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.
