Re: Ellen Meiksins Woody Allen

[Greg Schofield <gschofield@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis I think this might be a misreading of the Wood quote:

At 03:29  24/05/01 -0400, you wrote:
>At the same time, Spain, the dominant early colonial power and the leader
>in "primitive accumulation" of the classical kind, which amassed huge
>wealth especially from South American silver and gold mines, and was well
>endowed with "capital" in the simple sense of wealth, did not develop in a
>capitalist direction. Instead, Spain expended its massive colonial wealth
>in essentially feudal pursuits, especially war and the construction of its
>Habsburg empire in Europe.

The quote above is speaking of the accumulated surplus from the Americas,
in Spain and how it was employed, not as the quote below, which is a very
interesting one, which speaks of the opposite - the surplus retained in the
Americas.

The problem with Spain, and one which has been pondered from many different
angles, is where did all the surplus go (16-17th centuries). Initial
conquests of the Americas appropriated the accumulated wealth of the Aztec
and Inca empires (that is most their gold "reserves"), after this initial
rape the Spanish concentrated on extracting whatever surpluses they could
lay their hands on in the most brutal way imaginable (Silver and gold mines
being classic examples) - the export back to Spain was enormous - but in
Spain very little of this found its way to anything resembling capitalist
development (shipbuilding and other military supplies etc being an
exception but still not leading to an Iberian capitalism).

In Britain as a counter example, Liverpool slave trading merchants
(somewhat similar in disposition to the Early Spanish) invested their
profits into such things as Manchester mills other merchant ventures and
plantation developments, which complemented their slaving but also stood
separate from it to one degree or another.

Likewise the latter profits of the East India Company. Imperial profit thus
directly fed into capitalist developments in Britain regardless of the
effect on those places where the surpluses were first extracted.

James Lang below is talking about the other end of this extraction where
surplus was retained and deployed, it would not surprise me then that
capitalist development might even be further ahead in the Spainish colonies
than in Spain itself - taken the quote below at face value.

A similar thing happened in convict Australia (1789-1833) where various
trading innovations (whaling, sandlewood and tea) actual meant that
convicts in Australia sometimes reached a higher standard of living than
workers in Britain (not part of the British plan at all) - this was
recently proved by recent excavations of convict barrack sites in Sydney
which revealed items of luxuries far above that generally expected
(mother-of-pearl buttons, fine china, well made shoes, quality linens). Of
course this in Australia also led to some capitalist development, hampered
by the convict system (for some time Rum was a recognised currency)  so the
picture is actually quite different to the one of Lang's below.

If the picture Lang paints is true (and logic would seem to support it)
then that is one more contradiction to through into the pile, but I do not
think it touches on Wood's point which is how the surplus was treated in Spain.

>James Lang, "Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas"
>(Harcourt Brace, 1975):
>
>"The seventeenth century belies most of our common assumptions about the
>Spanish empire in America. Creoles exerted strong pressure on bureaucratic
>administration. The proof of the vitality of that power is that the
>economic interests and needs of the colonists in the long run determined
>the nature of the economy. Whether it was the regulation of the Indian
>labor, the restrictions on intercontinental trade, the prohibitions against
>the contraband traffic, or the limitations on vineyards and olive groves,
>the initiative of the monarchy had, at best, mixed results. Our image of
>colonial Spanish America as a stagnant morass capable only of silver
>production is false. So is our assumption of remorseless Spanish
>exploitation that deprived the New World of all its silver in exchange for
>a rigid political theocracy that imposed the will of Madrid. In the
>seventeenth century, the colonists of the New World retained the greatest
>share of silver for their own use, investing it in the domestic economy or
>employing it to purchase foreign goods either through the Indies fleet or
>contraband channels. They built ships, carried on trade, developed
>plantation agriculture oriented toward tropical products, and invested in
>mining and 'obrajes' (an early version of textile sweatshops). The
>merchants of Lima were no less resourceful than those of Boston, and their
>influence was often extensive."
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org