The problem is that the bourgeoisie and proletariat are not birthed in contradiction with the serf and nobility but rather emerge - are birthed, as a new quality within an existing system process. Somewhere, somehow a new quality has to be introduced into a process - quantitatively, to begin the process of qualitative change
^^^^^^^^ CB: There has been commodity production and exchange, production for exchange not use by the producer, since the first master/slave societies. The term "proletariat" is from Rome, so presumably there were proletarians, wage-laborers in Rome. The Roman army was paid with money. Anyway, the bourgeoisie and proletariat are not entirely new in feudalism. Shane Mage has a whole theory that there was a potential bourgeois revolution thwarted at the assassination of Julius Caesar, I think. See Michael Hudson on the ancient history of finance capitalists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hudson_(economist) In 1984, Hudson joined Harvard’s archaeology faculty at the Peabody Museum as a research fellow in Babylonian economics. A decade later, he was a founding member of ISCANEE (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies), an international group of Assyriologists and archaeologists that has published a series of colloquia analyzing the economic origins of civilization. This group has become the successor to Karl Polanyi’s anthropological and historical group of a half-century ago. Four volumes co-edited by Hudson have appeared so far, dealing with privatization, urbanization and land use, the origins of money, accounting, debt, and clean slates in the Ancient Near East (a fifth volume, on the evolution of free labor, is in progress). This new direction in research is now known as the New Economic Archaeology. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
