Well, agreed about specificity, which is one reason I don't care for your largely nonspecific (as you have described it) and apparently ahistorical alternative. I have no objection grand theories if they are useful tools, and historical materialism is in my view an extremely useful tool. I don't generally hold social science theories to the kind of predictive demands that one expects in physics or chemistry, but HM is far more powerfully predictive than evolutionary biology or meteorology.
It tells us, e.g., that the government policies, laws, and basic social institution of a capitalist society will accommodate themselves to the interests of that class, explaining why the Democrats are so gutless; it explains why attempts to reform imperialism don't work. it predicts the increasing rate and savagely of the rate of exploitation, etc. This is a good theory, even predicatively, by any standard. It also unifies a lot of disparate phenomena under a comprehensive explanation that is relatively simple, and (like evolutionary theory) it provides good backward looking narrative explanations. When I used to teach this stuff I used to claim that HM was the only theory of history worthy of the name in the last 200 years.
Suspicion and testing is always called for, but it's not progress to replace a good theory that like all theories have holes with no theory at all, in the manner of many historians.
I know that Manning and others have tried to construct alternatives, but I have not been impressed by their global power, predictive and explanatory success, simple derivation of many different observations from a small and comprehensive body of principles, and political utility.
I agree that small business can be capitalist. Marx distinguishes between the petty bourgeoisie and big bourgeoisie, and he is quite right to do so. The PB or P commodity producers are one of the small borderline cases. They are not a Popperian falsifications. They are part of the original theory. (See the discussion of commodity fetishism, which takes place in an ideal model involving PCP, for example, not capitalism expoilters.)
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Andie:
>
> Still, understanding the PMMC is an important and
> difficult question in the critical theory of modern
> capitalism and Woj is right, if that is what he
> means,
> that Marx offers little guidance here.
>
> Unfortunately, neither Woj nor Marvin do a lot
> better.
> Woj talks about "effective control," but offers no
> metric for this. What is "effective" control, and
> how
> much do you need? He also offers no theory of the
> dynamics of societies where the effective control of
> social resources (of what sort?) is
> disproportionately
> in the hands of minorities. Such societies include
> all
> class societies, so an "effective control" theory
> runs
> together Homeric Greece, the Hanseatic States,
> communist Hungary, modern Holland, and the
> contemporary US. That's not to useful -- it suffers
> from the same problems as talking of "the rich."
>
>
> [WS:] I am highly skeptical of grand theories that
> subsume complex reality
> into a few elegant equations. I'd much prefer a
> case by case approach in
> which a few general principles are applied to the
> specifics of individual
> circumstances. I am surprised that you have a
> problem with that approach,
> being a jurist in the common law tradition.
>
> Specifically, class stratification depends on the
> specific institutional
> arrangements in any given society, the amount of
> power a group can wield in
> those arrangements, and the means through which they
> wield their power. In
> once society, that means can be property relations
> (cf. 19th century
> England), but in some other society, it can be
> control of the state
> bureaucracy (cf. the USSR or perhaps Japan or South
> Korea). In both cases
> you have highly stratified societies with relatively
> narrow groups wielding
> considerable power over the rest of society. Yet,
> if you concentrated on
> ownership alone, you would not be able to analyze
> the bureaucratic control,
> and even incorrectly concluded that such
> bureaucratic societies were free of
> the outcomes of the property relations (e.g.
> exploitation.)
>
> So if you use two general principles (i) The devil
> is in specific
> institutional arrangements and (ii) it is the
> effective control of the
> institutions that matter, and perhaps add a test
> rule for the effective
> control - e.g. the ability to overcome opposition
> coming from other social
> or institutional actors, you can get some good
> mileage of that conceptual
> apparatus, in my opinion. Surely, it will not
> produce a grand theory of
> history and the world - as some Marxist and
> neo-classical accounts attempted
> to do. At best, it will produce a bunch of medium
> range theories with
> limited scope conditions - but I do not see anything
> wrong with that. As I
> said before, I tend to distrust grand theories -
> they may be elegant, but
> their predictive power is generally close to nil.
>
> PS. As a matter of clarification, small businesses
> meet all four conditions
> that you mention: they own their assets, they can
> hire wage labor (albeit on
> a small scale), and produce goods or services sold
> on the market.
>
> Wojtek
>
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