Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Louis: It is hard for me to get any sense whether pen-l has attracted new subscribers in the past couple of years since it seems like the same-old same-old who post. I have the same feeling. Why so? Why is it that we don't hear from new voices but hear about more or less the same stuff over and over again from the same people, including myself? What is to be done to change that? Sabri
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
for what it's worth, Jurriaan is new to pen-l and posts a lot of stuff that seems new to me. And then some complain that he posts too much! Jim -Original Message- From: Sabri Oncu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sat 8/30/2003 9:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood] Louis: It is hard for me to get any sense whether pen-l has attracted new subscribers in the past couple of years since it seems like the same-old same-old who post. I have the same feeling. Why so? Why is it that we don't hear from new voices but hear about more or less the same stuff over and over again from the same people, including myself? What is to be done to change that? Sabri
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
I wish that I had some answer. A long time ago, I tried to take a day or so in which none of the regulars were allowed to post, only new people. I also tried to set aside a day in which people from outside the US were allowed to post -- so that we would learn more about what is going on elsewhere in the world. In the past, people told me that the argumentative nature of the list discouraged them -- but I think that we have been doing better in that regard. Should we try some experiments. On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 09:49:06PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: I have the same feeling. Why so? Why is it that we don't hear from new voices but hear about more or less the same stuff over and over again from the same people, including myself? What is to be done to change that? Sabri -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
I know this is a big question but I am still not clear about what people on the left mean by the terms empire and imperialism. By that I mean what is the political significane of people writing about say the American empire rather than talking about American imperialism? Is this terminology designed to highlight the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. achieved through its ability to penetrate other states and form alliances of capital under its own leadership. Is it designed to deny any serious capitalist rivalry? Or ... Any quick insights would be greatly appreciated. Marty
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
I have been subscribed for about a year. The reason I seldom post or reply is that much of the virtual conversation on this list takes place among professional/academic economists and I am not familiar with that jargon. This is not a complaint, just a description. Joanna Michael Perelman wrote: I wish that I had some answer. A long time ago, I tried to take a day or so in which none of the regulars were allowed to post, only new people. I also tried to set aside a day in which people from outside the US were allowed to post -- so that we would learn more about what is going on elsewhere in the world. In the past, people told me that the argumentative nature of the list discouraged them -- but I think that we have been doing better in that regard. Should we try some experiments. On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 09:49:06PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: I have the same feeling. Why so? Why is it that we don't hear from new voices but hear about more or less the same stuff over and over again from the same people, including myself? What is to be done to change that? Sabri -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Hello All, James Devine wrote, for what it's worth, Jurriaan is new to pen-l and posts a lot of stuff that seems new to me. And then some complain that he posts too much! Jim Doyle I agree with this point, but I would like to dilate on this also. For Michael, how much people post may be directly related to how much the list costs, so I am not asking for someone to bear a greater burden for the personal opinions and thoughts of individuals. Second to this Carrol tends to observe what is readable, so if a posting is two web pages long it is about readable but something longer is not. This has some merit in my view given the form. However, I believe there are other issues also affecting this discussion. If one looks at the business world collaboration applications are a major part of the business climate. From Instant Messaging to the more complex Content Management Systems (CMS) a major component of working groups is the organization of the content and making of documents that are done by more than person. It is dead obvious that two web pages is not adequate to express much content. On the other hand non of us wants to read only book length tomes on the web. It seems to me that these are worthy areas for Marxists, and leftist who were previously known as Marxists but call themselves something else. I'll make some points that I think are relevant as well from my own perspective. The web is a medium in which access to people with disabilities is possible and a part of the technical debate about the web. So a text based list is about as accessible as anything one encounters on the web. That makes it pretty democratic in some senses. But not for those with cognitive disabilities. They may require more visual based solutions to content. Secondly from my point of view, most of the time individuals write these things. We just have the most impoverished view of working together by seeing individuals writing by themselves to produce something for these lists. Instead what the collaboration 'is' is the debate about which underlies Carrol's and Michael's observations. Individual voices are guaranteed to emphasize the divisions. Contrarily, many thoughts can be shared and built together which email lists obscure. For example, if I shot many photographs in a major peace demonstration, my pictures will hardly be different than anyone else's. So If we combined the best from many people we'll have a wonderful collaborative work but not any sense of the individual voice. Individual voices are important because experience gives 'some' people a deeper insight in making pictures and so forth. And that is what a list serves to provide many voices, but many projects really require a variety of persons contributing to be truly powerful. For example to write adequately about racism really requires having more voices than Caucasian men can bring to the issue. One cannot answer on a text based list certain sorts of questions. For example the use of images on a web site is much more useful than to paste images into an email. The form of email lists simply doesn't allow more ambition toward making images. Primarily in terms of bandwidth issues. Finally file size and productivity are related to how much images are used. One can get by fairly well with 35kb pictures posted to a web site. But an email is often far smaller file, mainly due to brevity of expression. A hundred images is viewable in a matter of seconds but according to a 35kb standard text is over 3mb in size reads like a major chore at 3mega bytes of file. So text based lists in some ways hover in the nineteenth century when journals were text and images were an extreme luxury. The communal nature of thinking processes is not well served by email lists. But email lists do encourage global conversation and should not be discouraged until the higher production bandwidth and collaborative tools to reach more ambitious goals are widely available. Doyle
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Doyle Saylor wrote: For Michael, how much people post may be directly related to how much the list costs, The list costs me nothing, but some people -- especially those outside of the US -- pay a great deal to use the net. so I am not asking for someone to bear a greater burden for the personal opinions and thoughts of individuals. Second to this Carrol tends to observe what is readable, so if a posting is two web pages long it is about readable but something longer is not. This has some merit in my view given the form. However, I believe there are other issues also affecting this discussion. Also, in many cases, a paragraph or two can illustrate where a post is going. Shorter posts are better at opening up a dialogue or a multilogue. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
In chapter 2, 'The Empire of Property,' Wood uses historical arguments, referring to the Roman, Chinese and Spanish empires, to show that military power (extra economic force) constituted the essence of the 'empire of property.' Yes, I would recommend that pen-l'ers rent the excellent video Quo Vadis that depicts the life and times of General Marcus Vinicius of the 14th Legion who returns to Rome after three years of victorious battle in Mexico against the Aztecs. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Even though some on pen-l have attacked Meiksins Wood unfairly, this book looks very good. When is it coming out in paperback? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Human Nature Review 2003 Volume 3: 376-378 ( 6 August ) URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/capital.html Book Review Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood New York London: Verso, 2003. Pp. x + 182. Reviewed by Kofi Ankomah, Ph.D., 144 Freetown Avenue, (La-Bawaleshie Road), P. O. Box 9395, Airport, Accra, Ghana, West Africa.
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Even though some on pen-l have attacked Meiksins Wood unfairly, this book looks very good. When is it coming out in paperback? What's unfair? To describe the notion of capitalism originating in the British countryside in the 16th century as tendentious at best? It is hard for me to get any sense whether pen-l has attracted new subscribers in the past couple of years since it seems like the same-old same-old who post. If there are, they might want to take a look at what I wrote about Wood. Wallerstein wanted to publish it, but after he began treating me like a dissertation advise, I told him no thanks. === The Brenner Thesis as Iberiantalism In Ellen Meiksins Wood's defense of the Brenner thesis over the past several years, you can lose track of the issues that made it so controversial in the first place. This was not simply an analysis of how capitalism began, it was also an intervention into the debate around development strategy that was raging in the 1970s. This article will consider Wood's defense in light of scholarly material on the question of the transition to capitalism. It will also refocus the discussion on the often tortured development debate itself, which in my view has tended to reflect the class composition of the principals with all of the obvious problems. Put simply, a North American or European professor in an African university or on a United Nations assignment will be in a poor position to analyze class relations in the host country and to recommend necessary solutions. Ultimately, those sorts of solutions can only emerge from parties such as the kind that Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin sought to build. Finally, the article will show how the Brenner thesis, if applied rigorously to modern South Africa, can only lead to absurd conclusions. If you examine Ellen Meiksins Wood's polemic against the late Jim Blaut in the May-June 2001 Against the Current (A Critique of Eurocentric Eurocentrism), you will notice something very odd. Other than a citation of A.G. Frank's recently published Reorient, all of the other six footnotes refer solely to articles written by Blaut or Brenner. In contrast, Jim Blaut's chapter on Brenner in Eight Eurocentric Historians (Guilford, 2000) (about the same length as Wood's article) includes fifty-seven citations often referring to specialized, scholarly material. (1) For example, since Brenner's argument that capitalism began in the English countryside relies heavily on Eric Kitteridge's The Agricultural Revolution, Blaut offers Titow's English Rural Society, 1200-1350 as an opposing view. When David Harvey spoke at Jim Blaut's memorial meeting in NYC recently, he said that while Jim was a dedicated revolutionary, he was also a conscientious scholar. As he put it, he took all of the baggage that went along with it quite seriously, including footnotes. Either Ellen Meiksins Wood is unaware of countervailing scholarly material or, being aware of it, considers the Brenner thesis of such divine inspiration so as to be immune from counter-arguments. This, of course, is no way to deepen our understanding of capitalism's origins. Since the Brenner thesis rests on the uniquely capitalist and uniquely productive character of British agriculture from the 15th century onwards, one might expect somebody defending it to investigate alternative interpretations. One can only wonder if Wood has stumbled across Philip T. Hoffman's much-heralded Growth in a Traditional Society: the French Countryside 1450-1815 (Princeton, 1996) in her peregrinations. Sifting through village records in Bretteville-l'Orguelleuse, Roville, and Neuviller, Hoffman makes a startling discovery. While at the outset he believed the failings of French agriculture derived from the small size of peasant farms and the lack of English-style enclosures, the data gradually convinced him that sharecropping, a typical form of property relations in these villages, did not hamper productivity or innovation at all. (2) By all standard measures of labor productivity, France was the equal of Great Britain. Or has she seen Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy? Pomeranz notes that in the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China was closer to market-driven agriculture than was most of Europe, including most of western Europe. (3) He adds, much of western Europe's farmland was far harder to buy or sell than that of China. Even in the nineteenth century, about 50 percent of all land in England was covered by family settlements, which made it all but impossible to sell. 1. IBERIANTALISM As fruitful as it would be to explore France and China as counterfactuals to the Brenner thesis, my goal now is to subject Wood's rather off-the-cuff remarks on Spanish 'feudalism' to careful scrutiny. For Wood, Spain functions as an example of everything that can go wrong when you do not make the transition to capitalism. Instead of using its colonial wealth productively,
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Devine, James wrote: Even though some on pen-l have attacked Meiksins Wood unfairly, this book looks very good. When is it coming out in paperback? Don't know about the paperback, but the book is really good. Good enough to make even careful excerpting of single passages misleading, but I'll give a couple. *** So in these theories of imperialism [Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao], capitalism by definition assumes a non-capitalist environment. In fact, capitalism depends for its survival not only on the existence of these non-capitalist formations but on essentially precapitalist instruments of 'extra-economic' force, military and geopolitical coercion, and on traditional interstate rivalries, colonial wars and territorial domination. These accounts were profoundly illuminating about the age in which they were written; [my emphasis] AND, TO THIS DAY, IT HAS STILL NOT BEEN DEMONSTRATED THEY WERE WRONG IN ASSUMING THAT CAPITALISM COULD NOT UNIVERSALIZE ITS SUCCESSES AND THE PROSPERITY OF THE MOST ADVANCED ECONOMIES. (p. 127) That is, though capitalism has now spread throughout the world, the fundamental perception of Lenin and Luxemburg still holds, for even now there is no possibility within capitalism for matching, outside the imperialist core, the successes of that core. The last three chapters of the book are devoted to developing this perception and to exploring its consequences (as labelled in the title of the last chapter, . . .War without End. She has gone far, I think, towards answering a question I have raised over and over again the last year. The initiatives of the Bush administration can be (perhaps) explained in terms specific to the men (and a few women) forming that policy, that does _not_ explain the apparent acceptance of that policy by the u.s. ruling class. Wood moves towards accounting for the invasion of Iraq as consistent with, perhaps even driven by, the fundamental dynamic of u.s. imperialism over the last half-century at least. She has reaffirmed, within a new context, Lenin's and Luxemburg's primary thrust, contra Kautsky, that imperialism is _not_ a policy but, rather, the mode of existence of capitalism. Another passage: *** Global capital needs local states. But, while states acting at the behest of global capital may be more effective than the old colonial settlers who once carried the capitalist imperatives throughout the world, they also pose great risks. In particular, they are subject to their own internal pressures and oppositional forces; and their own coercive powers can fall into the wrong hands, which may oppose the will of imperial capital. In this globalized world where the nation state is supposed to be dying, the irony is that, because the new imperialism depends more than ever on a system of multiple states to maintain global order, it matters more than ever what local forces govern them and how. One significant if not immediate danger is that popular struggles for truly democratic states, for a transformation in the balance of class forces in the state, with international solidarity among such democratic national struggles, might present a greater challenge to imperial power than ever before. In a world in which disparities between rich and poor are not diminishing but growing, this possibility, however remote it may seem, can never be far from the imperial consciousness. Nor is the imperial hegemon oblivious to the growing disaffection and anti-systemic sentiment generated by neo-liberal globalization all over the world, North and South. US-led global capital cannot welcome even the kind of electoral change that, as this book was being completed, was occurring in Brazil. (p. 155)*** Apparently the upsurge in Brazil has been, at least temporarily, contained -- but I think it remains a good example of Wood's point as to the vulnerability of global capital, and the sensitivity of imperial consciousness to that threat. Carrol
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Carrol Cox wrote: That is, though capitalism has now spread throughout the world, the fundamental perception of Lenin and Luxemburg still holds, for even now there is no possibility within capitalism for matching, outside the imperialist core, the successes of that core. The last three chapters of the book are devoted to developing this perception and to exploring its consequences (as labelled in the title of the last chapter, . . .War without End. She has gone far, I think, towards answering a question I have raised over and over again the last year. The initiatives of the Bush administration can be (perhaps) explained in terms specific to the men (and a few women) forming that policy, that does _not_ explain the apparent acceptance of that policy by the u.s. ruling class. Wood moves towards accounting for the invasion of Iraq as consistent with, perhaps even driven by, the fundamental dynamic of u.s. imperialism over the last half-century at least. She has reaffirmed, within a new context, Lenin's and Luxemburg's primary thrust, contra Kautsky, that imperialism is _not_ a policy but, rather, the mode of existence of capitalism. This sounds like you've got a master theory, and the actual events of the real world represent its inevitable unfolding. But that's not good enough. You personalize or reify capitalism and imperialism - U.S. capital needs X, therefore Y happens. But just what does U.S. capital gain in Iraq? How did capital's need(s) express themselves, to whom, where, and when? Since things aren't going exactly as Bush PNAC planned, does that mean that capital is failing? Or is Bush irrelevant? Would the U.S. be in Iraq if Gore were president? Or don't those questions matter when you're looking down on earth from that World Historical altitude? Doug
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Doug Henwood wrote: This sounds like you've got a master theory, and the actual events of the real world represent its inevitable unfolding. Dunno. I wrote a quick post off the top of my head attempting to describe some of my first responses to a fine book. Carrol
