Chris Burford wrote:
> In my earlier post entitled 'A People's History of England' I
> gave detailed
> evidence of why orthodox marxist views on England in the past gave
> prominence to the role of sheep and wool in the emergence of
> capitalism in
> England,
Morton's classic work does show how you need to have a sense of deep time to
see how events close to hand are grounded in very long standing
developmental processes. The excerpt you cited does show, for example, how
important it was to the eventual emergence of English capitalism, that a
strong English state existed even in Anglo-Saxon times.
I am not sure how much one can argue about a strong English state in Anglo-Saxon times but in general there were favourable conditions for the emergence of the precursor of a national state in England.
The size of the territory was sufficiently large to make tribal groupings unstable once a sufficient level of development was reached, but protected as an island from an endless risk of invasion once a system of national defence could be organised. At the same time the sea, as Mark correctly said, linked England by trade with more distant parts, and ensured the influence of the Roman Empire well before the Roman invasion, and the spread of Norman culture before the Norman invasion.
Political peace is important for the development of trade. The Anglo Saxon Chronicles praised William I (in translation): "it is not to be forgotten that good peace he made in this land so that a man might go over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold... and no man durst slay another."
Sheep mean social peace and the rule of some sort of law. As Morton argued:
Sheep are of all kinds of property the easiest to lift and the hardest to protect, and only under circumstances of internal peace not normal in the Middle Ages was sheep farming on a large scale profitable.
The establishment of the judicial system responsible to the crown, under Henry II (1154-1189) to help him raise revenue and concentrate on his wars in France, was very important for the social peace that allowed large scale sheep farming to develop in England.
State policy was directly involved too in the struggle to control outlets for the raw wool to the manufacturers in the Low Countries, with England drawn into the Hundred Years War partly for the interests of the wool merchants. On more than one occasion it cut off the supply of raw wool and later it banned it, providing the basis for the development of woolen textile production in England on a mass basis, able to supply a large market more readily than the finer woolen cloths of the Mediterranean.
I note too that Mark himself gives considerable emphasis to another matter of state policy in the rise of capitalism: the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries.
Either way these factors, while very much within the context of a European network of trade and politics, are internal causes, although possibly catalysed by external factors. The wealth of the monasteries is accumulated surplus over several centuries suddenly transformed into a medium of exchange and a store of value for the strengthened royal state and a new class of bourgeoisie.
I indicated that *prior* to the discovery of the Americas there might still be room to argue that the boost to English protocapitalsim might come from external causes - "primitive accumulation", plunder, of subordinate peoples such as the Welsh, Scots and Irish, within the British Isles, or a section of the French population. Mark for one, did not take this opportunity. The English invasion of Ireland and Scotland in the Middle Ages, did not succeed for all the brutality. The ruthless and effective subjugation of the principality of North Wales under Edward 1 produced a causative relationship which may not be one of simple "primitive" accumulation: Mark wrote
Wool was
one of the main motivations for the persisting attempts made by the Normans
to crush the Welsh principality in the 12th and 13th century.
Perhaps Mark can explain the causal connection he had in mind.
From the evidence provided I cannot see that the issue is that Ellen Wood fails to acknowledge the fact that the English economy developed within a wider international economic and political context. Even if some of her remarks are to guard against one-sidedness in the presentation of her case it is arbitrary to say contemptuously that in doing so she is covering her "spoor". Such a remark too should really be withdrawn.
In looking for fragmentary accidental reasons why capitalism developed first in England when it could have developed in so many other places first, we are doing the opposite of elevating English culture to some idealised plane.
There is a sort of quantum probabilistic aspect to this. The largest of the British isles was perhaps a favourable quantum size that once proto national state was formed in the less hilly agriculturally rich areas it was relatively able to defend itself from external attacks while being able to trade freely.
Once in existence it is an absolute law of capitalist accumulation that it is uneven.
In his discussion of primitive accumulation, Marx inserts the phase "so-called". (Chapter xxvi Capital Volume 1)
He argues "The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former."
He argues that bourgeois historians see only the side of the emancipation from serfdom. "But on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropiration, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire."
If Samir Amin is arguing an external cause for the expansion of capitalism on a global basis, rather than an internal cause, this is a departure from marxism.
It may be related to his inability to provide a mechanism for explaining unequal exchange. Certainly as quoted in this argument by those who are using him, it is unclear whether he says that the accumulation of capital by the imperialist countries is fundamentally due 1) to plunder, or 2) to unequal exchange, or 3) to the dynamic of the workings of capitalism as it engulfs all countries in a world market.
As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;
(Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation Chapter XXXII)
By arguing that "imperialism" is inherent to the expansion of capitalism Samir Amin is correct if he means colonial oppression. But not if he means that colonial oppression is a fundamental external cause of the expansion of capital separate from the process of the expansion of capital itself. And furthermore if his formula disguises and confuses a crucial concept behind Lenin's use of the term imperialism - the global domination of *finance* capital - that is very harmful for finding a current strategy for world revolution.
Mark has not produced any convincing evidence from Wood herself that her politics are essentially reformist. There is no comparison of her strategy for revolution and that of Amin. As quoted Amin's strategy is a passionate one on a world scale but not a revolutionary one on a world scale. Have I missed something?
About the politics of the changes at Monthly Review, they may have been discussed on this list, but I for one have only seen an allusion that the matter was personal. If there is clear evidence of reformism, let it be summarised. That would be the most conclusive argument.
Mark disdains to respond to my "meretricious remarks about insiders and outsiders"
I do not see why they are meretricious. They appear to me to be central to the sectarian dismissal of a left-wing academic researcher by people who wish to be respected as making serious comments on history without paying the entry fee of some self-discipline about sources, reliability, and codes of handling conflicts of evidence. Serious misunderstanding about this is quite damaging to a list like this which attempts to bridge the gap between the committed left and progressive academics.
Mark's dismissal of Christopher Hill as "the Master of an
Oxford College, not a revolutionary" fails to grasp the long Gramscian struggle for hegemony, as if "revolutionary" historians should write in a completely different language from other historians and refuse to accept academic honours.
If Mark's suspicion is that Wood's detailed analysis of the origins of capitalism has implications for the relevance of reforms for the struggle for socialism, those implications shoul be spelled out more clearly than through contemptuous prejudice. Wood makes one inside in her essay in Historical Materialism 1997 Vol 1 which is suggestive:
"Brenner makes it clear that direct producers could be deprived of non-market access to the means of their own self-reproduction even while remaining in possession of the means of production, and that such a condition subjected them to the imperatives of the market (which by the way, is a point worth keeping in mind in debates about 'market socialism' today)."
If capitalism exists in the "interstices of feudalism", socialism exists in the interstices of capitalism. Political struggle is needed to liberate it.
But that means discussing reforms.
Including on a global scale.
We could consider modern capitalist intensive methods of rearing sheep and other cattle, and how to stop viruses ripping through the food chain. But it would be a reform, in which an emerging global state power might be as important as the emerging national state power was in England in the feudal era of sheep rearing.
Chris Burford
London
.
