[PEN-L:27340] Re: Re: Re: LTV and income disparity

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> Unemployment, or whatever you want to call it, had different effects on the
> economy before capitalism, of course. I never said otherwise. SO did trade,
> and technological progress, and lots of other things. You wouldn't say
> therewas no trade before capitalism just because it had different effects on
> the economy. But I was responding to the Blautian line that everything was
> just wonderful before capitalism--no unemployment! high living standards!
> disalienated labor!

I would agree with this more or less, but (there's always a but) I think
unemployment, like surplus value (as opposed to surplus product) should
be seen as a relationship, not a "state of being." The vagabonds of
14th-century England (and the forces which turned them into vagabonds)
may have been in a general way among the conditions which can be seen,
vaguely, as conditions which opened the way for the 16th-century
developments that Brenner traces. Unemployment is a _necessary_ property
of capitalism, not understandable except as it is related to capital.
Somewhere Jim Blaut says that if we knew all the facts we wouldn't have
to study relationships. I think that is almost true of 14th-c
"unemployment." There is merely a linear causal relationship between
the  vagabondage of a given ex-peasant and the lordly action that drove
him from the land. (No feedback, one might say.)

And the same is more or less true of pre-capitalist trade. It relates
(say) China and 12th century Europe, but the relationship is external
instead of internal. (There's an old theory that Chinese expansion
triggered some of the movements of peoples which the Romans felt as
"barbarian invasions." Whether that's true or not, it would be what I'm
calling an external relationship, linear causation.) "I've gotta use
words when I talk to you" one of Eliot's characters says, and "trade" is
the best word we have to talk about all the vigorous commercial activity
that went on for several thousand years prior to the emergence of
capitalism -- but when we talk about the Silk Road of pre-capitalist
periods and the Triangualr Trade of the 18th century, it is almost
merely accidental that we use the same word "trade." One can't make
sense of 19th century slavery in the u.s. without knowing something
about Manchester and London bankers and Indian peasants and the growth
of opium addiction in China. There simply was not that necessity in the
relations of trade prior to capitalism -- and this is one of the reasons
14th century unemployment ought to be called something else.

(Michael Hoover's post this morning onf "surface appearances" (with
which I agree) is relevant here: if we continued this discussion long we
would be repeating the arguments over whether the value is a necessary
category for understanding capitalism.)

Carrol