Re: Micro-Factors in World [Systemic] Macrohistory: Elusive Needles in a

In a message dated 9/20/2002 12:28:53 AM Eastern Daylight Time, larondin@yahoo.com writes:


> What is the social psychology and psychohistory associated with [natural] human economic activity & behaviors, such that “capitalism” was born out of it?  Does such economic activity act alone and exclusively in world system history or in concert/interactively with the dynamics of idea-informational-communicative exchanges?  And, what is the connection of memes/memetics to such patterns of economic/world systemic activity in world history?  If we don’t ask these questions and/or others about ecology, sociobiology, physics, etc. as they impinge on our human activity over the ages, we are left with a theory or analysis that can do nothing more than deal with the sociopolitical aspects of economic behavior in world history.  All it can show is “who – in a particular time and place – was on top and who wasn’t, etc.” in the world economy of a given historical period. 


One of the confusions of World System Theory is to make the analysis economic at all. The obvious appearance of 'capitalism' in modern times could just as well be seen as a subcomponent of a more general process. 
What was the Industrial Revolution and the Age of  Capitalism? Why did the works of Kant, Hume, appear in the same generation, along with the music of Mozart, and Beethoven. Why is there such a massive clustering just here? Could music appearing in a non-random fashion have an economic explanation? 

There isn't much in the rise of capitalism that wasn't in principle present among the Sumerians. The Industrial Revolution, and the slow modern rise to it as 'bourgeois civilization', are more outcomes or intensifications of already present processes. A distinct new type of economic civilization is the characteristic outcome of modernism. But there is nothing absolute in that. It is not an intrinsic stage of history. Here Marx saw the point clearly, but in trying to codify a fixed series of stages from capitalism to socialism, we have confused ourselves. 
The point of Marx should rather be, not that capitalism was a new phase of history in a fixed sequence, but that its sluggish outcome dragged down the real potential of modernism with history's endless distortions of inequality, class division, social domination of democratic process attempting and reattempting to be born. 
The message is as much what didn't happen, as what did. The year 1848 is a good example. Nothing happened. And a celebrity Napoleon swept the field and installed a secret chamber for screwing girls in his office (true, he did, every few hours). 

Modern Germany suffered as much from what didn't happen, as from what did. As Arno Mayer points out in his The Persistence of the Old Elites is the real outcome. The French Revolution nosedives. The Republics get preempted. The new potential of the Industrial Technology is applied as if it were something from the days of the Pharaohs. And so on. And here theory has tended to confuse the issue. Everything that moves is a bourgeois phenomenon. Philosphy, art, cultural progress of any kind is the bourgeois phenomenon. The whole range of explanation is cockeyed. 
But Marx's points are clear enough. You can find a simple 'stepping stone' Marx, starting with his commentary on Hegel's issues of Right. Thence Feuerbach, thence etc... Take each stepping stone, splash cold water in you face, and reflect on the symbol series. Then Marx is obvious.
And Marx was ambivalent about the true outcome. The natural evolution of the system, left along, versus the constructs possible through intervention, possibly total intervention to create a new society--this dilemma exhausts the energy of analysis by leftists. 
Still, the analysis is clear enough. However, the extension backwards to world history of economic explanation doesn't really work. We see that capitalism is not so much a phase of inevitability as a wretched botch in a long list of things botched. 
 
The basic question remains, although it is a lot harder to answer than we thought. Can this system be transformed into something better? We are reasking that question all over again, almost as if for the first time since 1848. 
You might find helpful my distinction of econo-sequence and eonic sequence. There is an overlay of the economic and a more general process. We can resolve many of the confusions of self-enclosed economic history by distinguishing two levels. Cf. http://eonix.8m.com/enx_theory2.htm
John Landon
Website on the eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
nemonemini@eonix.8m.com