I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
But what do you make of Wood’s argument that capitalism began in rural late medieval England? The relentless capital accumulation you find there is pretty different from a place like Renaissance Italy, where feudalism and slavery just seem so much stronger. Take Venice as an example. It has so many seeming hallmarks of capitalism—factories, trade, wealth. But the ruling class there is really qualitatively different from the capitalist ruling class, which is always reinvesting capital in improving the forces of production. You find the Venetian ruling class, in contrast, investing in feudal estates and titles which are really not that productive and which ultimately lead them nowhere. The same thing happens even in the Netherlands. Wealth is based on buying cheap and selling dear over long distances rather than improving the productive forces. This is ultimately the reason why England and then the USA conquer the world.
I feel like there’s also a difference between capital in the traditional sense, i.e., stuff you use to make stuff (machines in a factory for instance), versus capital in the Marxist sense—a relationship between the people who own the means of production and the people who don’t. That relationship doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on Earth until the enclosures ramp up in England. Like, you will find an urban proletariat in medieval Florence and Venice, but where are you going to find capitalists? You might have some pieces you need to make capitalism, but they never come together in the very specific required way until the enclosures. The ruling class in Renaissance Italy also makes its money completely differently from English capitalists—separately from the state via economic imperatives (work or you won’t have wages to buy food) for the latter versus via the state and political imperatives (work or we will kill you) for the former.
I think I'm substantially less convinced by Woods' argument after reading Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, which builds off of Braudel and addresses many of the points you bring up. It's a phenomenal work.
I always saw Arrighi's description of the Italian led non-territorialized networks of exchange as the valuable seed that was planted in the fertile soils of the competitive English leasing market described by Wood
But I think both of them got a little too wrapped up in the historical realities of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they miss the crucial mutation that transformed capitalism post-1730, not only in terms of technology but also the super-profits generated by the intensification of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade
End of the day I think Marx was dead on in his description of the evolution of industrial capitalism in relation to its previous iterations
We need a substantial treatment on not only the historical origin of capitalism, but also on the invisible second origin embodied by industrial capitalism
Yeah I think as works of history Woods and Arrighi both have great cases, and can totally complement each other if the terms are changed a bit for each. Would absolutely love to read that kind of substantial treatment on industrial capitalism, if only it existed... this kind of long duree history on capitalism is few and far between.
A while ago I found a useful historical outline to formulate the treatment, but it's limited to only tracking the technological spatial diffusion of early steam engines, but I still think it's a decent map if it was paired to the concurrent developments of capital and labor markets during this time-period
The crucial years for understanding the development of modern industrial capitalism are 1700-1803, the trick is to find all the puzzle pieces shattered around academia, pieces that deal individually with slavery, technology, war, trade, history of labor and generate a work similar to Arrighi's or Wood's
It's pretty telling that something like that hasn't been attempted, we always have to remember even historians are politically minded and politically sensitive, or in the infamous case of Walter Johnson in his treatment of Marx's writings on slavery about this same time-period, outright intellectually dishonest
At least for me, one of the reasons why I find the idea of Italian city-states having an early form of capitalism convincing is because the ruling ideology of those Italian city-states wasn't particularly feudal. You can draw a straight line from Renaissance humanism espoused by intellectuals like Erasmus to Protestantism and finally to liberalism of the Enlightenment. Renaissance humanism was also a break from feudal ideology by stressing on the individual, the hallmark of all subsequent capitalist ideologies like liberalism.
I interpret the Renaissance's fascination of ancient Greek and Roman text as a rejection of feudal ideology. Since capitalism didn't exist yet/barely existed, capitalist ideology also didn't exist/is barely developed, so they can't just replace feudal ideology with liberalism but instead had to reach for some nonfeudal ideology, which in the Italian city-states' context, would be the intellectual works produced by societies organized under the slavery mode of production. This nonfeudal ideology would be further intellectually developed until it finally emerged in its mature form as liberalism.
I've been thinking a lot about this because I think you made some really good points, especially with your second paragraph. With the first I would just say that modes of production can coexist even if one is always dominant, and when one dominant mode is replaced by another, the current dominant mode can subsume the ideology of previous modes for its own ends. Italy itself was probably always the most Roman place in the entire feudal world, especially with regard to its continuous trade links with the Arabs and Byzantines, who themselves practiced slight variations on the slave mode of production. (Slavery still existed in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; some of the most successful city-states like Venice and Genoa were powered by the slave trade.) I want to say it was Cardinal Bessarion or some other Byzantine intellectuals fleeing to Italy from the Byzantine world in 1453 who helped kick off the Renaissance devotion to ancient Greece and Rome, although Italian intellectuals like Dante and Petrarch who were active a century earlier obviously helped a lot. Renaissance humanism to me seems like a reawakening and further development of the ideological superstructure of Roman slavery. The fact that you can draw a straight line from Erasmus to Locke doesn't necessarily mean that Erasmus was living under a capitalist mode of production. Capitalism itself still utilizes feudal ideas (Leonard Leo, architect of the modern SCOTUS, is literally a hospitaller); feudalism likewise used Roman ideas even in the middle of the Middle Ages (Charlemagne called himself Emperor of the Romans for instance but there are many other examples).
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