To say that any precapitalist empire acted systematically to promote
capitalist development is to make as grave an error in the retrospective
illusion of teleology as to hold that Roman emperors from Septimius Severus
to Diocletian systematically acted to promote the growth of Christianity,
since in retrospect everything they did in fact facilitated and accelerated
conversions to Christianity, howbeit the conscious objectives of the emperors
was to suppress it.
The unnaturalness of capitalism was most readily taken for granted in every
European state wherein a privileged hereditary aristocracy governed the state,
increasingly in collaboration with the representatives of entrepreneurial
specialists as junior partners. That a point was reached, sometime in the
nineteenth century at the very latest, where the hereditary aristocracy had
become the polito-military wing of the capitalist class, howbeit wearing
funny costumes rather than business suits; and drinking, gambling, holding
officers' commissions, sitting in the Lords, having amorous affairs, *and
in their spare time* managing the state, whilst the lawyers of the lords
of the loom wore business suits, acting businesslike in a Dickensian way,
obfuscated the situation sufficiently to render it palatable. This state
of affairs confused Karl Marx above all; witness the famous Chapter LIII,
Vol III, of Capital, "Classes," in the course of writing which Marx went
mad, "Here the manuscript ends." Since that time, we have seen the
entrepreneurial specialists get along, more or less reluctantly, with
politico-military specialists wearing even funnier costumes, such as
South American *gorila* costumes (shades of that Brit movie, Morgan); Nazi
SA and SS uniforms, and even more recently, Communist Party *nomenklura*
veterans wearing Mao jackets or Shoddy Consumer Goods redolent of the Old
Days. The point being, where the privileges of the privileged class were of
recent memory (and if the privileged class doth not have privileges, what's
the sense of having a privileged class) it was correspondingly patently
commonsensical to hold that this, too, capitalism, that is, shall pass away,
and we should, this Revolution, tie a lttle red ribbon to the *tricoleur* to
symbolize this Republic's being a *Social* Repulic, as opposed to just plain
Republic, as in 1793-4, partisans of that system being known henceforth as
Radicals to distinguish them from Our Kind, who are Socialists.
In North America, this privileged class was less than completely existent,
except in places like Quebec under the Monarchy and the Province of New York,
wherein the Proprietor, the Duke of York, promoted Manorial Lordships of Vast
extent, parcels rented out to tenants, in part for the cultivation of marijuana
for HM Navy, to be worked up into ships' rope in NM roperies in Liverpool by
Irish girls under the Navigation Acts of 1653 and 1661. As the free white
cultivators preferred ownership in fee simple, the marijuana in question was
grown on slavegang plantations, eg, Hempstead, by Afro-Jamaican forced labour
imported for this purpose; the capitalistic element recently introduced into
this system having been the fact that it was more profitable to grow sugar
in Jamaica than marijuana, which cost nothing and, as far as was known in the
seventeenth century, could be sold for nothing, that is, except for rope for
HM Navy, when processed in Liverpool. The white population of the Province
languished in the competition despite the most flagrantly immoral, to con-
temporary eyes, propaganda by Treasurer Cadwallader Colden, "This province
has the best soil on earth for the cultivation of *hemp*!" [Italics his.]
Having by default or obliviousness been deprived of intentionally contrived
social development in the Monarcho-Lordly mode till Mr Pitt's stunning, and
seemingly decisive, triumph over the ancient foe at the Treaty of Paris, 1763,
the sudden burst of activism of a Parliament behaving in unseemly fashion as
so many Columbuses induced question-raising of the sort only characterizable
as Awkward, ie, What do you mean, Fair? Fair share of what? After all you
did for us? Forsooth, ye be so many Jewish Mothers, not yet invented, even.
To this day, the indigenous armenian citizen, in reviling somthing as the
depths of irrelevance or tangentialism, snorts, "What's this got to do with
the price of tea in China?" Which obliviates the curious fact that in 1773
this was the most important price on earth, for which reason a price in
excess of this price was set for sale of tea in the Commonwealth of Massachu-
setts, for which reason Patriotism was committed, not to be confused with
rioting, vandalism, destruction of property, and various and sundry offenses
of seditious nature against the Crown. And with great unanimity, there was
a switch to Brazilian coffee, whereto the US has been faithful ever since.
It is this virginal inexperience of aught but the Purest forms of the
market mechanism, in the official mythology, which explains the US social
and ideological staility. To this there is a grain of truth, and this grain
is presented for consumption by Prof Lipset, in his Commie-evocative title,
American Exceptionalism. (In the 1920s and 1930s, a heretical doctrine was
propounded among the local Marxist-Leninists of the CPUSA by this name.)
Capitalism may best be understood as "something which just leaked out."
Had there been any tipover point, established by precapitalist economic
theorists, whereby, when it was reached, the babbage, a computational
vegetable invented by a US slave geneticist, I believe, which may however,
be mistaken, would ring the alarm, and the assembled policy makers would
have Taken Steps to preclude the tipping-over from being consummated. The
reasons are many and various in addition to subjective apperances of
unnaturalness.
Firstly, the entrepreneurial specialists cannot be entrusted with making
decisions which might prove Bad For Business, whether in genral or in
particular. Notable among these decisions are those related to warfare.
What from the standpoint of scrap dealers in 1941 exporting vestiges of
previously-owned cars to Japan was getting a good price for exports, was
potential Trading with the potential Enemy to the state officials in
Washington concerned with control of strategic materials, and to the
Japanese government was the raw materials for naval construction subsequently
used in a daring naval surprise attack that December. More generally, the
outbreak of war is at best a gross inconvenience in many sectors of the
market economy, calling away employees to the military, imposing rationing,
increasing taxation and curtailing consumer spending, and sending a horde
of frockcoated snoops throughout the land to collect, say, the Excise, as
in eighteenth-century England. (See the remarkable book, Sinews of Empire,
by Brewer, 1991.)
It does not go without saying that the entrepreneurial specialists will
be most hostile to the same states that the politico-military specialists
will be most prone to war upon. If this were true, friction with Germans
should now be at apogee, and China snuggled up to. Who, I daresay, looking
about a computer lab, would not choose to snuggle up to the Chinese woman,
whose typing fingers may hold delights other than to the keyboards of this
nation, unlike the domestic product. [Note: At this point the World Party
operative invokes Appendix C, "Women of the semiperiphery," etc.] Besides
which, the footwear I have on, one third off the usual lowlowprice at Payless,
Made In China from All Man Made Materials, ie, purest Chinese plastic, though
they caused me yet another nasty spill on the wet floor of the cafeteria next
door, which in turn requires overdressing in this heatwave, such that I escape
the Elsewise-certain Fourth Amendment violations due to looking insane, "You
look stressed," the staff says, at which point I plead emphysema, convincing
nobody. But it cannot be gainsaid, the shoes themselves were originally not
just Affordable, but outright Cheap, Elsewise dicontinued by native armenian
manufacturers on grounds of profit margins, profit pictures, and the like.
In Ancient Times, I recall, Sir Alec Douglas-Home forecast a Chinese
aggression to seize Siberia, to Chinese, legitimately, at least a million
square miles of it, stolen from them by imperialist unequal treaties in the
nineteenth century. Though I am certain the Russian Federation contingent of
WSN would vehemently disagree, it would be childsplay to mount a Walk For
Peace at some occasion when the Yeltsin regime has done itself in by reason
of, whilst it's a lesser evil than its opposition, it's evil enough. The
peaceful occupation of the disputed million square miles, possily much more,
is assured. Yet China, the PRC, one cannot be too specific, prefers to
bully Taiwan, which cannot get much impressed by this, and seize the odd
Spratly. Possibly this is mere calisthenics, but diplomacy is so much show
business at all times.
I have omitted the tendency of entrepreneurial specialists to destroy
capitalism if left untended for long; with consequent hawklike vigilance
from a single state of coalitions of states requisite to averting the worst
horrors, but that's for the professional economists out there to agree with.
[Note: I'd intended to write this post about eleventh century China, which
goes to show, WSN, you can't lose 'em all.]
Daniel A. Foss
[Note: Watch for Appendix B, out soon, "Militantly combat the lie that there
is capitalism in outer space."]