Re: Re: No agrarian revo?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol:
>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.

False. Michael Perelman's "Invention of Capitalism" is one of the more
important scholarly works on these questions that has been published in
over a decade. He did not go looking into city hall records from provincial
France in the 17th century. He merely read carefully from material found in
libraries. I even tracked down a rare book for him (Steuart, I believe)
from the Columbia library. As a matter of fact, Maurice Dobb's "Studies in
the Development of Capitalism" proceeeds in the same manner. Marxist
historians generally make use of primary material written by specialists.
Unfortunately, the discussions on PEN-L around the origins of capitalism
fail to do this. Is it possible that people have better things to do with
their time than read about colonial Mexico in the 18th century? Isn't there
a Santa Claus?

>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.

So true. Just five minutes ago, I pinched my nose to make sure I still exist.

Louis Proyect
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