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.
> He does not address the issue of
> whether the
> qualitative change of it becoming as a raw material the main
> export in the
> 12th century, and later this becoming finished textiles, could represent
> the basis for a qualitative change.
Britain has always been a raw material and commodity exporter, even at the
height of the British empire, when British coal exports were important
(equally, the US too has always been a major raw material and commodity
producer). However, exporting raw materials is not enough by itself to
create an empire, or to launch capitalist take-off. Is it?
> I welcome that Mark clarifies the issues in more measured terms than that
> Ellen Wood's class composition is somehow dubious. But
>
> >trying to provide a political cover for a crass and
> >primitive and parochial reformism
>
>
> is still an very arbitrary criticism of a careful historian.
>
> If the issue is reformism, rather than the need to struggle for reforms,
> could he please summarise the world strategy and tactics of Samir
> Amin, and
> those of Ellen Wood, and show how one is revolutionary and the other
> reformist, although both, of course will have to include reforms.
Summarising, there is a lot of special pleading in Wood's derivation of the
origins of industrial capitalism, a lot of fitting the facts onto a
preconceived scheme, one which broadly wants to say that 'progress' happens
in the 'leading' capitalist countries and that colonial empires are just
secondary things. I don't agree with either the theory or the politics here,
and I've tried to show why Wood's history-writing is poor, since she cuts
the facts to fit her own procrustean ideas. Why is she doing this? Because
her politics is what it is. Hers is the "kindly", benevolent-seeming,
"charitable", but actually hypocritical face of what to the outside world
(the world outside US provincialism) looks like the traditional patronising,
chauvinist arrogance, the racism, murderousness and imperialist paranoia, of
Uncle Sam.
>
> To burden the subtle analysis of historical causation with
> prejudice about
> current political policies will break it.
On the contrary, the only point of history-writing is to understand the
present. Otherwise we are just idle antiquarians.
> Or if there are clear differences of policy behind her departure from
> Monthly Review let them be summarised more directly rather than
> by innuendo.
I don't know anything at all about her and MR other than what I read here.
> And if her history writing is "so bad", how does she get Christopher Hill
> to do the introduction for one of her works?
Christopher Hill is interesting but a red herring here. Of course, he might
support her publishing activity. That doesn't mean he was right to do so, or
that he was in any way engaged with her politics. Hill was the Master of an
Oxford College, not a revolutionary.
> There must be defended by direct quotations from her, or be withdrawn.
Well, this thread is supposed to be closed, isn't it? But I think I did her
sufficient justice. I'm not going to respond to your meretricious remarks
about insiders and outsiders
> I have now found another text by Ellen Wood in the first issue of
> Historical Materialism, Autumn 1997, where she says (page 19)
>
> "the commercialization model may be fatally flawed, but that does not
> change the fact that capitalism emerged within a network of international
> trade and could not have emerged without that network. So a great deal
> still needs to be said about how England's particular insertion into the
> European trading system determined the development of English capitalism."
>
> I would ask you please now withdraw the previous assertion.
Why? Wood knows how to cover her spoor, but this quote illustrates how she
mangles the truth to fit her own agenda. What on earth was the "network of
international > trade", if not the form taken by primary accumulation, a
great part of which consisted of colonial plunder, the profits of slavery,
and the whole traffic in human misery which is the history of capitalist
imperialism since the 17th century? I earlier mentioned the fact that 11
million Africans are *known* to have been exported as slaves in this period.
This huge flow of human beings should be set in demographic context: the
combined white population of England and North America was less than 10 m
persons during most of this period. Consider the vast scale of the crime.
And consider its economic consequences. Michael Perelman put his finger on
it in 'The Invention of Capitalism' where he points out that it was
precisely *slavery* which launched the USA as a great commercial and
industrial power, and *not* the kind of (by comparison) piffling processes
of accumulation in 'the countryside' which Wood, Brenner etc go on about:
>>Smith and Lenin were at one in their reading of the American experience.
Sounding more Smithian than Smith, Lenin contended that, "in America, it was
not the slave economy of the big landlords that served as the basis of
capitalist agriculture, but the free economy of the free farmer working on
free land, free from all medieval fetters, free from serfdom and feudalism"
(Lenin 1974, p. 85; see also 1908, p. 140). He may well have been correct,
although quantification is difficult in this sort of matter.
We do know that early American farming was predominately a process of
capital accumulation (Bidwell and Falconer 1941, pp. 82-83; see also Primack
1966 for a later period). The homesteading family often pushed itself as
hard as any slave driver could push his crew. Moreover, a relatively small
share of its efforts were directed toward providing itself with consumption
goods.
Hard work was not enough. Between 1710 and 1775, for example, per
capita incomes were estimated to have grown at a modest 0.4 percent per year
(Lee and Pasnell 1979, p. 20). Growing standards of living in the U.S.
awaited the introduction of the intensive use of slavery to produce the
exports that formed the economic base the country.
True, slavery had its limits. Eventually, the slave system ran up
against the dual barriers of soil depletion and the contradiction between
incentive system of slavery and the need for higher productivity, as well as
the development of more advanced production techniques that were
inappropriate for a slave system. By the time of the Civil War, the eclipse
of southern agriculture was well underway. Hinton Helper calculated that
the combined cotton, tobacco, hay, hemp, and sugar harvest of the fifteen
slave states was worth less than the hay crop of the free states (Helper
1860, p. 53). However, Helper, like Lenin, overlooked the enormous
contribution of earlier slave labor in the process of accumulation in the
United States.<<
(Invention of Capitalism, Duke UP, 2000, p358)
Incidentally, the youthful Lenin Perelman rightly criticises, thought this
way in 1894 when he wrote on the history of Russian capitalism. By 1916 he'd
moved on and his final theorising of imperialism begins with the notion that
the primary level of the world economy, its determining last instance, was
not the level of the nationa state and of national capitalism, but the level
of imperialism as a world-system.
>to imply that a
> serious marxist writer should be accused of promoting a 'convenient
> illusion' without evidence, because she does not go along with this, is
> quite arbitrary.
We don't agree about this I'm afraid.
Mark Jones
