Barkley: > Well, there is a serious question about when >capitalism really began. As near as I can tell, this >problem of the separation of the city from the countryside >(and the ecological destruction arising therefrom) dates >back to the initial emergence of true cities about >5,000 years ago. Although most of these cities arose >in centralized states ruled by god-kings (like pharoahs) >they also involved a critical dependence on long distance >trade, the agents of which were certainly doing it to make >money and profit, nascent capitalism if you will, arguably >peripheral but crucial nevertheless. Actually, your analysis based on this thing called "nascent capitalism" serves as the target of Ellen Meiksins Wood's latest book. I may have some more to say on these questions after reading it. The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood "Typically, these fetters are political: the parasitic powers of lordship, or the restrictions of an autocratic state. Sometimes they are cultural or ideological--perhaps the wrong religion. These constraints confine the free movement of economic actors, the free expression of economic rationality. The `economic' in these formulations is identified with exchange or markets, and it is here that we can detect the assumption that the seeds of capitalism are contained in the most simple acts of exchange, in any form of trade or market activity. That assumption is typically connected with the other presupposition, that history has been an almost natural process of technological development. One way or another, capitalism more or less naturally appears when and where expanding markets and technological development reach the right level. Many Marxist explanations are fundamentally the same--though they add attention to bourgeois revolutions to help break the fetters." - from the Introduction Few questions of history have as many contemporary political implications as this deceptively simple one: how did capitalism come to be? In this incisive study, Ellen Meiksins Wood refutes most existing accounts of the origin of capitalism, which, she argues, fail to recognize capitalism's distinctive attributes as a social system, making it seem natural and inevitable. Wood begins with searching assessments of classical thinkers ranging from Adam Smith to Max Weber. She then explores the great Marxist debates among writers such as Paul M. Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and E.P. Thompson. She concludes with her own account of capitalism's agrarian origin, challenging the association of capitalism with cities, the identification of "capitalist" with "bourgeois," and conceptions of modernity and postmodernity derived from those assumptions. Only with a proper understanding of capitalism's beginning, Wood concludes, can we imagine the possibility of it ending. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
