I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view back at the end of 2015 and wrote my review here. But then a month or two I picked it up again. Because.
It's an odd thing, to read a book by a Marxist, because Marxists live in a different universe, and they use the language of Newtonian mechanics -- moments, laws of motion -- that Marx used when he wasn't being all materialist with Feuerbach. Oh and "self-reproduction," presumably as in Darwin.
Oddly, when I reread the book I seemed to have no recollection of reading it previously!
Wood's narrative is basically this. Back in the old days, humans lived through "non-market access to the means of self-reproduction, and specifically land." Thus, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." But then, with the "improvement" movement, in which landowners started to want to make money on their land, people became proletarianized, they became "market-dependent;" they became wage slaves. Today people live under a "market imperative."
But, Wood notices, the English aristocracy was "demilitarized" before the lords in the rest of Europe.
I can see why I reread The Origin of Capitalism with new eyes. Because, you see, in the intervening years I have read about what this demilitarizing of the aristocracy was all about, and why it led to "improvement."
See, back in the day the feudal lords were basically mini kings and ruled their estates as royalty. And the peasants that tilled the land on their estates were not just there for the convenience of "passively appropriating" rents. The peasants, or at least the male ones, were there to constitute the army of the lord, what the notables in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays call "our powers."
But when Henry VIII disarmed the nobles he effectively dissolved their mini-kingdoms and their mini-armies. See what that means? Back in the day, the idle peasants were useful as cannon- or at least arrow-fodder. Not any more. So that's when the lords started kicking their peasants off the land and enclosing the common land, and trying to make money with "improvement." As Marx put it:
A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...
Well, they were useless now, but not back in the day when they were part of the feudal host, available to march to the battlefield. Then they were useful as soldiers, as part of the lord's power projection.
Wood talks about how the proletarians live today under the "market imperative." So they do. So we all do. They must prostitute themselves in the labor market and work for wages -- and the wages are determined by the market, the ebb and flow of supply and demand for human labor, and not justice.
Yes, but back in the day, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." So they did. And they allowed to peasants to scratch around and utilize "common lands" and the peasants worked out a communal approach to share the use of the common lands. And everything worked out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Until the day that the lord needed the peasant and his billhook in the lord's army. Jolly good fun, unless the lord lost the battle and some other lord came to lord it over the peasant, and maybe loot the lord's land and kill the peasants and sell the peasants' wives into slavery.
Of course, in our day the peasant is not completely living under the "market imperative." He or she can subordinate himself or herself to the ruling class and get passively appropriated benefits from his or her loving lord. Call if living under a "political imperative."
The last word in Wood's book is telling.
The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.
Do you see the utter head-in-the-sand determination not to see what is right in front of you?
For I would say this:
Two steps forward and one step back, the economy of the free market has performed the miracle of increasing the real income of humans by 30 times in 200 years. Meanwhile all experiments in socialism have been criminal, murderous failures. What is wrong with people that can still conjure up a vision of "the real alternative of socialism" despite the evidence of 100 million dead in 100 years?
Socialism is not a "real alternative." It is not sitting there, waiting to be tried. Instead it is a proven failure. Because every time it has been tried it has been a failure. No, not just a failure, but a bloody failure, a starving failure. And it's about time that lefties admit it.
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