[PEN-L:11663] Re: Re: Re: more on col'ism

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley writes:
>      Of course you're right about definitions.  I am
>not going to pop one off here, though.

Why not? isn't the intellectual clarity that comes from even provisional
definitions worth the effort needed to define terms?

>      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.

Enclosures happened a long time, it is true (as Paul Phillips pointed out),
but there seems to have waves of this process. Marx argues -- convincingly,
to me -- that the wave that happened in the late 1400s and early 1500s (in
the aftermath of societal crisis that followed the Plague, as those more
demographically-minded than  Marx would note) was decisive.

I don't get where the reference to the 1700s comes from; it doesn't come
from me but from people like Mantoux (who remains a useful source, BTW). As
Paul pointed out, a lot of enclosures came before that. The 1700s
represents pretty much the end of the enclosure process, not the beginning.
(However, as I mentioned someone I knew in grad. school grew up in a town
in the UK near fields that had never been enclosed. My feak and weeble
memory suggests that it was the Nick Crafts, the economic historian.)

Getting up and leaving the land in Western European history, at least
before the Plague, mostly meant a move (by serfs or semi-serfs) to the
Eastern frontier and the effort to free-hold.

>Those workers who went on strike
>in Douai in the late 1200s were not a fantasy.

I never said they were. I just pointed to the "threshold effects" needed to
start the self-feeding process that defines capitalist accumulation.

>     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.

Why are the forces of production part of the definition of capitalism? I
know that some people (including Polanyi) define capitalism in terms of the
use of machines ("capital"), but I've never understood that at all.
Capitalism, in my mind, is defined by the relationships between people, not
the nature of the tools that people use.

Though I like Polanyi's work (the empirical research and much of the
interpretation, the link with anthropology, etc.), you've got to admit that
his theory in THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION is in many ways "Marx Lite." (His
theory seems  fuzzier than Marx, though not as fuzzy as Heilbroner.) He
also seems more Eurocentric than Marx. The "100 years peace" indeed! It
(1815-1914) was only "peace" (and a limited one at that) if you look at
relationships among the established capitalist powers.

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