[PEN-L:11661] Re: Re: more on col'ism

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

Jim,
      Of course you're right about definitions.  I am
not going to pop one off here, though.
      It is useful to remember something that has now
been pointed out:  enclosures had been going on for
some time.  An urban proletariat did not just start appearing
in the 1700s in England.  That had been such a proletariat
in a lot of towns for a long time in lots of parts of the world.
People were either being shoved off the land or were just
getting up and leaving.  Those workers who went on strike
in Douai in the late 1200s were not a fantasy.
     What may be at issue here is that old bugaboo, the threshold
effect.  At what point does capitalism, whatever it is, come to
totally dominate a society?  This is the way that Polanyi
considered the question, and he answered that it was not
until quite late.  That involves a transformation of both relations
and forces of production in both the countryside and the city.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 4:38 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:11657] Re: more on col'ism


>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
>
>