Michael Perelman wrote:
>Yoshie, this sort of attribution can ingnite some nasty flames. That is
>why I had hoped that I had put this to rest, but then Lou decided to
>restart it. I really don't see much positive coming out of this
>discussion.
I'm all for leaving B & W behind. The topic of primitive
accumulation, however, is one that greatly interests me. Perhaps we
can discuss your work instead.
Michael Perelman writes:
***** Primitive accumulation cut through traditional lifeways like
scissors. The first blade served to undermine the ability of people
to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern
measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival
strategies outside the system of wage labor. A host of oftentimes
brutal laws designed to undermine whatever resistance people
maintained against the demands of wage labor accompanied the
dispossession of the peasants' rights, even before capitalism had
become a significant economic force.
For example, beginning with the Tudors, England enacted a series of
stern measures to prevent peasants from drifting into vagrancy or
falling back onto welfare systems. According to a 1572 statute,
beggars over the age of fourteen were to be severely flogged and
branded with a red-hot iron on the left ear unless someone was
willing to take them into service for two years. Repeat offenders
over eighteen were to be executed unless someone would take them into
service. Third offenses automatically resulted in execution (Marx
1977, 896ff; Marx 1974, 736; Mantoux 1961, 432). Similar statutes
appeared almost simultaneously during the early sixteenth century in
England, the Low Countries, and Zurich (LeRoy Ladrie 1974, 137).
Eventually, the majority of workers, lacking any alternative, had
little choice but to work for wages at something close to subsistence
level. (bibliography omitted, Michael Perelman, _The Invention of
Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of
Primitive Accumulation_, Durham: Duke UP, 2000, p. 14) *****
While classical political economists are said (by neoclassical
economists as well as many Marxists) to be champions of laissez
faire, _The Invention of Capitalism_ reveals that they did _not_
trust the spontaneous workings of the market alone to bring about the
radical separation of direct producers from their means of
production. In fact, they advocated coercion, for they realized
that, left to their own devices, peasants, even under very difficult
conditions, resisted submitting themselves to the discipline of wage
labor as long as they could.
Unlike Marx, who, for polemical reasons, de-emphasized the empirical
co-existence of "so-called primitive accumulation" with the workings
of the capitalist market, Michael Perelman focuses on primitive
accumulation as a long drawn-out process in such a way that it cannot
be relegated to "a precapitalist past or even some imagined moment
when feudal society suddenly became capitalist" (12). Primitive
accumulation continues to this day, in so far as the scissors are
still working to prevent those who have yet to be fully incorporated
into -- or have become expelled from -- the regime of wage labor
discipline from "finding alternative survival strategies outside the
system of wage labor" (14). Even now, when capital has come to hold
direct or indirect sway over everyone in the world, it continues to
fight against "alternative survival strategies" still found in
interstices of the world market. No one in the real world --
including classical political economists -- has ever trusted to the
"invisible hand." It goes without saying that, at the dawn of
primitive accumulation & capitalism, they did not trust that the
commercial sector would eventually win & the household sector lose
because of the former's "efficiency," "technological superiority,"
etc., especially since at that point there was no "conclusive
evidence of the technological superiority" of the former relative to
the latter, _especially from the point of view of peasants_.
Yoshie
