Ellen Meiksins Wood radio interview

I want to urge everybody to listen to the interview with Ellen Meiksins 
Wood that is online at: http://www.livingroomradio.org/. Although it is 
marred by an unwillingness by interviewer C.S. Sung to ask tough 
follow-up questions, it does at least allow this celebrated author to 
expound freely on ideas found in her latest book "Empire of Capital" 
available from Verso Press.

That this book is grounded in the Brenner thesis should come as no 
surprise. Wood has endeavored to popularize and generalize this theory 
on the origins of capitalism in contrast to the more specialized, almost 
Mandarin, efforts by Brenner. Brenner did try to broaden its 
implications in a NLR article over 25 years ago, but except for this 
has stuck to narrow questions of land tenure, etc. in journals like Past 
and Present.

Wood has a rather strict definition of capitalism. It is defined by 
market relations where the two classes in society confront each other 
without mediating political, legal or military institutions. It should 
be obvious that feudalism did not work in that fashion. Under feudalism 
the serf was required by law to perform corvee services, which was labor 
performed in lieu of taxation such as mending fences, repairing roads, 
etc. Once the serf was freed, he could no longer be required to perform 
such services, nor would he be ceded land upon which he could sustain 
himself and his family. Under capitalism the worker receives a wage and 
the control that the boss exercises becomes much less transparent.

While this is a useful distinction, Wood goes completely overboard by 
failing to recognize that capitalism can just as easily revolve around 
non-market relationships when the need arises. For example, fascism was 
distinguished by an elaborate network of political, legal and military 
institutions--including slavery--that operated outside the framework of 
the marketplace. When Thyssen and Krupp employed slave labor during the 
Third Reich, they were just as much capitalist as they are today under 
bourgeois democracy.

More to the point, the colonial world never really enjoyed market 
relations over an approximately 400 year period while capitalism of the 
pure sort was being developed in England. Wood pretty much admits this 
when she tells the interviewer that India was never really capitalist 
when ruled by England. By virtue of the fact that the British army ran 
the country and forced unfavorable trade agreements on a subject 
population, it was outside the realm of market relations and hence 
outside the realm of capitalism. Now none of this obviously makes sense. 
Even in Karl Marx's flawed articles on India, he was clear about the 
nature of what was going on:

"These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the 
greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the 
brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, 
as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those 
family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar 
combination of hand-weaving, hands-pinning and hand-tilling agriculture 
which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having 
placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping 
away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small 
semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their 
economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the 
truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm

Betraying her professional academic background, Wood seems intent on 
coming up with typologies that could be used to categorize different 
forms of imperialism. Ancient Rome was an "empire of property" because 
it relied on seizure of land. The next type of empire to appear on the 
stage of history was the "empire of commerce", which included both 
Holland and the Arab-Muslim principalities. These empires are 
characterized by buying cheap and selling dear, so the argument goes. 
This analysis is drawn from Marx's rather musings on mercantile capital, 
which in contrast to his discussion of 17th to 19th century British 
economic history, are rather barren of empirical data. This is 
completely understandable since he was consumed by trying to understand 
British society, where a powerful working-class was fighting politically 
and open to the ideas of socialism. It is doubtful that Marx had the 
time or the inclination to really understand how 17th century Peruvian 
or Bolivian societies were organized. Of course, Ellen Meiksins Wood has 
no excuse and it is singularly disappointing to find so little interest 
in her writings about class relations between silver miners and their 
bosses.

She seems almost obsessed with the figure of John Locke, who is turned 
into a kind of Major Prophet of capitalism in her writings. It is too 
bad that the interviewer was either unaware of or unwilling to mention 
the fact that this very same John Locke was embraced by Southern 
slave-owners as their main ideologist.

According to James Oakes in "Slavery and Freedom":

"The writings of eighteenth-century Southerners were steeped in Lockean 
premises, never more thoroughly than during the American Revolution. 
'Men in a State of Nature are absolutely free and independent of one 
another as to sovereign Jurisdiction,' Richard Bland of Virginia wrote 
in 1766. They enter into society 'by their own consent,' he explained, 
just as 'they have a natural Right to quit the Society of which they are 
Members . . . [to] recover their natural Freedom and Independence.'" (p. 60)

Indeed, Locke, a slave-owner himself, wrote the state constitution of 
South Carolina in 1669 that stipulated: "But yet no slave shall hereby 
be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in 
all things in the same state and condition he was In before."

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