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Re: Immanuel Wallerstein's Planet by Louis Proyect 22 January 2002 16:55 UTC |
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>http://logosonline.home.igc.org/fitch.htm This is a hatchet job on Immanuel Wallerstein by Bob Fitch, who used to edit Ramparts Magazine ages ago. I will not comment on some of the passages that deal with aspects of Wallerstein's work that I am not familiar with. I will say something, however, about the importance of Brenner's arguments in Fitch's piece, since I have become somewhat of an expert on Brenner's rather rancid, neo-Kautskyite writings. FITCH: No one has done more to call Wallerstein’s emphasis on core-peripheral trade into question than UCLA’s Robert Brenner – his sharpest and most persistent critic. Now Director of UCLA’s Institute for Social and Economic History and a former fellow of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Brenner has an international reputation not just as a specialist in late medieval history, but as a ferocious critic and a debater of the highest order. The Brenner Debate, edited by T. S. Ashton, President of the Economic History Association, represents his widely acknowledged demolition of the mainstream, Annales-Cambridge tradition of medieval history. LOUIS P: "Widely acknowledged" is a mischievous use of the passive voice, something one would expect from the bourgeois press and not from a radical journalist. Who acknowledged this? Ernesto Laclau? Ellen Meiksins Wood? Why won't Fitch name names? FITCH: Brenner is probably Wallerstein’s most damaging critic too, if only because trade is more fundamental to the foundation of the The Modern World System than absolutism. It would be nice to be able to explain the core/periphera relation in terms of the strong state/weak state distinction. But if he can’t, the bottom explanatory line must be showing that underdevelopment and development along with the various “labor market control mechanisms” – slavery, serfdom, wage-labor – are all produced by the trading system that springs up in the 16th century. But Dutch-Polish trade couldn’t have brought about serfdom in Poland, Brenner points out, because it was well underway before the 16th century. He cites big chunks of Wallerstein’s own Polish sources to establish the 15th century origin of the “second serfdom.” LOUIS P: Unfortunately, Fitch has the same "tunnel vision" of history that Jim Blaut diagnosed in Brenner. Once you set parameters that are bounded geographically by England and Poland, you leave out the crucial element of England's "take-off", namely the relationship to the New World. Absent throughout Brenner (and Wood's) copious writings on the origins of capitalism is any detailed analysis of the class character of mining and plantations in Peru, Mexico, Jamaica, etc. This is not only shoddy scholarship, it is a slap in the face to the kind of internationalism that marked Karl Marx's research project. FITCH: Trade with the Dutch didn’t cause Polish serfdom, neither did it cause Polish backwardness. Wallerstein is simply clueless about the real motivation behind Polish serfdom, Brenner argues. “Wallerstein thinks that the reason why Polish capitalism doesn’t develop is because the Dutch use their strong state crowbar to break pry open the door of the Polish market and force free trade on the weak-state Poles. In fact,” he says, “the door was wide open: Polish lords promote free trade not because it’s in the interest of the Dutch, but because they want to prevent free competition for labor power which would limit their ability to control the serfs by force.” LOUIS P: The real dynamic at work was surplus product extraction from the New World. Polish "backwardness" could have been alleviated if it had been lifted up from the earth and plunked down in Western Europe. For Brenner, the map of Europe is a bit like that famous New Yorker cartoon in which New York City occupies 75 percent of the map and California is confined to 10 percent or so. Japan is peanut-sized. FITCH: If the grain for linen trade didn’t cause Polish retardation, or Polish serfdom, it can’t be held responsible for Dutch development either, argues Brenner. There simply was no such division of labor as Wallerstein describes. Most of the wheat that the Dutch imported from Poland they didn’t consume, but simply re-exported to the southern Mediterranean. The Dutch were simply intermediaries between raw-material exchanging peripheral countries. LOUIS P: One can not blame Brenner for moving on to other subjects and thereby not keeping up with current literature. But what is Fitch's excuse? I'd be embarrassed to write something as ill-informed as his web article (no responsible journal would have published it. Well, there's always Against the Current.) If you read Kenneth Pomeranz's "The Great Divergence", you'll learn that Chinese agrarian society was even more capitalist than Great Britain's. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
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