[PEN-L:11323] Re: Re: Capitalist development

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 09/20/99 11:52AM >>>
I forwarded Ellen Wood some of this exchange and she answered me with
a few introductory sentences and some excerpts from recent writings.

Doug

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[excerpts]:

from Origin of Capitalism, pp. 100-101:
-clip-

      +For those who regard capitalism as the consequence of
commercial expansion when it reached a critical mass, there is
something paradoxical about the development of English
capitalism.

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Charles: Marx describes the uniqueness of England as compared with other European countries in the primitive accumulation of capitalism as England's thoroughgoing divorce of the producers from the means of production in the brutal and rapid removal of the English peasants from their land in the formation of wage or free labor. For Marx the differentia specifica seems to be greater early formation of free labor than in other European countries, not England's particular  system of trade and commerce, whether foreign or domestic. This is consistent with Marx's overall analysis of capitalism which starts with production and not exchange or circulation ( trade and comerce). Surplus value is generated in production and not exchange.  Perhaps this is why there is a paradox in seeing commercial critical mass as the difference for England.

Thus, if  " England's peculiarity was not its role in an
outwardly expanding commercial system but, on the contrary, its
inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy" , might we say further specifically that the uniqueness of the English domestic economy was the early establishment  of wage-labor relations as compared with other European domestic economies ?


CB

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 England was certainly part of a vast trading
network.  But other European nation states in the early modern
period were also deeply involved in the system of international
trade, and non-European civilizations in Asia and the Islamic
world also had highly developed and extensive trading networks.
What distinguished England --and what was specifically capitalist
about it-- was not, in the first instance, predominance as a
trading nation or any peculiarity in its way of conducting
foreign trade.  England's peculiarity was not its role in an
outwardly expanding commercial system but, on the contrary, its
inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy.½
      +What marked off England's commercial system from others
was a single large and integrated national market, increasingly
uniting the country into one economic unit (which eventually
embraced the British Isles as a whole), with a specialized
division of labor among interdependent regions and a growing, and
mutually reinforcing, interaction between agricultural and
industrial sectors.  This market was also distinctive in the
extent to which it traded not just in luxury goods but in cheap
everyday goods --the means of survival and self-reproduction--
for a mass market.½
      +So while England competed with others in an expanding
system of international trade, a new kind of commercial system
was emerging at home --which would soon give it an advantage on
the international plane too.  Unlike traditional commercial
systems, this one did not just depend on profits derived from the
carrying trade or an "infinite succession of arbitrage operations
between separate, distinct, and discrete markets."?5?  This
system was unique in its dependence on intensive as distinct from
extensive expansion, on the extraction of surplus value created
in production as distinct from profit in the sphere of
circulation, on economic growth based on increasing productivity
and competition within a single market --in other words, on
capitalism.½
      +So capitalism, while it certainly developed within --and
could not have developed without-- an international system of
trade, was a domestic product.  But it was not in the nature of
capitalism to remain at home for long.  Its need for endless
accumulation, on which its very survival depended, produced new
and distinctive imperatives of expansion.  These imperatives
operated at various levels.  The most obvious was, of course, the
imperialist drive.  There was, to be sure, nothing new about
colonialism, and Britain's major European rivals were just as
much involved in the subjugation of colonial territories, in the
oppression of colonial peoples, and in the slave trade.  But here
again, capitalism had a transformative effect.  The new
requirements of capitalism created new imperialist needs, and it
was British capitalism that produced an imperialism answering to
the specific requirements of capitalist accumulation, its
particular need for resources, labor, and markets.½