Dear Gil and Rakesh, I have enormous demands on my time right now and therefore can not carry on a full debate on the matters that you have raised. I am afraid that this short response will have to end the debate from my side--at least for the time being. 1) I initially wrote the critique of Brenner more than ten years ago. I cannot find a copy of the journal and do not have time to go to the library to make a copy for purposes of looking at the context of the quotations that Gil takes from the article. I would point out, however, that in critiquing someone, you are to an extent constrained by their framework and that my main purpose in writing the article was to challenge what I saw as an overly reified conception of 'agrarian capitalism.' While I do think that embryonic capitalist relations in British agriculture were important to the development of capitalism first in that country, I also think that many other factors played important roles, factors that tend to be pushed into the background if we too single-mindedly focus on class relations in the agricultural sector. Moreover, class relations in the agricultural sector evolved enormously over the period that Brenner labels 'agrarian capitalism', and I find that his use of the concept leads him to read back into history more fully developed class relations than actually existed. 2) Were Gil more familiar with my work, he might still be critical, but he would have to make different criticisms from the ones that he does make. For example, he would see that my use of Marx's theory of the laws of motion of capitalism is not concerned with quantitatively weighting variables for purposes of determining rigid boundaries between the capitalist and non capitalist. Indeed, in general I find the fetishizing of boundary problems to be a waste of time, and it is for this reason that I was never very excited by the so-called 'modes of production debate.' 3) Consider for a moment the institution of 'servants-in-husbandry.' In what ways is this institution like the capitalist wage form and in what ways not? For example, is the extreme personal dependency, paternalism, and deference embedded in such relations that which makes them more similar or dissimilar from the capitalist wage form? Such judgments depend on our understanding of the capitalist wage form. Indeed, I think that in any historical context we will find the more capitalist mixed in with the less, the capitalist mixed in with the non-capitalist, and the economic mixed in with the political and ideological. If this is the case, we need ways to think the articulation of these differences, and one of the great strenghts of marxian social science is that we have a theory of capital's necessary inner connections that can guide us in this thought. 4) For me, the fact that some tenant farmers used some wage labour in 1700 is not sufficient empirical evidence to establish so strong a systemic concept as Brenner's 'agrarian capitalism.' It would be like claiming that because some producers hired some wage labourers in Ancient Athens, the Athenian economy was capitalist (I am exaggerating here to make a point). 5) I suspect that the most important single factor underlying our disagreements is how we understand and utilize Marx's theory of the laws of motion of capitalism. This, of course, opens out on to very large and complex questions such as how are the laws of motion interrelated and how can we best use them to understand history? In the corpus of my writings one can find fairly clear answers to this sort of question, answers that of course evolve and develop with my own research efforts. I hope these brief comments are of some help. All The Best, Rob Albritton
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