Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 17:01:16 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: Re: Adam on Linebaugh


Geez, you can see much of Thompson in Linebaugh, can't you?  There is so
much of Thompson's explanation for the genesis of Luddism in Linebaugh's
5-part taxonomy of productive modes.  The protection/status conferred by
the apprenticeship system was completely lost to the Lancashire cotton
weavers by the end of the century.  The Yorkshire cropper too was on his
way from apprenticeship-based artisan to factory hand.  And the Midlands
weavers had to rent their means, becoming alienated from means, peer and
product alike by the 'putting out' system, and becoming price takers rather
than price makers (to the extent they ever were) by the end of a defining
century I simply knew nothing about.  The trend to the union of labour in
time and space is apparent in 1700 and completely dominant by the time
their grand children claimed their distorted inheritance.  I wonder how
much more like Marx and Engels's work *The Wealth Of Nations* would have
been had Smith written just a few decades later?

I think we also see in the small property holders of Newgate and the Old
Bailey the nascence of a value system and a mode of association (Habermas's
'bourgeois public sphere' [?], formulating definitions of citizenship in
the process of defining property; without one, you can not have the other,
and the gallows mark your position on the margin) that was to drive the
political economic culture for two centuries.  Linebaugh is quite the
semiotician!  To my mind, he also brings in some of the more useful stuff
Foucault had to say about prisons, clinics and punishment, but strictly
maintaining a (non-Foucauldian) materialist analysis throughout.  

It's all so bloody compelling. I'd just love to see a classical liberal
arguing against this.  I'm really not sure it's possible!

Adam, if you've done nothing else, you've sold a book!

Regards, Rob.




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