Re: Re: Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re: weber)

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:52 PM 12/7/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >Enclosure mattered the most at the _origin_ of capitalism, for the
> >_creation_ of the drive toward M-C-M'.
> >
> >Yoshie
>
> Except in Spain?

I don't know enough about the enclosures in Spain (and my Spain books are
all at home), but it's quite possible that enclosures there were different
from those in England. It's quite possible that individual property in land
was created without creating a sufficiently-large class of proletarians who
were divorced from access to the means of subsistence and thus had to work
for the capitalist or die. Both parts of Marx's "double freedom" (freedom
from bondage and freedom from direct access to the means of subsistence)
are needed to allow the existence of a proletariat large enough to permit
extended reproduction of capital (and M-C-M'). It's important to remember
that even during the "feudal" period, there were large swaths of Western
Europe that had individual property in land ("freeholds"). However, it was
usually owned by small-holders who pursued a survival strategy rather than
allowing themselves to be swallowed by the capitalist market. (They were
allowed to pursue that strategy because of their direct access to the means
of subsistence.)

In addition, I wonder about the timing. _When_ did these enclosures take
place? if they took place in 1492 and after, it's quite possible that the
landless proletarians were absorbed by the military and by the effort to
loot the "New World" and to be the overlords of the forced-labor
plantations that were established there. (BTW, one of the often-ignored
societal bases for colonial expansion is that it solves the "labor
problem," allowing a cross-class coalition against the colonized.)

I would love to hear from an expert on this subject to see how valid or
invalid my speculations are.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine