The sociological palaeontology of capitalism is contaminated with
evolutionary biology, itself elsewhere a wonderfully useful idea. But
here, the Panda Sucks Its Thumb. "Capitalist" forms, institutions, whatevers,
are *a priori* assumed to have developed out of whatevers which temporally
preceded them, whether or not in the societies under study or being compared
the earlier whatevers fortified massively conservative fixtures of the social
formation whose reproduction was tantamount to precluding capitalist
development; where the later whatevers were, equally *a priori*stically,
hailed as essential features of Modern Capitalism.
Terminological digression: Prior to the Women's Movement, sociologists
would have written, in place of my nebulous "whatevers," *social
structures*, as the evolutionary biologist continues to write
*morphological structures*. As we now realize, *social structures*,
as manifestions of *yang*, stand proudly *erect* until *fatally
undermined* by *yin*. Today, as we all recognize, there are, and
rightly so, *social cavities* and even *social mineshafts*, the
latter bearing menacing warnings to the effect of AUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL ONLY and HARDHATS NO ADMITTANCE.
We have all read numerous versions of basically reshuffled or rehashed
models sharing the following features.
Firstly, the *post hoc ergo propter hoc* fallacy. The positive version
is in effect, "Given that capitalism developed or occurred here, meaning,
the West (Euroarmenia and Japan), with admission slightly higher for
Japanese than others since they're *latecomers* so *consequently look
funny*, that which is now West had *preconditions* for capitalism, such
as Feudalism. The modification of the Weberian-Parsonian explication of
the *preconditions* thesis to fit Japan was accomplished by the infamous
Marion J. Levy, whose nonsense was regurgitated whole, for fifty or more
pages, by Fernand Braudel in Volume Three of Capitalism and Civilization.
The negative version, which symmetry-fetishists such as Max Weber and
Latinists for whom the *filioque* clause (the Double Procession of the
Holy Spirit) is meaningful may develop *pari passu* with the positive,
holds that where "pristine capitalism" did not originate *could not ever*
have developed capitalism, for reasons which the author will tell you
with, if anything, even greater enthusiasm than those adduced for its
positive-version *preconditions*. This is due to the author's intense
conviction that the Failure to develop capitalism is indicative of
*essential* Inferiority of the Failures to the Successes. The psychotic
tendencies (often more than merely that) of Max Weber were elicited by
his fixation upon Rationality, allegedly related to his abstinence from
sexual intercourse except for one occasion, with Marianne Weber's best
friend. Consider that he attempted a book arguing the Rationality of
"Western music" compared to the Other.
The foregoing vicious smear is necessary in light of the pervasiveness
of Weberian influence. Mark Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past, Stanford,
1973, argues that the Mediaeval Chinese city was unsuitable for capitalist
development in that there was *no civic consciousness* in which case,
why did each city have its own City God?. Relatedly, there was *no political
separation* between city and countryside, as in Europe. There is no effort
to explain why sharp political-jurisdictional demarcations promote capitalist
development. Consider that among the first acts of the French Revolution, by
mob action in many places even prior to legislation, was precisely the
destruction of such boundaries as relics of "feudalism," the latter a coinage
of that moment. It should rather be argued that, in Western Europe, the
inhabitants of towns persevered *despite* having to endure encapsulation
either for local supremacy in context of the wider rural-based feudal
polity; or more often as confinement by territorial lords facilitating
the mulcting of inhabitants within.
Consider the recent study by Ann Wroe, A Fool and His Money: Life in a
Divided Town in Fourteenth-Century France, 1995, of Rodez, Languedoc, during
the Hundred Years War and, yes, the Bubonic Plague. It was divided by a
walled frontier *within*. The City proper was ruled by the Bishop, whose
regime bled it white for the Cathedral, a "sinkhole for money" begun in the
late thirteenth century and more or less completed two hundred years later.
The Bourg, on the other side of the internal wall, was taxed till it screamed
by Count Jean I of Armagnac, shakily allied to Charles V of France against
Edward the Black Prince, ruler of Aquitaine. Nowhere is to be seen Weber's
Noble Savage Capitalists, bound by *conjuratio* against the Baddies Outside.
The less history you know, the more plausible the full-blown Weberian
hypothesis looks. Not surprisingly, it was taken to its logical conclusion
by the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who for many years styled himself
"cultural materialism." Harris wrote, quite baldly, that feudalism was
progressive, in human history, because it made possible the city states,
which made possible capitalism, which made possible Western Civilization.
Because Harris considers himself a Marxist, and Marx, in historical
sociology, was a Weberian *avant le lettre*. Do not let the Mode of
Production gibberish fool you.
Perry Anderson, who knows considerably more history than Marvin Harris,
and argued E.P. Thompson to death with Marxist theory besides, wrote much
the same idea in Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, 1973. In Lineages
of the Absolute State, 1974, he characterized absolute monarchies in early
modern Europe as consodlitated or congealed expressions of feudal
aristocracies in an epoch when capitalists per se were immature. Nowhere
does he suspect that aristocracies were *politico-military specialists*
of capitalist societies, howbeit with *funny costumes and powdered wigs*.
*Where*, though, was the *most sophisticated absolute hereditary monarchy*
ever built? In China, during the Ming 1368-1644 and Qing 1644-1912
periods. The Ming, however, gave rise not to the French Rovolution but
to the rebel Li Zicheng; and the Qing, to the Heavenly Kingdom of Great
Peace, 1850-1864.
Second, we have all been exposed to the *reified continuity of the
West*. This is a consequence of positing a *je ne sais quoi* or essence
which gave rise, in the fullness of time, to Capitalism, the highest
stage of *Homo sapiens sapiens*. From the standpoint of the Classical
Greeks, the Romans would be, geographically speaking, to their west,
but hardly as of c. 450 BC, civilized even if accompanied by an Etruscan;
and as for c. 146 BC, they'd been politely told by Polybius that opinion
to the effect that Romans were not civilized was unhealthy. Visible
resemblances in Imperial Rome to later tourist attractions in India,
such as painted temples where dancers locally called "fantails" exhibited
themselves, were neither coincidental nor more substantive than social
features shared with China in the same period. This was all before
Christianity, which will never be known, thanks to Constantine and his
biographer, Eusebius. The historian Fergus Millar writes, "If we may trust
Eusebius, and why should we not,..." Historians of Stalinism may not say
this of, say, Zhdanov.
This entire demolition job is requisite to inquiring of Wallersteinian
application to China and Europe of the appelations World System, World
Empire, and *immunity to capitalism*. For, by the criteria of qualitative
changes in production and a No Limits cultural ambience in a fraction of
the population, capitalism on a self-sustaining basis *had been achieved*
as of the Yuan dynasty.
"What!?"
If, say, that is true, how would you go about verifying it? It is
certainly the case that it ceases to be true *after the first third or
so of the fourteenth century*, and whilst not acknowledging that China
was capitalist at this time, Mark Elvin, in Patterns of the Chinese Past,
1973, which builds on decades of Japanese research on what is now known
as the Song Economic Revolution, offers a demographic-migrational cum
economic-productivity explanation for why it should have happened in
the middle of the fourteenth century. The trouble is that his explanation,
which manages to ignore the Bubonic Plague and the Revolution of 1351-1368
entirely, would require a century or a century and a half for the stated
causes to have had the observed effects.
Capitalism, were it to have come to China, would have had *funny costume*.
Property law would have been quite strange. Family law would have been even
stranger, as it was, in Mediaeval China as later, contrary to prevailing
sexual mores for a socially prestigious man to limit *licit* sexual
relations to one woman; possibly scandalous. The precocious appearance
of printed paper money was most striking, but is explicable by the
cumbersome character of the copper or bronze coins used for small
*and* large transactions. Paper money had its inception in certificates
of deposit issued to salt merchants by the state salt monopoly in exchange
for silver bullion or copper cash. The invention of printing facilitated
emergence of genuine paper currency in the Song period, backed by the state
salt monopoly's anticipated ability to sell salt, a necessity of life, to
the mass of the population. So long as, with experience, the state succeeded
in refraining from temptation to simply print money, and Assumption Number
One held, the currency grew in stability, ease of circulation, and variety
of denominations. In 1355, however, Assumption Number One failed, due to
Bubonic Plague depopulation, massive famine consequent upon rapid
deurbanization due to disease such that owners of "manors" worked by
serfs, tenants, and landless labourers ceased feeding their "staffs." The
latter died like flies also. In 1344, the entire family of Zhu Yuanzhang,
son of a landless labourer in the Huai valley, died of the Plague, and
the the starving, homeless teenager donned robes, shaved his head, and
went forth with begging bowl as a Buddhist monk. (We don't know whether
this was merely Unofficial or utterly Phony, as Authentic certificates
of ordination were issued exclusively by the Bureau of Buddhist Affairs
or the Bureau of Daoist Affairs of the Ministry of Rites, and these conferred
legal tax exemptions. As do our municipal bonds. For this reason, genuine
ordination certificates circulated as quasi-monetary financial instruments,
subject to quotation, speculation, and brokerage trading.) Depending on the
historian, Zhu Yuanzhang went underground or did what would become better-
kept-hidden until either 1348 or 1351. He was either a believer in the White
Lotus religion or he was not. He either fought for patriotic reasons after
1348 or joined a "red army," ie, military unit of the Red Turbans, the
"politcal arm" of the White Lotus. (See John C. Dardess, Conquerors and
Confucians, Columbia, 1973, for "red armies.")
With Plague and famine, salt smugglers, who to the extent that the state's
fiscal soundness depended on the salt monopoly, like Bourbon France, tended
to figure in or, like Huang Zhao in the late Tang (who burned Guangzhou,
recall), led mass movements as heroes of the people, did so again. Some
of these, in the Lower Yangzi, became politically important by 1348. State
revenues were shrinking from low land tax yields, which landlords had had
practice evading for a thousand years anyway, and now from commercial taxes,
with commerce dwindling in Plague-stricken ports. After peasant war broke
out, when faced with death at rebel hands in 1352, the Yangzi landlords
(Dardess, ibid) "served notice that they would rather rebel than pay arrears
of taxes." The Yellow River changed its course in 1347, and the immediate
precipitant of peasant war was the conscription of 200,000 men in 1350 to
dig a new channel in Plague-infested Shandong province.
The peasant war which broke out in the Yangzi valley seized control of
*exactly* the same territory ruled by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Great
Peace *exactly* 600 years later. No accident, either. Both religions were
led by archetypal Messianic figures of the Chinese Popular Religion, which
has mutated and developed for hundreds or even thousands of years as elites
have pretended to avert eyes and hold noses.
Such people never win, but they may facilitate the rise of those who
do or fatally wound the material and moral viability of a political regime:
the *shifting of the mandate*.
Han Shantong was regarded in the 1340s as a manifestation upon earth,
*avatar*, of the Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of the Future, whose Advent
at the "turn of the *kalpa*" would bring or restore a reign of justice to
the wicked world of the present. Han Shantong, reportedly, syncretized a
doctrinal stew of Mahayanism (Maitreya), Central Asian Manichaeanism (the
advent of the Prince of Radiance who wars against the Prince of Darkness),
and the Daoist veneration of the Great Mother, if she is the same deity
as the Eternal Mother mentioned by the historians. (In later times, eg,
the rising of 1813, the mantra of White Lotus was, "Eternal Mother in Our
Original Home in the World of True Emptiness," womblike bliss.) Han Lin'er,
son of Han Shantong, called himself *xiaominwang*, Lesser Prince of Radiance,
heralding He Who Will Be Even Greater. In 1850, the labourers in Shandong
discovered a buried stone statue, planted there by sectarians for ready
discovery. The authorities, smelling trouble, arrested Han Shantong, and
in early 1351 the terrified Han Lin'er called for an immediate rising with
his preparations yet incomplete. (When or who ever started the revoluton
according to plan.)
The Mongol Yuan regime had in 1350 what the Qing conspicuously lacked
in 1850: and energetic, brilliant young Prime Minister, Toghto, who was
additionally a great and resourceful administrator. He held office during
1340-1344 and 1349-1355. Unlike the Qing of the future, he acted swifly
to prevent the rebels from consolidating a political regime in the lower
and middle Yangzi valley. Though forced to print money to cover expenses,
he swiftly seized, by late 1353, most rebel-held cities; by January 1355,
only Gaoyu, strategically located on the Grand Canal (which fed Beijing),
held by a salt smuggler, held out, but was surrounded and about to be
stormed. At the last moment, Toghto was deposed (it was feared he had
dessigns on the throne, which he should have carried out much earlier
considering the current emperor's lassitude and stupidity), exiled, then
murdered, aged 42. At this time, 1355, the paper money went into
hyperinflation, the state could not pay itself, and collapse of the
state ensued.
None of this could have occurred in Europe before 1793 or 1918, perhaps.
TO BE CONTINUED.
BUILDING CLOSING.
Daniel A. Foss