[PEN-L:11702] Re: Capitalist development

["James M. Blaut" <70671.2032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rod:

If you take the total bundle of conditions that -- we now know in hindsight
-- would lead to economic and technological development, and then weigh the
European bundle and compare it with the Chinese, Indian, etc., bundles,
you'd find, I think, that they weighed about the same in 1500. Europe was
ahead in some technologies, behind in others. Europe was about on a par
with several other civilizations in matters of banking, accounting, credit,
etc. The same holds true for the psychological traits -- progressiveness,
need to achieve, inventiveness, venturesomeness, watever.

This is not mystical. There are two key facts: (1) there was diffusion of
all these things among the economic centers of all these civilizations so
that opportunities/solutions available to one of them would become known to
others; stated differently there were interlocking trade circuits (see
Janet Abu Lughod's BEFORE EUROPEAN HEGEMONY on this) that connected up the
regions from western Europe to east Africa to east Asia;, and (2) there
were no cultural "blocking agents" (caste, religion, whatever) that held
some civilizations back, as was traditionally thought.

I'm talking mostly about advanced centers, mostly cities and their
hinterlands, and most of them seaports (because sea travel had no political
or other barriers,"gateways," as land travel did). Also, I'm not making the
mistake of assuuming that commerce, not production, was the core of the
process.

HOWEVER, in addition to all this, I suspect that, across the entire swathe
of class-stratified agricultural landscapes, some sort of slowly emergiung
crisis was occurring, probably based -- as we Marxists know very well for
Europe -- in the contradictions of landlordism and the necessarily
continuously increasing demand by landlords (essntially = ruling class) for
more and more surplus, to which peasant resisted. There were peasant
revolts all over the place during the 13th-16th centuries. Now, I can't
support tthis last proposition (widespread emerging rural crisis) with much
hard evidence. I do have at least fragmentary evidence that potential
productivity of peasnat labor in all these regions was probably about the
same: enough to meet subsistence needs and to provide a surplus of -- what?
-- say about 50% of production for the elites, mostly as rent in kind or
cash or labor service, until the ruling class demands became excessiv eand
oppressive. I know that the differing farming systems tended to be rather
similar in their potential for reutrns to labor (tho not to land).

SO: I'm suggesting that perhaps a common evolutionary process was going on
in both in rural and urban areas of the class-stratified portion of the
Eastern Hemisphere, but only Europe experienced the transition to
capitalism and that is because of early colonialism -- slave production,
unequal trade, and bullion -- resulting from the Conquest of America.

Does that answer your question about my argument?

Cheers

Jim Blaut