Kelley wrote:

>At 04:22 PM 12/5/00 -0600, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>kelley wrote:
>>  > no, i'm talking about Weber's study of the rise of capitalism.  the
>>>  conditions were, largely, there for the chinese to have been the place
>>>  where a proto-capitalist economic organization took off, not all the
>>>  conditions, but many.  nonetheless, various places in the west took off and
>>>  were more successful and this was about the development of accounting
>>>  techniques, in part, that aided people in conceptualizing symbolically
>>>  rational planning of projections based on past, present, future.
>>
>>Kelley, you are way out on a limb. Have you any idea what storms have
>>raged around this on the pen-l and marxism lists?
>>
>>The story about double-entry accounting belongs as much to urban legend
>>as does the 400 names for snow. "Take-Off" is a very loaded term. And
>>Weber held to an absolutely indefensible "stagist" and linear view of
>>history.
>
>no, he didn't, that's a misreading.  he largely abjured such 
>accounts of history and he saw himself as elaborating marx's 
>framework, in some ways.  but it was precisely the grand theory of 
>history as developing in some logical progression that weber was on 
>about.

Jim M. Blaut, in Chapter 2 of _Eight Eurocentric Historians_ (NY: The 
Guilford Press, 2000), correctly argues that Max Weber was a racist. 
For instance, about Africans, Weber had this to say: Negroes are 
"unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have 
not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep.  Here is one case in 
economic history where tangible racial distinctions are apparent" 
(_General Economic History_. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981, 
p. 379).  With regard to the Chinese, Weber, among many other lovely 
remarks, made this pronouncement: the Chinese exhibit "slowness in 
reacting to unusual stimuli, especially in the intellectual sphere," 
"horror of all unknown...things," "good-natured credulity," "absolute 
docility," "incomparable dishonesty" & "distrust...for one another" 
which "stands in sharp contrast to the trust and honesty of the 
faithful brethren in the Puritan sects" in Europe (_The Religion of 
China_, NY: Free Press, 1951, pp. 231-232).  For Weber, so-called 
"Europeans" were "rational," and so-called "non-Europeans" were 
either "irrational" or less "rational," and he attributes the origin 
of capitalism to this alleged difference: "European rationality."  In 
Weber, one cannot but see one of the founding fathers of what might 
be called cultural racism.

Even worse than racism (which was common among "Europeans" of his 
days & still is today), Weber committed an irredeemable intellectual 
crime of putting the cart before the horse: he essentially argued 
that capitalist rationality caused capitalism.  Capitalist 
rationality was, of course, a _result_ of capitalism, so it logically 
could _not_ have been its cause.  Weber's intellectual sleight of 
hand -- racializing capitalist rationality & calling it "European 
rationality" -- has been influential ever since, even among those who 
would be too embarrassed to make an outright argument for racial 
superiority ("Europeans were smarter than the Chinese & all other 
non-Europeans, and that's why they have gotten richer than everyone 
else!").

In place of Weber's anachronistic "theory," I recommend Robert 
Brenner's & Ellen Wood's non-Eurocentric accounts of the origin of 
capitalism.  Brenner writes:

*****   In England, as throughout most of western Europe, the 
peasantry were able by the mid-fifteenth century, through flight and 
resistance, definitively to break feudal controls over their mobility 
and to win full freedom.  Indeed, peasant tenants at this time were 
striving hard for full and essentially freehold control over their 
customary tenements, and were not far from achieving it.  The 
elimination of unfreedom meant the end of labour services and of 
arbitrary tallages.  Moreover, rent _per se_ (_redditus_) was fixed 
by custom, and subject to declining long-term value in the face of 
inflation.  There were in the long run, however, two major strategies 
available to the landlord to prevent the loss of the land to peasant 
freehold.

In the first place, the demographic collapse of the late fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries left vacant many former customary peasant 
holdings.  It appears often to have been possible for the landlords 
simply to appropriate these and add them to their demesnes.  In this 
way a great deal of land was simply removed from the "customary 
sector" and added to the "leasehold sector", thus thwarting in 
advance a possible evolution towards freehold, and substantially 
reducing the area of land which potentially could be subjected to 
essentially peasant proprietorship....

In the second place, one crucial loophole often remained open to 
those landlords who sought to undermine the freehold-tending claims 
of the customary tenants who still remained on their lands and clung 
to their holdings.  They could insist on the right to charge fines at 
will whenever peasant land was conveyed -- that is, in sales or on 
inheritance.  Indeed, in the end entry fines often appear to have 
provided the landlords with the lever they needed to dispose of 
customary peasant tenants, for in the long run fines could be 
substituted for competitive commercial rents.

The landlords' claim to the right to raise fines was _not_, at the 
start however, an open-and-shut question, _nor did it go 
uncontested_.  Throughout the fifteenth century there were widespread 
and apparently quite successful refusals by peasants to pay fines. 
And this sort of resistance continued into the sixteenth century when 
an increasing labour/land ratio should, ostensibly, have induced the 
peasant to accept a deteriorating condition and to pay a higher rent 
[if we believed neo-Malthusians].  Ultimately, the peasants took to 
open revolt to enforce their claims.  As is well known, _the first 
half of the sixteenth century was in England a period of major 
agrarian risings which threatened the entire social order_.  And a 
major theme of the most serious of these -- especially the revolt in 
the north in the mid-1530s and Kett's rebellion in 1549 -- was the 
security of peasant tenure, in particular the question of arbitrary 
fines.

_If successful, the peasant revolts of the sixteenth century, as one 
historian has put it, might have "clipped the wings of rural 
capitalism"_.  But they did not succeed.  Indeed, by the end of the 
seventeenth century, English landlords controlled an overwhelming 
proportion of the cultivable land -- perhaps 70-75 per cent -- and 
capitalist class relations were developing as nowhere else, with 
momentous consequences for economic development.  In my view, it was 
the emergence of the "classic" landlord/capitalist 
tenant/wage-labourer structure which made possible the transformation 
of agricultural production in England, and this, in turn, was the key 
to England's uniquely successful overall economic development....

The continuing strength of the French peasant community and French 
peasant proprietorship even at the end of the seventeenth century is 
shown by the fact that some 45-50 per cent of the cultivated land was 
still in peasant possession, often scattered throughout the open 
fields.  In England, by contrast, the owner-occupiers at this time 
held no more than 25-30 per cent of the land.   (emphasis mine, 
footnotes omitted, Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and 
Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," _The Brenner Debate: 
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial 
Europe_, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 46-49, 61)   *****

So, depending upon contingent outcomes of the long drawn-out process 
of _class struggles_ & class formations in Europe, Africa, & the 
so-called New World, (a) it is possible that capitalist social 
relations might have emerged elsewhere in the world before the 
British conquered much of the world; and (b), alternatively, 
capitalism might _not_ have emerged _at all_, and we would be living 
in a world unlike the one in which we struggle now.

As it happened, the British landlords succeeded in primitive 
accumulation first in the English countryside & then in Ireland, 
reducing the latter to the breadbasket for England.  At the same 
time, the Atlantic slave trade & chattel slave production in the 
so-called New World were vastly expanded & incorporated into the new 
dominant mode of production: capitalism.  Here lied the origin of 
_capitalist rationality_, which, in turn, facilitated the so-called 
Industrial Revolution later.

After reading Brenner, Wood (_The Origin of Capitalism_, NY: Monthly 
Review Press, 1999), & Blaut, read Michael Perelman's _The Invention 
of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of 
Primitive Accumulation_ (Durham: Duke UP, 2000); Eric Williams' 
_Capitalism and Slavery_ (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P, 1994 
[1944]); Samir Amin's _Accumulation on a World Scale; a Critique of 
the Theory of Underdevelopment_ (Trans. Brian Pearce, NY: Monthly 
Review Press, 1974) & _Eurocentrism_ (NY: Monthly Review Press, 
1989); etc.

Yoshie

P.S.  If Marx & Weber appear to you as if they were making 
complementary arguments, that is because you do not understand the 
nature of causal explanation & think that cause & effect are 
interchangeable in history.

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