Customer Reviews

The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Second Edition)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

In the midst of the noisy and empty-headed celebrations of bourgeois values and free-market economics currently echoing around shady right-wing think-tanks and obsequious university departments, Meiksins Wood provides us with a salutory reminder that freedom in the context of the capitalist market is an illusion. We are in fact free to do only - and precisely - what the market demands. This potted history of the rise of a market dependency that is anything but an inevitable product of fixed human nature or evolutionary progress, followed up skilfully in her sequel 'Empire of Capital', is splendidly written in a clear, breezy style that the lay person should have no trouble following. In an intellectual world currently saturated with stale and repetitive free-market mumbo-jumbo, Meiksins Wood reminds us that some of us are still capable of mobilising critical intelligence.

This is an academic work: Wood's theses about capitalism, its historical specificity, and its genesis are put forward in terms of disagreements with other historians and thinkers. This isn't bad in and of itself, but it does present a barrier to the interested reader who isn't a specialist.

Wood locates the beginning of capitalism in England with the imposition of land rents on peasants for their living accomodiations. For her, this both created a class whose only economic resource was their labor power and gave the landholding non-nobles a chunk of capital to valorize. In terse but Marxian terms, this was *THE* act of primitive accumulation. I'm not qualified to judge this as an historical claim, but it does point out a definite discontinuity between feudal and capitalist production. Yet Woods dwells overmuch on capitalism as markets, and not as a regime of production. There has always been trade, and even trade such as we could not countenance today: for example, trade in human beings. But trade is not capitalism, and so a thesis of the advent of capitalism as the marketization of what was previously sacrosant seems tenuous.

It's entirely possible that these are my misunderstandings, and not Wood's intentions. When she puts aside her debates with other scholars, she writes in a direct and fluid style. I hope she will write an account of her research and theses on this topic for a non-scholarly audience. The subject deserves it.

This work could be rated higher. It is a very academic treatise and not easily accessible to the lay reader. I found it to be a refreshing examination and restating of historical facts and one small step towards discovering the truth behind the origins of our current society and culture. The ideas and analyses are a concise critique of free enterprise myths as to the origins of capitalism and short comings in Marxist theory.

I'm all for a general call to investigate the historical specificity of capitalism. EMW does a good job arguing the case for a radical investigation of the specificity of agrarian capitalism as opposed to the more liberal thesis that contends capitalism has always been there in history, in embryo, all it needed was the processes in place to remove the fetters that prevented its full blossoming. I liked this book, the last two chapters on the nation state and postmodernity were the only weak parts in an otherwise trenchant argument. Oh Barbara I know what you're thinking, but what the heck, I'm broke ... why not turn over a new leaf. Down with the coercion of capital, good work Ellen.

I read this book to obtain a historical overview of capitalism versus an economic treatise or philosophical debate over its political context. The first six chapters did a good job of providing that context but the conclusion was extremely disappointing. She should have stuck with a summary of the historical context and left out what I perceived to be her political commentary on the benefits/detriments of capitalism.

While I do agree with the other reviewers that Wood does a good job at summarizing the transition debates beginning with Dobb and Sweezy in a straighforward manner, I think thats the only thing the book does. Wood is rehatching the Brenner argument of 1977. I thought we already moved past this racist type of argument. I guess Wood felt the need to revive it. What i dont understand is where in the whole book are we supposed to read about anti-Eurocentrism. I really looked for it and didnt seem to find it. In light of some more interesting scholars who see primitive accumulation as racialized/gendered {patricia McFadden, Maria Mies, Samir Amin, Massimo De Angelis Silvia Federici, Issa Shivji, Kaushik Sunder Rajan etc} Wood examines it only in terms of the transition to capitalism, which is still centered on ENGLAND. There is no acount of colonization, plunder, expropriation of non-European people. Hmm... I wonder how this would compare with scholars like Oliver Cox, CLR James and most recently Verene Shepherd and Veront Satchell.

I don't like propaganda. Take a look at Jerry Z. Muller's The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. It is apolitical, richly textured, tightly organized, and packed with ideas. If you are looking for the antecedents of the Industrial Revolution, read Maxine Berg's The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820.