----- Original Message ----- From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> Sent: Monday, May 07, 2007 10:10 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] More on Transition, Brenner, Allen, Productivity
LP: I suppose there is no need to explain why England's agrarian productivity was on a par with the rest of "precapitalist" Europe in 1700 when supposedly the big leap forward took place at least 150 years earlier. _____________________________________ But clearly, England's productivity is above par with precapitalist Europe and at par with the low countries where similar capitalist agricultural relations existed. As I stated previously, it would be worthwhile to read Brenner's analysis of the development of capitalism in the low countries. Nowhere in his writings do I find Brenner referring to a big leap forward in England in the mid 16th century. What Brenner does say in his initial paper "Agrarian Class Struggle and Economic Development" is: "That agricultural improvement was already having a significant effect in English economic development by the end of the 17th century can be seen in a number of ways: most immediately in the the striking pattern of relatively stable prices and (at least) maintenance of the population of the latter part of the century... Thus although English population in this period reacched the very high levels of the early 14th century (which at that time had meant demographic crisis) there was not the same sort of violent fluctuations in prices nor the crises of subsistence which gripped France and much of the Continent in this period. Nor was there the marked demographic decline which came to dominate most of Europe at this time, the famous Malthusian "phase B." In short, England remained largely exempt fron the "general economic crisis of seventeenth century" which sooner or later struck most of the Continent.... It seems moreover that agricultural improvement was at the root of those....processes which... had allowed some 40 percent of the English population to move out of agricultural employment by the end of the 17th century..." Several things are of note here: first Brenner is specifically attacking and refuting the demographic determinism that sought to substitute population pressures for class analysis, and analysis of class struggle, in the conditions of society in general and agricultural production in partiuclar. Secondly, the increase in productivity takes root in the changing of class relations in the 16th century, but only makes itself manifest as sustainable, as sustainability at the end of the century. Thirdly, this increased productivity is measured "internally," so to speak, not in some sort of gross comparison to other countries, but in its ability to support release of labor from agriculture, again to sustain specific social relations. _________________ In response to Dough Henwood's query: Brenner really begins with question of demographic determinism, the role of population pressures in the breakdown/emergence of feudalism and the transition to capitalism, and he shows that demographics themselves, abstracted from actual class relations of production cannot account for breakdown, emergence, transition. Those features are products of class struggle. For Brenner, the class struggle rather than simple developments in the forces of production determines the varied, and specific, developments in the countries of the dying medieval and emerging modern era. In so doing, Brenner is attempting to locate, and ground specifically, Marx's birthmark of capitalism --"separation of the means of production from the means of labor"-- in the relations of agricutural production and producers. Now the Brenner debate originally was a debate with the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian orthodoxy. It burst forward into a blazing debate within the left after the 1977 publication in NLR of his "The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," in which he takes on Wallerstein, Frank, Sweezy etc. about the specificty of the origin of capitalism, and capitalist social relations-- arguing that that entire line of analysis displaces class relations from economic analyses of development and underdevelopment. Frank and Wallerstein after him essentially argue that the origin of capitalist development in England, France, in Europe is in the underdevelopment of other countries. Accumulation then is not a a class process, but a country, region world process, and it is not a process of reproduction, but of transfer. Accordingly capitalism can be seen to be everything everywhere all the time-- anywhere trade exists, or expropriation of surplus, that's capitalism. The specific nature of capitalist accumulation, the need for expanding reproduction not of the means of production as the means of production, but as capital, to aggrandize more, not just labor, but wage-labor; the specific capitalist transformation of the markets from activities and areas for the exchange of goods to the arena for the realization of value-- drops away-- and we get capitalism that supposedly was born by transferring gold, or pearls, or silver, or sugar from new to old worlds. How exactly this wealth could transform a society based on subsistence where the population is chained to peasant-based agriculture is never explained. How the simple transfer of wealth can make agriculture so productive that significant portions of the population can be "productively" dispossessed into the cities without triggering the Malthusian demographic crisis is never explained as class drops out of the analysis. (And with all respect to Eric F William, author of one of the truly great, mistaken works of historical analysis, the slave traders of Liverpool did not become the industrialists of Manchester, nor did they become the bankrollers of the industrialists of Manchester ). Certainly more than a few Marxists saw in Brenner's analysis a pretty strong critique of current day "third worldism," and the battle was on.
