>>> dhenwood at panix.com 12/06/00 09:44PM >>>
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>CB: I think it was use of force and violence externally that made
>>primitive accumulation on a global scale possible. Would have been
>>difficult to accumulate globally by only doing things internal to
>>Europe.
>
>Enclosure + chattel slavery = primitive accumulation = the origin of
>capitalism. The rise & development of the dominance of instrumental
>reason (the Benthamite part of "Freedom, Equality, Property, &
>Bentham") are an effect, not the cause, of the capitalist ensemble
>of social relations.
But why enclosure? Why travel abroad and steal people? Why did it occur to people to enclose common land for the first time?
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CB: Here's a hypothesis. The proto-capitalists, the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages gradually got into competition with the feudal ruling class, the feudal lords and church officials. What was this competition ? To have the most wealth ( all the while the bourgeois were changing the form of wealth too, changing it to capital from the feudal forms of holding wealth especially in land). The bourgeoisie invented enclosure, removing peasants from the land and making them wage-laborers and (re)introduced slavery as ways to out accumulate the feudal ruling class.
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Why didn't they think of it before?
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CB: There had never been a class exactly in the circumstance and relations with other classes that the bourgeoisie was in in that period.