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From the "green capitalist": "When seventeenth-century New England towns are compared with those of the nineteenth century, with their commercial agriculture, wage workers, and urban industrialism, the transition between the two may well seem to be that from a subsistence to a capitalist society. Certainly Marxists wedded to a definition of capitalism in terms of relations between labor and capital must have trouble seeing it in New England towns. Most early farmers owned their own land, hired few wage laborers, and produced mainly for their own use. Markets were hemmed in by municiple regulations, high transportation costs, and medieval notions of the just price. In none of these ways does it seem reasonable to describe colonial New England as 'capitalist.' And yet when colonial towns are compared not with their industrial successors but with their Indian predecessors, they begin to look more like market societies, the seeds of whose capitalist future were already present. The earliest explorers' descriptions of the New England coast had been framed from the start in terms of the land's commodities. Although an earlier English meaning of the word 'commodity' had referred simply to articles which were 'commodious' and hence useful to people - a definition Indians would readily have understood - that meaning was already becoming archaic by the seventeenth century. In its place was the commodity as an object of commerce, one by definition owned for the sole purpose of being traded away at a profit. Certain items of the New England landscape - fish, furs, timber, and a few others - were thus selected at once for early entrance into the commercial economy of the North Atlantic. They became valued not for the immediate utility they brought their possessors but for the price they would bring when exchanged at market. In trying to explain ecological changes related to these commodities, we can safely point to market demand as the key causal agent. The trade in commodities involved only a small group of merchants, but they exercised an influence over the New England economy beyond their numbers. Located principally in the coastal cities they rapidly came to control shipping and so acted as New England's main link to the Atlantic economy...But the famers had their own involvement in the Atlantic economy, however distant it might have been. Even if they only produced a small surplus for market, they nevertheless used it to buy certain goods from the merchants - manufactured textiles, tropical foodstuffs, guns, metal tools - which were essential elements in their lives. The grain and meat which farmers sold, if not shipped to Carribean and European markets, were used to supply port cities and the 'invisible trade' of colonial shipping...Taxes [also played a role and] had the important effect of forcing a certain degree of colonial production beyond the level of mere 'subsistence', and orienting that surplus toward market exchange. But the most important sense in which it is wrong to describe colonial towns as subsistence communities follows from their inhabitants' belief in 'improvement', the concept which was so crucial in their critique of Indian life. Colonists were moved to transform the soil by a property system that taught them to treat land as capital. Fixed boundaries and the liberties of 'free and common socage' assured a family that improvements belonged to them and to their heirs. The existence of commerce, however marginal, led them to see certain things on the land as merchantable commodities. The visible increase in livestock and crops thus translated into an abstract money value that was reflected in tax assessments, in the inventories of estates, and in the growing market...Here was a definition of transferrable wealth few precolonial Indians would probably have recognized: if labor was not yet an alienated commodity available for increasing capital, land was. ...Because the Indians lacked the incentives of money and commerce, [Europeans] thought, they failed to improve their land and so remained a people devoid of welath and comfort. What the Europeand failed to notice was that the Indians did not recognize themselves as poor. The endless accumulation of capital which they saw as a natural consequence of the human love for wealth made little sense to them. Marshall Sahlins has pointed out that there are in fact too ways to be rich, one of which was rarely recognized by Europeans in the seventeenth-century. 'Want,' Sahlins says, 'may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little.' Pierre Biard, who noticed this fact about the Indians, extended it into a critique of European ways of life. Indians, he said, went about their daily tasks with great leisure, 'for their days are all nothing but pastime. They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions.' Historians often read statements like this as myths of the noble savage, and certainly they are attached to that complex of ideas in European thought. But that need not deny their accuracy as descriptions of Indian life. If the Indians considered themselves happy with tge fruits of relatively little labor, they were like many peoples of the world as described by modern anthropologists...Speaking strictly in terms of precolonial New England, Indian conceptions of property were central to Indian uses of the land, and Indians could not live as Indians had lived unless the land was owned as Indians had owned it. - William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 2000, pp. 77-81 > 17 авг. 2015 г., в 14:46, Louis Proyect via Marxism > <[email protected]> написал(а): > > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > >> On 8/17/15 2:39 PM, Manuel Barrera wrote: >> Rather, the idea that somehow native peoples are, or were, immune from >> contributing to megafaunal extinction because a) they were too small in >> number and b) some charlatans want to link past history of survival with >> a racist modern argument justifying human roles in extinctions and >> climatic change today. > > This is not about immunity. It is about the difference between production for > use and production for exchange. Before the Hudson Bay Company came to the > New World, Indians hunted beavers because their pelts could be used to keep > warm. But when a market was created for hats in Europe using beaver fur, the > Indians entered the commodity circulation sphere and the beasts were almost > wiped out. This is not about the "noble savage". It is about the difference > between primitive communism and capitalism. > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/shalva.eliava%40outlook.com _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
