Louis Proyect wrote:
I have stated that capitalism can involve market forces, as Brenner and Wood focus on, and it can also involve extra-economic forces such as the corvee in much of French colonial Africa, King Leopold's semi-slavery in the Congo, apartheid South Africa with its pass laws, Nazi Germany, etc. As a rule of thumb, when there is an ample supply of labor, it is more efficient to allow market forces to exert the whip. When there is an inadequate supply, you need the actual whip.
Who claims that concrete, historical capitalist societies involve only market forces? I don't know this Brenner fellow, but claiming that capitalism is market forces only is like saying that the moon is made up of cheese. If that were Brenner's position, then spending a second refuting it would be a waste of time. Without having read this guy, but knowing your Internet persona, I find it very unlikely that such a silly view is the Brenner thesis. How do I know? I don't know, but a clue is that you have previously assimilated my views to those of Brenner. On that basis, even without having read Brenner's work, I think that you are confused. And your confusion arises from not understanding the distinction between a general mode of production and the concrete society in which a mode of production dominates. So the matter is not, mainly, one of historical knowledge, but of method.
Marx was simply describing the pure form that existed in Great Britain.
Again, you are confused. In the mid 19th century, England was an extremely fluid, complex capitalist society -- at least as fluid and complex as any other society of the time. It provided Marx's theorizing with an empirical referent, not because it typified in any way the origins of capitalist production. Marx never wrote that England was the "classic ground" of the *gestation and birth* of capitalist production. Or show us where. Rather, it was the best available empirical referent of *industrially mature* capitalist production. Marx knew of -- and duly documented -- the origins of capitalist production in a number of places, including the city ports of the Mediterranean and northern continental Europe. (And *capitalist production* is not to be confused with *capital* in its "antediluvian forms" whose origins are traced to the ancient world.) That's all in Capital. However, when trying to pin down, not the historical genesis, but the "logic" of developed capitalist societies -- starting with the logic of capital (although not intending to stop there, as Michael Lebowitz has shown to my satisfaction) -- the English case provided the best available empirical referent. *At the time*, mid-19th-century England happened to be the place where *the inherent tendencies of capitalist production* (which emerged and evolved historically in more than one place taking all sorts of convoluted historical routes) were more apparent, because capitalist production there was most advanced. But not for a moment Marx thought the concrete early history of capitalist production in England was some kind of prototype the development of capitalism in other places had to follow. Again, prove the contrary. Since that's a non-issue, I insist that the base problem here is that you mistake the abstract for the concrete. Since the abstract is always less rich than the complex, then you discard the abstract as inadequate. But that's because you don't seem to grasp the role adequate abstractions play in figuring things out.
I simply don't think that he gave much thought to how capitalism functioned in Latin America or would begin to function in Africa after he was dead. As I pointed out, what he wrote about Asia was wrong.
Of course Marx missed things. Partly his inborn personal limitations. We all know he wasn't a very talented guy. And partly the limitations imposed on him by time and circumstance -- he didn't have LexisNexis or Google at his fingertips. That said, a more fruitful effort would aim to disentangle the extent to which "what he wrote about Asia" was "wrong" (assuming it was) due to (a) his understandably limited knowledge of Asian societies and what due to (b) the approach with which he dissected the little he knew of those societies. I understand everything is related, but it's a non sequitur to say that being "wrong" because of (a) implies being "wrong" because of (b).
I see capitalism as a global system that was initially fed by three tributaries. One, the internal changes in the European countryside that are associated with the Brenner thesis. Two, the expansion of manufacturing and a growing division of labor in the old guild systems of the Middle Ages. Three, the rape of Africa and Latin America which provided the silver and gold and other key resources (timber, fur, tobacco, sugar, etc.) that fueled economic growth in the mother countries. It was a perfect storm.
If by the time I write this note, you still believe this is a fair description of your views, then maybe you'll be in a position to note that your real beef is with the historical characterization of *the origin* of capitalist production. That dispute is and should be, by nature, inconclusive. Why? Because it's in the nature of historical analysis to uncover new facts and continuously re-evaluate the past through the lens of current history. The kind of argument that can tilt the balance in favor of one or another theory is necessarily casuistic and -- ideally -- should be founded on facts. Now, Louis, I don't mean to question your credentials as a historian, but -- if you're really adamant about debunking some folks' thesis about the origins of capitalism -- there are venues where that effort could be more effective. I doubt that a direct quote by Winston Churchill speaks for itself. The settlement of the historical argument does not weigh *directly* on the issue of what the specific essence of capitalist production is. And that's my beef with your way of reasoning. Plunder, expropriation by force, enslavement, and murder have been common to the whole arch of human history. These horrors have been turbocharged under capitalism. Yet, neither of these methods create wealth. They only reshuffle existing wealth -- and destroy some in the process. The key to understanding modern societies -- the sequence of industrial revolutions that have led from the artisan shop in the Middle Ages to Smith's needle factory to Engels' cotton factory in Manchester to Ford's assembly line to object-oriented programming, etc., the social upheavals in the last few centuries, and the expansion of human possibilities thus making human emancipation from need and exploitation a reachable goal -- lies in the characteristic mode of creation of wealth, in the mode of reproduction of social life, in the basic mode of exploitation of labor. What Marx argued was that the primitive methods of exploitation were being superseded, pushed to the corners, sublated, transformed into subsidiary methods by the new mode of production: surplus value production. Pinning down the specific essence of capitalist production allowed him to roughly anticipate the direction of concrete capitalist societies in ways that conflating capitalist exploitation with other modes of exploitation would have precluded. I don't know how we can observe recent history and not see how right the guy was. Frankly, based on what I know of you, I don't believe you are motivated by a genuine search for historical truth. You seem to be driven by the desire to shock and prove that you're more radical than the Joneses. Proudhon argued that property was theft. That seemed like a deeply radical notion. Marx showed that what appeared to be a radical critique of property and capitalism was actually superficial, circular reasoning, and a political dead end. You may think that by re-defining capitalist production as based on extra-economic exploitation, your thesis becomes much more radical than Marx's. But that's in your head only. [I don't have time to proof this note. Apologies beforehand.]
