File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 127


Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 23:03:18 -0500
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Gunder Frank, the ole Mississip' etc


Mark:

1. Yes, the same Malcolm Caldwell. I had read somewhere that his death was
considered an unsolved mystery.

2. AGF. His underlying problem, his ball and chain, so to speak, is his
hostility to Marxism. Ithink I agree with all (?) his criticisms of
Eurocentrism in Marx's thought, but he thinks it invalidates the whole
model and I think that is dead wrong. Also. he has lately taken to arguing
that the rise of capitalism, the bourgeois revolutions and all that
happened prior to about 1800, including the scientific revolution, was not
really all that important in the context of world history; Asia was ahead
of Europe right down to 1800. I can't accept that. He calls me Eurocentric
for arguing that Europe's "rise" relative to Asian civilizations began in
the 16th or 17th century. Europe, says AGF, didn't really begin to "rise"
until the mid-18th, with the onset of the industrial revo. He agrees with
me that the looting and slave production in the americas explains the fact
that Europe managed to begin its "rise." But I say that this led to the
bourgeois revolutions and the taking of power by an emergin capitalist
class, and say further that it was this POLITICAL VICTORY which (1)
destyroyed feudalism, (2) put the state to work for accumulation, including
forced proiletarianization, (3) led to colonial expansion, and then (4)
permitted an industrial revo. AGF thinks the bourgeois revolution wass
unimportant and he doesn't even want to usde the word "capitalism" in this
context: like Weber, he equates capitalism with merchant capitalism and
sees it slowly rising for millennia. He is probably (with Samir Amin) the
most important radical world historian of our time, mainly because he
understood imperialism and brilliantly showed how it works (I don't know if
he knew or knows his debt to Lenin), and because he kindled the crusade
against Eurocentrism.

3.  As to coal: I seem to have read that the Native Americans ignited it
for heat, and this in a forested region: coal as fuel is hardly a new
discovery. And iron and steelmaking is an old art, using various fuels.
Undoubtedly, when the industrial revo had reached the point where water
power and charcoal would not do what was needed, the availabiluity and
location of coal measures was important, but that came late in the process
and so doesn't "explain" (as a crucial factor) the IR.

4. "I think that the current fashion of
dismissing the Newtonian revolutiona and the craft of clockmaking etc, is
bending the stick too far...the emergence of a certain instrumental
rationality in England, the Low Country etc." These things are importan t
but they arrive LATE. I believe that the inflow of wealth -- not some
innate, lurking propsnsity toward science and progress -- explains these
things, including the Scientific Revolution. There was science in other
civilizations. Science had little to do with the rise of technology before
the 19th century. (AGF denies that a scientific revolution occurred.)

Janet Abu-Lughod thinks that the Black Death hit Asia harder than Europe
and this explains the rise of Europe. I don't agree. Windmills?
2000+-year-old Persian invention which diffused eastward and westward.
Clocks? Apparently older in the Islamic civilization and China than in
Europe. Europoean clocks became the best in the world much later.  I agree
with you that change speeded up in Europe during the 16th century, but not
earlier. 

5. "Where you, I, Lou, AGF and most of us by now agree is that there is
nothing predestined, teleological or "Right" about the emergence of Europe
and the arrival of industrial capitalism. Such inevitability as there is is
not that of righteous design but of the thoroughly-odious 'iron laws of
capital' which Marx first revealed."  I think there were three "moments"
that need to be explained. 1) The original start of the rise of Europe
above other civilizations. This can be dated precisely to the early 16th
century, with the arrival of loot from America. 2) The seizing of power by
early preindustrial capitalists -- the burghers -- over relatively large
political entities (Holland, England, etc.), allowing capitalism to operate
in a political nexus controlled by the capitalists, and thus allowing the
Law of Value to hold sway, and (3) the industrial revolution which comes a
century later than the bourgeois revos and firmly centered capitalism
thereafter in the European world.

6. "...it is YOU who stil have
to explain away the awkward fact that the era of Industrial Capitalism is
coterminous with the large-scale use of non-renewable fuels, and this is a
fundamental, decisive thing. Without hydrocarbons, there could never ever
be a capitalism more advanced than say 13th China, which was the most
advanced PROTO-capitalism known to history. This is just a simple,
inescapable truth, a truism in fact." Largely true. But the explanation for
the IR is not the same as the explanation for the original rise of
capitalism and for the bourgeouis revos -- see above. By the time Newcomen,
Watt, and theri friends were doing their thing., Britain was sucking up
colonial wealth in West Africa (slaving), the Caribbean, North America,
India, etc. And the IR got well underway before water power and charcoal
proved inadequate. 

En la lucha siempre

Jim  


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