Date:         Thu, 11 Feb 93 02:49:22 EST
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu>
Subject:      What the precapitalist capitalist maximizes
To:           Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@JHUVM>
 
   Comrades: The following should not be read from beginning to end. The long
story of when how why a big business is drawn irresistably to lose money, till
losing money has become its reason for being in business, is deliberately made
as weird and complicated as I could have done it.
 
   There is no single point or thrust. The piece is an exploration of the
Black Holes of theory, why they are where they are, why, and whether people
could stand doing theory without them, that is, in full awareness of what they
tend to obliviate hence refraining from obliviating.
 
   There is this old I-E root (there are no new I-E roots), beloved in one
form or another to you all, *rg-, I think, which has flowered luxuriantly in
*rich* variety, from India, *raj*, kingdom, to Irish Gaelic, *Ard Ri*, High
King. Riche, roi, rico, Reich, reiche, Riksdag, rich. One etymological strand,
surely the oldest as it antedates private property to be owned in fee simple,
money the owned property is worth, the exchange of the second for the first or
vice versa directly, or by fee overcomplicated as mediated by brokers, title
insurers, and lawyers, is the strand denoting or indicating power and dominion.
This one is faithful to the original. Kingdom, power, might. The estate of the
*ricos hombres*, in the 12th century Kingdom of Aragon, was that of the Great
Magnates, quite distinct from the common smut of nobility.
 
   In Old English, *rice*, pronounced like the Modern English *rich*, meant
power/kingdom. This was a nebulously fused conception. In each mock-tribal
polity (that is, a People called, say, East Angles, as further subdivided
into the NorFolk and the SufFolk) there was a lineage descended from a god,
normally Woden. (In Sussex they did everything differently.) This lineage
was called *cyningas*. So where the tale tells of "five kings of Wessex"
getting killed in one battle this didn't mean an efficient chain of command.
Five males of this lineage were killed but there were lots more where they
came from given pre-Christian distribution of the female population according
to the worth of men (quantifiable in coin for *wergild*). Only one *cyning*
was said to *feng to rice*, a blunt phrase including two four-letter English
words which is untranslatable. The likeliest choices are, "came into the
kingdom," "succeeded to the royal office," and "came to power."
 
   The same word, today, may only denote "possessing a superfluity of assets
denominated in currency units [less liabilities where relevant i.e.
decreasingly in that you can go as bankrupt as Trump and live richly ever
after]." The sole dubious exceptions, which nobody takes seriously, are usages
of moralists as to inner or spiritual richness money cannot buy. Which nobody
bothers about to deliver the riposte, "If money cannot buy happiness what is
the sense of having America," or "Whatever the truth value of the proposition
that money cannot buy you love, it is certain that the lack of it buys unlove."
That, comrades, is rich.[a]
 
   When we scrutinize the past for the veritable *cusp of capitalism* we may
hardly improve upon the meaning of the sobriquet of the sixteenth-century
Augsburger known to history and EMHIST-L alike as Jakob Fugger der Reiche.
Does this mean, "Jakob Fugger the Mighty," Medievally speaking, or "Jacob
Fugger the Rich," Rise-of-capitalistically speaking? Dirty little teleologists
that we are, we opt for the latter. Quite likely those alive at the time would
have thought it a stupid question and have been unable to tell you one way or
the other, as The Fugger was both rolling in money and politically mighty one
aT the sAMe time. Still, we are totally unwarranted in disentangling the one
meaning we can "wrap our heads around" as opposed to the other.
 
   The world-system, historical-sociological-in-general, Rise-of-Capitalism/
Rise-of-West ambience suggests that the commercial-industrial actor is not
in business for his or health in the remote past as in the present: And why
not? Scratch any whiteman, uh, Westernized/Modernized Person, you will find
a teleologist. There has got to be a Good Reason for why things Ended Up as
they did. As I just mentioned to Ms. Gu, the eighteen-year-old doctoral
candidate, "If there was not something, that certain extra something, the
JNSQ [in factor analysis, *je ne sais quoi*], which we had and you did not,
*you* might have realized *we* were in a race which under no circumstances
were we about to lose and as a further consequence ensured that we would
*win* and, having won the race, become the Greatest of racists." (Ms. Gu
has more career-development-relevant on-task behaviours to exhibit than
detect homor. But in business for their health they were. Security of life
and limb, unimprisonment, let alone protection of the rights of property,
requires maximaization of the means of violence as state power or, given the
most unpromising conditions to work with, feudal power, is what the actor
must attend to lest they attend to him/her.[b]
 
   The position I have taken on Chinese protocapitalism is that there is if
anything a *moral deficiency* on the part of the West with respect to
technical, intellectual, institutional, and maximization-imperative compared
to the backward "Western" <ha ha> "competition." <ha ha>
   The Chinese "Lost" for the reason that they were differentially impacted,
by reason of their indubitable *superiority*, by an EXOGENEOUS CATASTOPHE
which might as well have been from the Moon or, e.g., The Andromeda Strain.
   There was no Virtue, not relgious, not bilogical, not intellectual, not
institutional, not philosophical which conduced to acceleration of stagnated
European development of circa 1297 to 1348. Europe deserved to *lose*,
condemned for *deadend*, yet got a *reprieve* for no *virtue* of its own.
 
   There is no point in making spurious sense of the above, no matter how
tempting. THE RISE OF THE WEST WAS SHEER DUMB LUCK. Precapitalist people
make no sense to us (and vice versa should they have been warned by prophets
of doom).
   Finally, THE REASON CAPITALISM HAD TO EMERGE OUT OF FEUDALISM IS PURELY
AND SIMPLY that IT HAD TO HAVE AROSE (I could have said arisen but this has
got more socko impact) OUT OF SOMETHING we can CALL SOMETHING. That, comrades,
is what Comrade Sanderson's Feudalism boils down to. Wh needs it? What kind
of Historical Faze is it that is no more than a teething ring?
   ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
   FROM VOLUME MINUS ONE, THE MYSTIC DIAGRAMS OF PRECAPITAL
   ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
   M -> C -->M'
         \ / \
          W-->W
 
   The crude childish scrawl above is one possible circuit diagram modo
Marxisto for the General Law of the Accumulation of Precapital, where the
letter W represents "maans of violence" and M. C, and M' retain their original
Scriptural sense. Electrical engineers and social scientists are invited to
send in their ideas for a better circuit design with a boxtop of a new PC
with original styrofoam balls in a beach ball.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
   In a long-neglected text on WSN which has not come down to us, I wrote:
   "It follows that [from what is lost-df] in the capitalist core-area, at
   least, or most clearly, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class has been
   bifurcated, for centuries, into its entrepreneurial specialists and its
   politico-military specialists. Poulantzas characterized this situation as
   "disunity in structure," which if it does not clarify anything very much,
   certainly lends awesome theoretical majesty to the most sordid and porous,
   yet notionally indispensable, frontier within the dominant-cum-exploiting
   class in terms of occupation or career specialization.[c].
 
   What I hadn't said was that I parted company with Poulantzas (who was not
yet dead when I first thought of this but was versy seriously famous and, as
an occupational failure, the sociologists were not going to indulge my mudpie
making as "creativity") over how good a reason there was for the enduring
structurally structured, long-duree'd persistence of this inner organization
of the bourgeoisie. Poulantzas emphasized legitimation of the state apparatus
as illusorily outside class hierarchies (Capitalism and Social Classes, 1973).
For my part, I pointed to the bifurcation antedating open competitive
elections and persisting as parliamentary systems gave way to dictatorships,
the latter to electoral systems. The true reason may involve the
*devalorization of capital* by economically suicidal if politically
rational means. Also the ritual-defilement taboo pertaining to certain types
of pecuniarity finger-to-skin with the holy-of-holies of state.
 
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
   *In a capitalist society, THE LIFE OF THE NATION may depend on whether you
    have the moral fortitude to use thermonuclear weapons against cruelly
    duped and misled diseased limbs of the Nation*. There is a moment, then,
    when a man must decide, Am I a propertyowner, or am I a TRUE PATRIOT.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
    [I should think that, allowing for exaggeration, the foregoing captures
    the perspectival difference as best as at this moment I can state it.]
 
   What about Francesco Datini, beloved of Werner Sombart and Fernand Braudel
alike? Hah, the paradigm case of exception to the rule. Datini's native town
of Prato was a colonial dependency of the Florentine Republic way back to its
foundation in the thirteenth century. Prato, a town of no pretensions, no
ambitions, was hence a low-overhead place notwithstanding it was soaked to
the gills by the City of the Lily's taxes. (And low overhead place it still
is, for reasons partly illegal and partly explained by Network Analysis; also
beloved by the Flexible Specialization theorists in economic sociology. Such
include Professor Mark Lazerson, MLAZERSO@ccvm.sunysb.edu, of the Stony
Brook sociology department, don't mention my name, he needs to be famous.)[d]
 
   What we read in histories of world-systems, which boil down to histories
of commerce by anonymouus entites between two trading areas in products whose
volume waxes or wanes but in the usual instance, for example,
 
>silver waned, Japan became a major exporter of copper, with the
>biggest buyer being China.
 
an author makes no effort to infer the maximization and optimization parameters
in terms whereof the behavior of the organisms engaged in trade are delimited
or stimulated.
 
   In the estimation of the precapitalist capitalist's microeconomic
optimization functions we shall perforce omit the broad masses of small
traders, one of whom in Medieval Latin was known as *mediocris*. To think
that in younger days, when denounced as a "*petit-bourgeois* mediocrity"
without a comeback, I hadn't even known it was a redundancy! This factoid,
from Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class In Medieval London, 1948, reminds
us that the conditions of existence of small-merchanthood were unstable,
unpredictable, and unconducive of the maximization of anything but prolonging
the agony of staying in business to the bitter end, about three generations
with luck. The status of women among the *mediocrites* was fairly high, with
the relevant comparison being relabive status across status groups and estates
relative to each other. Desmond's barrow in the marketplace got inherited by
his widow, Molly, or his daughter, Molly[2], or daughter-in-law, Molly[3].
The small merchant community had bilateral descent.
 
   When we turn by contrast to the most noble English tin trade to play Find
That Capitalist, we find our most conspicuous profit maximizers Kings of
England, who reinvested not a sterling silver penny in the entire enterprise.
The tin mines of Cornwall were worked since the Bronze Age, when they were a
hangout for Semites inducing the Celt to burrow neath the sod, as the Celt
has been thought suited for since. With bronze not selling, pewter, the poor
family's Teflon of the time, became an export industry, just add tin to lead
pancake and, a dish! (Someone pest has just insisted on telling me that King
Richard I Lion Heart, 1189-1199, was "gay," which if anything fortifies a
point made earlier re vassals putting up with victorious overlords. A great
tin man was he.[e]
 
   "In 1198 King Richard I, realizing how profitable the stannaries were,
   decided to reorganzie the industry to favor the free miners and thereby
   encourage them to increase production. He announced to his assistance
   juries drawn from the miners, and in 1201 King John followed suit and
   confirmed the ancient privilegea of 'digging tin and turfs for smelting
   it at all times, freely and peaceably and without hindrance from any man,
   everywhere in the fens of bishops, aboots, and counts...and of buying
   faggots to smelt the tin without without waste of forest, and of diverting
   streams for their works, and in the stannaries just as by ancient usage
   they have wont to do.'" (J. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 1976)
 
   Hey, Paranoids, *what was the business*? Exploiting the tireless horny
horny hands of toil of the tin-clotted mining proletariat (under whatever
legal fiction they were wage slaves) or was it, use your imagination, *selling
exemptions* to the much bigger fish who stood to lose by enforcement? The
miners wer Free by definition, but there were *serfs* all round. Why, you
could make a killing selling your boyscout oath to ruturn fugitive serfs to
their rightful servile duties and natural lord for, just to cover costs, a
small pittance. Miners, howsoever free, comparable in the eyes of God with
bishops, abbots, and counts does not figure even today. And those faggots.
Here are rough guys on the loose authorized to buy, if someone is watching,
or with greater probability, steal dead cellulose from history's most
redoubtable *tree huggers*, well, you know how lawyers made up "nacient usage"
and how they sold unusing it.
   This was how war bonds were sold in the twelfth-thriteenth centuries to
fight off the State-Building Process, Philip Augustus, Battle of Bouvines,
and the Charles-Tilly-inevitability of it all.
 
   Tin is intermixed in a slovenly fashion with silver, a factor in all the
foregoing, down to the end of the century, when one of the three or four big
Florentine banks - the banks of consequence were Bardi, Peruzzi, Frescobaldi,
and Accaiuoli - became the dubious benefit of precocious "privatization." In
the 1290s the Frescobaldi were granted a management contract such that they
made money on each load of silver/lead/tin ore if they could induce the
to accept a lower price than the 5s paid Edward I (1277-1307). They could
not; labor disputes of ante-Thatcheristic ire broke out, and by 1305 the
Frescobaldi had the operation running smmothly with mounting losses.
   *Why did these sound businessmen do it*?
 
   For the reason that it was sound business practice.
 
   It was an offer the Four Families could not refuse.
 
   There were two vastly larger sources of profit. One was the financing of
the sheeping of English sheep, the most sheepish in the world. The Lord
Chancellor, as is is still done, sat upon The Woolsack to symbolize that
England was a nation of sheep, not of men. The Frescobaldi were the most
acutely analytic of sheepship quality, and had their own Source from the
Cistercian abbeys, where sheep of passing sheepliness dod grow. The
Frescobaldi had not merely, with the other Italian families, been engaged
in woolgathering on a massive scale; they used their leverage over the
woolen manufacturers of Florence, whose own guild, the Arte di Lana, was
outstipped in prestige by the bankers' Arte di Calimala, to gear up for
truly massive woolen production at the ecpense of the woolen industry of
Flanders. The King of England had declared War upon the Count of Florence
which, were the King of France cognizant of what's yer own good, need be none
of his business; and the Flemish were made to pay an export tax on English
wool sold to them by the Italians to build up the Tuscan textile factories.
 
   When wool was obtainable, the Flemish paid for competition inteded by two
foreign governments in combination to *ruin* them bust. When it was not, there
was starvation in the cities. Strikes, riots, insurrections broke out.
   The County of Flanders (with neighboring Brabant), the site in the late
thirteenth century of the greatest concentration of industrial wage labor,
was by reason of intense, concentrated, and sustained political pressure
exerted by the Kings of France over it (e.g., supporting the Counts against
townsmen, capitalists against workers), was more a part of political France
than was the loose-cannon Duchy of Burgundy from 1391-1479. As the export
market for sheepish fiber it for this reason aroused the King of England to
War. War most expensive, the source of the war finance was Italian credit,
a fiendishly complicated thing of bills of exchange and discount rates which,
in the crisis of 1343, the Italians could not understand.
 
   Edward I Longshanks, mighty man of war, forced the Count of Flauders to
break his oath of homage to the French King in an obsurely torturous travesty
of legalistic feudal formulaic rituals; this came in 1297. By so doing, he
became the greatest deadbeat in Europe, loading the Italians with immense
uncollectable debts on the books as nonproducing assets. This is what the
Italian invention of double entry bookkeeping meant. The greatest of Italian
states, which the Families controlled, had no way of breaking his legs. To
save what was left of their investment, the Italians poured more and more
money into English warfare, culminating in Edward III's aggression in the
Hundred Years' War. With only six years of play and England one touchdown
in the lead (1337-1343), the banks crashed. They'd done the best they could
in a long-run money-losing struggle; but, in the immortal words of Mel Brooks,
"Who knew?"
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
 
[a] A rich man once sang,
"I don't care so much for money;
 Money can't buy me love."
But another, whose income depended heavily upon poverty, sang,
"Nobody wantsya
 Whenya downandout."
See the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Howard Kovar, SUNYSB Soc Dept,
whose author set himself the mystic quest of discovering the universal key
to the decipherment of all popular music lyrics ever written or possible to
ever be written, from a Marxist Class Struggle Perspective. The inordinate
length of this dissertation is such that the author remembers nothing in it,
just his PhD diploma from June 1990. For fingerwitness testimony to the
contents of the dissertation we have to thank the eidetic memory of Ms. Wanda
Oliveira, Graduate Secretary, and recipient of Pres. Bush's Typical Americanism
Award, 1991, "to one person, a typical American, who does nearly all the work
for nearly all of the money, seven, no, maybe now it's eight out of ten of us."
[b]I wish to solicit suggestions from the viewing audience as to what each or
any one of you might wish to ask the world's greatest social science child
prodigy. I am too stupid.
[c]That's the dictionary definition of *awesome*, not your kid's definition of
*awesome*.
[d]There are many of us who want Mark Lazerson to become famous. Were it not
for him, I'd never have read Oscar E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies,
Free Press, 1982. See chapter 8, beginning, p. 138: "In the beginning there
were markets...." From his graduate student, Brian Uzzi, I learned the moral
lesson that the understanding of the mind of the economist is, from childhood,
the greatest achievement possible for the Marxistically-rooted. The sneering
of those of Marxist ancestry is racist snobbery pure and simple. This is the
starting point of wisdom. Mark Lazerson is my Spiritual Master.
[e]Compare the deaths of William II Rufus (1087-1100, "hunting accident") and
Edward II (1307-1327, hot poker, uh, forget it).