etc. than the others, it has to be determined why did the Europeans reacted differently. ((( Charles: Marx seems to imply that "greedierness" and greater viciousness were necessary factors in the difference of Europeans such that they took the plunge to capitalism. Although Marx is not comparing the Europeans with the non-Europeans, his MATERIALIST or objective discussion of the "genesis of the capitalist farmer and the industrial capitalist" is full of references to the looting , conquest, brute force, barbarities, murder,meaness, treachery, bribery of the European project. This is not some lapse by the founder of historical materialism into idealism. The ideologies or belief systems of a people are part of their material existence (See _Marxism and Literature_ by Raymond Williams; and _Illusion and Reality_ (Introduction) by Christopher Caudwell). Marx is opposed to INDIVIDUAL psychological explanations. His materialist approach does not exclude the fact that different cultures have different SOCIO-historically developed idea systems or ideologies. Marx is not s! aying that Europeans of this period were greedier or more vicious because of biological inheritance, but because of their cultural ideology. This was not the only difference, but it was a necessary element (some of the other differences have been discussed on this thread) . The invention of the institution of wage-labor, was as important as the invention of the institution of white supremacy. And wage-labor was established by viciousness toward other Europeans (fellow Britains even) in removing the peasants from their land ( Marx describes this at length in the primitive accumulation section.). Weber is not incorrect for looking at socio-historical cultural differences of Europeans. He just got the content wrong. The differnence was not more sweetness and light in Europe, but more greediness, viciousness and feeling that Europe had been the backwater of Asia for long enough. It was a sort of socio-cultural inferioirty complex expressed as a superiority complex. (Jim Blaut: Does it make any sense to think of Europe as a different continent from the rest of Asia in a normal land mass division process in geography ? Europe is Northeast Asia, and historically it had been a relative backwater) However, as capitalism developed , it cannot be denied that the Europeans did develop some of the smarter ideas of this era. The Europeans did initiate capitalism because they were initially smarter, "brighter" (notice the association of smart with brighter as opposed to darker). But they have become the center of much of science and intellectual achievement since they took the leap that others did not. The European domination of the world today is dependent on viciousness and greediness but not only on that. It is dependent upon superior intellectual achievements in a number of different areas. This is not genetically , but socio-historically derived. ( Since Mat brought up the political issue, I will respond. I want a politics that emphasises the universal nature of human society--the common elements. "Identity politics", "anti-imperialism" etc., finds enemies where there are none. All whites are the enemy, all Americans are the enemy. All men are the enemy, etc., All the time reinforcing the division that this society puts between people. We have supposed leftists supporting tin pot third world dictators, because they in some stretch of the imagination are "anti-imperialist" The enemy is capitalism. Capitalism developed in Europe, (for whatever reason). It now encompasses the globe. It is the common enemy of us all. We are all in this together and will have to find a common way out. It helps not at all to pine for some romantic vision of how things were before the 16th century. There is no going back. ((( Charles: This is true. But the enemy is actually captialism/patriarchy/racist colonialism. And that is not a thing, but a social institution with people occupying roles in the system , roles that act to retain it. There is a tiny minority of people who are incorrigible pillars of the institution. However, most white men , men of all colors, white women , petit bourgeoisie do not have ultimate objective interests consonant with capitalism , although many of them don't know this or are ambivalent about it. Their failure to know this is the barrier to all around liberation and revolution. Charles Brown Jim Blaut wrote: In other
[PEN-L:11414] Re: Capitalist development
Carrol wrote: Lou believes that this empirical question is at the source of eurocentrism. I believe the source of eurocentrism *is in the present*, not the past. I agree. No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' The problem lies in the question, not various answers given to the question. The day we'll get rid of capitalism other oppressions, we'll stop asking questions such as 'why did China fail to become capitalist?' 'Are blacks intellectually inferior to whites?' 'What causes homosexuality?' And so forth. Yoshie
[PEN-L:11418] Re: slavery and capitalism
Concerning the question of whether or not "New" World slave owners were
capitalists during (say) the 19th century, I had answered unequivocally
"yes no." Yes, they were in the sense that they were in a capitalist
social formation dominated by industrial capital in its core -- but no they
weren't because slave-labor isn't the same thing as proletarian labor.
Jim Blaut answers: No, its not "yes and no" regarding the importance of
slave production and slavery. It is "yes."
You forget that the slave plantation system was generating profitss from
1600 (Brazil) and more so from 1650 (Barbados, Jamaica).
As I said in my discussion with Charles, it depends on your _definition_ of
capitalism. Following Marx, I don't define capitalism as simply "profit
generating" (though of course capitalist does generate profits, when
there's not a severe crisis going on). After all, ancient Roman slave
plantations generated profits, didn't they? But most wouldn't see them as
"capitalist." There are other "profit generating" systems besides
capitalism. (One might interpret a tributary state as making a profit off
its subject populations. I wouldn't.)
But it's a free Internet. If you want to use a different definition of
capitalism, it's fine, as long as you make it clear what definition you're
using. (BTW, I think a lot of the debate about the rise of capitalism (the
timing, the causes, the location) is based on the use of differing
definitions by different people.)
The flaw in your argument is this: At that period there was no capitalism
of the sort you describe. There was hardly any proletariat in Europe
although wage work was general. There was hardly any manufacture in which
to employ proletarians.
I was talking about the 19th century rather than the 1600s. But in the
1600s, as I read them, there was an incomplete form of capitalism, merchant
capital, which was based on noncapitalist modes of production (different
forms of forced labor). Full-scale (industrial) capitalism only prevailed
in the English countryside at the time.
And BTW, the existence of manufacturing is irrelevant to the issue.
Capitalism can easily exist in agriculture. ("In the strict sense, the
farmer is as much an industrial capitalist as the manufacturer," writes
Marx in the first footnote of ch. 31 of vol. I of CAPITAL. He says this in
explaining his use of the nonstrict sense of the word.) In fact, people
like Marx and Brenner see it as happening there first. Capitalism -- as I
am using that word, meaning full-scale (industrial) capitalism as opposed
to incomplete versions like merchant capital and money-dealing capital --
involves the existence of a "free" proletariat on a large scale (relative
to the society).
You shouldn't generalize to [from?] the slave plantaTION system as a whole
from the very late and unique form it took in the US South, essentially in
the 19th century. At the time cotton-producing plantations were flourishing
in the US, slavery wass being abolished in the British colonies.
I wasn't generalizing from the slave plantation system of the Southern US;
rather, I was trying to make my discussion concrete by talking about a
specific case (one I know a lot about).
I am familiar with the way that several European colonies in the "new"
World abolished slavery before the period I was talking about (and some
abolished it later). My understanding (and correct me if I am wrong), was
that in many cases (due to abundance of labor relative to demand and the
inability to use slaves all year round in the production of some crops) it
turned out that slavery wasn't that much more profitable than freeing the
slaves and relying on the reserve army of labor. In the latter case, the
employer isn't responsible for the ex-slave's welfare at all. If a slave
starves, it's a capital loss, while if a free proletarian starves, it
doesn't show up in the balance sheet at all. Given such changes in relative
profitability, the abolitionist efforts were more likely to be successful.
(Not all slave-owners benefited from the change, so that there was some
resistance.)
Apples and oranges. 17th-18th century slave production -- very late
18th-20th century non-slave industrial production.
I agree, but again I was trying to answer a "big theoretical question"
partly by dealing with a concrete case (one that I'm more familiar with).
Also, it's important to remember that apples and oranges are both fruit,
i.e., they do share some characteristics. (The apples/oranges problem
really takes hold when you try to add them, something I wasn't doing.) So
we can learn something about slavery outside the US antebellum South by
studying the latter, as long as you realize that there are differences, too.
And there were great numbers of wage workers involved in the accumulation
of capital by plantation owners (in Europe as well as in the colonies).
Many free laborers in the mills, and as overseers. Sailors bringing the
stuff to England -- and in the triangular trade.
[PEN-L:11421] Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 12:35PM There have been horrible social disasters in these parts of the world, but they're not accurately described as recessions or depressions in the economic sense except for the former USSR. Africa shows positive GDP growth in the 1990s, and East Asia, despite the 1997-98 collapse, still shows an average growth rate of over 7% for the whole decade. India and China, home to about 1/3 of the world's people, both show very strong growth rates in the 1990s. The fact that African GDP is positive in this decade shows that it's a poor measure of human welfare, but Frank seems to be operating under his own set of definitions. (( Charles: Some questions for the answers: Why is the whole region of East Asia looked at to determine whether there is a recession ? Maybe there was a recession in Indonesia but not one in China. Isn't one conventional defiintion something like negative growth for four or five straight quarters in one country ? Why is the period of measure a decade ? Over the history of recording recession/depresions aren't some of them in individual countries and some world or regional ? One commentator says the first crisis of overproduction broke out in Britain in 1825. The 1847-48 crisis which embraced the U.S. and some European countries was the first world or regional crisis. Aren't crises of different geographical reaches and for different lengths ,including a year or so, in length ? If the time period is stretched long enough and an average taken , most crises can be averaged away. This is especially so if the time period is stretched to a decade. Even the Great Depression of `1929 to 1933 might be averaged away if the decade is 1923 to 1933 ? Can China, with a very mixed economy, be considered on a full capitalist business cycle ? Can its growth be credited to the world capitalist system ? Charles Brown
[PEN-L:11422] Re: Capitalist development
I agree that these questions are wrong questions. However, the problem I see with the one ( and maybe another )is the double question in one, on the model of the old trick lawyer's question, "When did you stop beating your wife ?". This is really two questions: Did you beat your wife ? If yes, when did you stop ? Similarly the question below sneaks in an answer to a hidden premise question such as "Did the Chinese commit a failure by not leaping into what has become capitalism ? If yes, why.? or in this case "If no, why ? The answer to the second is obvious. I am not clear on the dehistoricizing aspect. Seems to me that the dissolution of capitalism, racism and homophobia is a dialectical unity of their past, present and future. The working class revolution today is still part of historical materialism. The empirical history of capitalism is part of its instant dissolution, no ? Charles Brown Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 12:57PM Carrol wrote: Lou believes that this empirical question is at the source of eurocentrism. I believe the source of eurocentrism *is in the present*, not the past. I agree. No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' The problem lies in the question, not various answers given to the question. The day we'll get rid of capitalism other oppressions, we'll stop asking questions such as 'why did China fail to become capitalist?' 'Are blacks intellectually inferior to whites?' 'What causes homosexuality?' And so forth. Yoshie
[PEN-L:11424] Re: Person work hours at the dawn of capitalism
Louis Proyect wrote: Has anyone here read Robin Blackburn's histories of slavery? He argues that slavery was seminal in the development of Europe. Any comments? Sam Pawlett THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. By Robin Blackburn . 582 pp., I haven't read Blackburn's book, but I did a long interview him when it came out. He argued that, aside from the material contribution of slavery to primitive accumulation, the slave ship itself was institutionally important to the evolution of capitalism - a proto-factory, with the captain as capitalist, managing the crew and keeping accounts. Doug
[PEN-L:11423] Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
"James M. Blaut" wrote: Carrol: ... So questions of the form, "Why didn't China? are, in my humble opinion, no longer interesting. Jim, my core point is that such questions *never* were interesting -- or, more explicitly, that even asking them reflects a false sense of history. They usually, in fact, conceal the premise (explicit of course in Adam Smith) that 'men' [sic] are naturally traders and dealers and that any society which does not take the fetters off that natural impulse are somehow deficient. So bending the stick perhaps too far, may I suggest that trying to answer the question, whether the answer is your answer or Rod's answer, is a sort of giving in to eurocentrism. The argument as such, regardless of content, suggests that "letting capitalism develop" is "natural," and there is something wrong with a people or a culture or what have you that "fails" to allow this natural process to go on. "Why did the Chinese fail to develop capitalism?" The very question is repellant. The question that is politically important to answer is, "Why did capitalism develop at all?" I would argue that it was *not* inevitable. That (to use Gould's metaphor for contingency in evolution) if one played the tape of human history over again, that after 500,000 years (instead of 100, 000 as of now) human culture would still be paleolithic or feudal or what have you. Because capitalism *did* develop, we know that it was *possible* for it to develop. We do *not* know that it was either a necessary or even probable development. The debate, also, and despite the intentions of the debaters is apt to produce rhetoric with unfortunate implications. I assume that you are not making moral judgments -- but (as Jim Devine noted) the rhetoric often suggests that. And the problem with making moral judgments of imperialism is that it implicitly treats imperialism as a *policy* rather than as the mode of existence of capitalism. And treating imperialism as a policy formed the root of Kautsky's errors. It is also at the root of the errors of those leftists or would be leftists who support humanitarian bombing. (Rod, in suggesting that anti-imperialism finds enemies where there are none, obviously sees imperialism as merely a policy of a given government that one can tinker with.) Carrol
[PEN-L:11429] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
Carrol, I do not reject the role of random accident in history. But in this case it was not random accident that set Columbus to trying to cross the Atlantic. He was merely the culmination of a long business-motive driven effort that had been going on for some time, with the earlier stages having been initiated and overseen by the Portuguese king, Henry the Navigator. Nothing similar was going on in East Asia at that time. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Monday, September 20, 1999 6:51 PM Subject: [PEN-L:11371] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote: If they were so, it was because of something going on inside of Europe, not some random accident. Barkley, Yoshie has posted lately (perhaps on lbo) in reference to the role of contingency in human history (echoing Gould's arguments on the role of contingency in biological evolution). Do you reject out of hand the possibility of random accident? The possibility does not of course mean that in any given case it was a matter of contingency. Carrol
[PEN-L:11434] Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to Darity
Carrol writes: But this proposition of Rod's does show that their objections to his politics are richly grounded. A "universal politics" is simply another name for support in practice of eurocentrism and western imperialism. It should be noted that the "old-fashioned Marxism" of the 3rd 4th internationals often embraced a kind of "universal politics" without being in favor of imperialism. One of the critiques of capitalism for a long time has been "hey, I'm all in favor of enlightenment, modernism, universalism, and all that, but capitalism does it wrongly. What we need is a proletarian enlightenment, a proletarian modernism, a proletarian universalism." Maybe that's what Rod is talking about. (I can't read his mind.) I don't endorse this view exactly (since it's much too simple), but its existence should be noted. My point is that all sorts of folks criticized eurocentrism and western imperialism from a modified enlightenment perspective, long before postmodernism, postcolonialism, and "identity politics" were invented. (Think about Mark Twain.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11436] Re: Capitalist development
Jim Devine wrote: No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' is there anyone on pen-l who thinks that non-Europeans are inferior to Europeans? (I'd like an electronic show of hands.) Yoshie, do you think that there are people like that on pen-l? Apparently, on PEN-L, questions such as 'why China failed to become capitalist?' are quite compelling (enough to become a long, contentious thread and to launch related threads) and make listers like Ricardo even want to speculate on various non-material causes for this supposed failure (which is a failure only from the bad Hegelian view of historical necessity). From such a viewpoint, the fact that capitalism originated in Europe makes for an argument that there had to be something lacking in -- which is easily if illogically translated into the notion of inferiority of -- the rest of the world, which prevented them from becoming 'discoverers' conquerers of the 'New World,' as they should have (while other listers feel compelled to refute this implied lack and inferiority). Why should they have? Because Europeans did! If this manner of thinking is not Eurocentric, I don't know what is. And, to repeat, this type of Eurocentrism gets the question of necessity and contingency wrong. The day when same-sex love and sexuality become matter-of-fact (i.e. not something to be justifed), we'll stop asking 'what causes homosexuality?' The same will happen to the Eurocentric view of history if and when we will get to abolish capitalism worldwide. Yoshie
[PEN-L:11438] Re: Re: Response to Darity
Actually, much of what not many of us disagree with in "postmodernism," i.e. rejection of positivism, etc., is in the anti-eurocentric writings of the 19th and 20th centuries. But the larger point is about (and I'll skip the quotes around every word) frames of reference, world views, conceptual frameworks, and the like. There are whole obliterated worlds out there that are not obliterated for some of us. Thus the Ellison quote about (in)visibility. How can an emancipatory project be forged that, to put it simply, is something like a noneurocentric anti-racist antipatriarchal Marxism? W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, C.L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Eric Williams, George Padmore--so many struggling with these issues throughout their lives. See Ronald Bailey's discussion of Du Bois' "Apologia" to the 1954 edition of _The Suppression of the African Slave Trade_, first published in 1896. Du Bois asks himself "how could I...have neglected the classic work of Marx on the colonies as the source of primary capitalistic accumulation...What I needed was to add to my terribly conscientious search into the facts of the slave-trade the clear concept of Marx on the class struggle for income and power, beneath which all considerations of morals were twisted or utterly crushed."This is what I hope is not missed: that we are not looking to get rid of Marx!..mf I don't endorse this view exactly (since it's much too simple), but its existence should be noted. My point is that all sorts of folks criticized eurocentrism and western imperialism from a modified enlightenment perspective, long before postmodernism, postcolonialism, and "identity politics" were invented. (Think about Mark Twain.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11439] Capitalist development
Carrol wrote: Lou believes that this empirical question is at the source of eurocentrism. I believe the source of eurocentrism *is in the present*, not the past. I agree. No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' The problem lies in the question, not various answers given to the question. The day we'll get rid of capitalism other oppressions, we'll stop asking questions such as 'why did China fail to become capitalist?' 'Are blacks intellectually inferior to whites?' 'What causes homosexuality?' And so forth. Yoshie But I don't think that Jim Blaut wrote this book to change the minds of people like Rod Hay, Ricardo Duchesne and Aidan Campbell. I would assume that it is directed to people who are not ideologically committed to Eurocentrism, but who have merely been miseducated in high school or college. Although I don't think that Jim Blaut could write academic jargon if his life depended on it, the "Colonizer's Model of the World" is refreshingly clear and accessible to the average person. I hope that it becomes a classic. If I were going to compile a list of books for a person new to these sorts of questions, I'd include the following: 1) Jim Blaut, "Colonizer's Model of the World" 2) Walter Rodney, "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" 3) Eduardo Galeano, "Open Veins of a Continent" 4) Dee Brown, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" 5) Gerard Colby, "Thy Will be Done" 6) Howard Zinn, "People's History of the United States" 7) A. L. Morton, "People's History of England" 8) Leo Huberman, "Man's Wordly Goods" 9) Marilyn Young, "Vietnam Wars 1945-1990" 10) Basil Davidson, "Lost Cities of Africa" Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:11440] Re: Re: Capitalist development
Yoshie writes: Apparently, on PEN-L, questions such as 'why China failed to become capitalist?' are quite compelling (enough to become a long, contentious thread and to launch related threads) and make listers like Ricardo even want to speculate on various non-material causes for this supposed failure (which is a failure only from the bad Hegelian view of historical necessity). From such a viewpoint, the fact that capitalism originated in Europe makes for an argument that there had to be something lacking in -- which is easily if illogically translated into the notion of inferiority of -- the rest of the world, which prevented them from becoming 'discoverers' conquerers of the 'New World,' as they should have (while other listers feel compelled to refute this implied lack and inferiority). Why should they have? Because Europeans did! If this manner of thinking is not Eurocentric, I don't know what is. And, to repeat, this type of Eurocentrism gets the question of necessity and contingency wrong. You were suggesting that some people could _never_ be convinced that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' That's _racism_, which is much stronger than mere Eurocentrism. A Eurocentrist interprets the world from the perspective of Europe (or its outposts like the US). A racist goes further to say that Europeans are _better_. Maybe these are merely degrees of the same phenomenon, but I think some Eurocentrists might realize that one can look at exactly the same question from a non-European perspective. And a Eurocentric interpretation of the rise of capitalism can easily be interpreted as damning the Europeans for foisting their system on the rest of the world, as I said before. I have nothing to say for Ricardo. He's one person on my Eudora filter list. BTW, the term "Eurocentrism" seems a bit quaint in an era when the US is the self-proclaimed center of the world. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11446] Re: Capitalist development
Lou, how could you possible know what kind of person I am. What my "ideological committments are" What my political committments are. Has your former heroine Ellen Wood suddenly become "ideologically" committed because she disagrees with Jim. The debate is about interpretations of what has happened in history. This is important if we are going to do something about it. If you want to slur me (Ricardo can answer for himself) go ahead, I really don't mind. But others on the list might. Mat and I have had many debates without questioning each others motives. He has always responded to my disagreements with him in the best manner, a comradely searching after the truth. I see no reason why interjections by others could not be kept in the same tone. And yes I do think that capitalism is an advance over feudalism wheither the European or the Chinese kind. The revolutions in China and Russia were possible because Western imperialism had weakened the old feudal regimes. As capitalism will weaken the regimes in Indonesia, and many other countries with despotic governments. Original Message Follows From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] But I don't think that Jim Blaut wrote this book to change the minds of people like Rod Hay. I would assume that it is directed to people who are not ideologically committed to Eurocentrism, but who have merely been miseducated in high school or college. Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archives http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://members.tripod.com/rodhay/batochebooks.html http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/ __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:11449] [Fwd: Re: Senate Resolution 172]
FYI-- There are no lack of issues. This week, the Senate Rules committee plans to address Senator Sam Brownback's Senate Resolution 172 "To establish a special committee of the Senate to address the cultural crisis facing America." The notion of a Culture Committee at all sets a dangerous precedent; this particular initiative targeting "social and cultural regression" will give Senators Brownback, Leiberman and McCain a greater platform to further their agenda of dictating what culture they find acceptable and appropriate. SR 172 says in part: "To establish a special committee of the Senate to address the cultural crisis facing America. RESOLVE: (b) PURPOSE- The purpose of the special committee is- (1) to study the causes and reasons for social and cultural regression; (2) to make such findings of fact as are warranted and appropriate, including the impact that such negative cultural trends and developments have on the broader society, particularly in regards to child well-being; and (3) to explore means of cultural renewal." You may remember Senator Sam Brownback as the force behind recent hearings on music and it's relationship to youth violence. PLEASE write to your Senator and ask them to vote against this resolution! To find the name, address, telephone, and often email address go to the US Senate page at http://www.senate.gov/ and click on your state. Remember: Be polite and thoughtful in your letter, if you go off on a Senator he will just ignore you. The full text of Senate Resolution #172 is reproduced below: 106th CONGRESS 1st Session S. RES. 172 To establish a special committee of the Senate to address the cultural crisis facing America. IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES August 4, 1999 Mr. BROWNBACK (for himself, Mr. MOYNIHAN, Mr. LOTT, Mr. DORGAN, Mr. ALLARD, Mr. CONRAD, Mr. ABRAHAM, Mr. COVERDELL, Mr. SESSIONS, and Mr. CRAIG) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration RESOLUTION To establish a special committee of the Senate to address the cultural crisis facing America. Resolved, SECTION 1. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE. (a) ESTABLISHMENT- There is established a special committee of the Senate to be known as the Special Committee on American Culture (hereafter in this resolution referred to as the `special committee'). (b) PURPOSE- The purpose of the special committee is-- (1) to study the causes and reasons for social and cultural regression; (2) to make such findings of fact as are warranted and appropriate, including the impact that such negative cultural trends and developments have on the broader society, particularly in regards to child well-being; and (3) to explore means of cultural renewal. No proposed legislation shall be referred to the special committee, and the committee shall not have power to report by bill, or otherwise have legislative jurisdiction. (c) TREATMENT AS STANDING COMMITTEE- For purposes of paragraphs 1, 2, 7(a) (1) and (2), and 10(a) of rule XXVI and rule XXVII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, and section 202 (i) and (j) of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, the special committee shall be treated as a standing committee of the Senate. SEC. 2. MEMBERSHIP AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE. (a) MEMBERSHIP- (1) IN GENERAL- The special committee shall consist of 7 members of the Senate-- (A) 4 of whom shall be appointed by the President pro tempore of the Senate from the majority party of the Senate upon the recommendation of the Majority Leader of the Senate; and (B) 3 of whom shall be appointed by the President pro tempore of the Senate from the minority party of the Senate upon the recommendation of the Minority Leader of the Senate. (2) VACANCIES- Vacancies in the membership of the special committee shall not affect the authority of the remaining members to execute the functions of the special committee and shall be filled in the same manner as original appointments to it are made. (3) SERVICE- For the
[PEN-L:11452] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: slavery and capitalism
At 05:30 PM 9/21/99 -0400, you wrote: Jim, Well, such institutions as accounting and banking were introduced into England from Flanders and Northern Italy. They did not develop them autochthonically, although the Scottish banks were centers of considerable institutional evolution in how banking operated. I thought I made it clear that neither accounting nor banking define capitalism. Weren't there banks in the Roman empire? As a matter of fact, Belgium, which contains most of Flanders, was probably the second place in the world after England to have full-bore modern industrial capitalism. Not so severely squelched by the French, although perhaps to some extent. ah, nostalgia! this reminds me of the paper I wrote in college on the Belgian industrial rev. However, though I'd bet that mass proletarianization (i.e., the rise of full-blown capitalism) was necessary to an industrial rev., I wouldn't equate an industrial rev. with capitalism. I wish I remembered more of my sophomore research so that I could delineate the links here. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11454] Blackburn versus Brenner
Robin Blackburn, "The Making of New World Slavery": A tradition of British Marxist historiography culminating in Eric Hobsbawms Industry and Empire (1964) and Christopher Hills From Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1968) has argued that British colonial expansion did indeed furnish crucial economic space for British capitalist development. Writers in this tradition had no difficulty finding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statesmen and political economists who urged colonial development on the grounds that it would boost the national economy. The evidence of official statistics seemed to confirm the picture, but a traditional view of this sort was bound to furnish the target for a wave of revisionism. Approaches inspired by a variety of economic models classical, neoclassical and Marxist came to reject the thesis that there was a primitive contribution to Britains industrialization; in some quarters the problematic of a primitive accumulation was itself deemed primitive in conception. After all, Britains internal market had grown rapidly in the seventeenth century, and was probably growing as fast as foreign trade in the eighteenth. Historians as different in their approach as Charles Kindleberger, a neoclassical economic historian, Paul Bairoch, a neo-Physiocrat member of the Annales school, and Robert Brenner, a Marxist, all challenged the view that colonies or commerce made any decisive contribution to Britains capitalist industrialization. The arguments they advanced appeared so cogent that for much of the 1970s and 1980s they enjoyed a certain hegemony.8 Bairoch contended, against Hobsbawm, that colonial markets and profits made a very modest contribution to capital formation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, and that it was, rather, the agricultural revolution of roughly 16601800 which opened up the space for economic growth. Brenner, as a Marxist, argued that the decisive moments of capitalist development were those which transformed social relations in the West European countryside, and that no essential contribution was made by colonial markets or by surplus extracted on the slave plantations; in Brenners case it was the capitalist world-system approach of Immanuel Wallerstein that furnished the object of his critique. Historians of the slave systems in the Americas have had their own version of the controversy over primitive accumulation and the importance of trade to capitalist development. The classic reference here is, of course, Eric Williamss Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944 and seldom out of print since. Its argument was placed within a broader framework by the same authors history of the Caribbean, From Columbus to Castro, published in 1962. In the ensuing decades and most particularly in the l960s and 1970s many challenges were mounted to Williamss contention that the profits of Britains triangular trade with Africa and the West Indies lent a major impulse to the Industrial Revolution. The so-called 'Williams thesis became the target of repeated attempts to show that neither the Atlantic slave trade nor the plantation trades had made any large or decisive contribution to British economic growth. In 1973 Roger Anstey published a major investigation of Britains involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, conceived as a comprehensive refutation of Williamss arguments.9 The putative contribution of colonial profits was challenged in a different way by those who questioned whether an industrial revolution had even taken place in Britain in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. New calculations of British economic growth during this period suggested that it was modest compared with modern, especially post-World War II, rates of growth, and that it may have been similar to the rate of growth already achieved in England in the seventeenth century. It could also be shown that the growth of agriculture had made a large contribution to the advance of overall output, for some time overshadowing the relatively small manufacturing sector. But in fact the new models and new evidence did not give good grounds for abandoning the idea of an industrial revolution, while the new findings on trade, growth and capital formation actually increase the significance of the colonial contribution, as we will see. Britain was the first country to undergo an industrial transformation such that the agricultural workforce was overtaken by urban or manufacturing employment. The share of the male labour force in industry grew steadily: 18.5 per cent in 1688, 23.8 per cent in 1759, 29.5 per cent in 1801 and 47.3 per cent in 1847.10 Agriculture grew in absolute terms, but accounted for a declining share of national income: 45 per cent in 1770, 33 per cent in 1801 and 20 per cent in 1851.11 Such developments proved to be a watershed in human history, inaugurating a new pattern of society. While agricultural advance helped to create the
[PEN-L:11455] Re: Blackburn versus Brenner
Louis Proyect wrote: Robin Blackburn, "The Making of New World Slavery": There are many interesting graphs in Blackburn's chapter, but for brevity's sake and in order not to upset Carrol Cox, I will only cite one which deals with British important of cotton, essential to the textile industry. Without this raw material imported mostly from the colonies and without the slaves to pick it, it is virtually excluded that the British Empire could have been built. If we are only in the realm of what Wojtek calls "educated guesses," I'll certify that this proposition is a very good educated guess -- I think it is the one I myself would make. But I very much dislike to have my politics depend on merely an educated guess. And nothing in this whole cluster of threads so beautifully illustrates the unwisdom of basing political conclusions on sheer data. What this information tells us is merely that British capitalism *did* use slave grown cotton. It tells us nothing whatever about what *would* have been the case had slave labor not been available. To establish that proposition you would have to argue that *in principle* it would have been impossible for british capitalism to develop without the use of african slavery. Now what that argument suggests to me is a deeply racist implication buried in the grade school history texts of my youth. Those texts explained why black africans rather than native americans were enslaved. The reason was that Indians were too proud to accept slavery. How do you know that the British capitalists or the american planters would have been unable to subdue "free white labor" to their ends? How, in fact, do you have any idea whatever of what *might have been* given other conditions? Britons never will be slaves must be your motto for this argument. Facts simply do not explain themselves. Incidentally, the first great Virginia tobacco boom was based mostly on the labor of indentured white servants. Carrol
[PEN-L:11456] Re: Re: Blackburn versus Brenner
What you can surmise is what would have been in those countries which produced their own textiles for many centuries before British outlawing of domestic production in those countries, forcing their own textiles on the populations instead. It doesn't take much to figure they would have continued producing for themselves. mf -Original Message- From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 6:20 PM Subject: [PEN-L:11455] Re: Blackburn versus Brenner Louis Proyect wrote: Robin Blackburn, "The Making of New World Slavery": There are many interesting graphs in Blackburn's chapter, but for brevity's sake and in order not to upset Carrol Cox, I will only cite one which deals with British important of cotton, essential to the textile industry. Without this raw material imported mostly from the colonies and without the slaves to pick it, it is virtually excluded that the British Empire could have been built. If we are only in the realm of what Wojtek calls "educated guesses," I'll certify that this proposition is a very good educated guess -- I think it is the one I myself would make. But I very much dislike to have my politics depend on merely an educated guess. And nothing in this whole cluster of threads so beautifully illustrates the unwisdom of basing political conclusions on sheer data. What this information tells us is merely that British capitalism *did* use slave grown cotton. It tells us nothing whatever about what *would* have been the case had slave labor not been available. To establish that proposition you would have to argue that *in principle* it would have been impossible for british capitalism to develop without the use of african slavery. Now what that argument suggests to me is a deeply racist implication buried in the grade school history texts of my youth. Those texts explained why black africans rather than native americans were enslaved. The reason was that Indians were too proud to accept slavery. How do you know that the British capitalists or the american planters would have been unable to subdue "free white labor" to their ends? How, in fact, do you have any idea whatever of what *might have been* given other conditions? Britons never will be slaves must be your motto for this argument. Facts simply do not explain themselves. Incidentally, the first great Virginia tobacco boom was based mostly on the labor of indentured white servants. Carrol
[PEN-L:11460] Re: Re: Re: Blackburn versus Brenner
Mathew Forstater wrote: What you can surmise is what would have been in those countries which produced their own textiles for many centuries before British outlawing of domestic production in those countries, Mat, what we don't have to surmise is that your politics and mine are awfully close, as are mine and Lou's. After I sent the post you quote I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with Lou when I was in NYC for the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference. I had made a hypothetical proposal of some sort. I don't remember the subject, but I remember Lou's reply: That he would never consent to discuss a merely hypothetical proposition. But a proposition about what would have been in 1700 under some other set of conditions than those which in fact held is every bit as hypothetical as some hypothetical proposition re 2010. I think that the educated guesses made by you, Lou, Jim B, etc. are pretty good guesses. But that is all they are, and I want to base my anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics on something firmer than educated guesses about a past empirical state of affairs or hypotheses however educated about what would have been if In fact hypothetical propositions re 2010 can be both more useful and more certain than those about 1700. Some fine critiques have been submitted to the marxism list of the erroneous position of the Australian DSP. Every one of those critiques takes the form of a comparison of the state of affairs following (now and in the future) the DSP's error on East Timor and the state of affairs that would have existed had it followed a principled anti-imperialist line. The DSP has essentially committed itself to the ideology of "The White Man's Burden." That is the eurocentrism that I want to fight. Carrol
[PEN-L:11459] Re: Re: Capitalist development
Jim Devine wrote: Here's Solidarity's statement. I'll let others decide whether this contradicts Marxist principles or not. I think it's a stupid and shitty position and will haunt them in the future. It's also a sad position because AAC is a pretty good journal and Solidarity is in many ways a good group and I hate to see it befoul itself. But I would be a bit more chary than Lou in declaring whether a decision "contradicts Marxist principle." I would rather say (at least in this case) that it is a very bad/mistaken application of marxist principle. I do believe that any renewed left movement will make opposition to all u.s. intervention abroad one of its unifying principles -- and in the meantime it is certainly one of my principles. I wish it were Solidarity's also. Carrol
[PEN-L:11458] What the founders of the UN intended
Phyllis Bennis, "Calling the Shots", (Olive Branch, 1996): THE FOUNDERS, THE HISTORY The UN Charter is filled with stirring rhetoric that seizes the heart and captures the imagination. Written for a world so recently threatened by the slaughter of fascism, it called for countries to come together in a new organization. Nations would unite to "prevent the scourge of war to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small ... to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." But the founding of the United Nations wasnt only a victory of moral principles and the triumph of democratic values. Behind the high-minded phrasing was the hardball world of diplomatic power-plays and forced, reluctant compromises. While the drafters of that remarkable document included some of the best democracy- and justice-oriented minds of the Western world, some of their governments in Washington, London, Moscow, and Paris had goals in mind far more primitive than world peace and shared equal development. For the Allied powers, the goal was to insure, through diplomatic means, that the governments that had won the war would continue to rule the post-war peace. The founders were a strange blend. The official U.S. delegation, and its parallel advisory team, included political analyst-activists and diplomats of various stripes, most of whom shared a commitment to internationalism, as well as academics and intellectuals seeking a form for a new peace-oriented global body whose mandate would be to prevent future wars, insure economic development, and create some modicum of social justice. They included brilliant minds and committed people. Many of them believed that the UN would truly represent a step to- wards a one-world government, an agency that could, if not challenge directly, at least provide an alternative to the continuation of economic, political, and strategic domination by any one power. The UN, they hoped, like no organization before it, would project the derivative power of joint U.S., European, and Soviet backing while simultaneously upholding the worlds collective interests. It would enjoy the unassailable credential of internationalism and provide an independent voice in global affairs. But the democratic-minded activists and academics were the Third Deputy Secretaries and the Staff Assistants and the behind-the-scenes grunt workers, who toiled over successive drafts without fancy titles or job descriptions. They werent the ones making the final decisions. The U.S. government controlled the bottom line, and its representatives, headed by Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, had not traveled to Dumbarton Oaks, and later to San Francisco, only to talk about peace and justice and internationalism; Washingtons agenda was power. LESSONS OF THE LEAGUE The 1945 San Francisco meeting, officially known as the Conference on International Organization, had learned a number of lessons from the UNs predecessor, the League of Nations. Founded after World War I, the League had failed to create a more harmonious world, and, most crucially, had failed to prevent the rise of fascism and the outbreak of another world war. The U.S., then emerging as a global super-power, had refused to join the League. There was a strong isolationist current in U.S. political culture, and it was dominant after World War I. President Woodrow Wilson, while a strong supporter of the Leagues stated goals, was unable to win Senate endorsement for U.S. membership. In the Congress, and through- out the political echelons of U.S. policy-making, League membership was suspect. Rejection of League membership, corresponding to popular opinion, was couched in the more diplomatic language of a threat to U.S. sovereignty. But for Washington, beyond electoral concerns mandating isolationist rhetoric, the real fear was that joining the League would somehow result in a significant loss of international power and influence. There were no sufficient protective guarantees, Washington policy-makers believed, to insure that League decisions would always be taken in accord with U.S. policy and interests. The Leagues claims to represent a truly global organization faced a number of daunting contradictions. First and foremost, for all its high ideals, the League was a creature of, by, and for Europe and, to a lesser degree, Europes Western allies. Its concerns regarding Europes colonies, the rich lands and impoverished populations of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, primarily focused on keeping then that way. The Leagues leadership by the colonial powers also helped institutionalize the conflicts and competition between them. The absence of the U.S. further undermined any chance the League might have had to operate in a broader multilateral fashion. Ultimately, colonial rivalries and competition among
[PEN-L:11457] Re: Capitalist development
Louis writes: ... Solidarity has just endorsed UN troops in East Timor, a clear violation of Marxist principles. I may disagree with them on that one, but I'm sure that their justification for that position is at least highly informed about the subject (rather than simply applying dogma). (I disliked their position on Kosava/o even more, so their E. Timor position might be a sign of progress on their part. ) I think that it's a moot point, however. (The troops are already there, while no-one with any kind of power gives a rat's ass about the position of a small group like Solidarity.) The US let their mad dog (Indonesia) ravage E. Timor for 25 years and indeed encouraged that ravaging. The US delayed any kind of pressure on their loyal allies in the Indonesian military to stop the carnage. Having done all this damage, the "peace-keeping" forces are basically going to clean up what's left (not much). And then, if an E. Timor independent state arises, it will be totally under the US thumb. But the UN force is better than a US/NATO force, because the former is more likely to be held responsible to a wide variety of different countries representing different perspectives. A mere US/NATO force (like the one that leveled Serbia) is decided upon in secret, followed by a propaganda wave to convince the "public" to endorse it. Further, I understand a lot of E. Timorese endorsed the UN intervention, which should count for something. However, it should be noted that the US and NATO have a hell of a lot of influence on the UN (with the US slowly paying its debt to the UN as a way of controlling it), while the Ozzies (who form the vanguard of the peace-keeping force) endorsed Indonesia's conquest of E. Timor. Here's Solidarity's statement. I'll let others decide whether this contradicts Marxist principles or not. INDEPENDENCE FOR EAST TIMOR! END ALL MILITARY AND ECONOMIC AID TO INDONESIA! ENFORCE REFERENDUM VOTE! SEND IN U.N. TROOPS! SAFE RETURN OF ALL REFUGEES! East Timor Statement from Solidarity PC [Political Committee], September 12, 1999 The will of the East Timor people was made loud and clear in an August 30 referendum: 78.5 percent voted yes for independence. After 24 years of military occupation by Indonesia, the people stood up for their fundamental right to have their own country. The ruling elite and military high command in Indonesia refused to accept defeat. The next day a genocide terror campaign was launched against an unarmed population. Thousands have been slaughtered. Religious figures and other leaders of the independence movement have been targeted and assassinated. The U.N. compound and other internationals have been attacked. The leader of the pro-independence movement who was freed from prison by Indonesia on September 7, Xanana Gusmao, learned his father was among those murdered. Some 200,000 of the illegally occupied country's 800,000 have been forcibly removed from the territorysome to nearby West Timor, others to far away Indonesian islands. Tens of thousands more Timorese have fled the capital, Dili, to the hills. The horrific murder campaign is organized by the Indonesian military (TNI) and their armed militias. Their objective is to teach the people a deadly lesson for refusing to stay under their feet. While the New Order regime of President Habibie and General Wiranto claim the military is trying to do their job by declaring martial law and sending in more troops, it is clear that the campaign of terror was orchestrated by the highest levels of the military and the Habibie government. Using a cynicism well known to bloody criminals the world over, Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said of the Timorese fleeing the island: "These people want to go to safer places, and we are helping them." He reiterated that the army and government will oppose any outside military intervention. For the ruling elite in Indonesia the stakes are quite high. Despite pressure from the United Nations and international public opinion, the rulers, who are based in the army, see a free East Timor as the first step toward their loss of power. The downfall of the 32-year dictatorship of former President Suharto, in May 1998, opened up a period of democratic space not seen since the 1950s. The ruling elite was thrown into crisis by Suharto's downfall and the army was in political retreat. Unfortunately, the weakening of the New Order regime and the military did not lead, yet, to fundamental changes. While the student-led movement was able to force Suharto out, the political awakening of the mass of workers and
[PEN-L:11453] Capitalist development
BTW, unless things have changed drastically, the guy some have dismissed as "Eurocentric" (Bob Brenner) is a leader of Solidarity. Not that one thing has much to do with another, but Solidarity has just endorsed UN troops in East Timor, a clear violation of Marxist principles. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:11451] Re: Re: Re: Response to Darity
Rob, Actually it was the Chinese who first figured out how to use gunpowder to make guns and cannons. The technology diffused westwards. Indeed, it was the tremendous edge in cannons that the Ottoman Turks had that allowed them to finally conquer Constantinople in 1453. Arguably in the early 1500s, under Suleiman the Magnificent, they were the world's most technologically advanced military power. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: Rob Schaap [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 5:21 AM Subject: [PEN-L:11398] Re: Re: Response to Darity G'day Jim, Terrific thread! Surely nobody here is talking 'superiority'? I'm going back to residue of high school history here (I really shouldn't be in this thread but I'm keen to get a grasp), but is it not true that the Chinese invented/discovered gunpowder? Does this make their culture 'superior'? It took Europeans to see in a powder contemporarily efficacious only for spectacular ritual celebration (fireworks) a potential for projecting missiles in belligerent settings. Does this make them superior? Maybe it just points to a difference in experience. More than a hundred years of war (from 1337 to 1453) in the heart of Europe (yeah, I've been watching Joan of Arc), might do that to a culture! Anyway, the CBS Joan of Arc page (I quote only unimpeachable sources) tells me that the French hung on to the inferior crossbow (against the demonstrably vastly superior longbow deployed by the Poms) because it cost too much money to train longbow archers. The new powder would be quick to become 'gun'powder in such a political economic setting, eh? Anyway, more unqualified speculation below ... Catholicism was part of the jingoistic drive in Europe. It at once accorded its adherents a sense of superiority over and a sense of responsibility for the 'souls' of their heathen brothers and sisters (just look at how the church treated the Gnostics up to this time - horrid death visited upon dissentors, not just 'for' Mother Church, but also, by this logic, 'for' the souls of the tortured and the killed). It also controlled distribution throughout its sphere of influence. Imperialism might be seen as the aggregated response of individuals to Catholic hegemony - whereby the individual at once enjoys the blessings of Mother Church (taking the Word to the heathen) and a way of acquiring wealth outside so constrained a system (bringing the wealth produced outside theocratic control into the core). Add to that James Burke's techno-determinist thesis (a status we need not accord it here) that a painter in Bologna invented the grid to allow representation of perspective, and that this grid quickly found applications in everything from plotting the trajectory of projectiles to plotting location and progress without earthly reference points (both damned handy at getting a bloke to thinking about travel and conquest), and you have an instrumentally superior technology, spawned within a habitually belligerent culture which validates itself with reference to a religion that rewards conquest whilst constraining development at home (eg. whilst 'indulgences' are commodified, rewarding earthly wealth with eternal ecstacy, a host of research and development is squashed, and paths to differential wealth and power within Europe are blocked as a consequence). Also, the likes of Portugal are very wary of the likes of the English, and needs both a larger navy and more wealth with which to build that navy. War encourages innovation and risk-taking but destroys life (and didn't Weber take Hobbes's 'war of all against all' as the model for the new economics of his - our - day?). No superior culture here then, just one that's as good at kicking arse abroad as it is at home. If I may wax Weberian (and I don't mind a bit if I'm forthrightly put right), belligerence breeds instrumentalism, and instrumentalism breeds a concern for efficiencies that might just contribute to specialisation in production, and the gradual eclipse of merely commercialised surplus product to commodification (and the attendant wage relation, and hence the birth of surplus value). Yours stretching the longbow to its very limit, Rob.
[PEN-L:11450] Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
A question to Jim Blaut: I am not quite sure what are you trying to demonstrate in this and related threads: - that slavery and colonial exploitation created economic benefits for slave owners and pludereres? - that seems an obvious and uninteresting conclusion. - that slavery and colonial exploitation was a key element in capitalist development? - that seems a moot point for several reasons. First we need to define what kind of "condition" we are talking about - is it a necessary condition?, a sufficient condition?, a contributing factor (but neither necessary nor suffcient)? The necessary condition argument can be rebutted by showing instances of countries that pursued capitalist development without any meaningful benefits of prior colonial exploitation or slavery - exmples include Germany, Sweden, or Japan. The sufficient condition can be questioned by the counterefactual of Spain and Portugal that in th einitial phase of colonial expansion seemed to be main beneficiaries of colonial exploitation. The Spaniards, for example, are 'credited' with plundering virtually ALL Inca gold. Yet, both countries became thrid rate industrial and military powers by the 18th century - which indicates that plunder alone was not a suffcient condition for the capitalist takeoff. The contributing factor argument is trivial, unless we specify the exact conditions and exact nature of that contribution. That endeavour, however, seems to me problematic for methodological reasons, Unless one insists on a simple, monocausal explanation of capitalist development, we must assume many pre-conditions and contributing causes. For example, geographical location that favors exchange with different cultures (Middle East, Far East, as well as the legacy of previous cultures, mainly Roman and Greek transmitted to Europe via Arab connection), type of economy and agriculture, social institutions, type of military conflict, type of interaction with foreign countries and cultures, the type and level of colonial exploitation, the pre-existing class structure, the importance of cities and unrban economies, cultural and religious heterogeneity, type of leadership, knowledge and technology etc. All those conditions and their combinations represent different variables that must be considered in different combinations to evaluate their contribution, if any, to the outcome in question (i.e. capitalist development). Just to illustrate the complexity of teh task, the twelve variables I just listed can produce 144 different combinations if each those variables has only two values. The problem is, however, that we do not have enough cases to make all the relevant comparisons to sort out th ecombinatins that re important from those that are not - in fact, we have more possible variables than cases, the latter being limited to a handlful of Western European nations, and perhaps Japan and the US. In this situation, we simply have no way of analytically separating the exact set of conditions that "account for" capitalist development in Europe but not elsewhere. The best we can do is to form an "educated guess" which means forming different opinions that cannot be proved or disproved by empirical evidence. That is avery sobering thought, indeed. wojtek
[PEN-L:11448] Re: Re: Re: Re: slavery and capitalism
Jim, Well, such institutions as accounting and banking were introduced into England from Flanders and Northern Italy. They did not develop them autochthonically, although the Scottish banks were centers of considerable institutional evolution in how banking operated. As a matter of fact, Belgium, which contains most of Flanders, was probably the second place in the world after England to have full-bore modern industrial capitalism. Not so severely squelched by the French, although perhaps to some extent. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 3:18 PM Subject: [PEN-L:11441] Re: Re: Re: slavery and capitalism "Pockets" of full-bore (industrial) capitalism? I would agree. But a mere pocket can easily be squelched. The Nothern Italian version, for example, never quite made it. There's some sort of threshold effect (or rather, a critical mass) needed for a full-scale capitalist explosion. I don't see the capitalist explosion that hit England as coming from Flanders or North Italy. Switching metaphors in mid-stream, it was home-grown, though well watered and fertilized by the profits from the slave trade and the like. At 02:31 PM 9/21/99 -0400, you wrote: Jim D., On the question of the existence of full-scale capitalism, I think I agree with Jim B. on this one. There were pockets, small as they may have been, of pretty full-scale capitalism scattered about here and there. There was some in China and in India and in the Middle East and in Flanders and North Italy from the 1200s, if not earlier. Most of this was in urban areas. For an account of this in Europe and of the strike by an industrial proletariat in Douai in the 1200s, see Henri Pirenne's _Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe_. I am familiar with that book. However, the rise of the French Absolutist state squelched the full-scale development of capitalism there. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11447] RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Capitalist development
I think that all but two or three of the pen-l people opposed the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia. . . . More, actually, who e-mailed me privately. They didn't want to be called imperialists or "Euro-centric" for supporting the protection of innocent people, non-"Euro" ones, no less. Including a Muslim who probably never thought of him/herself as "Eurocentric." Gawd, what idiocy. mbs
[PEN-L:11445] Re: Re: Re: Re: Capitalist development
*That* [J. Edgar's outrageous and presumptuous statement and the normality of that sentiment in the US] -- and even a momentary failure to note that -- is the serious eurocentrism that, I argue, can't be broken by debates over empirical history. It can be broken only by a complex political practice that interweaves at least two kinds of groups: independent black groups and multiracial organizations. ... I totally agree with the need for independent black (and women's and gays' and ...) organizations and organizations that unite those groups. In fact, I used to belong to political group that had that as a major principle. It was called "Workers' Power" (a name that almost everyone hated) which became part of Solidarity (also a poor name), which also holds to that principle as part of its "socialism from below" perspective. (It's the group that puts out AGAINST THE CURRENT. See http://www.igc.apc.org/solidarity/indexATC.html.) BTW, unless things have changed drastically, the guy some have dismissed as "Eurocentric" (Bob Brenner) is a leader of Solidarity. ... assuming an initially friendly audience (audience, not reader) of two or three who already in a kneejerk fashion agree with me that u.s. bombing in Yugoslavia is a probably a bad thing, how do I help them see the relationship between that bombing (or the popular support for it) and the backlash against affirmative action in the u.s I think that all but two or three of the pen-l people opposed the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia. I don't know what the link is between that bombing and the gutting of a.a. Maybe they're both part of the general rightward trend of U.S. politics over the last 30 years. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11444] Re: Re: Re: Capitalist development
Jim Devine wrote:
No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think
otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.'
is there anyone on pen-l who thinks that non-Europeans are inferior to
Europeans? (I'd like an electronic show of hands.) Yoshie, do you think
that there are people like that on pen-l?
I agree with Yoshie essentially, but let's say you are right re all on pen-l,
that none of them personally think "that non-Europeans are inferior to
Europeans." Two broad points. Whether or not one would subscribe
to such a flat statement, it is clearly possible to act and think on a
broad range of issues *as though one did*. I would, for example,
ascribe such virtual belief in european superiority ("the white man's
burden") to all those who in one way or another, directly or
indirectly, support "humanitarian intervention" by imperialist nations
around the globe. Guthrie's refrain still describes very accurately
huge numbers of people (including 10s of millions who wouldn't
admit it, even to themselves): "The radio says they are just deportees."
Let me offer a quick self-test. J. Edgar Hoover purportedly once said
something like, "You can tell communists because they are comfortable
in the company of blacks." There is the obvious direct sneer at blacks.
There is the less obvious and deeper racism of assumng that of course
only whites are independently communists. *That* -- and even a
momentary failure to note that -- is the serious eurocentrism that,
I argue, can't be broken by debates over empirical history. It can be
broken only by a complex political practice that interweaves at least
two kinds of groups: independent black groups and multiracial
organizations. And most of the mass support of both such groups
(as well as most of the leadership) won't really know much one way
or the other about the growth of capitalism in the 17th century.
The other broad point. While I personally found this debate enlightening --
I get a kick out of history -- politically I tend to view it from the
perspective of its contribution to agitational and organizational work.
Assuming (and I'm not assuming here -- I'm speaking of people I've
talked to in the last week) -- assuming an initially friendly audience
(audience, not reader) of two or three who already in a kneejerk
fashion agree with me that u.s. bombing in Yugoslavia is a probably
a bad thing, how do I help them see the relationship between that
bombing (or the popular support for it) and the backlash against
affirmative action in the u.s. Debates about the exact proportion of
slave and free labor exploitation in the 17th century don't help
me much.
Carrol
[PEN-L:11443] Re: Can Greenspan do it?
Louis Proyect quoted: He's Got the Whole World in His Hands ROGER ALCALY ...a Marxist turned hedge fund operator. Doug
[PEN-L:11442] Can Greenspan do it?
He's Got the Whole World in His Hands ROGER ALCALY October 7, 1999 Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy by Robert M. Solow, John B. Taylor, The Alvin Hansen Symposium on Public Policy, and edited and with an introduction by Benjamin M. Friedman 120 pages, $12.00 (paperback) published by MIT Press Central Banking in Theory and Practice by Alan S. Blinder 92 pages, $12.00 (paperback) published by MIT Press There are essentially three perspectives on the current state of America's continually expanding economy and the dilemmas it poses for policymakers.1 The first, the so-called "new era" view, holds that the spread of computers, the Internet, and other forms of information technology have increased productivity so much that we no longer have to worry about inflation, limits to economic growth, or the business cycle. As more goods are produced per hour of work, spending by consumers and producers will increase but it will not outstrip rising economic productive capacity; prices will remain steady or rise gradually. While this argument surely overstates the case, there is little question that the recent acceleration in productivity has helped keep inflation in check, and that, as Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan believes, it "owes importantly to new information technologies."2 The second, more traditional view claims that there are well-established limits to how low unemployment can fall, or how fast the economy can grow, without triggering ever-accelerating inflation. These limits are thought to be unemployment rates of 5 to 6 percent, or growth rates of about 3 percent, and we have exceeded them by a large margin. As shown in the chart on page 36, the unemployment rate is just over 4 percent, the lowest it has been since 1970, and the economy has been growing at approximately 4 percent a year since 1996, about a third faster than its average from 1991 to 1998, yet inflation has fallen to less than 2 percent a year. Most conventional economists and other experts who still maintain this position believe that inflation has been kept in check only by special factors such as the Asian financial crisis, falling commodity prices, and the lack of pressure for higher wages for workers, but that these forces are weakening, and the Federal Reserve should act to slow the economy before it is too late.3 (complete article at: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:11441] Re: Re: Re: slavery and capitalism
"Pockets" of full-bore (industrial) capitalism? I would agree. But a mere pocket can easily be squelched. The Nothern Italian version, for example, never quite made it. There's some sort of threshold effect (or rather, a critical mass) needed for a full-scale capitalist explosion. I don't see the capitalist explosion that hit England as coming from Flanders or North Italy. Switching metaphors in mid-stream, it was home-grown, though well watered and fertilized by the profits from the slave trade and the like. At 02:31 PM 9/21/99 -0400, you wrote: Jim D., On the question of the existence of full-scale capitalism, I think I agree with Jim B. on this one. There were pockets, small as they may have been, of pretty full-scale capitalism scattered about here and there. There was some in China and in India and in the Middle East and in Flanders and North Italy from the 1200s, if not earlier. Most of this was in urban areas. For an account of this in Europe and of the strike by an industrial proletariat in Douai in the 1200s, see Henri Pirenne's _Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe_. I am familiar with that book. However, the rise of the French Absolutist state squelched the full-scale development of capitalism there. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11437] Re: Re: Re: re: colonialism
Jim, Certainly there were Chinese at various periods in such Central Asian cities as Samarkand. I also think you are right that Muslims out of China would go to Mecca on the Hajj. Ironically we may have the conclusion that the Europeans ended up getting ahead because they were behind. They wanted to get at the Asian goods and the Asians were uninterested in getting at their goods. This led to the concerted efforts by the Europeans to make long voyages for trading (and conquest) that the Asians did not bother with. But it was not dumb luck regarding geography of the oceans. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: James M. Blaut [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 3:34 AM Subject: [PEN-L:11396] Re: Re: re: colonialism Barkley: I'll have to delve to find references on Chinese travellers in the -- generic -- West. You may be right that they only got as far as Byzantine Constantinople. From memory I recall reading that a Chinese envoy resided in Samarkand around (?) 1400 and maybe in the same period a Chinse junk called at Jeddah and I think Chinese made the hadj to Mecca. Re the Vikings: see my earlier post today in which I emphasized the (obvious) point that we're not talking about discovery in the abstract but about consequential contact, involving developed medieval merchant communities that would, upon discovering a place to loot, would invest in more and more voyages, more and more looting, etc. Lots of mercantile-maritime comunities had that capability but America at that time was accessible only (speaking in terms of extremely high probabilities) to the Europeans. Distance and wind systems. Experience in utilizing the Atlantic circulation for voyages to the Azores and -- yes! -- to Iceland. A comment, finally, on your post to Lou. " The Chinese or Koreans or Japanese could fairly easily have sent out expeditions to get furs from Northwestern North America. They did not do so. Why not? I would guess that enough furs could be gotten in northeastern Asia, including maybe Manchuria. It wouldn't surprise me if Chinese or (more probably) Japanese ships made it to the NW coast of America, but what would have justified the transformation of one chance voyage into a Conquest? Cheers Jim
[PEN-L:11435] Re: Re: slavery and capitalism
Jim D.,
On the question of the existence of full-scale
capitalism, I think I agree with Jim B. on this one.
There were pockets, small as they may have been,
of pretty full-scale capitalism scattered about here
and there. There was some in China and in India
and in the Middle East and in Flanders and North
Italy from the 1200s, if not earlier. Most of this
was in urban areas.
For an account of this in Europe and of the
strike by an industrial proletariat in Douai in
the 1200s, see Henri Pirenne's _Economic and
Social History of Medieval Europe_.
Barkley Rosser
-Original Message-
From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 1:23 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:11418] Re: slavery and capitalism
Concerning the question of whether or not "New" World slave owners were
capitalists during (say) the 19th century, I had answered unequivocally
"yes no." Yes, they were in the sense that they were in a capitalist
social formation dominated by industrial capital in its core -- but no they
weren't because slave-labor isn't the same thing as proletarian labor.
Jim Blaut answers: No, its not "yes and no" regarding the importance of
slave production and slavery. It is "yes."
You forget that the slave plantation system was generating profitss from
1600 (Brazil) and more so from 1650 (Barbados, Jamaica).
As I said in my discussion with Charles, it depends on your _definition_ of
capitalism. Following Marx, I don't define capitalism as simply "profit
generating" (though of course capitalist does generate profits, when
there's not a severe crisis going on). After all, ancient Roman slave
plantations generated profits, didn't they? But most wouldn't see them as
"capitalist." There are other "profit generating" systems besides
capitalism. (One might interpret a tributary state as making a profit off
its subject populations. I wouldn't.)
But it's a free Internet. If you want to use a different definition of
capitalism, it's fine, as long as you make it clear what definition you're
using. (BTW, I think a lot of the debate about the rise of capitalism (the
timing, the causes, the location) is based on the use of differing
definitions by different people.)
The flaw in your argument is this: At that period there was no capitalism
of the sort you describe. There was hardly any proletariat in Europe
although wage work was general. There was hardly any manufacture in which
to employ proletarians.
I was talking about the 19th century rather than the 1600s. But in the
1600s, as I read them, there was an incomplete form of capitalism, merchant
capital, which was based on noncapitalist modes of production (different
forms of forced labor). Full-scale (industrial) capitalism only prevailed
in the English countryside at the time.
And BTW, the existence of manufacturing is irrelevant to the issue.
Capitalism can easily exist in agriculture. ("In the strict sense, the
farmer is as much an industrial capitalist as the manufacturer," writes
Marx in the first footnote of ch. 31 of vol. I of CAPITAL. He says this in
explaining his use of the nonstrict sense of the word.) In fact, people
like Marx and Brenner see it as happening there first. Capitalism -- as I
am using that word, meaning full-scale (industrial) capitalism as opposed
to incomplete versions like merchant capital and money-dealing capital --
involves the existence of a "free" proletariat on a large scale (relative
to the society).
You shouldn't generalize to [from?] the slave plantaTION system as a whole
from the very late and unique form it took in the US South, essentially in
the 19th century. At the time cotton-producing plantations were flourishing
in the US, slavery wass being abolished in the British colonies.
I wasn't generalizing from the slave plantation system of the Southern US;
rather, I was trying to make my discussion concrete by talking about a
specific case (one I know a lot about).
I am familiar with the way that several European colonies in the "new"
World abolished slavery before the period I was talking about (and some
abolished it later). My understanding (and correct me if I am wrong), was
that in many cases (due to abundance of labor relative to demand and the
inability to use slaves all year round in the production of some crops) it
turned out that slavery wasn't that much more profitable than freeing the
slaves and relying on the reserve army of labor. In the latter case, the
employer isn't responsible for the ex-slave's welfare at all. If a slave
starves, it's a capital loss, while if a free proletarian starves, it
doesn't show up in the balance sheet at all. Given such changes in relative
profitability, the abolitionist efforts were more likely to be successful.
(Not all slave-owners benefited from the change, so that there was some
resistance.)
Apples and oranges. 17th-18th century slave production -- very late
18th-20th century non-slave industrial production.
I agree,
[PEN-L:11433] Re: Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
Jim Devine wrote: BTW, does this "D." refer to Deidre? I don't know but I presume so. I just forwarded it for the fun of it. The topic is beyond my competence to have an opinion on. Carrol
[PEN-L:11432] Re: Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 02:06PM Charles Brown wrote: Charles: Some questions for the answers: Why is the whole region of East Asia looked at to determine whether there is a recession ? Maybe there was a recession in Indonesia but not one in China. Isn't one conventional defiintion something like negative growth for four or five straight quarters in one country ? Why is the period of measure a decade ? It was Frank's choice, not mine. He claimed a decade-long world depression. There's no evidence for that. The conventional definition is two consecutive quarters of real decline in GDP in one country. Charles: I see (( Over the history of recording recession/depresions aren't some of them in individual countries and some world or regional ? One commentator says the first crisis of overproduction broke out in Britain in 1825. The 1847-48 crisis which embraced the U.S. and some European countries was the first world or regional crisis. Aren't crises of different geographical reaches and for different lengths ,including a year or so, in length ? If the time period is stretched long enough and an average taken , most crises can be averaged away. This is especially so if the time period is stretched to a decade. Even the Great Depression of `1929 to 1933 might be averaged away if the decade is 1923 to 1933 ? Yes, you're right. Ask Andre Gunder Frank why he chose to make the period a decade. (( Charles: I see. I'll send him a copy of this (( Can China, with a very mixed economy, be considered on a full capitalist business cycle ? Can its growth be credited to the world capitalist system ? They've certainly become at least partly capitalist, have opened partly to foreign investment, and depend heavily on exports for growth. ((( Charles: Isn't it interesting how China often breaks up the conventional categories, not just on this issue ,but many others. CB
[PEN-L:11431] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
Jim, This may have added extra oomph to the search for gold and silver. It is clear that getting gold and silver was a major fixation of many of the European colonizers in the early phase, with the Spanish being the most successful at it. Certainly there was a trade deficit for Europe with East Asia, which continued after 1500, leading to the gold and silver ending up in the East, at least a lot of it. Of course, to deal more directly with Jim Blaut's argument, if gold and silver are so important to the development of capitalism, why did not the ultimately greater flows of gold and silver into East Asia stimulate capitalist development there? We already know, as he accepts, that it did not do so in Spain, the main entry point for Europe of the New World bullion. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Monday, September 20, 1999 6:57 PM Subject: [PEN-L:11372] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism Barkley writes: Clearly there was something that was pushing the Europeans to have more "desire" to travel long distances to try to gain profits in various forms than other peoples at that time. ... I have questioned that both in terms of was bullion all that important, was it really all that more difficult to get to the Americas, if not necessarily the bullion-bearing zones, and was it not in fact this hunger or drive for profit in Europe that was pushing them to go systematically to places such as around the Cape of Good Hope and to the Americas that was not somehow operating in the East Asian societies. Again, there is no approving in my arguments here. I have described the Europeans as "aggressive and rapacious." But I don't think positing some inherent degree of greater aggressiveness or rapaciousness to Europeans is either useful or even necessarily accurate. If they were so, it was because of something going on inside of Europe, not some random accident. Some economic historians argue that before 1492 Europe suffered from a chronic shortage of gold and silver, adding extra oomph to the European search for such metals. This shortage arose from the chronic balance of payments deficit Europe had with the East, especially with China: because gold was flowing to the East, it was in short supply in Europe. A short supply of gold meant deflation (without the disastrous effects that having a modern financial system implies under deflation) and that coins had to be smaller and smaller (less gold per coin) in the absence of paper money, putting a strain on the coin-making technology. (Paper money's existence seems to require a modern nation-state. What the old kings used to do was add lead, etc., to the coins. This had obvious limits, like undermining the legitimacy of the king's coins.) There might have been liquidity problems before the conquest started. Why did China have the payments surplus, the flip-side of Europe's deficit? The Chinese didn't want to buy anything from the Europeans, as noted. Further, some argue that the relative prices of the monetary metals in China had been set in the wrong way, creating an incentive to hoard gold and silver. The folks in India hoarded gold, too, I understand. any thoughts? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11430] Re: Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
Charles Brown wrote: Charles: Some questions for the answers: Why is the whole region of East Asia looked at to determine whether there is a recession ? Maybe there was a recession in Indonesia but not one in China. Isn't one conventional defiintion something like negative growth for four or five straight quarters in one country ? Why is the period of measure a decade ? It was Frank's choice, not mine. He claimed a decade-long world depression. There's no evidence for that. The conventional definition is two consecutive quarters of real decline in GDP in one country. Over the history of recording recession/depresions aren't some of them in individual countries and some world or regional ? One commentator says the first crisis of overproduction broke out in Britain in 1825. The 1847-48 crisis which embraced the U.S. and some European countries was the first world or regional crisis. Aren't crises of different geographical reaches and for different lengths ,including a year or so, in length ? If the time period is stretched long enough and an average taken , most crises can be averaged away. This is especially so if the time period is stretched to a decade. Even the Great Depression of `1929 to 1933 might be averaged away if the decade is 1923 to 1933 ? Yes, you're right. Ask Andre Gunder Frank why he chose to make the period a decade. Can China, with a very mixed economy, be considered on a full capitalist business cycle ? Can its growth be credited to the world capitalist system ? They've certainly become at least partly capitalist, have opened partly to foreign investment, and depend heavily on exports for growth. Doug
[PEN-L:11428] Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism
Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 01:43PM "Why did the Chinese fail to develop capitalism?" The very question is repellant. The question that is politically important to answer is, "Why did capitalism develop at all?" I would argue that it was *not* inevitable. That (to use Gould's metaphor for contingency in evolution) if one played the tape of human history over again, that after 500,000 years (instead of 100, 000 as of now) human culture would still be paleolithic or feudal or what have you. Because capitalism *did* develop, we know that it was *possible* for it to develop. We do *not* know that it was either a necessary or even probable development. ((( Charles: To support Carrol's point, if a comet had hit the earth and exterminated the human race in the year zero, or before capitalism, then capitalism would not have developed. So, the development of capiitalism was contingent upon a comet not hitting the earth. )) The debate, also, and despite the intentions of the debaters is apt to produce rhetoric with unfortunate implications. I assume that you are not making moral judgments -- but (as Jim Devine noted) the rhetoric often suggests that. And the problem with making moral judgments of imperialism is that it implicitly treats imperialism as a *policy* rather than as the mode of existence of capitalism. And treating imperialism as a policy formed the root of Kautsky's errors. It is also at the root of the errors of those leftists or would be leftists who support humanitarian bombing. (Rod, in suggesting that anti-imperialism finds enemies where there are none, obviously sees imperialism as merely a policy of a given government that one can tinker with.) Charles: I agree with this, but there is a subtlely different role for morality in history. The morality of a given people, culture, group is an OBJECTIVE aspect of its social existence. A people is , a society is both a social practice and a social theory ( social "morality"). The development of the people is a dialectic of their practice and their morality. Thus, Marx , the arch historical MATERIALIST, discusses the degree of brutality , ruthlessness, willingness to use force and violence and other moral characterisitics of Europeans as material factors ,along with their social productive practices, in the whole bundle of CONTINGENCIES, that resulted in their inventing wage-labor/racist-colonialist capitalism. Charles Brown
[PEN-L:11426] Re: Progressive Nationalism
This is interesting, Max. On 20 Sep 99, at 23:55, Max B. Sawicky wrote: To me 'nationalism' connotes some kind of conscious notion of collective self-interest. Progressive nationalism (PN) suggests some kind of novel departure from the conventional ideas of what is progressive or nationalistic. Yeah but I think there is a semantic problem here, because "progressive" and "nationalist" don't belong together (this was my recollection of the PEN-L discourse, particularly the Norwegian Trond Andresen's arguments from 1993-94). There are various kinds of "post-nationalist" politics in Southern Africa, for instance, and of course the (generally unsuccessful) struggle is also to go "post-neoliberal" (and more so, "post-Post-Washington Consensus"). The left-internationalist progressive-nationalist folk who are putting forward these positions, in many different ways, essentially prefer the nation-state as the optimal terrain of struggle. But in an increasingly coordinated way, crossing borders as much as possible to weaken the interstate system. Clearly the orientation to "restoring sovereignty" (as the March Bangkok conference had it) will never resolve the global problems like environment. But in the short-term (our lifetimes) its the only hope for changing the balance of forces sufficiently to prevent a world- state institution from replicating and amplifying the horrors of the present. But you're right, to turn next to the problem of class alliances. The only reason to use the term national is to open the door to some kind of collaboration between the working class and others, where the terms of alliance reflect disparate interests and not merely the absorption of non-working class groups into a socialist formation. I was wondering if you contemplated any such formation in the U.S. (as I do). I have no idea about the US, as it proved sufficiently depressing for me to choose "exile" more than a decade ago, after doing lots of activism, research and journalism and the like in various cities and struggle sectors during the 1980s. So I beg off on grounds of ignorance and pessimism. But the Nader/Friends of Earth/etc alliances with the far right suggest some amazing flexibility. Maybe that's where the Alexander Cockburn turn is comprehensible (if not defensible). ... To me PN connotes a modernized populism -- something I've been thinking about -- but I was really probing to see how you saw it. I'll ventilate on my own take some other time. If by that you mean the kind of Greider/Goodwyn revival of Farm- Labor Alliance, yes, perhaps that's the best way to codephrase "class struggle" in the US. Modernized? Explain? For instance, Tom Schlesinger and the Financial Markets Center have tried to milk the generic US populist hatred of banks, and have done great work. But when the SL scandal failed to generate any better social base for this work than, say, garden-variety community Alinskyism/ACORN organising strategies. But dating back many decades, there's great resonance for that kind of populism here. I've got a few paragraphs from a paper which I'll reproduce below, which try to sketch out similar sentiments from southern Africa. The phrase "populist" is not a good one here, signifying a lack of rigour and integrity, and opportunism in pushing a pop line when more militant working-class politics are called for. On the other hand, the despoilation of African statist economics, for good and bad reasons, means that a different kind of codephrasing is required. Samir Amin has got quite a good balance on this... The response to the challenge of our time imposes what I have suggested naming "delinking" ... Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal development ... Delinking implies a "popular" content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent interests. This is from Samir Amin, `Preface,' in A. Mahjoub (Ed), Adjustment or Delinking? The African Experience, London, Zed Press, 1990, pp.xii-xiii. See also his Delinking, London, Zed Press, 1990. He has run this argument in Johannesburg quite a bit and it resonates well with the left forces in the SA Communist Party, including the country's leading young intellectuals. Concretely, what would this feel like in Southern Africa? Alternative national- and regional-scale development policies have been established in several places, including the UN Economic Commission on Africa's AAF-SAP and the 1994 African National Congress Reconstruction and Development Programme (as well as other South African economic strategies offered by the Macroeconomic Research Group in 1993 and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1996). The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions' spinoff Movement for Democratic Change is
[PEN-L:11427] Re: Re: Capitalist development
I wouldn't say Europeans are morally superior or that they are smarter based on genes or biological inheritance. But I would say that in the current era, the Europeans have developed certain areas of science and other thinking better than other parts of the world. This is not white supremacy. The leading intellectual achievements in human history have occurred in different groups at different times. There is nothing racist about acknowledging that Europe has led in a number of areas in the current period. This does not mean even that Europe made all of the smartness advances in this period. It does not even mean that this smartness has not been mixed with some serious dumbness, when we consider the whole picture. But there must be some way to note the leaps of Europe compared to elsewhere in this era. For one thing, only by acknowledging that , can we begin to throw out the bathwater and not the baby of European advances today and in this historical epoch. Charles Brown Workers of the West , it's our turn. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/99 01:19PM No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' is there anyone on pen-l who thinks that non-Europeans are inferior to Europeans? (I'd like an electronic show of hands.) Yoshie, do you think that there are people like that on pen-l? I don't think anyone was arguing that Europeans are or were superior (though maybe I don't read his or her messages, due to the Eudora filters I use). That isn't and shouldn't be what the discussion is about. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11425] Re: Re: Re: Response to Darity
Rod Hay wrote: Since Mat brought up the political issue, I will respond. I want a politics that emphasises the universal nature of human society--the common elements. "Identity politics", "anti-imperialism" etc., finds enemies where there are none. All whites are the enemy, all Americans are the enemy. All men are the enemy, etc., All the time reinforcing the division that this society puts between people. As I have indicated, I am uncomfortable with a politics that bases itself too much on empirical arguments over earlier history. (That is, I agree with the contemporary politics of Lou, Mat, Jim B but I am not happy with their conviction that to support those politics they must support certain empirical conclusions re 16th, 17th etc centuries.) But this proposition of Rod's does show that their objections to his politics are richly grounded. A "universal politics" is simply another name for support in practice of eurocentrism and western imperialism. It is simply bizarre to affirm that anti-imperialism finds enemies where there are none. And clearly he is utterly innocent of the debates that swirl about the term "identity politics" -- even the mere dictionary sense of the term is a matter of debate. But as used here it sems to refer to the black liberation movement. (This is *not* my sense of the term.) And if so, if he rejects the legitimacy and necessity of an independent black liberation movement in the u.s., then he in fact supports racism. The "universal nature of human society--the common elements" names nothing whatever and to desire a politics grounded on such a concept is to deny the possibility of politics. Carrol Note: I myself think of "identity politics" as having reference to the kind of individualistically based loose coalitions advocated (for example) by Stanley Aronowitz or Laclau and Mouffe. It is often (though not always) associated with what is called *Radical Democracy*. But that is another topic or collection of topics.
[PEN-L:11420] Re: Re: Capitalist development
No amount of empirical refutations will convince those who think otherwise that 'non-Europeans' were and are not inferior to 'Europeans.' is there anyone on pen-l who thinks that non-Europeans are inferior to Europeans? (I'd like an electronic show of hands.) Yoshie, do you think that there are people like that on pen-l? I don't think anyone was arguing that Europeans are or were superior (though maybe I don't read his or her messages, due to the Eudora filters I use). That isn't and shouldn't be what the discussion is about. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11419] Re: Eurocentrism run amok: LM's defense of slavery
WHY SHOULD SLAVERY DAMN MODERNITY? By Aidan Campbell A review of: --The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 Hugh Thomas, Picador, £25 hbk --The making of New World Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 Robin Blackburn, Verso, £15 hbk --The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery Robin Blackburn, Verso, £17 pbk Can being a slave ever be 'a good thing'? Not since the French Revolution of 1789 made freedom a reality. We find it easy to choose between the options of slavery or freedom. Yet in pre-Revolution times, the choice was frequently between being enslaved and being killed. In fact selecting slavery is the better option here. When mankind lived like an animal, only bestial methods were available to lift humanity out of the mire. Aidan Campbell makes great ideological leaps in his bad Hegelian view of history. In his mind, what happened = what was necessary = what must be morally rationalized. At each step, he makes, without any arguments, equivalents out of non-equivalents. Here is another reason why the denial of contingency deforms a 'dialectical thinking' into an anachronistic reading of necessity (and rationality, since what's necessary is what's rational for Hegelians) into the past from the vantage point of the present. Yoshie
[PEN-L:11416] Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: How US Trained Butchersof Timor]
So I always thought that Wade's story was less than fully coherent: how did the heroes of Act I become the villains of Act II? If it was U.S. state power that warped Bank research products, why didn't this warping stop as soon as key bureaucratic posts were filled by people who had staked large chunks of their reputations on the study? I don't know this specific story, but it's very common for those who become insiders in large capitalist bureaucracies (or other types of bureaucracies) to become co-opted, to modify their views in order to maximize their organizational success, perhaps thinking that "someday, after I rise to the top, I'll reform this organization." Typically, they change their views of the world by the time they get to the top. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11417] Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
- EH.RES POSTING - On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, D. McCloskey wrote: The trouble with the idea of a cycle that long is that we will have had so few of them. I know I bought a hardback copy of Ravi Batra's The Coming World Depression of 1990, based on such ideas, for $3.25 in 1993. It seemed worth having for class purposes, if you see what I mean. if the book was so worthless in terms of prediction, shouldn't the price have been even lower? If I were king of the market, the price of any of Batra's books would approach zero. But then Milton Friedman's books would have negative price. BTW, does this "D." refer to Deidre? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11415] Re: Early economists and the origin of capitalism
Sam wrote: The mercantalists (and physiocrats) also believed that the origins of capitalism and economic evolution was agrarian. How could anyone believe otherwise? There's an old tradition (pushed by urbanites, natch, and still common among Noo Yawkers) that contrasted the "progressive nature of the city" to the "backward nature of the countryside." This view dominated the field of development economics for decades. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:11413] BLS Daily Report
BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1999 Construction of new private homes rose 0.4 percent in August, Commerce Department figures show, signaling many home buyers are unfazed by recent rises in mortgage interest rates, according to analysts. ... (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; New York Times, Sept. 18, page B14)_Construction of new homes and apartments increased 0.4 percent in August, led by another big rise in apartment building. ... (Washington Post, Sept. 18, page E1)_Housing starts stayed surprisingly strong last month despite rising interest rates, though there are hints of a future softening. ... (Wall Street Journal, page A2), At a time when the nation's child-care system faces higher demand because of a surging economy and the influx of an estimated 1.5 million children of former welfare recipients now holding jobs, the supply of day-care slots is stagnating or falling as workers depart the profession for better paying jobs in shopping centers, offices, and classrooms. ... The national day-care hourly median salary for family day-care providers is $4.59 and for child-care center workers, $7.03. ... (Washington Post, Sept. 19, page A1). application/ms-tnef
[PEN-L:11412] Eurocentrism run amok: LM's defense of slavery
WHY SHOULD SLAVERY DAMN MODERNITY? By Aidan Campbell A review of: --The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 Hugh Thomas, Picador, £25 hbk --The making of New World Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 Robin Blackburn, Verso, £15 hbk --The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery Robin Blackburn, Verso, £17 pbk Can being a slave ever be 'a good thing'? Not since the French Revolution of 1789 made freedom a reality. We find it easy to choose between the options of slavery or freedom. Yet in pre-Revolution times, the choice was frequently between being enslaved and being killed. In fact selecting slavery is the better option here. When mankind lived like an animal, only bestial methods were available to lift humanity out of the mire. And that made slavery a more progressive option than being slaughtered. Moreover, history shows that slavery can take many different forms: from the slave who labours all day and night in the mines until he dies, to the Mameluke soldier slaves who ruled Egypt and dominated the Middle East in the fourteenth century. Would the world be a better place without the scientific and cultural achievements of ancient Greece and Islam? Without slavery we would not have had them. Yet increasingly these days the conclusion is drawn that, if they involved slavery, then we would have been better off without the immense contributions to human culture made by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is why, for example, Debbie Allen, the producer of the recently released anti-slavery film Amistad, can state that African culture is 'far beyond and centuries ahead' of America's. African culture is assumed to be far more modern than America's because the continent was the main victim of the Enlightenment's institution of slavery. It is indeed true that slavery during the embryonic stages of capitalism was far more barbaric and extensive than under any previous system. As Karl Marx said, the market system came into life dripping in blood from head to foot. But its ferocity was a product of its vastly greater dynamism. For the same reason it was also more civilised than any previously existing order. Most significantly, for all its ghastly crimes, capitalist society at least held up the prospect of humanity advancing to a consistently civilised world. Even when viewed in its most romanticised light, no pre-modern society ever remotely offered that possibility. In a weak reply to the prevailing anti-modern temperament, Hugh Thomas makes the point that slavery had been an institution in Africa for millennia before Portuguese explorers began to venture down the African coast early on in the fifteenth century, and he points to evidence of the enslavement of bushmen in Lower Egypt in 8000 BC (p25). One can go much further back than this, since humanity originated in Africa and slavery was one of the first instances of the division of human labour. However, this rational point does not justify Thomas' claim that the anti-slavery policy pursued by Britain from 1815 to 1832 was the most humanitarian foreign policy ever conducted. Evidence of African slavers from that period seems to make Thomas' point that Britain was a force for good in the eradication of slavery. But in truth abolitionism only served as a pretext for colonisation - to the point where Britain seized most of Africa to set it free. Thomas acquits Europe of responsibility for slavery by saying that everybody else was just as bad, but Robin Blackburn relishes the special culpability of the European Enlightenment. For Blackburn, 'the Enlightenment was not so antagonistic to slavery as was once thought' (p590). Whereas Thomas sees no connection between free market industrial capitalism and slavery, Blackburn is determined to prove the link since, for him, the intensification of slavery as capitalism developed places a question mark against the whole project of modernity. Blackburn carefully lists those features of capitalism which he associates most closely with its slave plantations in the Americas: the growth of instrumental rationality; the rise of the nation state; the spread of market relations and wage labour; the development of administrative bureaucracies and modern tax systems; the growing sophistication of commerce and communication; the birth of consumer societies; and, finally, the 'individualist sensibility' (p4). He then demonstrates the persistence of slavery 'well into the nineteenth century', argues that 'the spread of philosophical enlightenment, the advent of industrialisation and the eruption of revolution was, for a time, compatible with a continuing growth of slave populations and a mounting total of slave produce' (pp590-1) and adds a footnote for good measure that records the existence of 'many millions' of child labourers in the mid-1990s, which is a form of 'thinly veiled slavery' (p593). His book concludes that 'anti-slavery could not make substantial advances until
[PEN-L:11411] Re: [Fwd: Fw: EH.R: Kondratieff Cycles]
Carrol Cox forwarded from Andre Gunder Frank: No I do NOT know what you mean in re buying Ravi Batra. Although he based his analysis on US data etc., 1989-92 WAS the worst recession in the US since probably 1937 or maybe 31-33, so so far he was right as far as he went [and in re the growing inequality in the distribution of income he was also right]. That's a pretty odd claim. The 1989-92 period was unusual for the length of its stagnation, but GDP was 3% higher in 1992 than in 1989, which hardly makes it the worst recession since the 1930s. The formal recession - July 1990-March 1991 - was the shallowest since the 1969-70 downturn. TOTAL REAL GDP LOSS, LAST 4 U.S. RECESSIONS 1973-75-3.7% 1980 -2.5% 1981-82-2.8% 1991-92-1.5% U.S. income distribution flattened a bit between 1989 and 1991, though it spiked in 1992, leaving the gini a bit higher in 1992 than it was in 1989. The expansion has widened income inequality more than the recession did. And whats MORE, the 1990s have also been the WORST WORLD DEPRESSION decade EVER, or if economic historians can find a worse one, 1873 ff, 1857 ff, 1720 ff, 1640 ff?, i would like to know about it; 1640 would be my bet if any. But be that as it may, if this is not a super disasterous decade of WORLD DEPRESSION, I would like to be told what it has been, eg by Russians, East Europeans, East Asians, Central Asians, West Asians, South Americans, North/West/East/South Africans, and and... There have been horrible social disasters in these parts of the world, but they're not accurately described as recessions or depressions in the economic sense except for the former USSR. Africa shows positive GDP growth in the 1990s, and East Asia, despite the 1997-98 collapse, still shows an average growth rate of over 7% for the whole decade. India and China, home to about 1/3 of the world's people, both show very strong growth rates in the 1990s. The fact that African GDP is positive in this decade shows that it's a poor measure of human welfare, but Frank seems to be operating under his own set of definitions. Doug
[PEN-L:11410] Person work hours at the dawn of capitalism
Has anyone here read Robin Blackburn's histories of slavery? He argues that slavery was seminal in the development of Europe. Any comments? Sam Pawlett THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. By Robin Blackburn . 582 pp., By PETER KOLCHIN The colonization and settlement of the New World went hand in hand with the spread of slavery. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, more than 10 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic to cultivate luxury products that Western Europeans increasingly came to consider necessities: sugar, tobacco, coffee and cotton. Many current-day Americans may be surprised to learn that only about 6% of these Africans wound up in what is now the United States, whereas more than three-quarters of them were destined for Brazil and the Caribbean islands; Britain's richest and most prized possessions in the New World were Barbados and Jamaica, not Virginia or South Carolina. In "The Making of New World Slavery," Robin Blackburn, author of "The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848" (Verso, 1988), turns his attention to the creation of New World slavery. Unlike much recent slavery scholarship, this book focuses less on the lives of slaves than on the actions and arguments of Europeans. Beginning with a background chapter on slavery in the Old World, Blackburn devotes successive chapters to the slave-trading and colonizing ventures of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English and French before turning to consider slavery's role in promoting the economic development of modern Europe. This is as much a work of European as of American history. Although Blackburn's story is too complex to summarize in a brief review, a number of central themes deserve mention: * Slavery had become insignificant in most of Western Europe by the late medieval period, but the idea of slavery's acceptability remained largely unchallenged, as Christian theologians adopted the Muslim precept that it was legitimate to enslave heathens but not true believers. * In a variety of ways, including its commercial orientation and racial basis, slavery in the Americas differed from previous versions of slavery; as Blackburn puts it, "Slavery in the New World was not based on an Old World prototype." * Although the Portuguese pioneered opening Africa to European contact and dominated the slave trade until the early years of the 17th century, the British established naval supremacy in the mid-17th century, after a brief Dutch challenge, and became by far the leading slave-traders in the 18th century. * The increasing European (especially British) addiction to sugar fueled both the trade in Africans and the colonization of the Americas. At first regarded as a luxury, sugar became available to English of modest means in the 18th century; annual per capita consumption of the sweetener in England surged from 2 pounds in the 1660s to 8 pounds in the 1710s to 24 pounds in the 1790s. * Europeans held strong class, racial and ethnic prejudices and expressed few scruples about mistreating those whom they regarded as different from themselves. Economic motivation, however, was central to the establishment of slavery--"I have found no evidence," writes Blackburn, "that those most concerned with the construction of the slave systems were primarily animated by racial feeling." * New World slaves typically experienced mortality rates so high and fertility rates so low that only continued importation of Africans permitted the slave population to increase. The major exception was the United States, where, well before the War of Independence, the slave population grew "naturally," from excess of births over deaths. Blackburn's book is primarily a work of historical synthesis rather than one of original scholarship--most of what he has to say will be familiar to experts in the field. He has, however, brought together diverse strands of historical research and woven them into a compelling story. Based on extensive reading in secondary sources in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese), this is a learned and informative survey. Most readers will not, however, find it easy going. A discursive style, an abundance of detail and statistics, frequent recourse to long indented quotations and use of English terms unfamiliar to most Americans (for example, "batten" and "subjacent") make this book something of a struggle. Some readers are also likely to be surprised by the rather flat, matter-of-fact way in which Blackburn presents his evidence. Although almost everything he discusses has important interpretive implications, he usually eschews analysis of historical issues and historiographical controversies in favor of a descriptive (this happened, that happened) presentation. Similarly, he rarely engages in the kind of comparative analysis for which this book would seem ideally suited. Occasional comparative observations cry out for development. Blackburn remarks, for
[PEN-L:11409] Re: Re: Re: Re: IMF to become autonomous?
Patrick Bond wrote: Agreed, Doug, that's exactly the point of this definition of what I take to be a progressive *nationalism* (namely that the power to regenerate national sovereignties will only be constituted to a large extent through radical international and more precisely anti-world- state activism): What kind of national sovereignties? No country in Africa could go it alone in any meaningful way; there's got to be some kind of regional integration, with specialization, division of labor, etc. What is a nation-state in Africa, anyway? An inheritance of colonialism in both concept and practice, right? There are lots of ethnic/national tensions around state formation in your part of the world, aren't there? Doug
[PEN-L:11405] Person work hours at the dawn of capitalism
James M. Blaut wrote: I'm inclined to think that capitalism in its first, crude stage (after gaining power over labor in Europe and power to seize slaves in Africa and work slaves in the colonies) could not exploit wage workers efficiently enough so that they would be able to survive and reproduce themselves. So the main industrial capitalist enterprises were in the colonies, exploiting mainly slave labor. (Slaves did not reproduce themselves -- the average life expectancy of a slavbe in 17th-century Brazil was 8 years -- and this happened because they were worked to death: it was cheaper to do that and then buy more slaves in their place). Has anyone here read Robin Blackburn's histories of slavery? He argues that slavery was seminal in the development of Europe. Any comments? Sam Pawlett
[PEN-L:11403] Response to Darity
Rod Hay: Since Mat brought up the political issue, I will respond. I want a politics that emphasises the universal nature of human society--the common elements. "Identity politics", "anti-imperialism" etc., finds enemies where there are none. All whites are the enemy, all Americans are the enemy. All men are the enemy, etc., All the time reinforcing the division that this society puts between people. But as long as you defend the value of "foreign investment" in the neocolonial world as you did in your post that got this thread going, you will not be able to promote a universalist vision. Foreign investment in Colombia is a one way street. It is there to build roads which are used to transport agricultural commodities to the advanced capitalist countries, while Colombians are murdered who oppose exploitation. Your objection to "anti-imperialism" amounts to a defense of imperialism. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:11402] Re: Re: Response to Darity
Jim and Mathew: I am certainly not saying that Europeans were "better, brighter, bolder" than any one else. There is no doubt that the Chinese (and many others as well) had a very highly developed societies. But something sparked the Europeans to act in ways that these other societies did not. So unless you are putting up an argument that the Europeans were greedier, more vicious, etc. than the others, it has to be determined why did the Europeans reacted differently. Since Mat brought up the political issue, I will respond. I want a politics that emphasises the universal nature of human society--the common elements. "Identity politics", "anti-imperialism" etc., finds enemies where there are none. All whites are the enemy, all Americans are the enemy. All men are the enemy, etc., All the time reinforcing the division that this society puts between people. We have supposed leftists supporting tin pot third world dictators, because they in some stretch of the imagination are "anti-imperialist" The enemy is capitalism. Capitalism developed in Europe, (for whatever reason). It now encompasses the globe. It is the common enemy of us all. We are all in this together and will have to find a common way out. It helps not at all to pine for some romantic vision of how things were before the 16th century. There is no going back. Jim Blaut wrote: In other words, those who question the belief that Europeans were better, brighter, and bolder than everyone else before 1500 are the real "true believers." Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archives http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://members.tripod.com/rodhay/batochebooks.html http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/ __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:11400] More ethical foreign policy
Jakarta gets its three Hawk jets Fighters will be delivered in spite of British embargo Michael White, Political Editor The Guardian, Monday September 20, 1999 The government came under renewed criticism for the sale of Hawk fighter jets to Indonesia last night as the ministry of defence confirmed that three aircraft now stranded in Bangkok will be delivered, despite the crisis in East Timor. The revelation that British weapons are still reaching the Jakarta regime angered some Labour MPs and prompted the Liberal Democrats to demand government intervention to block final delivery. "The Indonesians have broken the conditions upon which these aircraft were to be supplied," said Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman. "There is not legal or moral obligation for Britain to continue to fulfil the contract." Though both the MoD and the department of trade and industry are involved in the elaborate export licensing procedures for Britain's huge arms industry, such talk renews the pressure on Robin Cook, the foreign secretary. Despite his high-profile ethical diplomacy stance, he had not won many Whitehall battles over arms sales until the recent brutality in East Timor forced a government u-turn. Contrary to reports, Mr Cook did not intervene personally to stop the three British Aerospace Hawk fighters - ostensibly bought for training purposes - being flown on from Bangkok. Their final delivery was apparently delayed by pilot illness. The licence on which BAe is selling the Hawks was suspended last week. That means a further six jets will not be delivered. But Whitehall officials suggest that the three already en route are now legally the property of the Indonesian government since they have left British territory. Mr Campbell argues that, even now, ministers can stop the delivery if the political will exists, because governments retain control over weapons sales by Crown prerogative. Ministers insist that this is not the case, but it will add to the unease at the Labour party conference in Bournemouth later this month. Britain has consistently argued that the Hawks were sold to Indonesia on condition that they were not used for internal repression. But the foreign office recently demanded an explanation from Jakarta about reports that Hawks had been spotted flying over East Timor. The trade secretary, Stephen Byers, was criticised by MPs last week after it emerged that the Hawk sales had been subsidised by the export credit guarantee department.
[PEN-L:11396] Re: Re: re: colonialism
Barkley: I'll have to delve to find references on Chinese travellers in the -- generic -- West. You may be right that they only got as far as Byzantine Constantinople. From memory I recall reading that a Chinese envoy resided in Samarkand around (?) 1400 and maybe in the same period a Chinse junk called at Jeddah and I think Chinese made the hadj to Mecca. Re the Vikings: see my earlier post today in which I emphasized the (obvious) point that we're not talking about discovery in the abstract but about consequential contact, involving developed medieval merchant communities that would, upon discovering a place to loot, would invest in more and more voyages, more and more looting, etc. Lots of mercantile-maritime comunities had that capability but America at that time was accessible only (speaking in terms of extremely high probabilities) to the Europeans. Distance and wind systems. Experience in utilizing the Atlantic circulation for voyages to the Azores and -- yes! -- to Iceland. A comment, finally, on your post to Lou. " The Chinese or Koreans or Japanese could fairly easily have sent out expeditions to get furs from Northwestern North America. They did not do so. Why not? I would guess that enough furs could be gotten in northeastern Asia, including maybe Manchuria. It wouldn't surprise me if Chinese or (more probably) Japanese ships made it to the NW coast of America, but what would have justified the transformation of one chance voyage into a Conquest? Cheers Jim
[PEN-L:11395] Re: Response to Darity
Comment on Ricardo's comment on Matthew: " the true believer will keep repeating this, since for the believer there is only 'either-or'." In other words, those who question the belief that Europeans were better, brighter, and bolder than everyone else before 1500 are the real "true believers." Perhaps the proposition should be reversed.? More crucially, Ricardo insists upon the utterly conventional view that yes, colonialism was important, but thats only a small part of the story -- the other part is the superiority of the European. We others insist on "either/or." Yes, we insist that Europeans in 1491 had NO superiority, actual or potential. Either they did or they didn't. They didn't. And again: "... these are...the words of... of the believer Darity, who thinks the issue is either-or. Jim B
[PEN-L:11394] Re: Re: Re: colonialism
Carrol: With all due (and lots of) respect for you and Barkley, you're shoving under the rug what surely is one of the most important problems in history, let along Marxist historiography. I insist that we have abundant evidence, most of it recently published, that all of the variaqbles that would lead medievasl Europe to progress in the way that it did progress -- to capitalism -- were present at the same time in China. So questions of the form, "Why didn't China? are, in my humble opinion, no longer interesting. We need to find out how many other civilizations also had the full array of preconditions. But regardless, we now can argue strongly that premodern Europe was not unique in its potential for development. Secondly, we need to eliminate the Eurocentrism that resides in classical Marxist historiography -- because Marx could not have knowen what we know about non-European civilizations. Cheerfully Jim B
[PEN-L:11393] why do we care?
Matthew: I agree with you totally. A longer and more detailed piece by Ron Bailey: "Africa, the slave trade, and the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States: A bibliographic review." AMERICAN HISTORY: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW 2(1986)1-91. Jim B
[PEN-L:11392] Re: re: colonialism
Barkley:
In my discussion I slyly slipped in the word "consequential" --
consequential discovery ("discovery" in quotes) of America. I think only
advanced medeival protocapitalist societies, located on seacoasts of
course, were candidates, because the project involved investment,
technology, and labor for the prupose of capital accumulation. Probably
Polynesians reached America once or twice. Probably others did. Vikings
presumably did. But none of this mattered because the groups involved were
not -- here I would tentatively use the word "protocapitalist" --
interested in or capable of using the discovery for profit-making pruposes,
then using part of the profit to build bigger ships with bigger cannon
which in turn generate more profits, etc. Chinese could have done so. Other
Old World communitiues could have done so. BUt the geography of things
suggests that only the Europeans, in that period, could have made it to the
Americas.
Jack Goody's book THE EAST IN THE WEST (Cambridge U.P., 1996, $18.95, I
reviwed it for SS last year)) pretty thoroughly covers your question about
banking east and west. He even gets into the details of accounting systems.
Asians did everything the Europeans did, although sometimes in different
ways.
Jim B
[PEN-L:11382] Re: Capitalist development
Ricardo: Ellen Wood is a believer in Brenner's Eurocentric theory of the rise of capitalism (it all happened in rural England) and she and I once argued Brenner by email. She doesn't like my views on history and vice versa. And by the way you cite the 1989 SS paper but not the 1993 book, in which I put up tentative numbers on labor in Europe vis-a-vis the colonies. I think I posted that passage from the book yesterday. Jim Blaut
[PEN-L:11379] Re: colonialism
Responding to Rod: Rod: "It would be extremely controversial to claim that the agricultural revolution was the result of demand growth. Where was this demand coming from. Surely not from those who accumulated gold?" (a) There was no agricultural revolution, in my mind and that of many economic historians. There was a fine debate on that issue on Econ-Hist.-Research (EH-R) net last winter. (b) Population in general was growing. Urban population -- hence non-food-producing [population -- was growing. More mouths, more demand. (c) Where does gold come into this, or are you making a joke, Rod? "Merchant capital has existed for a very long time. It is possible to find records of it in ancient Greece, and in many other societies. Surplus had been marketed for a very long time. But these activities are marginal to the great mass of the population." Probably when you wrote this you hadn't seen my latest post in which I argue that many urban-hinterland centers in the Middle Ages had lots of production and the so-called merchants were in no way reducible to "merchant capital." Moreover, these little enclaves were in a sense societies themselves, though very small and abutting on huge feudal/tributary rural landscapes. In these cities/hinterlands there was a proletariat -- wage workers engaged in production, some agricultural, some manufacturingh, and also (I don't want to get into the matter of defining " proletariat" transport (e.g., shipping), services, etc. There was a ruling class and a workinbg class paid with wages. There was capitaL accumulation. "A society becomes Capitalist however when capi talism penetrates the other institutions of society. When it becomes the dominant method of production. " It did that on a geographically tiny scale in many places. "When the mass of people produce very little more than they are consuming, this is not possible." You're thinking of serfs et al. in a non-commericalized rurl landscape -- something altogether different. I still don't understand the role of gold in James' scheme of things. Are you suggesting that gold was a 'store of value' for two hundred years as Europe waited for industrialisation?" Lots of other things, ultimately much more importasnt things, were happening during those 200 years. Slave plantations, for instance. Penetration of Siberia. Settlement of E North america. Trade, eventually unequal trade. Slave trade. Plus everything that was happening in Europe. Jim (not James to my friends and comrades)
[PEN-L:11375] Re: Re: Re: IMF to become autonomous?
Sorry, in a kind of preview of Y2k, most of South Africa was cut off from international emails and browsing from 16-20 September, allegedly due to the hurricane (so all our ISP claim). Here are three replies on the IMF-reform thread, which seem to be largely semantic at this stage... On 17 Sep 99, at 14:55, Doug Henwood wrote: > What about a progressive internationalism that doesn't focus on > creating a world state, but instead focuses on building links among > unions, NGOs (the good kind, not the icky Ford Foundation kind), and > activists around the world? This sort of thing seems to be giving the > bourgies fits these days. And it's schemes like NAFTA and the WTO that are > bringing together this new international. Agreed, Doug, that's exactly the point of this definition of what I take to be a progressive *nationalism* (namely that the power to regenerate national sovereignties will only be constituted to a large extent through radical international and more precisely anti-world- state activism): "... popular movements [should] join forces across borders (and continents) to have their respective state officials abrogate those relations of the interstate system through which the [neoliberal] pressure is conveyed." Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein, Anti-Systemic Movements, London, Verso, 1989 >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Max Sawicky) >Date sent: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 16:57:39 -0400 >>c) a "progressive nationalism" (again, a PEN-L phrase) which, in >>advocating WB/IMF defunding, takes heart and strength and >>knowledge from the potential unity of the variety of particularistic >>struggles against local forms of structural adjustment,malevolent >>"development" projects and Bretton Woods interference in social >>policies . . . >Question: do you think there can be progressive nationalism >for the U.S., and if so, what might it look like? >mbs Do you not have a couple of extremely good examples just North and Northwest of you, Max, in the Nader offices and Preamble Center? (I would add the Int'l Forum on Globalization out of SF, which has actually published a book on new protectionism, but I know Doug will jump all over me.) What does Bob Naiman of Preamble say? Is this ideological signposting even semi-accurate? On 17 Sep 99, at 14:15, Jim Devine wrote: > I don't think the progressive internationalism that was discussed on pen-l > involved establishing an alternative world state as much as resisting the > current globalization via solidarity from below. It might mesh well with > "international reformism" in that progressive internationalists (if > successful in their organizing efforts) would provide a back-bone for the > reformists, a reason for the international power elite to make > concessions. Sometimes to "mesh well" in this context is to take good advantage of radical pressure, as in the Jesse Jackson combination of "tree-shakers and jam-makers" (urban community activist groups and non-profit community development corporations). On the other hand, it sometimes leads to screwing up progressive strategic work by undermining a movement to deeper change. To illustrate, in the anti-apartheid movement, the concessions made by Washington reformists in the mid-1980s (agreeing to the "Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act" which destroyed the momentum for sanctions) once street and campus pressure had really intensified, did far more harm than good to the movement, both in the US and SA; luckily the SA comrades were not ready to cut the same deals and indeed anyone looking to "reform" apartheid by working with Pretoria was widely ridiculed in townships, churches and shopfloors. Without that strength of purpose, the SA democratic movement would have long ago agreed to the bizarre convolutions of democracy proposed by the Afrikaners, way short of one-person, one-vote demanded and finally won. I think around some of these world-state issues we may be at a similar juncture of international strategic decision-making, particularly around problems such as whether to promote a new round of WTO with labour/environment clauses (as the AFL-CIO appears ready to do in Seattle notwithstanding huge mobilisations against a new round), or whether "debt relief" schemes like HIPC+ESAF (the "Leach Bill") end up strengthening the workings of the interstate system that convey neoliberal pressure. The Jubilee South groups therefore have a fully rejectionist line on HIPC and ESAF, while some central Jubilee USA groups have been terribly confused about Leach. > ... > If progressive internationalism is to get anywhere, it has to figure out > how to harmonize international goals with national ones (or else this > movement will have as much impact as the 4th International) and keep the > nationalists from fighting each other (and thus dividing and conquering > themselves for international capital). So Jim, aren't "international and national goals" spelled out even
