Maureen Anderson wrote:
>
> Carrol:
> >A pure speculation: the notion of an Athenian (or other ancient)
> >capitalism seeped into Marxism from Weber, and is still promulgated
> >by many for whom "Weber" is a swear word. The late Jim Blaut seems
> >to have followed Weber in identifying capitalism with any sort of
> >profit-seeking commerce.
>
> Kelly:
> >except, of course, that weber doesn't claim this at all.
>
> No he doesn't. In fact he spills a lot of ink explaining why
> commerce in other eras wasn't like capitalism. But it's his
> enframing of the whole issue in terms of factors that "hindered" the
> free development of markets that Carrol's presumably referring to.
Yes. The debate has a rough similarity to the debate in biology about whether evolution as "we know it" was in some sense certain -- or to use Gould's metaphor: If we played the tape of evolution over again would the same results occur. Gould, of course, argues for a large element of contingency in evolution. I would argue for a large element of contingency in human history. It was by no means necessary for capitalism to appear: i.e., there is no super-historical "law of history" which determines what has happened. To put it in Marx's terms, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known."(MECW 28, p. 42).
The question, as Wood phrases it in a chapter title, is that of "History or teleology?" Given the human anatomy, we can better understand the anatomy of the ape -- but that does _not_ mean that given the ape we could predict the emergence of the human. There was no "tendency" for the ape to become human, or for commerce to become capitalist. In fact, probably the emergence of the human was an accident, as the emergence of capitalism was more an aberration than a probability or necessity. It could very well not have happened.
The assumption that capitalism would develop if not hindered is profoundly eurocentric. The particular debate within Marxism that I referred to stemmed from Jim Blaut's implicit acceptance of this ahistorical theory -- and hence to his conclusion that a European emergence of capitalism implied European superiority. The third sentence of the first paragraph of his Preface to _Eight Eurocentric Historians_ affirms that we must discard those arguments that attribute "historical superiority OR PRIORITY [my emphasis] to Europeans over other peoples." This equation of priority with superiority, with its teleological implication, badly distorts his entire argument.
Another way to approach the same tangled knot is to point out that to identify "tendencies" to capitalism in pre-capitalist social orders is to assume precisely what needs to be explained. Much of _Poverty of Philosophy_ revolves around confronting this error
Carrol