me:
>The plague upset traditional social relationships in the countryside, >setting the stage for full-blown capitalism. It raised the bargaining >power of the laborers who remained in many cases. But the landowners >struck back. In England, they struck back with the primitive >accumulation that Marx writes about, creating a proletariat by >expropriating the rural laborers, separating them from any claim to >land and other ways to independently support themselves. This created >the proletarian class (in itself, not for itself).
John G.
Huh? This does not accord with my education on the topic. The theoretical, and hence overly schematized, history of the "transition" with which I'm familiar is a good deal more tortuous and less cartoonish than what Jim serves up here. It (still a cardboard version) goes a little something like this...
you want something less cartoonish? but then I'll have to go on and on and on and on. Abstraction has its costs.
The black death decimates the Western European population of peasants and serfs. The resulting demographic imbalance results in their increased bargaining power vis-a-vis their overlords, emboldening them to demand the commutation of labor services and rents-in-kind and the introduction of money-rents. Thus you get a schism between rent-collecting absentee landlords and rent-paying tenant farmers. Agricultural land can now be put to its maximum rent-yielding use and this encourages and rewards enclosures and a complex system of stratification emerges in the countryside with vagrants and hired hands and household-based handicraft producers alongside the tenant farmers (a.k.a. the "yeoman" farmers). Simple commodity manufacture is going full throttle and the labor force eventually shoehorned into the Lancashire mills isn't anywhere close to existing yet!
I don't see any substantive difference (except apparent ones due to the brevity of my resentation). I would put more emphasis on the transformation of the old "feudal" landowners into new capitalist ones (as the main beneficiaries of the redefinition of property rights) along with the role of the British Civil War and the like. I would also emphasize the way that things turned out different in France than in England... -- Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
