At 09:58 PM 28/10/96 -0500, Carl H.A. Dassbach wrote:
>No matter how much one tries to minimize the `peninsular' experience, e.g.,
> pockets of capitalism occurred elsewhere and well before the emergence of
>capitalism in Europe (I doubt it - this is more a question of
>interpretation than historical fact), Europeans had being trying for eons
>to get the productive advantage over Asia , capital accumulation occurred
>in other parts of the world well in advance of the Europeans etc. etc.
>there are some aspects of the European phenomena (capitalism) that are
>irrefutably unique and reverberated around the world.
>
>For example, no other society, in no place and at no time, has been able to
>free the _majority_ of its population from subsistence production. No
>society has made the relentless expansion of productivity (or what Marx
>calls the general pursuit of wealth) the object of sustained pursuit and
>hence, constantly revolutionized the tools of production. No society has
>been in the position to fill the basic needs of all of its members.
>(Unless, of course, I missed some big developments 1000 years ago in the
>Yucatan or Tierra del Fuego)
Go with the Yucatan, plus Peru. Then, there's more. Every report on the
Kalahari "Bushmen" reports the same thing, that until recently they have
provided for their basic needs with a comparatively leisurely three or four
hours work a day -- made productive because of their high level of manual
and intellectual skills -- with the rest of their time being given over to
cultural pursuits. With the crushing of their society by the outside world
they are now reduced to poverty, and must work or beg full time.
The "Dinka" (I put these titles in quotes because they are the constructions
of white people too ignorant to actually figger out these peoples' own
names, the latter being Monjiaang, "The People"; Ding or Deng is the name of
every male firstborn of a couple, so the first white "explorers" mistook the
finger for the Moon and thought it was the name for the whole people, hence
"Dinka."), the Monjiaang look upon the outside world as an encroaching ring
of savages -- a reasonable and judicious view, it seems to me -- and respond
the same way the Japanese and Koreans did, by sending their best kids out to
get PhD's.
My point is not to mock the pretensions of industrial culture; that would be
cheap and easy. Rather it seems to me that the meaning of the world systems
exercise is this: it demonstrates that one can construct alternate
historiographies -- and this leads naturally to the question of of how far
this new found ability can and should be taken.
So far the first model out of the gate, "World System(s)", has all the
appearances of a vulgar Marxism writ large, as though we were simply seeing
the level of detail that Marx used in writing about Europe applied to the
wider world of Lenin's trade imperialism. This is perhaps natural. Other
than Marx, who has had large visions? Well, there's Gibbon, there's a bunch
of cycle crackpots, and that's about it, assuming we ignore the Aquinases
and Swedenborgs.
Are there any alternatives to the Vulgar Marxist (VM) version. Of course
there are. Here's one that I think avoids the problems that Dassbach is
having with capitalism and/or capital accumulation in the paragraphs above:
What we have just passed through is the Warring States Period. The Chinese
make the mistake of saying that this ended with the Ch'in Dynaty in 221 BCE:
it was just getting warmed up then, and lasted another 2100 years. During
the last segment of the Warring States, The Gunpowder Years, ~1400 to 1945,
led to the hegemony of Europe, including the conquest of China by Marxism, a
deviant form of Christianity. This last, I'm sad to say, is Reischauer's
quip, not mine. With the appearance of Mutual Assured Destruction, 1945-55
onward, the world seems likely to return to the pre-war process interrupted
2500 years earlier, which we may call Cultural Competition and Integration.
History starts up again, after an interlude of friction and madness.
This version solves all the problems of this "capitalism" craziness by
turning our attention to the central engine of the last 2500 years, which is
not trade but war.
The business side is obviously important, just as important as metallurgy,
education, diet, or literacy, but there is nothing special about the
economicses of Smith or Marx. Smith's demolition of mercantilism in a time
and a place was a middling big deal, comparable to the reshaping of the
corporation as reported by Gardiner and Means.
Query: isn't the DLJ Warring States Period just the interlude between
Toffler's (and later the Tofflers') Agricultural and Information
Revolutions? And aren't we rather losing track of the Industrial Revolution
here?
Reply: on the first, no. The Toffler enterprise is their historiographic
entry, and I think they simply have it wrong, much as I admire Al and
Heidi's writing skill and witty and tasteful use of detail. The information
revolution _is_ the agricultural revolution, _pace_ Jane Jacobs. You get
domestic animals by identifying the tame ones among your prey; you get
farming by taking thought (The cubit is not a measure of stature, but of
land area!), thought about which seeds are worth keeping and which stuff
isn't worth the trouble.
As for the industrial "revolution," just replace it with the word steam.
That lets you put chemistry, physics, and electronics into perspective, and
you see that there wasn't any sudden revolution, just a steady cranking up
of, or turning the potentiometer of, the intensity of information use.
The above, then, supplies a framework for a period, 500 BCE to 2000 CE, and
a tool of analysis -- Level of Violence -- for looking at subperiods, of
which The Gunpowder Years (tm) & (c) is perhaps the most interesting.
(You're welcome to refer to the gunpowder years, but as a book title, it's
mine.)
It also supplies the major subtext for the palimpsest of human unification:
the struggle between the animal which fights over scraps, and the
intellectual which creates, doesn't consume, resources. This is the
multi-millenium struggle to actually carry through the information revolution.
-dlj.