From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part II

-

 From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part II

Skip ahead 900 years and cross the Channel to England, and we find laissez-faire industrial capitalism at high tide.  Kings, nobles and clergy have been reduced to figureheads, replaced by a ruling class of bankers, merchants, mine-owners, mill-owners and financial speculators, all preoccupied with money, profit and the accumulation of capital.  The peasant class has been wiped out and nearly half the population and most of the wealth now reside in cities.  Everyone who works, whether rural or urban, works for wages.  Except among those who make their own clothes, all production is for someone’s profit.  Markets are everywhere, from the smallest Cotswold village to the vast sprawl of Birmingham, Manchester and London.   With the British Empire at its height, goods are being exported to, and imported from, every corner of the globe.  

Marx offers an explanation for this profound change in Capital, Volume I.  He points to four key sources, i.e., the growth of trade, the separation of the peasant from the land, the use of “free” labor in manufacturing, and the primitive accumulation of capital.  But he does so with necessarily uneven or incomplete access to historical proof – it’s sometimes comprehensive, sometimes sketchy, sometimes nearly absent.   
In the years since Marx’s death, scholars and polemicists have been eager to fill in the gaps with new historical data and, in doing so, they often make arguments favoring one or more of the sources Marx cites over the others.  There are at present three main schools of thought: the trade-and-towns/world-systems camp, the Rustic agrarian/political Marxism camp, and a productive forces, more inclusionary camp.  At least three or four prominent Marxists have contributed articles and books to each camp, and the total volume of literature on the subject would easily fill the bed of a Ford pick-up.  I’ll try to summarize and critique the main arguments as best I can.  With so many topics and sub-topics, and such a sweep of centuries to consider, I hope you’ll bring out in the discussion any arguments or key events I overlook or foreshorten.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carlyle’s Literary Vision Available

-
Image
Abbott Ikeler gained professional teaching experience at Emerson College. He spent ten years teaching undergraduate and graduate students majoring in communications. As a published writer, Abbott Ikeler has received multiple positive reviews on his book Puritan Temper and Transcendental Faith - Carlyle’s Literary Vision. Published by The Ohio State University press in 1972, Puritan Temper and Transcendental Faith - Carlyle’s Literary Vision discusses Thomas Carlyle’s legacy in English literature. The book examines and sets aside multiple explanations for Carlyle’s contradictory opinions and his attitude toward aesthetic experience, along with a thorough analysis of his early writings compared to his later works. Additionally, the author provides a novel approach to understanding Carlyle, citing the latter’s relationship to Goethe, his own father and his religious beliefs as thedominant sources of influence on his writing. The book received good reviews in the New York Times Book Revie...
Read more

From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part IIII

-
  From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part IIII To make their case, the “rustic economism” camp, as Brennerites are sometimes called, must ignore not only the role of trade and towns and commodity production in and for urban markets, but also the flight of peasants to the cities.  More striking still, they fail to account for three profound European-wide forces that accelerated the transition to capitalism from the 16th to the 18thC – namely the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  About those three factors, more later. Moreover, what both of these rival theories (Dobb-Brenner and Pirenne-Wallerstein) ignore is the development of forces of production under feudalism that eventually made a capitalist mode of production possible.  Chris Harman, a champion of the role of “productive forces” in the birth of capitalism, and a critic of both of the other camps, points out in “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” a long 1989 article in International Socialism, Marx’s a...
Read more

Dickens Studies Since 1970

-
Image
The observation of the Dickens centenary in 1970 was hardly  the perfuctontory ritual one might have expected. Nearly one the hundred fifty studies, short and long, appeared in that year alone. And what the calendar triggered, the critical community sustained: since 1970 upwards of eighty titles have been added annually to the Dickens bibliography. Certainly this decade's bull market has thrust into print many a dissertation that might otherwise have mouldered in its university's archives, but in general the quality of published scholarship has been high.  First of all, one must reckon with the commercial response. Even in an off year, public curiosity about Dickens generates a good deal of literary effluvia denied the likes of Eliot, Thackeray, and Meredith. Nineteen seventy produced a bumper crop of Pickwick hats and Weller corduroys, and some notice of the hoopla seems in order here. The best of the coffee-table books is E. W. F. Tomlin's Charles Dickens 1812-1870: A C...
Read more