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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
informative
Not the time to read as required extreme focus but I had a stack of books waiting...
Does capitalism have a navel? The usual narrative of how capitalism came to be portrays history as a progressive liberation of the productive forces from the fetters of kinship, communal obligations and all manner of tradition that stand in the way of accumulation for accumulation's sake, which is the only 'telos' capitalism recognizes. But this is to uncritically allow capital to retroactively obfuscate its own genesis and present itself as the inevitable final frontier of all expansion in commercial activity. On its own, the quantitative expansion of the scale of pre-capitalist commerce and the removal of barriers inhibiting the productive forces does not automatically culminate in a system of capitalist property relations. Otherwise, one would have to assume that petty producers, landlords and peasants were all driven by a sort of transhistorical spirit of capitalism to begin with. What is at stake is the nature of transition from one mode of production to another, and the so called 'commercialization model' fails to explain what is specifically novel about capitalism as a mode of production distinct from what came before it, e.g. feudalism, and therefore fails to explain the transition. Both feudal overlords and capitalist rentiers of the land extract surplus from direct producers, but they do so in radically different ways. Pre-capitalist (tribal, antique, feudal) surplus extraction is overwhelmingly extra-economic, in the sense of direct coercion exercised by lords, kings and states where it is less a matter of developing the productive forces (e.g. enhancing labor-productivity, cutting costs, innovating) than of extending or refining the already existing methods of appropriation such as taxation and other dues. The French Absolutist state, for example, took the latter route, and enabled the nobility and to some extent the bourgeosie to enrich themselves through state offices. Even in the absence of generalized wage labor, the existence of a integrated national market on which direct producers no less than appropriators must depend for access their means of self reproduction, and which compels its participants to compete against each other in maximizing the use of land, means that the general laws of motion of capitalism are already at work. "Until the production of the means of survival and self reproduction is market dependent, there is no capitalist mode of production" (141) Now, Wood's master argument in the Origin of Capitalism is that capitalism properly speaking "took off" in only one country. Wood isolates the class dynamics between the English countryside in the 1500s and historically unprecedented scale of the market dependence it engendered as the zero hour of agrarian capitalism. Once capitalism took off in England, it rewrote the rules of commerce and naturally forced the hand of its rival countries and colonial powers who then had no choice but to play by the new rules. All of this sounds plausible enough, but I am wondering if the elements of capitalist 'mentality', or innovating for the explicit purpose of enhancing labor productivity was already at work, for example, in the merchant classes in the semi-autonous city states of high medieval ages. To me at least, the idea that class actors in the English countryside were laying the groundwork for capitalism but did so unconsciously does not demystify the transition between capitalism and what came before it a whole lot better than the techno-determinist assertion that the forces of production naturally tends to break through he fetters of the relations of production assuming certain conditions are met (these conditions were met in the English countryside). But I have to say that this accessible and well researched book is a decent entrypoint into the literature on the transition debate, which I have now decided to read more about thanks to this book.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Surprisingly readable for a work of Marxist history and historiography. Meiksins Wood gives a full picture of the “transition” debates on the left, or put more simply the debate over how feudalism gave way to capitalism.
The first section gives summaries of the classic “commercialisation” model of capitalist transformation, most associated with Adam Smith’s idea that humans have a natural propensity to trade, truck and barter. According to this model, all that was needed for feudalism to give way to capitalism was for certain restraints on human nature, such as the political control of the economy by lords under feudalism, to be done away with to let capitalism be unleashed. Therefore, this model purports capitalism to be largely a quantitative leap from pre-capitalist commerce brought about by changing political and economic arrangements, as well as the primitive accumulation of capitalists and capitalist nations.
Meiksins Wood goes on to show that even though many Marxist historians have set out to turn many of the tenets of this model on its head, by remaining within the parameters of the model they merely end up with an inverted history which relies equally on the notion that human nature is driven by a commercial instinct. In the second section, she proposes an alternate model, whereby capitalism is a specific, contingent historical system which developed at first only in England throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Her location of the genesis of capitalism in English agricultural production rather than in the classic model’s location in industrial production draws our attention to what changes under capitalism is not a mere quantitative expansion of pre-capitalist production, but an entire qualitative re-orientation of production along capitalist social relations.
The model Meiksins Wood proposes certainly challenged a lot of presuppositions I had about the history and development of capitalism, however, I haven’t yet read another of the vast literature on the subject by authors such as Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi to comment fully on whether her critiques are aimed fairly at them. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to challenge some of the deeply held narratives we have inherited (often through the history curricula in public education systems) about capitalism, modernity and especially about pre-capitalist commerce and production.
Meiksins Wood offers a non-determinist Marxist history of capitalism, which opens up many possibilities in the form of critique of the past, but also of thinking of new futures, and maybe that is the real contribution of this book to the existing anti-capitalist histories of capitalism.
The first section gives summaries of the classic “commercialisation” model of capitalist transformation, most associated with Adam Smith’s idea that humans have a natural propensity to trade, truck and barter. According to this model, all that was needed for feudalism to give way to capitalism was for certain restraints on human nature, such as the political control of the economy by lords under feudalism, to be done away with to let capitalism be unleashed. Therefore, this model purports capitalism to be largely a quantitative leap from pre-capitalist commerce brought about by changing political and economic arrangements, as well as the primitive accumulation of capitalists and capitalist nations.
Meiksins Wood goes on to show that even though many Marxist historians have set out to turn many of the tenets of this model on its head, by remaining within the parameters of the model they merely end up with an inverted history which relies equally on the notion that human nature is driven by a commercial instinct. In the second section, she proposes an alternate model, whereby capitalism is a specific, contingent historical system which developed at first only in England throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Her location of the genesis of capitalism in English agricultural production rather than in the classic model’s location in industrial production draws our attention to what changes under capitalism is not a mere quantitative expansion of pre-capitalist production, but an entire qualitative re-orientation of production along capitalist social relations.
The model Meiksins Wood proposes certainly challenged a lot of presuppositions I had about the history and development of capitalism, however, I haven’t yet read another of the vast literature on the subject by authors such as Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi to comment fully on whether her critiques are aimed fairly at them. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to challenge some of the deeply held narratives we have inherited (often through the history curricula in public education systems) about capitalism, modernity and especially about pre-capitalist commerce and production.
Meiksins Wood offers a non-determinist Marxist history of capitalism, which opens up many possibilities in the form of critique of the past, but also of thinking of new futures, and maybe that is the real contribution of this book to the existing anti-capitalist histories of capitalism.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Meiksins Wood rewrites the common story of the emergence of capistalism. It lays out a history so clear that it places even Marx's "primitive accumulation" as just a phase in it. Feels like a must read for everyone willing to understand the emergence and specifics of capitalism. However, even though the story is very convincing, a book with such a title would have benefited from a more rigorous account of specific events and facts from those early centuries of capitalism.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
A bit of a slog, but a necessary reminder that capitalism is an independent tool of class war, independent of bedfellows like colonialism, markets, empire, slavery, etc. Also very clearly breaks from that historical inevitability them economicists be spouting.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced