I attended the Society for the Advancement Socio-Economics conference a month ago in Boston. This is an organization peopled by researchers trying to capture capitalism through a narrow set of institutions. These institutions pertain to the working of firms and on this basis they come up with varieties of capitalism. This is reasonable for advanced capitalism today but the apolitical stance and the flattening of history render this conceptualization faulty. I have critiqued this approach because the process of primitive accumulation underway today in India and the expansive formation and persistence of petty commodity sector create a kind of capitalism that is substantially different from the very Eurocentric varieties of capitalism.
Anthony D'Costa Professor of Indian Studies Asia Research Centre Copenhagen Business School Sent from my iPad On Jul 25, 2012, at 4:50 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > On 7/25/12 7:41 PM, Lakshmi Rhone wrote: >> Some merely >> lead to changes in government without altering the nature of the state, >> and others, such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, replace one >> tyranny with another, more murderous one. The crucial institutional >> transformations link together changes in the form of government with an >> extension of rights running throughout society. > > Talk about thinking outside the box. > >> That the second trend — the sweep of technology — follows from the >> rights revolution is a centerpiece of my interpretative framework. >> Indeed, the technological breakthroughs we have witnessed over the last >> century would not have been possible in a world dominated by extractive >> institutions. The incentives, freedoms, opportunities, and the level >> playing field provided by the inclusive institutions taking hold in many >> parts of the world were the foundations of these technological changes — >> in the same way that the initial, more-inclusive institutions that >> followed the Glorious Revolution in England were a sine qua non of the >> Industrial Revolution. > > Those "more-inclusive institutions" rested on a bedrock of slavery, > colonialism, poor laws, hereditary monarchy, and all the rest. This is > the basic problem with liberal social scientists. They can't understand > that the brutality of the Soviet Union was joined at the hip to the > primitive accumulation stage of capitalism. > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
