[PEN-L:11650] Re: Re: more on col'ism

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     Personally I have always rather liked Lewis Mumford's
old line (quoted approvingly by Braudel) that,
"Capitalism was the cuckoo's egg laid in the confines
of the medieval towns."  For all the talk of what went
on in the British countryside, it was indeed in urban areas,
whether Venice, Cairo, Canton, or Calicut that those nests
of capitalism spawned.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 11:11 AM
>Subject: [PEN-L:11623] Re: more on col'ism


>(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
>
>