[PEN-L:11656] Re: binary passions

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxx>]

At 01:09 PM 9/24/99 -0500, Mathew Forstater wrote:
>One of the issues I am trying to get at is that there were egalitarian
>societies, non-stratified societies, classless societies (the being
>obviously some controversy here--for a change!), and it is important to have
>a more subtle analysis I believe than the impression given by Wojtek below.
>There are also all kinds of "mixed" systems, or systems with differing
>levels and degrees of internal stratification or not, etc., and also just
>different systems period.  To seriously address the issues that are implied
>and suggested by Wojtek's post--whether he meant to or not--we need to--as
>Carroll has remined--do some theory.  We need a general theoretical
>framework--let's make the theoretical framework explicit, explore and
>develop it (by the way, for anyone who cares, this was exactly [one of]
>Darity's criticism[s] of O'Brien, but that got lost in the shuffle).


Before we agree on a theory, we need to agree on the unit of analysis.  As
you correctly observed, there are all kinds of "mixed systems", meaning
that in any particular social-historical setting, there are differet kinds
of units of production.  Some of them may operate in a "capitalist" mode
(i.e. employing wage labor to produce commodities for exchange, profit
maximizing, accumulating, etc.) whereas other do not (for example, peasant
households, artisan shops, etc.).  Thus, lableing such a "system" as
'capitalist' or 'pre-capitalis' is a pars-pro-toto fallacy, we focus of
those cases that we a priori label important while ignore other.

This is of fundamental importantce to answering the question whether
colonial exploitation was a suffcient/necessary/contributing condition of
capitalist development.  WEstern countries were not showered with pludered
gold, falling like manna from the sky.  Au contraire, plunder was a highly
organized activity - meaning that there were institutions that financed and
organized expeditions, and there were institutions that received and
controlled gold brough from the Americas.  Moreover, those instituions had
contacts with certain other institutions, both domestic and foreign and
have little or no contact with still other instituions.

So to answer the question at hand we have to examine how the availability
of plundered resources affected the structure and behavior of (i)
instituions (organizations) that directly received/controled those
resources, (ii) institutions that collaborated with those that directly
controlled the resources, (iii) institutions that controlled/regulated
these organizations that received the resources (iv) institutions that had
no contact or competed against those organizations that either directrly
received the resources or that benefited from those resources directly, etc.

That would suggest organization rather than the nation state (let alone
'world system' where everything is connected with everything so all we can
do is hold hands and hope for synergy instead of doing a rational analysis)
to be the proper unit of analysis.  It is not unreasonale to presume that
capitalist mode of production started at the level of individual
organization (firm) and then spread out to other fields, geographical
regions, countries.

So it is worthwhile to examine where the first capitalist firms emerged.
In Spain, where the plundered gold was received.  Certainly not.  So
clearly, the availability of the plundered resources was not the suffcient
condition.  But that does not rule out the necessary condition.  But the
problem with the necessary condtion is this.  A firm might have been able
to switch to the 'capitalist' mode of production solely because of the
availability of the plundered resources - as the third worldist crowd on
this list suggest.  But it might have also switched to that mode of
production solely because it was denied those resources, and in order to
overcome their disadvantage, it had to develop a more efficient form of
production/exploitation of domestic resources.

In both cases, the availability of plundered resources can be considered a
necessary condition of capitalist development, but each one tells a very
different story.  In the first instance, capitalist development was a
direct result of resource availability, in the second instance - it was a
response to competitive disadvantage created by availability of pludered
resources to some but not all organizations.

Moreover, we need to examine the response to 'capitalist innovation' by
other institutions/organizations, governments, organized religion,
nobility, guilds, etc.  Which one were supportive, which ones were hostile?
Under what conditions?

Again, the proper unit of analysis to answer that question is organization,
not nation-state, let alone abstractions like 'world system.'  Only when we
can test some empirical hypotheses at that level, we can come with a theory
of capitalist development.


wojtek