I plan to blog thousands of words over the summer about the
"transition debate", which involves principals including Paul Sweezy,
Maurice Dobb, Robert Brenner, Jim Blaut et al but just want to jump
the gun on something that is fresh in my mind.
Richard, of Lenin's Tomb fame, has been posting rather frequently on
this question. This in fact is what prompted me to return to the
subject once again. Today he has a post about 16th century Holland
that asserts "the essential character of surplus-extraction in the
Dutch economy was pre-capitalist commerce and 'political' extraction."
1) This led me to comment:
One of the difficulties faced in defining 16th and 17th century
Holland as non-capitalist or pre-capitalist is that it logically
entails answering the question in positive terms. If it wasn't
capitalism, what was it? Keep in mind that Engels's schema in
"Origins of the Family" defines capitalism as immediately following
feudalism. He didn't come up with these stages on his own. They were
shared by Marx. Was 16th and 17th century Holland "feudal"? If so,
then the word has no use as a strict social science category.
2) Richard replied:
We may be in need of a new typology, because the phrase 'transitional
forms' doesn't seem to capture what happened, and nor does
'absolutism'. But I think that we can at least say that commerce
develops in a variety of modes of production, and its character is
determined by what mode of production it is integrated into. Dutch
commerce was integrated into and reliant on the dyamics of a European
system that was still largely feudal, with the exception of England,
so I think it can be characterised as pre-capitalist precisely as the
Italian city-states were.
3) I then commented:
I don't think it is necessary to come up with a new typology. Marx
already summed this "transitional" stage up as primitive
accumulation. The chapter on the genesis of the industrial capitalist
in Capital V. 1 is replete with references to slavery, trade
monopolies like the East India Company. This is how capitalism began.
It combined separation of the peasants from the means of production
in Western Europe, slavery of Africans, forced labor in Latin
America, colonial domination in Asia, etc.
4) Richard replied:
No, I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it. First of all, he phrased it the
"so-called primitive accumulation".
-
At this stage I prepared a lengthy comment on primitive accumulation
but it got lost in the process of re-clicking the comment link by
accident. In general, I don't think that the comments sections of
blogs are useful for these kinds of exchanges. They don't incorporate
the typographical tools that facilitate listserv exchanges. They also
are not organized by thread, so that it is difficult to keep track of
things. In light of this, I am going to say a few words about
primitive accumulation here rather than on his blog.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/05/26/what-marx-meant-by-primitive-accumulation/
