[PEN-L:11350] Re: Re: Capitalist development

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

My question. Why could not the participants in the debate tried to settle
clearly what issue they were arguing and what its relations to other issues
were before they plunged into an icarian sea of mindnumbing empirical
data? As important as it is to understand the *history* of imperialism,
it is far more important to understand the dynamic of contemporary
imperialism, and it is by no means self-evident that the former (history)
determines the dynamic (present as history). On the other hand, the
*origins* of capitalism is a question that goes to the very heart of the
marxist understanding of the world. The indiscriminate citing of
empirical data served only to blur the crucial political issues.

Had all participants in this debate made a greater effort to grasp
the impact of Ajit's critique of individualism (and of causal theory)
this debate might have been more productive. Facts not only do
not speak for themselves, they are utterly opaque without an
adequate theoretical framework to make them intelligible.

Rod's post below (as well as Lou's later response) comes close
to suggesting that the whole debate was pointless. Wood's power
as a historian resides in her capacity to ask the right questions
before she piles up the facts.

Carrol

Rod Hay wrote:

> Louis. Where I am coming from sounds very much like this.
>
> Rod
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> I forwarded Ellen Wood some of this exchange and she answered me with a few
> introductory sentences and some excerpts from recent writings.
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> [introductory comment]: "As you'll see in the extracts appended here from
> Origin and the summer issue, I don't argue that colonial trade 'wasn't
> important' but that its contribution to the development of capitalism can't
> be explained without explaining the new, internal dynamic of England's
> domestic capitalism, the differentia specifica of English development, which
> transformed traditional forms of trade and empire into new, capitalist forms
> (trade and empire didn't have the same dynamics or consequences elsewhere in
> Europe, in the absence of that internal capitalist dynamic)."
>
> [excerpts]:
>
> from Origin of Capitalism, pp. 100-101:
>
>       »The new dynamics of this growing capitalist system
> produced a new form of colonial imperialism.  There had been
> other, even larger and more powerful, colonial states.  But
> Britain created a new kind of imperial drive: not just the
> age-old pre-capitalist hunger for land and plunder (though that,
> of course, did not disappear) but an outward expansion of the
> same capitalist imperatives that were driving the domestic
> market, the imperatives of competitive production and expanding
> consumption.«
>       »As early as the seventeenth century, or perhaps even the
> sixteenth, the distinctive attitudes and behavior of English
> imperialists were visible in England's first major colony,
> Ireland.  Forward looking public servants, like the political
> economist William Petty, saw Ireland as a testing ground for
> agrarian capitalism, a laboratory in which to test the effects of
> transforming property relations, whatever the consequences for
> the multitudes of dispossessed.«
>       »British imperialism also, of course, contributed to the
> development of the world's first industrial capitalism.  But
> while industrialization did feed on the resources of empire, it
> is important to keep in mind that the logic of imperialism did
> not by itself bring about industrial capitalism and that imperial
> power in other European states did not produce the same effects.
> For one thing, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the
> domestic market was still more important in the British economy
> than was international trade.  In this as in many other ways
> agrarian capitalism was the root of British economic development.«
>       »Marxist historians have persuasively demonstrated, against
> many arguments to the contrary, that the greatest crime of
> European empire, slavery, made a major contribution to the
> development of industrial capitalism.6  But here too, we have
> to keep in mind that Britain was not alone in exploiting colonial
> slavery and that elsewhere it had different effects.  Other major
> European powers --France, Spain, Portugal-- amassed great wealth
> from slavery and from the trade in addictive goods like tobacco
> which, it has been argued, fueled the trade in living human
> beings.7  But, again, only in Britain was that wealth converted
> into industrial capital --and here again the difference lies in
> the new capitalist dynamic which had already transformed the
> logic of the British economy, setting in train the imperatives of
> competitive production, capital accumulation, and self-sustaining
> growth.«
>       »Trade and empire, then, were certainly essential factors
> in the development of industrial capitalism, but they cannot be
> treated as primary causes, or, to put it another way, their
> specific effects varied greatly according to their context.  We
> have to look to the English domestic market, and to the agrarian
> capitalism in which it grew, to find the differentia specifica
> that harnessed commerce and empire to capitalist industry.«
>
> And here's the extract from the summer issue [of Monthly Review], pp. 6-7:
>
>       »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.  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.«
>       »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.«
>       »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.«
>       »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.«
>
> Rod Hay
> rodhay@xxxxxxxxxxx
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