Immanuel Wallerstein told me off line that I had not explained the
rise of capitalism in Europe before circa 1500, whereby it was made
possible for Columbus and da Gama to do what they did, recognizing of
course that someone else would have, in either case, done exactly the
same. Or if da Gama had not hired Ahmad ibn-Majid in Malindi, he would
have got to Calicut anyway, with some delay, and made somewhat less money.
These matters were already determined, like Newton's "discovery" of the
calculus, howbeit slightly before Leibniz.
The short answer is, *conversion of massive taxation of the Western
European peasants into capital*, including *anticipations of taxation*.
Wallerstein, in Volume One of The Modern World System, rightly emphasized
the enserfment of Eastern European peasants, notably in Poland and East
Elbia, to meet the demand for increased production under conditions of
relative labour shortage in the East and recovery of population to
something like pre-Plague levels in the West. But the story begins
earlier, in 1429. *In retrospect*, it looks, seems, makes sense, that
some sort of French esprit, elan, morale, protonationalism, or JNSQ -
*je ne sais quoi* - must have, via historical inevitability, Caused
French resistance of Anglo-Burgundian occupation. This is not, actually,
so obvious.
Consider. It's 1429, and France is four touchdowns behind at the opening
gun of the fourth quarter in the Hundred Years War. Despite the best efforts
of Charles V the Wise (1364-1380) and Bertrand du Guesclin, Marechal de
France, there French nobility, under Charles VI the Mad (1380-1426), reverted
to allowing only one play in its playbook, the frontal assault and cavalry
charge, for which they were shot up by English longbows at Agincourt (1415);
those who were not had their throats cut in a massacre of prisoners ordered
by Henry V (1409-1422) which shocked Shakespeare two centuries later,
to find inclusion in the greatest English deadwhitemale's subtextual
philosophy of history. By treaty in 1421, Henry married Elizabeth,
probably not the biological daughter of Charles VI by Isabelle of
Bavaria. The offspring, if any, was to be heir of England *and* France
upon the deaths of both monarchs; this was the infant Henry VI of England
(1422-1461, 1469-1470) who, by age six and monarch on both sides of the
Channel, was Retarded if not yet psychotic. Much of all this was facilitated
by the Family Feud among French Princes of the Blood, whose Deeper Causes
I haven't studied as hard as I should've, culminating in the bloody murder
of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1384-1404), which changed an appanage
into a Major European Power. That is, a Major European Power at this time
might be considerably more miniscule compared to the Mamluk, Ottoman, or
Delhi Sultanates. Burgundy allied with England, whose cloth, withal,
competed with the local product; this contradiction in turn added spice,
or instability, to the situation. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary
for World-System Theorists to know this stuff; but it *develops character*.
Charles VI had a male heir, if you were a member of the Armagnac faction,
defined so far as I know in contradistinction to the Burgundian faction. This
man, Charles, Dauphin of France, was almost certainly not the biological
offspring of Charles VI. Aspersions I have cast upon the Virtue, Moral
Character, and Family Values of Isabelle of Bavaria are those recorded at
the time, and I should state for the record that all persons should have
the right to free choice of sexual partners, excepting of course those to
whom I am married, which is a purely theoretical proviso at this time.
The utterance of Charles VI, "Who is this woman? I never saw her before
in my life!" was perhaps the least psychotic utterance he ever said.
In accordance with the Salic Law (qv), it was allegedly and suppositiously
*illegal* for the Throne of France to pass through the female line; which,
in the past, however, had proved contingent upon whom the candidate was,
inter alia. In which case, Dauphin Charles was, by right, law, and God's
Will, Charles VII, though Retarded. This was, at the time, a learned, and
among anti-Burgundians, a fighting, proposition; howbeit, it lacked a
certain *zing*.
Note: I have always said that it is necessary to maintain a posture
of value-neutrality toward bizarre political systems, including our own,
excpting when mass murder is committed above and beyond the call of duty.
With that in mind, I must confess to inordinate fascination with the most
bizarre of them I can find.
The would-be or might-be Charles VII was not quite even a wannabe,
wallowing or languishing in moral and material squalor, in 1429, as
the English, led by the Duke of Salisbury, Regent of France for the child,
later childish, Henry VI, closed in on one of the last defensible places
not yet captured, Orleans. It was here and now that the schizopolitics of
Jeanne d'Arc transformed the situation.
Schizopolitics is the solution, via bizarre indirection, of a problem
which is either unthinkable or, if consciously formulated, insoluble to
the best-informed commonsense of that society and epoch. That commonsense,
of course, may look very weird indeed to the people of another time and
place; and any observer of political or social-movement actors must take
care to separate the objectively impossible, the advocacy whereof is
*counterempirical*, from the Impossible, in the ideological sense. The
practitioners of schizopolitics who've made names for themselves have
exploited ideological blind spots whose existence gave rise to the
pre-existing *a priori*tization of the commonsensicality of Impossibility.
The uppercased Impossible is accordingly the *counterReal*, ie, contrary
to the Reality enforced as objectively real, but ideologically misrepresented,
by your Shrink.
Daniel A. Foss: Social constraints are objectively real.
Dr Aronson: Sociology is just your Paranoid delusional system.
Examples of practitioners of schizopolitics include: Muhammad, Constantine
the Great, Columbus, the Camisard rebels in Languedoc (1689-1693), Fra
Girolamo Savonarola, Zhu Yuanzhang, and Mao Zedong. I have not entirely
made up my mind about Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, but I am leaning at
this time to *yes*.
The single most conspicuous common feature among practitioners of
schizopolitics, victorious or otherwise, is their unpredictability. Should
one appear, and make some perceptible difference in history due to the
low-visibility character of social reality at the time due to impenetrable
peasoup fog of ideological mystification and delusion, this is a Good
Thing, or a Bad Thing, depending, but it cannot be predicted. If the
Bubonic Plague was an Asteroid from Outer Space, the practitioner of
schizopolitics is a large or small meteorite. If some statistical probability
of the manifestation of a schizopolitical figure may somehow be calculated,
the identification of this or that present, past, even future historical
conjuncture as one wherein or whereat one will appear, with whichever
consequences, is not. Anyway, it wouldn't be the way to bet, given the
odds, whatever they'd be, would be long against it happening at all.
Theory, as I said earlier today, must take into consideration where theory
has no business.
(Note that I have omitted the rich treasure trove of human religious
creativity. For many centuries, all social movements were also religious
movements; the reverse, however, was true of only a minority of religious
movements, though all claimed generalized human significance. Then
an apparently irreversible trend called Secularization modified this
a bit. More recently, things have got *really confused* out there. Ask
your local Christian, Muslim, even Jew. In India, ask your local BJP
or Shiv Sena voter. Only the Chinese, somehow.... There *are* some
borderline cases where it is difficult to ascertain, as during the
English Revolution, the social-movement stature of a figure like George
Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, when he said, "I was commanded
by the Lord to take off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter.")
I hope, therefore, to have established that there was no historically
determined necessity for a *second side* to appear, with a passionate
desire to beat the Anglo-Burgundians and *win* the Hundred Years War.
This is what Jeanne d'Arc was told to accomplish by Sts Michael and
Catherine, who were imaginary. What Jeanne d'Arc had going for her was
that, in the context of the society and culture into which she was born,
she was the lowest form of life: virgin unmarried childless female peasant.
Via a *liminal inversion*, in Anthrogibberish, she was able to induce
hardbitten French knights and men-at-arms to commit the unthinkably taboo
act of attacking the English from the rear when catching them in suitable
position; the stakes used by the longbow-archers precluded the formation
from moving. Whilst at night, refraining from touching finger to holy body,
as Jeanne's virginity was etiological to victory as Samson's hair. Then,
by God's will, as he had none of his own whatsoever, Charles was induced,
puttylike, to get properly crowned at Rheims; and Jeanne had got one
touchdown back. Having imparted what is in US politics called *momentum*
to the French side, which in some sense did not previously exist all that
much, Jeanne was abandoned by her own unit when wounded, to ensure certain
capture by the Enemy. This was part of the inner logic; the problem solved
was changing the fighting to ensure victory, as opposed to the social
prestige of Chivalrous Class, without endangering the social order whereof
Chivalry was ideologically indispensible.
Charles VII the Well-Advised (1426 or 1431-1461) nominally presided over
the pitiless reconstruction of the state, pronounced as Built by George Duby
as early as Philip Augustus, 1180-1218, though Charles Tilly might not go
that far. Rapacity, fiscality, and not a little rascality went into the
raising of a trained, disciplined standing army, which France, as we may
now speak of it, could definitely *not* afford, and it was this army, using
the sneaky, cowardly, chicken**** battletactics sanctified by God, which
won the battle of Formigny in 1450, tying the score in the Hundred Years
War. Lavish further expenditure yielded a mastercraftsman-made collection
of cast-metalbarelled gunpowder artillery, puny as the guns were compared
to those lumbered up to the walls of Constantinople by Mehmed II (1451-1481)
the same year, but which sufficed to enfilade and rake to shreds the English
forces at the battle of Chatillon, 1453, which ended in a French win in
Double Sudden Death Overtime, 116 years, in the Hundred Years War. Think
not of France doing anything for you; think of what you can pay for France.
La France, wasn't that a brand of bleach. Damn well bled white, weren't they.
Calais remaind in English hands; but France had conquered the whole of
Gascony, rival claims whereto had been the bone of contention over which
the war broke out.
The same year, 1453, saw a particularly spectacular peasant war in England,
called Jack Cade's Rebellion. This was so memorable that, in 1689, someone
adopted the nom de guerre Jack Cade in deposing the Second Lord Baltimore,
Proprietary Lord of Maryland, as part of the North American colonial theater
of the Glorious Revolution, as it was called, in the British Isles. The war
had been Brought Back Home, to England. With England clearly losing, a species
of Peace Movement, or anti-Lancastrian opposition, appeared among the less-
parasitic propertied classes, disseminating, eg, The Libell of Englysshe
Policye (1450), but what was fought about was the Throne. The epoch of
headhunting in high places called the Wars of the Roses was such that the
English gladly paid monstrous taxes for the illusion of peace at the hamfisted
dictation of Edward IV, whose reign got interrupted anyway by a restoration
of Henry VI, followed by the latter's final murder followed by thirteen whole
years of arbitrary executions at variable intervals. This lazy if violent
king left children, and a serial killer brother to watch them, with inevitable
results, with lots more headhunting, followed by a war fought between gangs
of mercenaries, which Richard III lost. Henry ap Twdr didn't at first seem
much better, but after fighting off two invasions, he reaped the benefits
of weariness with political instability, as well as hugely excessive taxes
announced fraudulently as intended for war against France, but squirrelled
away for a rainy day. Who was Henry VIII. How the latter squandered the whole
contents of the piggybank, confiscated one third the land area of England,
sold that off, went broke anyhow, is outside our Period.
Oh, yes, Italy. The Peace of Lodi, as your historical Atlas will tell you,
broke out in 1454, with very great quantities of money having been consumed
in idiotic warfare which changed practically nothing. All of this, too, went
to furthering the rise of capitalism, in the local form of Milanese armament
manufacturers, plate armour being a matter of life or death.
Europe and China both had privileged classes immune, legally or
fraudulently, from taxation. The burden, in both, was on peasants. Why
it was, at all comparable periods, possible to tax Europeans *much* more
heavily than Chinese peasants, is an answerable question, but not here and
now.
Daniel A. Foss
<home for the holidays though not saying where that is for obvious reasons>