Thu May 28 11:14:14 EDT 1998
================= EH.RES POSTING =================
Jim Blaut on 22 May mentioned Landes' environmental determinism.
Unfortunately it is also Frank and Goldstone's technoenvirodeterminism,
to the extent that their arguments are often just mirror-inverses of
Landes/Jones/Mokyr et al.
Frank thinks that Marxian exegesis of accumulation-regimes is
[expletive-deleted] but I think he protests too much. We need it
because there is no alternative, unless it is coal which according
to Frank/Goldstone is the residual which together with the Glorious
1688 now has to bear a vast new explanatory [confabulatory] load. Now it
is surely true that without fossil-fuels capital accumulation would
have run into a wall a lot quicker than it otherwise will do:
in fact, would never have got launched.
HOWEVER this changes NOTHING.
I agree with Blaut about the UNIVERSALITY of accumulation
and of commodity-production, even Africa must be looked at again
(especially Africa!) And this is what Frank also now seems to be saying
when he talks about the 'single competitive global market' (AGF posting
of 20 May). Frank now sees competition as the determining-last-
instance of the world system. It 'chain-links' everything else.
But competition is different from accumulation. Frank does not
see the wood for the trees.
It is not competition which synthesizes the world qua system, but the
flux and reflux of accumulation dynamics between and within regions,
economic sectors, and states.
Mokyr in 'Dead Labour, Cheap Labour & the Ind Revo' (Higonnet et al
1991) notes a conclusion reached by Marx and later by Raphael
Samuels in his studies of C19 labour-processes. Marx argued that low
labour costs led to low capital investment. There was actually no rush
to mechanise; most Brit industry remained muscle-powered to at least
1870 (Samuels described how even hi-tech locomotive factories had
practically no machine tools and workers chiselled out pistons and
cylinders with hammers, chisels and rule of thumb!). Where labour was
expensive there *was* a market for labour-saving capital goods: but that
was in the US, thus there was the phenomenon Marx noticed, of English
inventions and technology which were only exported to the US and never
deployed in the UK because it was cheaper to exploit [plentiful] British
labour to death. But Mokyr takes issue with this and argues that
low-wages = high profits = high rate of capital accumulation (ie,
growth). He suggests this explains the mysterious failure of the
Netherlands to industrialise despite good transport, financial
services, skilled labour, plentiful capital, colonies etc:
*High wages* held Holland back, unlike Belgium which as with the
UK had surplus labour (and COAL!).
But Mokyr admits his analysis breaks down when confronting Ireland (low
labour costs, but v. low rate of accumulation) or the US (the highest
labour rates, but also the highest capital investment rate). Mokyr ends
by agreeing with Ricardo, or was it Smith (don't have the book here):
what counts is labour-productivity, which was so low in Ireland that
Irish labour (in value terms) was more expensive than US labour; while
productivity was so high in the UK/US that labour costs were actually
among the world's lowest in value terms. If it wasn't technology which
lay behind high productivity then what was it? Answer: the Victorians
were able to achieve a phenomenal racking up of the rate of
exploitation, as Engels (Condition of the Working Class in 1844), Marx
(Capital I), Samuels (History Workshop, 3, 1977), Berg (Technology and
Toil in the Ind Revo) and others so well document.
But Frank says 'class struggle' is [expletive deleted] as an
explanation!
He couldn't be more wrong: the Victorian English accumulation-regime
(which had the American West as its true frontier -- 20m Brits
emigrated in C19, mostly to the US) was astounding for the
consumption of generations of foreshortened lives, consumed
in a holocaust of industrialisation.
Class struggle, the denial of liberty and even life in the name of
accumulation, was the essence of the process then as now. It was
facilitated by the presence of material factors (availability of deep-
mined coal, steam power, machine-building, excellent transport etc,
which as Goldstone documents, was all in the UK experience) in
combination with social factors (abundant, mobile population,
a LONG-STANDING, well-acclimatised proletariat --
Frank/Goldstone say there were no large proletariats before
1750 but are WRONG: there were 2 million English
rural PROLETARIANS, ie wage-labourers, not single-handed farmers, in
1800, so demographically there must have been at least 0.5m as early
as 1600, and one could go further back -- so to say there was no
proletariat is WRONG). And the presence, as Blaut says, of constantly-
expanding markets, creating a convivial climate for growth-minded
capitalists -- and of course, the elephant of colonial empires which
held up the metropolitan world.
Where Goldstone is right is on the centrality of fossil fuels
reducing energy costs and wrenching the accumulation-regime on
a new growth-path from the immobility of Advanced Organic Societies, ie
the states/modes of production'trade areas that were dependent
on muscle power, biomass and ultimately on 'renewable' solar
energy fluxes (as we will be again in 100 years time).
But Goldstone, too, has no concept of accumulation. This is weird since
accumulation is a primary human motivation.
The Hegelian (probably Aristotelian) idea that the immanent nature
of a form is revealed in its subsequent development (the development
which also 'effaces its origins') is also Marx's way of problematising
accumulation-regimes and logics. Once commodity production began,
and money developed, whenever that was, Sumer, Babylon, China, Greece,
I don't know what people say now, it flowed like a historical river,
seeping into the available nooks and crannies, working its way round
obstacles, submerging other social praxes/syntheses. Sooner or later,
simple commodity production had to result in capitalist commodity
production, if only because THAT IS THE LOGICAL DESTINY
OF THE COMMODITY-FORM. C-M-C had to become M-C-M'.
Is this teleology? No it is not, because we are speaking only of a
TENDENCY which might never be realised, and in any case never in a
predictable way, for example, there you could not predict the
beneficent accidents of British geology and insular geography.
But these contingent circumstances mattered ONLY because
commodity production was latent with capitalisn just as Homeric
gift-exchange was latent with simple commodity production, forae,
markets, coinage and mathematised space-time.
All history since the neolithic revo is about accumulation,
every husbandman/prince/merchant knew it, and it is no good
only concentrating on FORMS OF TRADE. What trade resulted in/
was engendered by, was the accumulation/sedimentation of immense
numbers of hieroglyphs of cultural development, and this is
not an accidental, contingent, fortuitous by-product of
our activity but its presence, actuality, within history.
Thus capitalism is implicit from the start, in ALL civilisations.
And BTW they ALL share more even than Frank/Goldstone acknowledge
because even Goldstone is hung up on the idea that China, India
etc were too 'big', bureaucratic, ossified etc which is why their
revolutions were always abortive, co-opted by the elites and hence
remained just revolts -- this is another take on Wittfogel and it's
wrong.
I have a thing about Wittfogel and I may post on him some time.
Related to this hoary idea of stagnant Asia is the brothers-Grimms,
pomo fairytale that European chaos was actually a *good*, ie the
warring petty princedoms were progressive. This is
mistaken (!), as Blaut points out and even Goldstone notes
there were huge efficient Asian markets, low transaction costs,
complex nets of confraternities, intellectual elites,thriving
merchant communities etc so no intrinsic reason why big states
couldn't do it.
If the history of Advanced Organic Societies consists of
millennia of 'sustainability' when nothing much happened but
the slow cumulation of hesitant steps with sometimes sudden
lurches forwards or catastrophic collapses back, then
ALL societies including the Mayans, etc, were striving
-- BLINDLY striving, but still the human, personal, private
impulse to accumulate informed societies -- to realise the
logic of accumulation immanent in the money form. Insofar as
they didn't, eg Aztecs fetishised gold, they were doomed
(altho all monetised societies built the market by the temple
for the same reason, even the Muslims, who crammed the mosques
with gold).
It was completely fortuitous that take-off happened in Europe: ALL
institutional arguments, ala Goldstone, who sounds almost like
Landes when he talked about Glorious 1688 and the Enlightenment etc,
are wrong. I am sure about this enough to concede lots to Landes,
even European weberian instrumentality. So what if Europeans made
better clocks (IF they did)? In the broader scheme of things it's
just irrelevant. Once take-off began the whole social world
was seized by this inexorable logic the way a dog seizes a rat and
shakes it to death in a fury. It was capitalism, not institutions, and
as Frank rightly points out, since take-off was so late, the argument
for institutions is more irrelevant than ever because there just
wasn't time for institutions to work in and to create such a quantum
change.
On the question of Marx's Eurocentrism, Frank is 100% wrong. It
is enough to look at the man's method and his account of the immanent
social logic of capitalist production to see that he couldn't possibly
have privileged ANY historical or geopgraphical space because the whole
point was to posit the overarching historical and social logic of
commodity poroduction and above all capitalist commodity production (in
which the only 'commodity' they seek to make is the money-commodity).
But part of the problem here is that there is no sign that people
are atually reading Marx. We get to hear about Marx's theory of
modes of production, and Marx's theory of stages, but this just is
NOT Marx -- Stalin invented the stages theory, with help from Engels.
Marx studied England as an exemplar, nothing more, and -- not
being psychic -- he couldn't write about things he didn't know, which
hadn't been researched but whenever he did know (and as someone who
has struggled to learn Russian myself, it says much for me about Marx
that he bothered to learn Russian for no other reason than to explore
for himself historical materials on the zemstvo etc, for no other
purpose than to decide whether a non-European path to the future
might be adumbrated) he always took the side of the underdog
and if the only exception is a couple articles written about
India in the 1840s, he more than made up for that in his terrible
criticism of the British in India later on. No-one is perfect.
Everything that has been done by world historian/geographers like
Blaut, has only served to confirm the results Marx achieved, his
holistic analysis, and Frank is up a gum tree because the success
of his own work has put Marxism back on the deck so squarely, no?
On primitive accumulation and colonialism, Blaut is right of course!
How else could it be: the problem however is not so much proving
the existence, rapacity etc of colonialism as understanding how
capitalism could and did destroy Chinese and Indian economy
-- after all these years, people still do not understand what is
combined and uneven development, or how to show how UNDERNEATH the
money-price data (which exists, is tabulated etc, perhaps not well, but
it's there) there is the real VALUE process which price-movements map
onto but not isomorphically. As Wallerstein says, capitalism likes to
avoid paying its bills, and that's what one has to home in on, in order
to explain the calamitious effect on China which Europe had, ie to
really nail down the guilt of colonialism. But Blaut has done all that!
Blaut wrote:
> Then a totally new set of processes entered in
> giving Europe a leg up. In systems terms, the boundary of a hemisphere-wide
> system was broken open when Europeans began to loot and enslave -- and
> produce -- i.e., colonize. The first effect was to give the
> NW European protocapitalist class the power to make Bourgeois Revolutions,
> partly fighting the feudal class but, I think, mainly buying them out
> politically and economically. Now we have a novelty on the surface of the
> planet: a large, populous region controlled by capitalisats. They now use
> sstate power to generate more rapid accumulkation, incljding of course
> bending society's resources to the task of expanding colonial territories.
I agree and I also think that the elites are always more historically
aware, more used to the possibilities of power, and more long-sighted
about their true interests, and more determined to achieve them, than we
ever credit them for, since most of us are paralysed with social
impotence and our general worm's eye view and we normatively extend that
to the rulers in our assumptions about what they are capable of.
And this also does not contradict the idea that capitalists are merely
personations of blind forces; Frank is wrong when he says there is an
'irremediable' contradiction in Marx.
Frank:
> the change in power from one upper class to
> another , ie slave owners to feudal lords to bourgeois, was NOT made
> primarily by the class struggle of the lower/oppressed clases. and that
> is manifestly true. the 'political' Marx [class struggle is motor of
> all history] and the historicla materialist Marx [people make histpory
> but not in conditions of their own chosing] are in irremediable
> contradiction with each other, as the TWO MARXIMS of Gouldner alos
> pointed out - and despiute the claim of my friend Mino Carchedi that
> Marx, Gramci and he Mino had 'resolved' this contradiciton.
This is almost barmy. If Marx was contented with the notion that
'class struggle was the motor of history' (BTW 'motor' is a
very Ind Revo conceit, implying machinery, and wouldn't even
have been THINKABLE 50 years before Marx said it), why did he spend
thirty years 'in this shit' as he called his economics studies? Class
struggle, ie conflicts between different interest groups, IS the OBVIOUS
motor, but its FORM OF APPEARANCE is in the interplay of ECONOMIC
PROCESSES which structure production, distribution, and create
'appropriate' elites/political forms etc, each with their own
mystificatory discourses and reified frames. People can and do
exercise free will and make judgments and behave ethically or not
while acting out unconscious roles predetermined by their social
position. How can anyone even think of denying this -- which was
Marx's discovery?
Respectfully Submitted
Mark Jones
============ FOOTER TO EH.RES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info EH.RES" to lists at eh.net.