Doug Henwood wrote:
is "luck" the right word? Something happened within Europe that encouraged conquest and led to the reinvestment of surplus rather than its consumption. I realize that historians have devoted their lives to examining just what this something was, but luck makes it sounds like winning at roulette rather than something explicable by social science.
I would answer no. Capitalism is associated with a specific kind of "subjectivity," one that requires a particular historical process of development (of "bildung") within a particular pattern of changing social relations (just as social relations are "internal" to subjectivity, different kinds of social relations are "internally" related to each other i.e. the emergence of a new kind presupposes the development of subjectivity made possible by the previous kind). These "internal relations" I take to constitute the essence of "dialectics."
One sign that this is Marx's approach is that he treats the subjectivity dominant in the early capitalism associated with "primitive accumulation" as significantly different from the subjectivity dominant in mature capitalism. In particular the sadistic greed that Marx takes as the dominant capitalist "passion" takes a more extreme, more irrational form in early capitalism. Here is some of the textual evidence supporting this interpretive hypothesis:
"Cruelty was of course the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong [Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged totheir work ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide ... The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder.�The profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility of limit; they began the practice of what is termed 'night-working', that is, having tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted, and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set quitted in the morning.�It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the beds never get cold."�(John Felden, as quoted by Marx, Capital, vol. I (Penguin ed.) pp. 923-4)
"If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (pp.925-6)
The early capitalist, as portrayed by Marx, is a "hoarder," "a martyr to exchange-value, a holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal column." (Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, p.134)
"At the historical dawn of the capitalist mode of production�- and every capitalist has to go through this historical stage individually�- avarice, and the drive for self-enrichment, are the passions which are entirely predominant." (Capital, vol. I, p.741)
"when modern bourgeois society was in its infancy, nations and princes were driven by a general desire for money to embark on crusades to distant lands in quest of the golden grail." (Contribution, p. 157)
"Gold is a wonderful thing.�Its owner is master of everything he desires.�Gold can even enable souls to enter paradise." (Columbus, as quoted by Marx, Contribution, p. 157)
�"The less advanced is the production of commodities, the more important is hoarding." (Contribution, p. 134)
�"Avarice clings to the hoard and does not allow money to become a medium of circulation, but greed for gold preserves the monetary soul of the hoard and maintains it in constant tension with circulation." (Contribution, p. 132)
"The hoarder of money scorns the worldly, temporal and ephemeral enjoyments in order to chase after the eternal treasure which can be touched neither by moths nor by rust, and which is wholly celestial and wholly mundane."� (Contribution, p. 129)
"The appropriation of wealth in its general form therefore implies renunciation of the material reality of wealth.�Hence the motive power of hoarding is avarice, which desires not commodities as use-values, but exchange-value as a commodity.�So as to take possession of superfluous wealth in its general form, particular needs must be treated as luxuries and superfluities."�(Contribution, pp. 128-9)
�"In order that gold may be held as money, and made to form a hoard, it must be prevented from circulating, or from dissolving into the means of purchasing enjoyment.�The hoarder therefore sacrifices the lusts of his flesh to the fetish of gold.�He takes the gospel of abstinence very seriously.�On the other hand, he cannot withdraw any more from circulation, in the shape of money, than he has thrown into it, in the shape of commodities.�The more he produces, the more he can sell.�Work, thrift and greed are therefore his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little is the sum of his political economy."�(Capital, vol. I, p. 231)
�A passage from a petition sent by the Cortes to Philip II in 1593 repeating a request made in 1586 that the king not permit
"the further importation into this kingdom of candles, glassware, jewelry, knives and similar articles coming from abroad, which, though they are of no use to human life, have to be exchanged for gold, as though the Spaniards were Indians." (Contribution, p. 129)
�"In Asia, and India in particular, [134] where the formation of hoards does not play a subordinate part in the total mechanism of production, as it does in bourgeois economy, but where this form of wealth is still considered a final goal, gold and silver articles are in fact merely hoards in an aesthetic form." (Contribution, pp. 134-5)
The specific form of the "passions" dominant in early capitalism - "mercantilism," the "monetary system" - explains why commerce and usury rather than industry are the dominant activities and why subsumption is only "formal" (production is "manufacture").
Mature Capitalism
�"Original sin is at work everywhere.�With the development of the capitalist mode of production, with the growth of accumulation and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be merely the incarnation of capital.�He begins to feel a human warmth towards his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at his former enthusiasm for asceticism, as an old-fashioned miser's prejudice.�While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, as 'abstinence' from accumulating, the modernized capitalist is capable of viewing accumulation as 'renunciation' of pleasure.�'Two souls, alas, do dwell within his breast; The one is ever parting from the other.' (Capital, vol I, pp. 740-1)
The early capitalist remains the "inner man" of the "civilized" capitalist, however.
"the expenditure of the capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the dashing feudal lord's prodigality, but, on the contrary, is always restrained by the sordid avarice and anxious calculation lurking in the background." (Capital, vol. I, p. 741)
"How little the inner man of the individual owner of commodities has changed even when he has become civilized and turned into a capitalist is for instance proved by a London representative of an international banking house who displayed a framed �100,000 note as an appropriate family coat of arms.�The point in this case is the derisory and supercilious air with which the note looks down upon circulation." (Contribution, pp. 134-5)
This "inner man" re-emerges in monetary crises:
"Under conditions of advanced bourgeois production, when the commodity-owner has long since become a capitalist, knows his Adam Smith and smiles superciliously at the superstition that only gold and silver constitute money or that money is after all the absolute commodity as distinct from other commodities - money then suddenly appears not as the medium of circulation but once more as the only adequate form of exchange-value, as a unique form of wealth just as it is regarded by the hoarder.�The fact that money is the sole incarnation of wealth manifests itself in the actual devaluation and worthlessness of all physical wealth, and not in the purely imaginary devaluation as for instance in the monetary system. �This particular phase of world market crises is known as monetary crisis.�The summum bonum, the sole form of wealth for which people clamour at such times, is money, hard cash, and compared with it all other commodities - just because they are use-values - appear to be useless, mere baubles and toys, or as our Doctor Martin Luther says, mere ornament and gluttony.�This sudden transformation of the credit system into a monetary system adds theoretical dismay to the actually existing panic, and the agents of the circulation process are overawed by the impenetrable mystery surrounding their own relations."�(Contribution, p. 146)
�"Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what its cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash.�Profane commodities can o longer replace it.�The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value.�The bourgeois, drunk with properity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation.�'Commodities alone are money,' he said.�But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity.�As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. [Cites John Bellers 1696 'The poor stand still, because the rich have no money to employ them, though they have the same land and hands to provide victuals and clothes, as ever they had; ... which is the true Riches of a Nation, and not the money.']�In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction." (Capital, vol. I, p. 236)
�"In times of actual monetary crisis, a contradiction appears which is immanent in the development of money as universal means of payment.�It is not required as measure; nor as coin ,,,.; but as exchange-value become independent, as the physically available universal equivalent, as the materialization of abstract wealth, in short, entirely in the form in which it is the object of actual hoarding, as money."�(Capital, vol. I, p. 236)
Ted
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