ellen meiksins wood democracy against capitalism pdf

#ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM PDF HOW TO#

The rest of Post’s theses are just elaborations of this fundamentally mistaken interpretation. Since in the United States there was no class of feudal landlords to act as prime movers of an “agrarian” capitalist development, Post makes the merchant-turned-land speculator the demiurge of American capitalism, asserting, against all historical evidence, that this class was able to “impose a social monopoly on land” shortly after the American Revolution. Post’s essays are an attempt to apply the so-called “Brenner thesis” (according to which the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the result of the self-transformation of the English landowners) to American historical development. I will argue that the great depression of the 1830s and 1840s represented a crisis point for agrarian capitalismwhich was only overcome by a transition to a new energy regime based on coal, one able to contain class struggles, open up new avenues for economic production and inaugurate a new era of industrial capitalism.Ĭharles Post’s recent collection of essays, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877, was greeted with enthusiasm in Marxist circles. The second part of this paper will make the argument that were it not for the geological accident of the vast coal deposits present in England, the Industrial Revolution could not have happened in that country, and that agrarian capitalism, bound by the thermodynamic limits of the flow of solar energy, would have fallen victim to its own internal contradictions – intractable class struggle and the 'metabolic rift' that led to declining agricultural sustainability. I will conclude by looking at the debate between Robert Albritton and Mike Zmolek on agrarian capitalism and the rise of the “putting out system” and raise the problem of the limits of relative surplus value extraction within pre-industrial forms of capitalist production. I will do this by reviewing Comninel and Wood's critique of the 'commercialization model' of capitalism and by also outlining Brenner's contribution to the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The first part of this paper will examine their work and elaborate a framework for understanding the rise of agrarian capitalism and its internal “laws of motion” which encouraged the “putting out” system and the industrial or factory form of capitalism.

These thinkers have argued that the development of agrarian capitalism holds the key to understanding the evolution of industrial capitalism and its technological breakthrough. In developing an analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism, my paper will build upon the theoretical approach established by a group of Marxist scholars and historians – Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel – to explain the genesis of capitalism in the English countryside. A synthesis of the two traditions offers a more complete and effective account of the transition, while providing a basis for a unitary materialist theory. A critical assessment of Wally Seccombe’s historical work illustrates how political Marxism can be deployed to correct this deficiency, while also revealing the extent to which these concepts must be rethought in light of materialist feminist concerns. I argue that this tension stems principally from an inadequate historicization of capitalism.

#ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM PDF HOW TO#

It departs from an unresolved theoretical impasse within the socialist feminist tradition: how to conceive of the imperatives of capital accumulation and class in a way that avoids both reductionism and dualism.

This paper makes an initial attempt at closing the analytical gap between these two historical materialist traditions. Political Marxists, in contrast, have devoted fastidious attention to this question in their own attempt to renew historical materialism but their dialogue has dedicated little attention to questions of gender, families, and social reproduction in the feminist sense. While offering a trenchant critique of orthodox Marxism, the tenor of the debate was highly abstract and theoretical, and largely ignored the question of capitalism’s origins.

When socialist feminists discussed the potential and pitfalls of Marxism in the “domestic labour debate,” the specific relationship between patriarchy and capital emerged as a defining concern.

Ellen meiksins wood democracy against capitalism pdf