[PEN-L:11657] Re: more on col'ism

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley writes:
>     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.

    It depends on what you mean by capitalism, doesn't it? I don't think
arguments about definitions are productive, but it sure helps discussion if
people share definitions, or at least make them explicit. (I haven't been
reading all of the recent discussion. Did you or Jim B. ever define
"capitalism"?)

    If you define capitalism in terms of markets for final goods &
services, then maybe the "urban area theory" works. (This theory equates
capitalism with simple commodity production and M-C-M.) If you define
capitalism in terms of the proletarianization of labor, on the other hand,
then the British countryside plays a big role. (This differentiates between
simple commodity production and capitalism, seeing the latter as a process
of M-C-M' which implies accumulation.)

    IMHO, the latter definition of capitalism works better (1) because it
distinguishes capitalism from the market, which is important since the
latter has been around for thousands of years while most observers would
say that capitalism has only been around & growing for a few hundred years
[*]; and (2) because the market theory ignores the importance of all of the
"factors of production" and the _macrosociological_ conditions needed for
the kind of extendend reproduction that capitalism has seen. (* I
deliberately left the number of hundreds of years vague, since different
schools differ on how long Kism has prevailed.)

     A town that develops commercially (or capitalistically, following the
first definition), will have big problems having sustained growth of the
market if it doesn't have a mass of proletarians available. As I wrote
before, not only did an agricultural revolution of the relations of
production (e.g., the enclosure movement in England) create a ready supply
of labor-power to the city's nacent capitalists, but it gets rid of an
alternative to the capitalist use of proletarian labor (i.e.,
directly-forced labor) and allows a _technological_ revolution in
agriculture that can supply food to the city. (Moving away from the
traditional three-field system under the control of a community and uniting
it as a one-field system controlled by an individual capitalist can have
some positive effects, though they are only narrowly-defined economic
ones.) The creation of a "free" proletariat also allowed the side-stepping
of the urban guilds; we should remember that most of the early mills in
England weren't in London, which was dominated by guilds, but in the
hinterland of the time (Manchester, etc.), where there were few guilds.
(This of course encouraged the London capitalists to improve their
competitiveness via "Combination Acts.")

     As you've probably guessed, I like metaphors and similes (and think of
theories as essentially a special kind of such imagery). You agree that
"Capitalism was the cuckoo's egg laid in the confines of the medieval
towns." In contrast, I'd say that the medieval towns weren't the _nest_ but
rather the _shell_. Capitalism grew inside the urban shell, which was
nurtured in the rural nest. (The mama vulture got nutriment from the
colonies, of course). That rural nest also allowed the development of rural
capitalism, in different shells.

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