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The west-European merchants, British, French, and Dutch, sold the products of America and Asia to their own peoples and those of Central and eastern Europe. Trade with Germany and Italy was fairly stable. With Russia it enormously increased. To cite the British record only, Britain imported fifteen times as much goods in 1790 as in 1700, and sold the Russians six times as much. The Russian landlords, as they became Europeanised, desired Western manufactures and the colonial products such as sugar, tobacco, and tea which could be purchased only from western Europeans. They had grain, timber, and navel stores to offer in return. Similarly, landlords of Poland and north Germany, in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, found themselves increasingly able to move their agricultural products out through the Baltic and hence increasingly able to buy the products of western Europe, America, and Asia in return. Landlords of Eastern Europe thus had an incentive to make their estates more productive. “Big” agriculture spread,, developing in eastern Europe a system not unlike the plantation economy in the new world. It had many effects. It contributed, along with political causes, to reducing the bulk of the east-European population to serfdom. It helped to civilise and to refine, in a word, to “Europeanise,” the upper classes. And it helped to enrich the merchants of western Europe.
The contribution of political economy
[Anti-Dühring]. In agreement with positivism on this question, Marxism sees in development a property which is intrinsic in Western civilisation: old primitive communities could subsist for thousands of years before commerce with the outside would within them bring about differences in fortunes which caused their dissolution.
Marxism however innovates on two points of topical importance. In the first place, it gives credit to old primitive civilisations for discovery without which western development would not have been conceivable, and in relation to which the extent of development, as it could be envisaged in the 19th century, is reduced to modest proportions: the most remote of antiquity… has as starting point man distancing himself from the animal reign and, in content, victory over difficulties such as would never again present themselves to man associated with the future” [Engels, Anti-Düring]. In the second place and especially, Marx overturns the perspective in which the process of industrialisation and development are generally considered. For him industrialisation is not an autonomous phenomenon to be introduced from outside, into civilsations which have remained passive. To the contrary, industrialisation is a function of, and an indirect result, of the condition of so-called “primitive” societies or, more exactly, of historical ties between them and the west.
The basic question for Marxism is to know why and how labour produces added value. It has not been often enough noticed that Marx’s response to this question offers an ethnographic aspect. Primitive humanity was sufficiently reduced to establish itself only in regions of the world where natural conditions a positive result to his work. On the other hand, it is a property which is intrinsic of the culture in the sense given by ethnologists to this term. – to establish between surplus value and labour a relationship such that the former is always added to the latter. For these two reasons, one logical, the other historical, it can be postulated that at the beginning, every labour necessarily produces surplus value. The exploitation of man by man comes later, and it appears concretely in history in the form of the exploitation of the colonised by the coloniser, in other words by appropriation, in favour of the latter, of the excess of surplus value which as we showed is a intrinsic component of primitive being: if we suppose that it takes for the inhabitants of the insular twelve hours of work a week to meet all his needs; it arises that the first favour that providence accords him is plenty of leisure. For him to use it productively, there should be a chain with historical incidences; for him to spend it surplus work for a third person, he should be pushed by force” [Marx, Capital II].
It results from this, firstly that colonisation is historically and logically anterior to capitalism, and that the capitalist regime consists of the treatment of the people of the west as the west had in the past treated indigenous populations. For Marx, the relationship between the capitalist and the proletariat is thus only a particular case of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. From this perspective, it could almost be posited that in Marxism, economics and sociology arise as belonging to ethnography. It is in The Capital, book one, Volume III, chapter 31, that the thesis is put forward with perfect clarity: the origin of the capitalist regime goes back to the discovery of gold and iron-rich regions of America, then the reduction of indigenes to slavery, and then the conquer and pillage of East Indies, and finally the transformation of Africa into “a sort of commercial garenne for the hunting of black skins.” This thus is the idyllic path to the primitive accumulation which signaled the capitalist era at its birth. Soon after, there was the outbreak of the mercantile war. For piedestal it needed the dissimulated slavery of salary earners of Europe, the nameless slavery in the New World.
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neant
We hold a B.Sc. [Honours] degree in Sociology and for some time now have been mostly engaged in the teaching of undergraduate Sociology [since 1999]. On scholarship we are inclined to systems of knowledge and systems analyses. We are a very private person and cherish musing and long solitary walks. We also enjoy the company of people with a good education and who are interested in Social Theory.When we are not in acivity we cherish reading, long solitary walks, conversations on spirituality and the company of fine people.
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