Louis writes:
>Yeah, there's a new Brenner debate goin' on as well. Mostly people
>refuting his NLR article on the imminent collapse of capitalism, just as
>they refuted his earlier articles claiming some kind of privileged status
>for the rise of capitalism in Great Britain.
Brenner didn't claim that capitalism was about to collapse. Nor did he
claim that GB was "privileged." (To over-use my previous analogy, it's like
saying that Typhoid Mary was privileged, because she spread the disease to
everyone else.)
Louis reproduces one of his previous posts:
>For my money, the most succinct statement of the Brenner thesis can be
>found in the initial article of "The Brenner Debate," ... it states that
>England was the site of an exceptional economic transformation in the late
>15th century. Elsewhere successful peasant revolts, especially in France,
>consolidated their control over small and medium sized farms. These plump
>and happy self-sustaining freeholders, relieved from the pressure to
>compete, produced food for their own needs, and a surplus for the local
>market. They were the hippies of their day.
The French peasants in Brenner's story were only _relatively_ privileged
compared to the English peasants. The hippie rhetoric is out of line. All
it tells me is that Louis doesn't like Brenner.
>But in England they were defeated. With this defeat, English landlords
>gained control over 70-75 percent of the land, leased large parcels to
>capitalist tenants who then employed newly landless peasants as wage
>laborers. Under marketplace pressure, these capitalist farmers--the
>Monsantos of their day--introduced new technologies to make profits,
>including convertible husbandry systems ... The key for Brenner, however,
>was the existence of exploitative class relations. The English countryside
>was, as we used to say at Goldman-Sachs in the 1980s, lean and mean.
again, this rhetoric is obscuring the argument. It's implying (without
actually saying) that RB was equating the English capitalists farmers to
Monsanto or Goldman-Sachs, which is obviously absurd. It's an effort to
reject RB's views by making fun of them, instead of contesting his facts or
logic. All it tells me is that Louis doesn't like RB.
>Once agriculture was transformed, leanness and meanness diffused out into
>the rest of English society, which then became a highly productive
>economic machine firing on all 8 cylinders, just like Reaganite America.
>Once you could put food on the table in sufficient quantities, the English
>ants could get busy and race ahead of all the European grasshoppers,
>especially the fun-loving French.
this simply continues the same rhetorical trick.
> Brenner writes:
>"It seems, moreover, that agricultural improvement was at the root of
>those developmental processes which, according to E. L. Jones, had allowed
>some 40 per cent of the English population to move out of agricultural
>employment by the end of the seventeenth century, much of it into
>industrial pursuits. Obviously, English industrial growth, predominantly
>in cloth, was in the first instance based on exports, spurred by overseas
>demand. Yet such export-based spurts were common in Europe throughout the
>middle ages and the early modern period; but previously none had been able
>to sustain itself."
>
>Once this powerful growth engine is in place, colonial trade can be used
>to make it go even faster. But you have to have the proper engine first.
>By analogy, if you use hydrogen fuel in a dragster, you can easily go a
>quarter-mile in under 6 seconds. But if you put that same fuel into a
>Volkswagen beetle, you won't get there much faster than if you were using
>plain old gasoline. So gold and silver from Peru and Mexico was the fuel
>and England was the dragster. Portugal would have been a Yugo.
This analogy makes sense to me. (I didn't know I had borrowed it from Louis.)
>In "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and
>England Compared," (in Aston-Philpin, "Brenner Debate"), Patricia Croot
>and David Parker argue that France was just as lean and mean as England,
>if not more so.
Now this is a valid way of arguing, but the phrase "lean and mean" conceals
more than it reveals. It's quite possible that the two countries were "lean
and mean" in different ways. We're talking about the social relations of
capitalism here, not some simple competition among countries.
>Large-scale farms were not even required for technological improvements on
>English farms, they say. Not only was manuring and new crops innovated on
>smaller farms, they also got into convertible husbandry. Such innovations
>were necessary for the survival of smaller farms that lacked the capital
>for large sheep flocks, the typical cash generator of 16th century England.
>
>They also insist that the French peasant was not that carefree and
>independent.
Of course, RB never said they were "carefree and independent." It's been a
long time since I read RB's articles on this, but my impression was that
what he's saying is that the French peasants weren't rich as much as
following a survival strategy that many peasants around the world would
like to follow (but typically can't), that of self-sufficiency and
avoidance of market relations wherever possible. The peasants who follow
this strategy are typically "dirt poor," but this strategy can persist for
generations.
>During the 16th and 17th centuries, French peasants were squeezed so tight
>that they had to seek supplementary income....
The question is whether or not they became totally dependent on markets for
their subsistence, the way proletarians are.
> A significant minority of the French peasants became totally
> dispossessed and ended up as vagabonds....
The question is to what extent this dispossession prevailed. RB's argument
is that it prevailed so much in England that it could imply the attainment
of the critical mass that allows the self-sustaining expansion of
capitalist class relations...
>Croot and Parker insist that only 20 percent land was owned by French
>peasants in the Toulousain and Lauragais regions by the end of the 18th
>century. Here, as in England, wage labor was prevalent and secured through
>the services of a "fermier", a middle man. In France and England, economic
>duress set the pattern for class relations in the countryside. Brenner's
>portrayal of British ants and French grasshoppers simply does not
>correspond to reality.
Of course, RB doesn't use the ants/grasshoppers analogy. LP does. So LP is
refuting his own analogy.
More importantly, I don't think that RB's historical analysis says that
either Britain or France was _homogeneous_ or uniform in its development
toward capitalism. In any case, his emphasis is not on "proving" the
"superiority" of England over France. Rather, his point is that the change
of social relations toward the _proletarianization_ of the peasantry was
necessary to the development of rural capitalism.
>Finally, there is ample evidence that English peasants actually fared
>better than their French cousins. By the mid-17th century, they write,
>"there was a far greater range of holdings with a significant proportion
>in the middle range using some wage labor and producing a surplus for the
>market." It was only in the beginning of the 18th century that
>concentration of landed property begin to develop in England. This time
>frame makes much more sense when speaking of agrarian capitalism rather
>than the early 16th century of the Brenner thesis, when feudal property
>relations were the norm. Most of Brenner's critics say the same thing: he
>is projecting backwards into a remote and distant period in British
>history class relations from a more contemporary time.
This is a substantive argument. However, what was RB's reply, which
appeared in the same book?
>Robert Brenner was often linked with Ernesto Laclau and Eugene Genovese in
>the 1980s. Although not quite forming a school, the three were widely
>regarded as upholding a classical tough-minded version of Marxism as
>opposed to the sort of wooly-headed populism that marched udner the banner
>of "dependency theory". What they shared in common was a belief that the
>"mode of production" was key. If the system did not revolve around free
>labor and did not exhibit technological innovation driven by the lash of
>competition, then it did not deserve the name of capitalism. Social
>inequality was not sufficient....
Is this an effort to use "guilt by association," since Genovese veered into
a nutty version of conservatism and Laclau embraced "radical democracy"? If
so, it simply indicates that LP doesn't like RB rather than presenting a
substantive argument.
>With these connections in mind, it is interesting to turn to a paper
>written by Shearer Davis Bowman in the Oct. '80 American Historical Review
>titled "Antebellum Planters and Vormarz Junkers in Comparative
>Perspective." To set the context for his comparison, Bowman cites Genovese
>as arguing for "the genuine conservatism of the planters and proslavery
>thought by insisting upon the 'precapitalist' character of the Old South's
>'paternalistic' master-slave relation and the consequent 'prebourgeois'
>outlook of antebellum planters--'the closest thing to feudal lords
>imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic.'"
>
>By this criterion, the Junkers were just as 'prebourgeois.' The term
>"Junker" is derived from the Middle High German "young nobleman" and
>designates both the noble and nonnoble owners of legally privileged
>estates (Ritteng�ter) in Prussia's six eastern provinces, the breadbasket
>of modern Germany. Bowman identifies the similarities between the
>slave-states and these provinces in terms of class relations:
>
>"Although the legal and racial status of slaves on a plantation was
>certainly quite different from that of the laborers on a Junker estate
>(before as well as after the end of hereditary bondage in 1807), there
>were significant parallels between the productive purposes to which
>menials on plantations and Ritterguter were put and between the ways in
>which they were governed. Each work force was subject to the personal,
>nearly despotic, authority of the owner, and each worked to produce cash
>crops for foreign and domestic markets. While Southern planters were
>growing cotton or tobacco for shipment to Liverpool or New York, for
>example, East Elbian Junkers were producing wheat or wool for shipment to
>London or Berlin. At mid-century most plantations and Ritterguter also
>achieved a high, cost-efficient level of self-sufficiency in basic
>foodstuffs as well. The functional and structural analogies between the
>plantation and the Rittergut are crucial to a comparative study of
>planters and Junkers, because these estates and their work forces
>constituted the foundations of their owners' wealth, political influence,
>social status, and, in many
>instances, even their self-esteem."
The key issue for RB is that unlike a true capitalist, the slave-owners or
the Junkers had the option of using direct force rather than technological
advance to raise the surplus-labor they extracted. Because they had the
option of using direct force (rather than simply relying on their state to
protect property relations and suppress strikes and radicals now and then),
that undermines the tendency to bring in technological advances.
Also, as the Southern US slave-owners showed, it is quite possible to be
market-oriented with the cash crop while striving for self-sufficiency on
other fronts (using slave-labor to produce food for the slaves). Though
slavery is clearly a form of class domination, it is not capitalism. (BTW,
I've never understood why people assert that Southern slavery was a form of
capitalism. Aren't Marxists opposed to _all_ class domination, not just
capitalist class domination?)
>While Brenner makes a strict linkage between capitalist farmers exploiting
>wage labor, Bowman points out that the Junkers were keen to make
>improvements to their land where labor was anything but free. Captain Carl
>von Wulffen-Pietzpuhl, writing in 1845, urged the creation of model farms
>so that his fellow Junkers could explore "the advancement of Prussia's
>practical agriculture". He declared that "the most rational" farmer
>managed to use "land and soil most effectively" and that the "most
>important aspect
>of rational agriculture" could be "reduced to the art of producing the
>cheapest dung." ...
The question is whether or not the Junkers actually set up the model farms
and whether or not they imitated the progressive techniques used there.
>The Junkers lord tended to have a view of himself as a kindly
>paterfamilias attending to the welfare of his faithful people, just like
>the American southern slave-owning class. While the slavocracy was able to
>impose its rule through outright ownership, the German oppressors had
>various labor codes--some extracted in the guise of "reforms" to keep his
>subjects in line. The proper way to regard both systems is as a mixture of
>economic control driven by the need for a capitalist gentry to support its
>life-style through the mass production of agricultural commodities, and
>political control based on forced labor. Reactionary authoritarian beliefs
>wed to militarism did not prevent these ruling class elites from
>extracting every bit of surplus from their properties through a combination of
>technological innovation and forced labor.
RB might argue that the tech. innovation was slighted relative to a similar
capitalism farm.
>So were they precapitalist or capitalist?
They could be precapitalist embedded in a capitalist social formation. In
fact, in volume I of CAPITAL, Marx talks about how the worst slavery is
that which is producing for the capitalist world market, as with the silver
mines of ancient European times. A pure slave system might produce only
use-values, which limits the role of accumulation, whereas a slave system
producing for market allows the accumulation of money (which is endless).
I'll stop here. I've run out of time...
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
