I don't buy it. I think they are two separate issues that have correlations in certain conditions. As I said before, there were other options for the social structure in which the newfound improvements could have been implemented and, as I pointed out, there were real cases in which the enclosure did little to improve productivity per se, instead resulting in a simple accumulation of surplus by those at the top of the pyramid. Finally, the idea that it is the "Capitalists" who do the innovation is not necessarily the truth. As I pointed out, many of the innovations were the result of other farmers who were renters; as Neal Wood points out, the improvement movement (Invisible College and all that) was not innovation per se, just the bureaucratic collectivization of their knowledge into the hands of the ruling class who thereafter enclosed the commons, primitive accumulation and all that. I also think Brenner is too neo-liberal in his understanding of the way imperialism worked in concert with this domestic agricultural innovation: in many ways there is much more in common with him and Adam Smith than Frank and Wallerstein. Your claim, for instance, that there was some 2-300 year boom in production that can be attributed mostly to capitalism fails because its two variables--purported political economic system and technological change--don't exist in isolation or even in any purity. on the purported economic system, of course, there is the question of whether the capitalist system was really all that capitalist--or if the gains were actually innovations (instead of skimming surplus in a variety of creative ways) or if those innovations were solely the result of increased competition (the scientific revolution is not the same thing as capitalism, despite what boosters for the latter would have us believe).
Further, I would note that, if the only thing at issue is whether it is possible to have increased agricultural productivity without capitalism
The improvements in yields came
> out of these changes, which fueled the division of labor and led
> further innovations that fed back into farming. If the innovations
> are not related to the changes in social relations then why the rapid
> innovation? Are you saying technological innovation is independent of
> the social relations (capitalism)?
I'm saying that it is not a linear relationship by any means and you are making a far too simplistic conclusion based on a set of corresponding variables that does not necessarily produce the things you say it will produce. Technological change occurred for thousands of years before capitalism, we just convientently forget that this was and is the case--and in recent years some of the more important changes have been the result of appropriating knowledge produced in this way (i.e. biopiracy) because capitalism's profit motives don't always work in the way you seem to assume they do. Social relations of capitalism (especially those of monopoly capitalism) often actually mitigate against innovation; and as Michael Perelman has discussed in many places, it is a complete misrepresentation of history to leave out the state as a major funder of basic science and technological research. In other words, some of the greatest innovations have happened in non-profit seeking situations. You are idealizing (along with Brenner) a fairly complex set of relationships that in many ways feeds directly into the defense of these kind of exploitative relationships--themselves, full stop--without any clear need to investigate whether, in any given case, the correlation between capitalism and innovation actually exists--or, as Alan insinuated (IIRC) if the capitalist definition of innovation is truly an innovation.
> I think you are correct that the state played a bigger role than
> either Brenner or Wood claim. But this does not invalidate the
> changes as coming out of the shifts in social relations. It just means
> that the state is always involved in these changes.
But even Brenner and Wood are clearly saying that it is the state and the law that help to shift those relations--social property relations aren't effective without a state, at some level, to defend them. And whatever Wood's earlier proto-rat-choice positions might have been, her more recent positions in Origins of Capitalism and Empire of Capital are clearly positioned more in the vein that Doug has sort of insinuated here, namely that there is a sense that the promise of emancipation doesn't lie in the Scottish enlightenment but the French Revolution--that whatever the claims to capitalism to produce more stuff for everyone, this is only valid if that extra stuff is actually distributed more equitably.
> Sean wrote:
>> In many ways the most perverse period has been the more recent turn to
> a more pure, market oriented capitalism--where farmers can no longer
> reuse the most productive seeds, or have to buy proprietary fertilizer
> or pesticide in order to make it work; where GM seeds have
> questionable effects on improved yields and unknowable effects on
> future mutations (as well as problems of monoculture Alan has already
> mentioned); and where "free trade" is really just a license to dump
> agriculture abroad and destroy any local projects of improvement
> before they could even be attempted. This is where the chemical and
> commodity qualities have been most clearly combined and it is clear
> that the more naked the capitalist exploitation. Conflating the two,
> I think, will get you nowhere in explaining the current conjuncture.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sure there are problems with monoculture, but there are also gains.
> Not really sure how we parcel out the two. Farmers have not produced
> the most productive seeds in quite some time. Let's remember that F1
> hybrid seeds produced plants whose seeds could not be resown too and
> these have been the most common seeds in the most productive
> agriculture for close to 100 years and they come from scientific
> research.
But again, you're conflating capitalism with science which is just ridiculous. And in the current moment, the use of science to merely further capitalism, rather than actually increase the long term sustainability of the planet seems to fly in the face of this conflation rather well.
Again, there are problems and benefits with this
> technology. Most of the problems arise not from the technology itself
> but from the control of it.
exactly the point I'm trying to make. I didn't say that there are problems with the technology but with the way it is deployed and the way the incentives actually work against the stated goal of, say, feeding people or even of making the earth more productive in the long term (issue of externalities such as how this will work out in the long run is largely overlooked in favor of finding new revenue streams.)
I don't know if 'free trade' is just a
> 'license to dump agriculture abroad and destroy any local projects of
> improvement'. I see it more as an attempt to dump products to
> transform the social relations of the receiving country, mostly into
> low cost factory production or export capitalist agriculture.
I'm not saying the intention of the dumping is to destroy local production; but that is what is done. Also, dumping is only possible because of state subsidies in the developed world--the point I was trying to make by discussing it in terms of dumping--and I would say that destroying local production certainly has the effect of changing the social relations, but the way you describe it is in perfect IMF/World Bank speak, as if moving people out of agriculture will naturally lead them to have other kinds of work--or as if producing cash crops for the world market is a better way to plan for development. I'll bracket the fact that this is rarely the case and it is a completely hypocritical policy for anyone in the first world to endorse fully. I am not saying there couldn't possibly be some gains from trade, but the current system is rigged against it, hence my critique of free trade was more of it as it is instituted in practice rather than some IMF/WB Rostovian fantasy. I think this is what Alan is discussing in his reference to slums. I can't quite get my head around how people in the slums should thank capitalism for destroying their livelihood and sending them to the slums, but I guess it takes a perverse kind of first world paternalism to see this as an unmitigated gain for them.
I don't
> think capitalists really care about local projects of improvement (and
> exactly how would these local innovations not be influenced by
> capitalist social relations), there drive is to compete with other
> capitalists by expanding and subordinating more people to the wage
> labor system.
In the first case, my point was not that they are intentionally stifling these projects, but that the "creative destruction" of the current system will make any future innovations difficult to sustain. My point here is that there are plenty of innovations at the local level that have been incorporated into the system in the past--and many that, in those local situations, have helped people to increase their yields and/or increase their sustainability practices. These would not be influenced by capitalist social relations by not being subsumed, as you then go on to say, into the wage relation alone: government supported projects, subsidies, cheap credit with a reliably low interest rate, tariffs to protect local industries and agricultural products, etc. In other words, all the things that the current regime doesn't allow developing countries to do (or at least doesn't allow them to do it easily) but which developed countries have enjoyed almost since their infancy. I agree that, "there drive is to compete with other capitalists by expanding and subordinating more people to the wage labor system," but the question at hand is whether that actually produces innovation and scientific progress or whether it just increases the monopoly hold of neo-imperialist corporations on the third world. You seem to see this as a benign systemic process that we should simply accept as inevitably innovative and cheery. I say bullshit.
s