[PEN-L:11623] Re: more on col'ism

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(I thought I posted this, but I never did. I'm posting it simply for
because it may be of interest to someone. I hope that it doesn't restart a
debate, which as Michael P. indicates has degenerated into uselessnes.)

Jim B writes:
>Those "pockets" of capitalism were sometimes very big. Millions of people.
The Venetian state. Egypt around Cairo. Calicut. Etc./Size: "there's some
sort of threshold effect." That seems to be speculation.<

(1) All understanding of the real empirical world involves some kind of
speculation, though hopefully as little as possible, because all
understanding involves some kind of theory, which in turn involves
speculation. (NC economists speculate that people maximize "utility," while
Marxists speculate that labor is the most important source of societal
wealth. Etc.) The "facts" cannot and do not "speak for themselves." They
are interpreted and constructed based on our theories. And speculation is
important as long as we don't know the complete truth already: we fill in
the gaps in our experience and our evidence with speculation, with theory.

(2) On the threshold effect, if you read the last section of vol. I of
CAPITAL, you'll see that it involves a bunch of interacting processes. The
enclosure movement in England threw a bunch of people off the land. This
didn't just increase the supply of "free" proletarian labor. It also helped
create the English home market, since, when "freed," the workers became
dependent on markets to attain the means of their subsistence. It also
helped feed the newly "freed" workers. This then allowed the rising
industrial capitalists (both rural and urban) to realize the surplus-value
workers produced as profit.

Now the first part might not have any threshold effects, but with the
second part thrown in, there are some: just having a few hundred
proletarians does not create a home market, while having a million does so.
There are economies of scale at work here: it makes sense to set up
workshops and produce textiles (in what Marx termed "manufacture") only if
there is a big home market or a big foreign market. Otherwise, there's an
incentive to stay with simple putting-out techniques (a.k.a.,
protoindustrialization, a very fuzzy-buzzy term which should probably be
avoided). Not only that, but a big market allows farms and industries to
specialize so that the capitalist class as a whole can benefit from
"external economies of scale." (It was Smith who pointed out that
specialization is limited by the extent of the market; it's modern
economics who call them "external economies of scale" when dealing with
specialization between firms.)

The existence of both internal and external economies of scale are pretty
well known and are hardly a matter of speculation. They are central to the
idea of a threshold effects.

(3) I don't know enough about the cases you refer to ("The Venetian state.
Egypt around Cairo. Calicut") to do anything but speculate, especially
since no dates are attached to the names.

But I should mention that the ancient Roman proletariat was pretty big
(though of course the meaning of "pretty big" depends on what you compare
it to). But competition from slave labor was a key force preventing
proletarianization from allowing a capitalist explosion. This story might
apply (in different ways, not involving Roman-type slavery) to Cairo and
Calicut.

Another possible case is that free labor is too scarce and thus too
expensive to allow the development of capital (the case in the last chapter
of vol. I of CAPITAL), though I doubt that it applies to any of the three
cases you mention.

I also note that your three examples are _urban_. It is possible that if
capitalism is to rise, it has to start in agriculture, where technical
issues are relatively simple, before it can move to the city. More likely,
it's a revolution in agriculture that allows a big urban working class to
work at relatively low cost to the capitalists. It's possible that urban
capitalism in "The Venetian state. Egypt around Cairo. Calicut" couldn't
thrive because the cost of food was too high, so that wages were too high
for widespread profitable use of wage-labor.

Further, and more importantly, as I noted in a previous message, I don't
believe in single-cause theories when dealing with the empirical world of
human history. The political position of Venice vis-a-vis neighboring
countries, the economic policy of the Egyptian government, the lack of
colonies for Calicut all could have played a role. Maybe the incomplete
destruction of guilds and guild-like worker organizations -- i.e.,
incomplete urban proletarianization -- squelched the development of
capitalism in all three cities.

You'll note the reference to colonies. I am NOT one of these folks
(strawmen?) who emphasizes simply _internal causes_ (which for me involves
an agricultural revolution); the external context (i.e., the ability to
conquer the rest of the world) is also important.

To overstretch a metaphor I used before, the birth of capitalism in the UK
was home-grown, though well watered and fertilized by the profits from the
slave trade and the like. Since home-grown plants have a hard time
surviving without water and fertilizer, that says that the slave trade and
the like were crucial. (I noticed after reading this, that Eric Williams
used the fertizing metaphor.) Of course, it's almost impossible to quantify
the relative roles of seeds, water, fertilizer, sunlight, etc., in
promoting a plant's growth.

It's a mistake to assume that there are only two views of the rise of
capitalism, the "Eurocentric" and the "third-worldist."

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx & http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine