[PEN-L:11315] Re: Capitalist development

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> 09/20/99 11:05AM >>>


The notion that Wood would have assumed co-editing
responsibilities with Paul and Harry, while sharing the
O'Brien-Duchesne-Max Weber world-view, is just a joke. That's what the
reference to "Skippy Wood" was meant to say.

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Charles: It is interesting to me that in the prototype for historical materialist analysis, _Capital_, Karl Marx, far from ignoring what some "materialists" on this thread have downplayed as "moral" elements, completely fills his discussion of the Primitive Accumulation , the Origins of the farming and industrial capitalists, with discussion of the murder, plunder, theft, brutality, force, violence, treachery, trickery against NON-EUROPEANS ( I accidently left my copies of Vol, 1 or I would give all the terms he uses) as NECESSARY MATERIAL PREMISES for Europe to leap from protocapitalism to full capitalism. In other words, Marx is not distinguished from a Weber by the absence of attention to "spirtual" or "moral" factors as causes of European capitalism's takeoff. Rather, instead of Weber's individual self-determination, rationality and work ethic, Marx sees a unique level of the ruthless and willful use of force and violence as the "moral" ( or moral lack) or spiritual premis!
es of European capitalism. Far from idealism moralizing or whatever, Marx's example shows these factors as important to an historical materialist analysis of capitalism.

Marx also notes this viciousness was critical to the process of primitive accumulation within Europe itself, the removal of peasants from their the land and transformation of them into proletarians. The creation of free labor was a brutal process. At the beginning  of the section on Primitive Accumulation, he mocks the myth that their were those who worked hard and those who were lazy , and the former got rich and became the capitalists and the latter became the workers.  His whole analysis then substitutes the fact of willful brutality and violence for the Weberian "work ethic" (pre-Weber of course) fiction.

Charles Brown