On 12/11/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim wrote:
>They didn't have an adequate supply of free-floating proletarian
>labor, while the workers were often semi-proletarians who could fall
>back on their own plots of land upon which they could support
>themselves.
As compared to the 14th century British countryside that had zero
workers.
The 1300s was a period of plague. I don't see why it's relevant here.
The most curious thing about the Brenner thesis is that it
states the birth of capitalism took place in a workerless womb.
please explain.
The plague upset traditional social relationships in the countryside,
setting the stage for full-blown capitalism. It raised the bargaining
power of the laborers who remained in many cases. But the landowners
struck back. In England, they struck back with the primitive
accumulation that Marx writes about, creating a proletariat by
expropriating the rural laborers, separating them from any claim to
land and other ways to independently support themselves. This created
the proletarian class (in itself, not for itself).
--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
