RE: Rethinking the transition from feudalism question

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: Rethinking the transition from feudalism question

I said:>>It should be mentioned that Brenner (a common target of Louis' ire) doesn't "belittle the achievements of the past and to assume in a

patronizing way that medieval people were primitive and ignorant..."
Rather, he assumes that people were basically "economically rational"
and that it was the feudal mode of exploitation that was irrational.<<

Louis:>I don't have "ire" toward Brenner or Wood.<

I don't know why Wood appears here, but I'll ignore her. (In my experience, her views are slightly different from Brenner's, while I found his presentation more convincing.) So, Louis, are you saying that your making fun of Brenner by (if I remember correctly) likening his view of French peasants to saying that he thought they were like back-to-the-land hippies wasn't done out of ire? It seems to me that criticizing someone by using that kind of weak humor expresses some sort of emotion, though maybe it's not ire.

>My efforts have been directed at showing their unfamiliarity with Spanish colonialism and their inability to adequately explain the contours of African capitalism, which took shape outside the framework of market relations, a sine qua non for Brenner and Wood. ..."

I don't know where you got the idea that "market relations" were a "sine qua non" (an essential condition, absolute prerequisite) for Brenner's definition of capitalism. It's the alternative "Sweezy/Wallerstein school" (and many of the dependistas) that emphasizes market relations in their definition of capitalism, not the Dobb/Brenner school. The latter focus on only a single type of market relations, i.e., that of labor-power markets: following Marx, Dobb & Brenner define capitalism in terms of the "double freedom" of labor, i.e., its freedom from slave or serf bonds and its freedom from direct control over the means of subsistence. Relatedly, Dobb & Brenner put a much greater emphasis on the production process than did Sweezy or Frank(who put almost all of their emphasis on the existence of markets for final commodities), with Wallerstein trying to emphasize both. (Though Dobb & Brenner follow Marx, it doesn't mean that Dobb and Brenner are automatically right as a matter of empirical history.)

I said:>>The fact that "the yield of corn in the fifteenth century ... had fallen since the thirteenth century" is not used to imply "that the people who grew the crops were stupid and lazy." Rather, the problem was that feudal social relations of production weren't very good at producing a surplus for the feudalists, i.e., at dealing with the widely-recognized Ricardian problem of diminishing returns in agriculture. (Capitalism seems to be able to deal with this problem, but we're now discovering the environmental and health impact...)<<

>I am not sure that the book under question can be refuted by simply
referring to "widely recognized" Ricardian problems. I posted from
its introduction in order to alert people that new scholarship is
being produced all the time that tends to undermine the Brenner
thesis...<

I wasn't "refut[ing]" the book or even trying to (especially since I think it's necessary to read an entire book before refuting it, just as I can't criticize a movie without seeing it). I just thought that the author was misrepresenting the people he disagreed with by attributing the "irrational peasant" theory to them.

I said: >>I believe that Brenner would agree with this: one of the problems he points to with feudalism is that the serfs and other underlings had control over their own tools, so that the feudalists had a hard time getting them to produce. Also, Bloch's magisterial book on

feudalism emphasizes the decentralized nature of the system, so that
the bit about people being able to take initiatives is quite logical.
No-one has described the feudal period as being "totalitarian." ...<<

>You make Dyer's book sound like a polemic.<

I didn't think it was; but you were using it as part of your polemic. Anyway, I was saying that Brenner would probably agree with Dyer on the point you quoted. I bet that all of the participants in the various debates agree on more (especially empirical evidence) than they disagree about; it's often a mistake to focus too much on the debate between "schools."

> Nothing could be further from the truth [than to describe Dyer's book as a polemic, something I didn't do]. Except for a passing reference to Brenner in the introduction, it is mainly a scholarly attempt to illustrate economic and class relations in the feudal era using new archival [and archaeological] records. Rather than focusing on the countryside as the Dobb-Brenner current does, he shows what was going on in the towns. Remember that Sweezy relied heavily on Pirenne's scholarship to answer Dobb. Obviously, if all we had at our disposal were these dated works, we'd be at a big disadvantage.<

of course we need new research. (BTW, I've heard that Brenner still researches the topic of the so-called Brenner debate.) But we can't read it uncritically.

>Dyer's scholarship is meant to bring us up to date. Here is a small excerpt to show you the sort of thing he is involved with:

>Merchants contributed much to the economy of towns, and took their
rewards in consequence. They traded over long distances both in
expensive luxury goods, and in cheaper commodities in bulk. Without
their management of the higher levels of the trading system, the
larger towns in which they were based could not have existed, but
they also had great influence on small towns and country markets, in
which the commodities they handled were bought and sold. Merchants
reduced risks by diversifying their activities, including the
purchase of land, moneylending and holding office. They were the
richest people in the towns, played a major role in municipal
politics, and advised the royal government.

>The wealthiest and most ambitious merchants had wide horizons. The
twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been a period of globalization,
in the sense that Europe's contacts with Asia grew in importance.
This was not so much because of crusading and the establishment of a
western Christian colony in Palestine, as through the growth of trade
with the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea in spices, silks,
cotton and other goods, which was mainly handled by Italian and
Spanish traders. The Italians led the world in the business methods
by which they raised capital in partnerships and companies, and then
arranged profitable ventures in distant cities through their factors.
The merchants of London and the other towns in Britain contributed to
this trade mainly by acting as distributors of the luxuries, enabling
rich consumers to indulge in a sophisticated Mediterranean culture.
Even in the commerce of northern Europe, English and Scottish
merchants took second place to those from Flanders, Brabant and
France, with the Italians and the Germans rising in prominence
towards the end of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, native
merchants still traded overseas, like Robert of London, who bought
pepper worth £183 at Genoa in 1186, and exporters of wool like
Lawrence of Ludlow from Shropshire, who went down with his ship
in the North Sea in 12.94 while taking a cargo to Holland. The
English participated in this embryonic globalization when in the
twelfth century they developed trade links with Spain, where
merchants found an outlet for English woollen cloth, and brought back
spices, gold and fine leather. Good-quality shoes were made from
Spanish goatskins from Cordoba (cordwain), which gave English
shoemakers, even if they worked mainly in locally produced leather,
the distinctive occupational name of cordwainers.

>When archaeologists excavated a rubbish pit in Southampton, in Cuckoo
Lane near the quay, they found a seal bearing the name of Richard of
Southwick, a merchant active in the 1270s and 1280s, who lived in a
stone house nearby. The pit contained rubbish from South-wick's
house, revealing his international contacts. He had business links
with a merchant from Normandy called Bernard de Vire, whose seal was
found, and he had bought decorated jugs from south-west France and
lustreware from Spain, together with more valuable but perishable
goods such as wine. The sheath for his dagger was made from Spanish
leather, and he ate imported figs and grapes as well as local fruits.
The pit also contained the skeleton of a small African monkey,
brought to Southampton by a sailor from the Mediterranean and
presumably kept by Southwick as an exotic pet.<

This is interesting stuff, but hardly new (except for some of the details). It's important to remember that people like Dobb & Brenner were very familiar with Pirenne's research (and similar). If I understand Brenner, he was saying that market relations in the distribution of final commodities preceded the rise of capitalism by centuries -- and that they may have been necessary to, but weren't sufficient to say that capitalism existed.

Jim  Devine