Lou replies to Ellen Wood:
>Instead, capitalism is conceived as a more or less natural outcome of
>age-old and virtually universal human practices, the activities of
>exchange, which have taken place not only in towns since time immemorial
>but also in agricultural societies. In some versions of this
>commercialization model, these practices are even treated as the expression
>of a natural human inclination, in Adam Smith's famous phrase, to "truck,
>barter and exchange."
>
>In other words, in these accounts capitalism doesn't really have a
>beginning, and its development doesn't really involve a transition from one
>mode of production to a very different once. They tend to take capitalism
>for granted, to assume its latent existence from the dawn of history, and
>to "explain" its development, at best, by describing how obstacles to its
>natural progression were removed in some places as distinct from others.
>
>>>REPLY: To speak of capitalism having a "beginning" leads one down the
>wrong path. A beginning invokes a point in plane geometry, when a more
>appropriate symbol would be a series of moving points, parabola-like, such
>as those identified in calculus, which is to mathematics as Marxism is to
>society. Marxism is the science of society in *motion*. To try to pinpoint
>the origin of "capitalism" is as sterile an exercise as identifying when
>"socialism" began in the 20th century. Essentially, it leads to the kind of
>idealistic and schematic doctrinal struggles that has fractured the Maoist
>and Trotskyist movement into a thousand shards.<<
Well, capitalism must have begun sometime somewhere, or else it would
have to be thought of as having existed everywhere throughout human
history -- a conception of history to which you would no doubt object
(the point you made in your objection to Jim Devine's use of the term
imperialism to refer to pre- & non-capitalist practices). Actually,
on this point, there is no difference between Wood & Jim Blaut; they
only disagree on when, where, & how.
> >>REPLY: This is a totally undialectical understanding of how capitalism
>takes root. Non or pre-capitalist modes of production are a minus,
>capitalism is a plus. In reality, the capitalist system at its inception
>ONLY BECAME POSSIBLE through reliance on FORCED LABOR and other
>"non-capitalist" social relations. For a thorough examination of this
>phenomenon, I refer people to Sidney Mintz's "Sweetness and Power: the role
>of sugar in modern history".<<
Forced labor existed before the rise of capitalism as well. The
question is when, where, & how forced labor became forced labor _for_
the capitalist world market.
Yoshie
