Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 21:47:46 EST From: "Daniel A. Foss" Subject: Slightly more conscious discussion of WS theory in time Chris Chase-Dunn deserves a more serious response than I was able to give last night on account of not-quite-conscious condition, but at least I have the post as rough notes for what should be said. First, a word about the methodological propriety of posing the counterfactual. Those who loved David Hackett Fischer's Historians Fallacies, 1970, will recall that hardly anything was as strongly tabooed as the counterfactual. But one respects no less Stony Brook's own Professor Ian Roxborough teaching historical sociology to History Department graduate students, leaning back in his chair, and solemnly giving the order: "Always pose the counterfactual." I must go with my lineage, who were sociologists for nearly a decade. What I suggest is, we have neither the right nor the opportunity to say that the variant of capitalism we have got is the only one we could possibly have got. Beyond that, is the version we did get the *cheapest*? the *safest*? the most *efficient*? the *freest*? the *fairest*? the most *civilized*? the most *rational*? the most (and this is not the same thing) *reasonable*? A safe no to each. And, even given we got what we got, could the product have been improved had historical actor X not screwed up the big scene with social movement agent Y. If there is to be a capitalist world market coeval with, and permeating, the economic life of a *state system*, we know that the pious incantation asserting that peaceful trade by pacific businessmen (the gendered variant valid till recently) following sound business practices should prove most assuredly conducive to peace among princes or nations are a crock. War is somehow contrived to go on, as war is what the state does some of the time, and instilling the fear of the state such that the ruled pay for protection war by the state against themselves in the interest of girding the state for war against the external enemy is what it does all the time. Or as Skocpol is quoted by everyone, "The state is Janus-faced." It follows that 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. In the Early Modern period, states contracted their recruitment of their armies and the government of remote territories to entities which, if holding official sanction as a charter from the sovereign, were also private profit- making enterprises and, with institutional development, joint-stock limited liability companies. There were indeed a dynasty of Lords Baltimore; a Penn who owned the rectangular region south of Immanuel Wallerstein, and a "John Company" exercising imperial sway over hundreds of millions till 1857. At the other end, in the Latest Modern, we have, alongside Insider Trading laws stringently as depleted personnel permits enforced by the SEC, and Conflict of Interest laws now snagging the Atty. Gen. designate for saving two "undocumented workers" from starvation, a nuclear-military-industrial complex wherewith the US regime partially privatizes its most awesome dimension of foreign policy and spews deadly poisonous radioactive contamination in far greater quantity than was dreamt of by protesters of the local Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. The boundary of criminality itself is blurred today in the macrosocial and macroeconomic policies of the state, where by allowing bizarre and insane speculation in real or unreal estate, unsound yet far from silent specialized banks for financing of the preceding, and accelerated depreciation allowances for more efficient new models of machinery used for unproductive purposes such that the accountancy profession is given scope for creative genius does not alter the idee fixe of corruption in the minds of the masses whose minds compartmentalize the universe into public and private sectors. We have scandals wherein legislators stand accused of writing bad checks for free spending money, which all corporate CEOs may acquire legally and indeed are even at lower levels of management must flant in the form fo thousnads of dollars of currency falling out of pockets in order to arouse credibility along with cupidity in clients or customers. This bizarre set of customs and traditions withal performs the fundtion of generating and sustaining a subculture within the tiptop class such that there are more important things than money and it is right and honorable to do things which are lousy for business. The soldier despises the profiteer, unless he in turn gets a crack at the gravy savored during exposure of life and limb to hostiles. Look at Ulysses S. Grant. Who stole but died poor, unlike today's soldier who defers huge income until after career termination. The same holds for career civil servant practicing law to influence peddler in private practice. Somehow, the wars still manage to get fought, and domestically they are good for business for at least one side. The exquisite euphemism coined by Carlo Cipolla, "negative production," was surely, prior to the most egregious ravages of trade cycles of quite recent, i.e., post-industrial-revolution, times, the principal mechanism for the devalorization of capital. This was, however, necessarily in conscious intent the devalorization of the enemy state's capital. The "fortunes of war," in the state system format, nevertheless ensured that even the best planned agressive wars of adjoining beliggerents would distribute the devalorization burden in a pattern dismaying to the capitalist and financier element whose support for the war had been thought desirable. The formation by the state-system-wide wars of the eighteenth century of military establishments of hundreds of thousands in France, Austria, Spain, and Russia; tens of thousands in England, The United Provinces, and Prussia nevertheless placed in being the coercive means for sustaining the rapacity of fiscality till one side or the other was ruined and exhausted. Then, key governmental posts would revert to the proponents of the peace and holders of debt anxious that there be no more debt to be held. The world-empire manages business and state affairs unitarily. The regulated private sector with associated specialized state officials supervising the minute details under the Song, whose regime was inseparable from the laudatory usage, "economic revolution," where the dynasty's name adjectivally modifies the latter, was one possible resolution. The succeeding wide-open boomtown economy of the Yuan, where entrepreneurial activity was stimulated further by the long shutdowns of the Confucian-literary-metaphysical degree-granting civil service examinations, and of those that were held, foreigners including Arabs, Persians, and Russians could compete, and at that in specially easy tests in recognition of their caste status as Mongol allies (semin). The salt industry was, however, transferred from closely-supervised private firms to huge state-owned and state-operated salt factories. Where I read that in one of these, of the 17,000 employed therein in 1342, 7,000 died that year, I suspect not Mongol beastliness, as the author intends I should, but the visit of *Pasturella pestis*. The dynamic involved was the circulation of paper currency. Salt and iron production had been state monopolies under the Han Dynasty, the Chinese Classical Antiquity analogue of the Roman Empire (which by Chinese standards was too administratively slovenly to permit ambitious schemes on such a scale), such that today Chinese are sons of Han much as Byzantine Greeks were Romaioi. The first unifier of the Warring States was like Rome a marcher state, Qin, notable prior to unification to Roman-analogous fetishizing of Law (the court-sponsored doctrine was Legalism) and military roads. Steven Sage, Sichuan and the Unification of China, 1990, says that Qin's laws gave property rights less definition than Roman, but Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, has heightened our awareness of the contribution of the law of slavery to that of quiritary property; and in the Warring States the peasanmt masses were never slaves. Paper was introduced under the Han and printing under the Song 800 years later. This expeditied the payment of the elite guild of salt merchants by certificates of standardized denomination called "flying money." Taxes on business and, even more so, land (meaning large estate) taxes, were evaded or were politically problematic. The state increasingly turned to forced sales of salt, even to tenant-serfs on great estates and wage-laborer households. On the eve of revolution compulsory sales of salt amounted to 80% of funds raised for state expenditure and wholly backed the paper currency. Business remained good through the first third of the fourteenth century; population reached a record 125 million; the incompetents and idiots on the throne did no damage. Bernard Lewis tells us that Chinese were racially stereotyped by the Arabs as gifted contrivers of gadgets. The Chinese world-empire, even after it had lost its technical dynamic such that its resumed marketization was called "involutional" by Philip C.C Huang (that is, the more efficient the market mechanism, the less the merchant had to do with the labor process and the more labor intensive household labor became on lower margins) reproduced till the 1911 revolution and beyond the correlation of education, wealth in land, and political power derived from "degrees": The latter were at once certificates of academic achievement and entitlements to office pending good behavior to offices at the lowest of the ranks (the *churen*[?] or "masters" degree) or the highest (the *jinshi* or "doctorate"). In theory, mere moneygrubbers, next to soldiers, were lowest forms of life, but the burning of paper money and wishes for luck in pecuiary form or "good fortune" in the same sense in popular Chinese religion indicated otherwise. Our own WORLD-L listmember, Gil Hardwick inquired Wed, 20 Jan 1993 10:03:38 WST regarding "the chronic nervous energy which is characteristic of large industrial cities,..." I can only refer our friend to Scripture, where in the Grundrisse makes straight in once sentence, "Industriousness is the artifact of the generalization of the circulation of commodities," that which Max Weber would spend a lifetime in the effort to make crooked again. And as in the lands of developed industrial capitalism the Chinese, too, imbibed a cerebral psychostimulant of the xanthide family, the active ingredient of tea, as are related xanthides the active ingredients of coffee and cocoa. Psychostimulands that which in time and place are "speed," "our divine nicotain" as the 16th century Allen Ginsberg precursor put it, has been the chemical Spirit of Capitalism since time out of Wallerstein. Before the Americans were in such a hurry they had first been speeding, which habit the British wrongfully taxed from being loaded to the gills with overstocked tea, whence America. You ever hear the expression, "what's this got to do with the price of tea in China?" as a byword for irrelevance? Back then that price was the most important price on earth. Even in the last Dynasty, the Qing, when factories wholly consisting of imported Western industrial equipment were imported, as part of the "self- strenghthening" movement, the perfectly-natural-considering-the-precedents seamless web of publicprivate sector devised for running the enterprises so as to make money in the national interest was called *official supervision merchant management*. (Had to memorize it for the Test in Chinese History, aced it too.) Now comes the hour when I must, morpheus calling, decide what if any point tonight's data entry has had. By Jove, I think there is one, you will disagree. It's this: There's more kinds of state you can get with anything vaguely like or structurally (even if you have to use a little topology to make out the relatedness of the structures, whatever structures are but a mixed metaphor) bearing family resemblance) *a capitalist-ish Thingie* than Social Scientists may dream of in your philosophy, you bunch of Poloniuses, you. (Note: Polonius was, it is true, a Polish joke of Shakespeare's, assuming he didn't pick it up from an even older source. But prior to the rise of the vast US philosophy industry, Poland was, since the Polish Renaissance if not before, and till the days of Kolakowski today, the principal European source of philosophers as an export commodity. To the Russians, Poles were always too smart by half.) We are in a sense only acquainted with the *nationally advertised brand* of state in capitalist condititons, that is, the state which *does its thing* in both the capitalist world-economy and the state system (*mistakenly*, I think, associated with the former in a determinate fashion). A capitalism not encumbered with a *European* state system, but blessed with a 1335-ish East Asian one would b a horse of another kettle of fish, it would combine public and private sectors wherefor no demarcation line had ever had to have been drawn. Just f'r instance. Respectfully, [also, God Is Large!], Daniel A. Foss <2. Chris Chase-Dunn. Self-explanatory.> <3. IRENA SUMI, Ljubljana, Croatia. irena.sumi@UNI-LJ.AC.MAIL.YU> <4. Haines Brown. Self-explanatory.> <5. [name withheld by own request] H760@cpc865.east-anglia.ac.uk, not in the WORLD-L list file, so this approval unlikely.> <6. Karen E. Haynes, 1LIKEK@UTSAVM1, included because of deep and undying contempt which would have to be overcome before she'd give good reviews: This writer epitomizes all the evil she's exercised willpower, selfdiscipline, and good clean living to overcome. Someone please explain, what's willpower, self discipline.> <7. [Name Withheld], Director of Psychiatry, Brookdale General Hospital, Brooklyn, New York City NY. Included exclusively on account of ownership of Mercedes Benz, which is the signifier of "entitlement-to-be-heard" in our culture.> ================================================================================ Received: from ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 1392; Fri, 22 Jan 93 02:11:35 EST Received: from UBVM.BITNET by ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) with BSMTP id 6989; Fri, 22 Jan 93 02:12:41 EST Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 23:09:33 -0800 Reply-To: World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history Sender: World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history From: wally@CATS.UCSC.EDU Subject: Ljubljana Comments: To: WORLD-L%UBVM.BITNET@cmsa.Berkeley.EDU To: "Daniel A. Foss" is in Slovenia. ================================================================================ Received: from ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 1466; Fri, 22 Jan 93 02:39:09 EST Received: from UBVM.BITNET by ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) with BSMTP id 7683; Fri, 22 Jan 93 02:40:17 EST Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 02:32:52 EST Reply-To: World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history Sender: World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history From: "Daniel A. Foss" Subject: Slovenia To: "Daniel A. Foss" Omigod, yer right! Did I really screw that up, I communicated with Irena Sumi & the Anth. Dept. at Ljubljana for months, even read a book, Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, this morning, and I could screw up like that, well, I gotta hang my head in shame, better yet, go to sleep, but cannot get up off this chair.... Thanks. God is Large! Island is Long! DAF