[PEN-L:11313] Re: Re: Capitalist development

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ricardo Duchesne wrote:

> > Ricardo: "Should remember that many Marxists, including Wood, do not think
> > the colonial trade was that important."
> >
> > Ricardo, I own all of Wood's books and waited until I got home to check up
> > on this. Her newest "The Origin of Capitalism" does not seem to take sides
> > on O'Brien-Darity type questions. There is no entry in the index on
> > colonialism, nor is there a reference to Blaut, Amin, et al. . . .
>
> ... if Wood does not even use the word
> "colonialism" in a book dealing with the origins of capitalism, it is
> because she does not think it was important at all.

I haven't read Wood's *Origins*, but I've read and reread the chapters
concerned with origins in her *Democracy against Capitalism*, and unless
*Origins* is very different from that earlier work, Ricardo is correct here.
Colonialism simply does not figure in Wood's conception of the *origins*
of capitalism -- and she does not discuss its *growth*.

As I have indicated in an earlier post, these are really quite different
questions, and this entire collection of threads has never touched
on the question of origins but has battled over the question of the
growth of capitalism once it had arisen.

Wood's main concern is to reject theories of origins which treat
capitalism as bound to happen as soon as certain fetters were
removed, as a mystic force of some sort always there and ready
to burst forth. Such conceptions dehistoricize capitalism and thereby
simply liquidate marxism. She is particularly anxious to refute what
she calls technological determinism.

Note that Wood by academic training is a political scientist and historian,
not an economist. This gives her a considerable advantage in exploring the
question of origins. Economics can only deal with the internal dynamics
of an existing capitalist system, not with the change from one mode of
production to another.

Carrol