Louis wrote:
>This was necessary since a review of scholars--including E.J. Hobsbawm and
>Robert Brenner--had revealed "how unsatisfactory is their treatment of
>metropolitan Spain." More to the point, the standard version of Spanish
>history, including that produced by Marxist historians, was one that argued:
>
>"[T]he failure of the Spanish economy has in a long tradition that extends
>from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth been
>explained in terms of arbitrary government, a bad religion, the tyrannical
>Inquisition, reactionary hidalgo values, the wretched laziness of the
>people, the absence of a capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit and other
>failings of the national character, as much as in terms of objective
>economic analysis."
It should be noted that Brenner's analysis is _nothing of the sort_. The
above is nothing but a misrepresentation of his views. His theory doesn't
refer to arbitrary government, religion, values, laziness, lack of any kind
of spirit, or failings of national character. Instead it refers to an
absence of capitalist social relations -- not "spirit" -- in agriculture.
Brenner's not an historical idealist. The same applies to Wood. Louis, why
do you set up your chosen enemies as mere straw people? why not read them
to learn from them instead of engaging in an Ideological War using tools of
misrepresentation?
I don't know Brenner's analysis of Spain very well (and I'm far from being
an expert on Spanish history), but if I were to study that country I would
look for the following. As Louis points out, Brenner saw Catalonia as one
of the few examples of a "capitalist system based on large-scale
owner-cultivators also generally using wage labour." I would examine how
the Castilian government (Ferdinand & Isabella and the gang) oppressed and
exploited the Catalans, preventing their rural revolution from going very
far. One crucial fact is that Barcelona (Catalonia's capital) was excluded
from the Spanish Empire for quite awhile and could profit only indirectly.
I wouldn't call this the actions of an "arbitrary state." Instead, that's
the way late feudalism worked. Most societies work that way, with some
ethnic groups (here, the Castilians) oppressing others (the Catalans). BTW,
this antagonism was one of the reasons for the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
>... Take for example the key question of urban growth. For Ellen Meiksins
>Wood, the fact that the urban population of England doubled between 1500
>and 1700 confirms the highly productive character of British capitalist
>agriculture. When fewer people are required to produce foodstuffs, then
>they are freed up to work in the cities in burgeoning industrial
>enterprises. However, according to Angel Garc�a Sanz, the population of
>Madrid increased from 30,000 in 1561 to 130,000 in the 1630s. ("Castile
>1580-1650: economic crisis and the policy of 'reform'") This beats English
>urban growth by 100 percent.
it's a mistake to judge economic success solely by population growth. It
could be the symptom of agrarian revolution -- or it could be the sign that
the bureaucratic and military capital city of a world-girdling empire
attracts a lot of people in search of jobs and an access to loot. For
Madrid during this period, I would guess the latter.
>.... Moreda produces some dramatic statistics. Figures for twenty
>Castilian cities in 1530 and 1594 show an increase of 84 percent, figures
>that seem consistent with Sanz's. While some of this growth reflects
>increased commercial activity related to colonial outposts in the New
>World, much of it has to do with exports to the rest of Europe.
the question, of course, is who benefited from the growth. The long quote
(which I elided) says in part that "That demand helped stimulate a process
of expansion which had its origins in behavioural changes within the rural
population resulting from the readjustments that took place during the
fifteenth century to changes in average yields, in labour productivity, in
wages and consequently in the rents and dues demanded by the lords..." It
sounds as if it wasn't the landowners who got the primary benefits. That
means that the peasants got the lion's share (along with the state, which
this author didn't mention, at least not here). Though it was great for the
peasants, it suggests that this change did not encourage the kind of social
revolution in agriculture that Brenner describes. Thus it encouraged the
development of a self-sufficient peasantry, not a class system of rich
landlords and landless proletarians, which in turn allows a technical
revolution in agriculture. (Note that what's bad for the peasants is good
for capitalism's development -- that's Marx's theory.) Of course, if anyone
is an expert on Spanish history, I'd like to hear if I'm wrong on this from
someone who _is_ an expert.
>This leads us to a key question which I find practically ignored in
>Brenner and Woods. Namely, does the growth of agrarian capitalism ensure a
>happy, upward path toward the industrial revolution and well-fed wage workers?
Nothing in history is insured. In any event, it's wrong to misrepresent
Brenner and Wood. They do not see the upward path toward the industrial
revolution to be "happy." Again, why the misrepresentation? are you afraid
of the _real_ Brenner and Wood?
Further, the existence of "well-fed wage workers" is not a result of the
industrial revolution. The industrial revolution involved the rise in labor
productivity associated with new technologies and machinery. As Marx argued
in CAPITAL, the capitalists fought hard to prevent workers from benefiting
from the rise in labor productivity. It's only the struggle by the workers
(within the context set by capital accumulation) that allowed them to grab
a greater part of their product.
>Frankly, most of what I have seen in Brenner and Woods seems innocent not
>only what I have read in recent ecological analysis of capitalist
>agriculture but what Marx himself wrote. For Marx, capitalist agriculture
>is filled with contradictions. While yielding short term profits, it leads
>to the exhaustion of the soil and the rural work force. Looking back at
>Wood's essay on the agrarian origins of capitalism in the special Monthly
>Review issue on agriculture is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. While
>every other contributor was explaining the irrational destructiveness of
>capitalist agriculture, Wood seemed swept up by the bourgeois ideology of
>"improvement" that swept across Europe in the 17th and 18th century. For
>her there are obvious injustices associated with the growth of agrarian
>capitalism such as people being forced from their land by the Enclosure
>Acts. Yet this seems some kind of necessary evil to reach the goal of a
>modern industrial society--sort of like Stalin breaking the back of the
>kulaks in the 1930s.
This lambastes Wood for talking about only one topic in a short paper
rather than relying on others to talk about the ecological impact of
capitalist agriculture. (Others did talk about this issue -- in a journal
that she was one of the editors of at the time!) You trash her because she
doesn't talk about everything (and doesn't toe your party line). BTW, it
sort of makes sense to minimize the role of ecological damage in one's
story if one is talking about the period before 1700 or so in England,
since it's only more recently that the ecological limits were hit. Of
course if one has the luxury of being able to write about everything, then
ecological issues clearly belong.
It also attributes attitudes to her (that smashing the peasants is a
necessary evil) that as far as I've seen she doesn't have. Please provide
evidence. Stop misrepresenting your foes. If they are really the poop-heads
that you seem to think they are, quotes from them would reveal that fact.
>... According to Anes, profit-driven expansion of agriculture in the 16th
>century led to putting more and more land into cultivation. That made it
>necessary to convert more and more land into arable fields even when such
>conversion would ultimately undermine the ecological health of agriculture
>overall. Specifically, "the ploughing up, sowing and cultivation of
>woodland, scrub and pasture reduced the area of permanent grazing, and
>necessarily also reduced the number of cattle and sheep maintained in each
>village in line with the loss of feed." Furthermore, with more land to
>plow, more plough-teams were required. However, with less grazing there
>were inevitably fewer oxen that could be supported. Eventually, oxen were
>replaced by mules which were more expensive. For poorer farmers this was a
>mixed blessing. The oxen were not only cheaper, their hides and flesh
>could be used once their useful working lives were done.... As this
>process spread across Spain, as more and more land became exhausted due to
>lack of fertilizer, the eventual result was predictable: a depression in
>the countryside.
It's possible -- and again I'm no expert on Spain -- that the difference
vis-a-vis England is that the latter introduced all sort of technical
improvements in agriculture (like the famous use of turnips, to fix
nitrogen in the soil and to feed the beast of burden), whereas the quote
above describes extremely intense exploitation of the land without
improving technology in a big way, leading to classic diminishing returns.
One thing about the kind of revolution in agrarian social relations that
Brenner talks about is that it gives the land-owners or their hired proxies
the ability to change agricultural technology. In the short run, at least,
this can avoid some of the ecological down-side (of diminishing returns),
though with the completing of the domination of the world by capitalism the
ecological consequences become clear.
(I've also read that Spanish property rights sometimes encouraged the
destruction of "common property resources," specifically connected with
shepherding, as there was neither private property nor community
organization nor government fiat to discourage abuse.)
>There were other factors that impinged on the Spanish farmer, including
>steep taxes to support the imperial adventures of the Crown and tithes for
>the clergy. Spain also had to contend with dwindling imports of silver
>from the New World, an exhaustible resource just like land.
It's always a mistake to fetishize silver and gold. Absent increased
production, inflows of specie simply encourage inflation. I doubt that
Brenner or Wood would ignore the other factors listed.
>At any rate, the last thing one can say about Spain in this period is that
>it was some kind of "feudal" historical counterfactual to England. Spain,
>in this period, was a victim of its own early agrarian capitalist success.
Except for Catalonia, Spain didn't have "capitalist" success, at least as
Marx defined that term (i.e., the polarization of proletariat vs.
property-owners). Instead, what you describe is "commercial success," the
success of buying and selling the product, within the context of a society
that was still very feudal (except for Catalonia).
BTW, didn't Wood used to be an editor of MONTHLY REVIEW, with Paul Sweezy
and Harry Magdoff? If the Brenner/Wood school is the kind of ideological
enemy of the Sweezy/Baran/A.G. Frank school that Louis describes, she
wouldn't have been hired in the first place. She lasted a couple of years,
and I understand that she was eased out for personal, not political, reasons.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
