From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Tue May 20 2003 - 04:56:49 EDT
Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > > > >The way to go forward with this would be to examine a particular historical > >case in some detail. I'm not suggesting that we necessarily do that > >(we are all time-limited and have our own interests), but methodologically > >that would be the next thing to do. > > > >-Ian. > > Hi Ian, > perhaps one important case is the one described by Peter Kriedte in > Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists (Cambrige, 1983). > Kriedte describes how with the increase of the pressure of demand, > merchant capitalists began to prise open the guild structures of mfg > and artisanal production. Whenever the merchant capitalists found it > impossible to build up a production apparatus in the towns unhampered > by the guild restrictions, they moved production to the countryside > and expanded there on a large scale in a process Kriedte has dubbed > proto-industrialization. Perhaps we see here the capital mobility and > investment, as well as competition in a nascent world market, that > allows for the law of value to begin to regulate production and > exchange? > Yours, Rakesh The fact that a mode of production has an internal dynamic that causes it to evolve into something different, does not mean that it did not exist. Capitalism has an internal dynamic that leads towards the collapse of profit rates. It is inherently a transitory mode of production that can only persist so long as it is surrounded by pre-capitalist production. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that capitalism never existed. Likewise with simple commodity production. -- Paul Cockshott Dept Computing Science University of Glasgow 0141 330 3125
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