Grant Lee wrote:
> some list members appear to see European and/or Asian
> capital as more progressive than US capital.
There are different types of "capitalist." Some of these are more progressive than others.
To begin with, "type" is an expression of internal relations. Though capitalist relations of production limit the kind of type dominant in them, this leaves room for significant variation depending on the more specific character of the relations.
This is true within US capital itself.
Michael Lind provides a description of US capital consistent with this.
He associates Bush with a "premodern" capitalist mentality that remains dominant in the US deep south (a region he claims includes that part of Texas whose population derives from the westward migration of southern plantation agriculture).
“By the time they reached Texas, the Anglo-Celtic ancestors of most of today’s white Texans has been conquering and expropriating other ethnic nations for centuries. Originally they were Protestant Scots whom the English planted in conquered Ulster on land stolen from the native Catholic Irish. Having displaced the native Irish in Ulster, some Scots-Irish families crossed the Atlantic to the Ozarks and Appalachians, where (with a few exceptions, like Sam Houston and Davy Crockett) they supported the ethnic cleansing of the civilized, literate Cherokee Indians. They brought with them to the American South one of their denominations, the ‘ironside Baptists’ – a term that originated in the seventeenth century among British Protestants fighting in the army of Oliver Cromwell.
“The swaggering Texan is nothing more that the Scots-Irish frontiersman – a more recent version of the stereotypical ‘Kaintuck’ portrayed in early-nineteenth-century American literature and popular drama, before the Texan cowboy became a cliché. The career in fact and legend of David Crockett, the Tennessean frontier politician who died defending the Alamo during the Texas Revolution, symbolizes the westward movement of this Scots-Irish archetype. The imagery of the Texan cowboy may be that of northern Mexico (the cowboy or vaquero costume, the lariat and horse, the ranch), but the spirit is that of the mountaineers of the Appalachians and Ozarks.
“Centuries spent conquering frontier lands – first from the Irish, then from the American Indians and Mexicans – and exploiting the labor of others (the Catholic Irish in northern Ireland, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and not least other Southern whites) turned the Anglo-Celtic Southerners who have dominated Texas into a people as militaristic as the ancient Spartans. Southerners have always been over-represented among American soldiers – and among American perpetrators of homicide and among devoted supporters of capital punishment like George W. Bush. The legendary feuding families, the Hatfields and McCoys, were, of course, Scots-Irish." (Michael Lind, Made in Texas, pp. 29-30)
He claims the mentality is much less "progressive" than the industrial capitalist mentality characteristic of other regions of the US.
“Although they may look like members of the old-stock Protestant business class of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, the oligarchs of Texas do not think like them. The mentality of the raditional Texan businessman is that of the premodern ‘seigneurial’ elite which, according to Luraghi, included not only the Southern slaveowners but also the British ‘Nabobs’ of the West Indies, the Mexican hacendados, and the Brazilian plantation owners. It is not an industrial capitalist mind-set at all, but the mentality of the Spanish conquistador, who dreamed of quickly acquiring fabulous wealth by plundering precious metals rather than by patient effort.
“Oil is a mineral, like gold and silver. It is no coincidence that much of Texas folklore resolves around hunts for lost treasure. Often in the legends the mine was first found by Spanish conquistadors and then forgotten – a motif that links the Anglo-Southern fortune huner to his aristocratic Spanish predecessor. The Southern planters and ranchers, like their Spanish and Latin American counterparts, thought it was more honorable, and certainly more exciting, to find, or steal, a gold or silver mine than to spend years devising more efficient ways to utilize the resources that they already controlled." (p. 47)
Ted