[PEN-L:11692] Re: Re: Re: Re: more on col'ism

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

JIm,
     Capitalism = private ownership of the means
of production as the predominant pattern in a
society.
     So there.  Take it or leave it.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 5:39 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:11663] Re: Re: Re: more on col'ism


>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
>
>