----- Original Message ----- From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 2:46 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Engels on Transition
Well, Brenner says that agrarian capitalism began in the 16th century, not the 17th century. As Allen's numbers point out, there was no difference in productivity between France and England in 1700. There's also a lot more that Albritton has to say that has a bearing on the topic, but I will save that for later. __________ Yes, Brenner states clearly that the relations of agrarian capitalism began in the 16th century. Nothing Allen writes in his paper refutes that. Actually nothing in Allen's paper is concerned with the origins of agrarian capitalism. ___________ > Except that Allen's stats were about productivity, not growth. ________________ Yes, again but the sentences you omitted in the parse refer precisely to "productivity" of yield based on intensifed labor. ___________ Yes, and Albritton documents that the social relations were nothing like Brenner describes. English agrarian labor in the 17th and 18th centuries was not at all like that described by Karl Marx in his discussion of labor as a commodity. ___________ Yes, and no. We are talking about the genesis of a social relation of production, qualitatively different (unless someone here wants to argue that Marx did not think the social relationship determining industrial capitalism was different) than its precursors. That relationship is precisely the distinction inter-penetration between ownership of the means of subsistence/production and the means of labor. Brenner finds that genesis in the English countryside, allowing for the "productive" dispossession of the population from agriculture. ___________________ > Odd that Karl Marx would regard the plunder of gold and silver, and > slavery, on an equal footing with the enclosures, etc. in "The > Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist". I guess he was a neo-Smithian _______________________ Marx thought much much more than just those overused and under-understood paragraphs. I would recommend a look into Volume 3 and the Theories of Surplus Value. I don't think Brenner would argue about the "hot house" impact of those conditions of primitive accumulation, but the point to all capitalist accumulation is the reproduction of the social relations of capital-- that's what primitive accumulation is supposed to accomplish. Now we've been through this before, but nothing in the terms of mercantilism, the slave trade, growth of the cities, etc. accomplishes, in and of itself, that radical transformation of social relations.
