Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: No agrarian revo?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Jones wrote:
>
>  There should be less
> opinionation and more factual spadework.
>

Mark, this is bizarre. You have done real history. Lou hasn't, and hence
he has an excuse for thinking that "factual spadework" consists in
reading secondary source A who has summarzied secondary source B who has
summarized secondary source C. For serious spadework here the minimum
requirements would be knowledge of German, French, Italian, English,
Polish, and Russian (or at least to work closely with someone who knew
the last two languages.

In reference to the origins of capitalism no one on this list (including
you) can claim to even be in a position to do _any_ of the "spadework";
we can only, not on the basis of our emprical knowledge which not only
is but will remain inadequate to the task, but on the basis of our
general theoretical understanding of history make the best choice we can
from among the historians who _have_ done the spadework. Brenner his one
of those. The historians who disagreed with him in the original Brenner
debate are _also_ among those who have done the spadework.

You haven't, and you are never going to. Lou hasn't, and he is never
going to. And incidentally, Ellen Wood hasn't either -- but she doesn't
claim to. She claims to understand Marx, and on that basis she makes her
choice from among those historians, including both Brenner and Brenner's
critics, whose explanation of the data seems to her to most fit Marx's
explanation of capitalism.

And your claim is also bizarre because it simply ignores (or covers up
with the unsupported label crackpot) the whole question of deciding
_what sort of information_ could settle the argument. Lou is utterly
lost in a non-marxist or anti-marxist empiricism, in the delusion that
facts explain themselves. You know better. So before you start demanding
more facts, please state your criteria for _what sort of facts_ are
relevant.

Carrol