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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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