Louis Proyect wrote: > For all of its devotion to British exceptionalism, the Brenner thesis > would seem ill equipped to explain why British rule failed to abolish > extra-economic forms of coercion in its most important colonial holding: > South Africa.
In general, it's wrong to expect any "hypothesis" to explain everything. You can't use Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain the laws of physics. In fact, any theory or hypothesis that purports to explain everything is _prima facie_ wrong. In any event, there's nothing in Brenner's thesis that says that capitalist-British rule should "abolish extra-economic forms of coercion" all around the world, not to mention in South Africa. The process of primitive accumulation in England (for example, described by Marx in his CAPITAL) is not about capitalists _consciously_ fighting to abolish extra-economic coercion. Instead, it's a matter of a series of real-world events such as King Henry VII's expropriation of Church lands and the lords' grabbing of peasants' [*] collective property (the commons) and turning it into their own personal property (one aspect of the Enclosure Movement). These events were not intentionally aimed at abolishing extra-economic coercion and creating a "free class of proletarians." Instead, these events had the _unintended effect_ of "freeing" British peasants from various non-economic bonds left over from the feudal period and (more importantly) from having direct control over the means of subsistence and the means of production needed to create them (while destroying peasants' collective organization). The latter "freedom" meant that the peasants became totally dependent (in their efforts to survive) on the newly capitalistic landlords and later the urban capitalists. Given this total dependence, extra-economic coercion wasn't _necessary_ to the existence of exploitation of labor by capital. Move from Marx's social perspective to an individual capitalist perspective: if extra-economic coercion is _profitable_ , it is engaged in (if the state allows). If organized capital (the British Parliament, etc.) found that it helped the their class as a whole (and more powerful interest groups within that class), they would allow, support, and even encourage individual capitalist decisions to engage in non-economic coercion. Coming to South Africa, for example, the British (and before them, the Dutch) took over preexisting systems of bondage and transformed them to serve capitalist goals (instead of transforming them into capitalist organizations). They also used new methods such as the head tax to force conquered peoples into the capitalist labor-power market. Again, it was individually profitable and seen as collectively beneficial to the capitalists, so systems of non-economic coercion were grafted onto the capitalist world market that centered on the full-scale or pure capitalism in Northern Europe (which had "doubly free labor"). BTW, competition from the "unfree" labor in South Africa and elsewhere in the global periphery could easily undermine the bargaining power of the "free" labor in Britain and the rest of the center, though this phenomenon has become important only relatively recently. Marx's last chapter of volume I of CAPITAL is about non-economic coercion in the colonies. Non-economic coercion seems to fit well with colonization by capitalist countries. Capitalists -- as individuals and as a group -- were quite willing to sacrifice their officially-state "liberal" principles if it was profitable to do so. Some Marxists argue that over the centuries, the mix of pure capitalism and non-economic coercion doesn't work, so that pure capitalism's system of doubly-free labor takes over. (The COMMUNIST MANIFESTO suggests as much.) But that's a completely different issue. FWIW, Brenner didn't (and as far as I can tell, doesn't) advocate "British exceptionalism" if that phrase means that Britain is somehow better than the rest of the world (or that Brits are better than other people). The "Brenner thesis" (shared by Marx, in his CAPITAL) is that Britain represents the geographic origin of the disease called capitalism (defined, in its pure form, as a exploitative system in which workers are "doubly free"). That doesn't say that Britain was "better" than the rest of the world. BTW, as a professional historian, if given empirical evidence, unless he is a total dogmatist (which I don't think he is), Brenner would agree that pure capitalism (as defined above) was _also_ created in some other places in the world. (Marx would probably agree too.) Even though Brenner is much more theoretical in orientation than other historians, for that group, empirical evidence rules. Besides, his thesis is about contrasting France and England; it's not about England versus the rest of the world. Or maybe I'm defining the "Brenner Thesis" inaccurately. What is your definition, Louis? -- Jim Devine / "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support." -- John Buchan [*] I'm using this term loosely to refer to rural direct producers. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
