[PEN-L:11662] binary passions

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wojtek:
>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.

Blah-blah-blah.

There is no mystery about how plundered gold found its way from Peru to the
Iberian peninsula--where relatively backward colonial states ruled over
Latin American--to England where it provided the springboard for English
capitalism. Spain and Portugal were just way-stations. Here, read this
please, and your confusion will dissipate:

Eduardo Galeano, "Open Veins of Latin America":

The gold began to flow just when Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with
England in 1703. The treaty crowned a long series of privileges obtained by
British merchants in Portugal. In return for some advantages for its wines
in the English market, Portugal opened its own and its colonies? markets to
British manufactures. In view of the existing inequality of industrial
development, this proved disastrous for local Portuguese manufactures. It
was not with wine that English textiles were paid for, but with
gold?Brazilian gold?and in the process Portuguese looms were paralyzed. Not
content with killing its own industry in the bud, Portugal destroyed the
seeds of any kind of manufacturing development in Brazil: until 1715 sugar
refineries were banned, in 1729 it was made a criminal offense to build new
roads in the mining region, and in 1785 local looms and spinning mills were
ordered burned.

England and Holland, the leading gold and slave contrabandists amassed
fortunes in the illegal "black meat" traffic and are said have illicitly
garnered more than half the metal the Portuguese Crown was supposed to get
from Brazil in quinto real tax. But Brazilian gold was channeled to London
by licit as well as illicit methods. The gold boom, which brought a host of
Portuguese to Minas Gerais sharply stimulated colonial demand for
industrial products and at same time provided the means to pay for them.
Just as Potosi rebounded off Spanish soil, Minas Gerais gold only reached
Portugal in transit. The metropolis became an intermediary. In 1755 the
Marquis de Pombal, Portugal?s prime minister, tried to revive a
protectionist policy, but it was too late. He declared that the English
conquered Portugal without the trouble of a conquest, that were supplying
two-thirds of its needs, and that British agents trolled the whole of
Portuguese trade. Portugal was producing almost nothing, and the wealth
brought by gold was so illusory that even the black slaves who mined it
were clothed by the British.

Celso Furtado has noted that Britain, following a farsighted policy with
respect to industrial development, used Brazilian gold to pay essential
imports from other countries and could thus concentrate investments in the
manufacturing sector. Thanks to this historical graciousness on the part of
the Portuguese, Britain could apply rapid and efficient technical
innovations. Europe?s financial center moved from Amsterdam to London.
According to British sources, the value of Brazilian gold arriving in
London reached £50,000 a week in some periods. Without this tremendous
accumulation of gold reserves Britain would not have been able, later on,
to confront Napoleon.



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)