Re: Ascent/Descent

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

DMS wrote:
> It is evident in the development of the US and France that
> the capitalization of agriculture, breaking the obsolete 
> forms of landed property, France in its revolution,
> the US in its Civil War, is the mechanism that allows
> for the growth of the domestic market, and the detachment
> of labor from land. 
>
> Regarding Spain, the history of Spain's interaction with
> its colonies, particularly the Caribbean colonies, is
> the history of Spain's inability to sustain its colonies;
> an inability that includes basic provisions, technical
> resources, means of transport (ships), and even the
> supply of laborers, slaves. England even won the asiento
> to provide the slaves to the Spanish colonies.

I don't find it particularly useful to study the rise of capitalism in a 
particular country like England or France. It is first and foremost a 
world system.

As Marx put it in the chapter on the genesis of the industrial 
capitalist in V. 1 of Capital:

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, 
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the 
beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of 
Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, 
signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These 
idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On 
their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the 
globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from 
Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is 
still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

"The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves 
now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, 
Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 
17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the 
colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the 
protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., 
the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the 
concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house 
fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production 
into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the 
midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an 
economic power."

In distinction to Marx, Robert Brenner relies heavily on this 
"capitalism in a single country" approach. This has led Perry Anderson 
to make the following observation in a review of Brenner's "Merchants 
and Revolution" in the London Review of Books:

"For all the power of this case (Brenner's thesis), there were always
difficulties with its overall context. The idea of capitalism in one
country, taken literally, is only a bit more plausible than that of
socialism. For Marx the different moments of the modern biography of
capital were distributed in a cumulative sequence, from the Italian 
cities to the towns of Flanders and Holland, to the empires of Portugal 
or Spain and the ports of France, before being 'systematically combined 
in England at the end of the 17th century'. Historically it makes better 
sense to view the emergence of capitalism as a value-added process 
gaining in complexity as it moved along a chain of inter-related sites. 
In this story, the role of cities was always central. English landowners 
could never have started their conversion to commercial agriculture 
without the market for wool in Flemish towns--just as Dutch farming was 
by Stuart times in advance of English, not least because it was 
conjoined to a richer urban society."

Turning to Spain, it is most useful to consider this country as a link 
in the chain that was responsible for the rise of Western Europe in the 
early mercantile phase of capitalism. Henry Kamen correctly observes:

>>The foreign markets and their agents now extended their operations to 
America, so that Spain in its relations with the New World found itself 
acting largely as an entrepôt for foreign goods. Seville rose to become 
the wonder of the world but its rise was a function of dependence. The 
early years of the boom gave way to disillusion. The bullion of Potosí 
and Zacatecas did not go to Spain. "Spain", reported an observer, "is no 
more than the channel by which the Gold of the Indies passes to 
discharge itself in the vast Ocean of other Countries."<<

Time permitting, I will expand on some of Kamen's other interesting 
insights.



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