Origins of Industrial Capitalism (was: Re: Genovese, Laclauand Brenner)

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxx 11/08/00 05:28AM >>>

-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>


Lou posted here a long theoretical/literature review section from an article
by Stern.  THANKS, Lou.  I now have the feeling that I understand what the
"Brenner debate" is really about.

Let me see if I have this right.

If I understand it correctly, and I am broadly generalizing, the debate is
largely between two schools of Marxist economists which differ about what
the decisive step or steps in the development of the capitalist system, and
its qualitative breaking away from and ultimate domination of the previous
feudal system in Europe really was or were.  School A is looking at the
merchant capitalists, slavers, war entrepreneurs, colonial magnates, etc.,
of the period 1550-1700 as essentially continuous with the bourgeoisie of
today, and is looking at their extraction of surplus value by means of
slavery and conquest as an essential part of that bourgeoisie's rise to
dominance.

(((((((((((

CB: There's also school C , that sees today's capitalists as a continuity of 
both the
merchants, userers, slavers , war entrepreneurs, colonial magnates AND the
agricultural capitalists in the English countryside.

))))))))



School B believes that "real" capitalism, the capitalism of importance, is
industrial capitalism, not "mere" merchant capitalism, and believes that the
merchant capitalists, left to their own devices, would have gotten nowhere
and would have created no new system.  The important thing that has to be
explained is the institution of capitalist production of commodities
-clip-