From one of the internet's tiny treasures, Delancey Place, January 13:
Today's selection-- from Capitalism by Sven Beckert. Human beings did not adapt easily or well to the introduction of the factory and the regularization and restrictions of labour and work:
“As wave after wave of commodification and dispossession crashed over large swaths of the world's countryside, societies were remade on a massive scale, changing how millions lived and subsisted. Capitalists reimagined the ecology of large areas and connected distant societies, The world that they built over two centuries was fundamentally different from any that had shaped human affairs before. This was the moment the familiar framework of the global capitalist economy emerged.
“Unsurprisingly, the revolutionary agenda that was shaking up the countryside encountered opposition—from both the top of social hierarchies and the bottom. Many rulers still preferred keeping capitalists at bay, even as they increasingly depended on them, and producers everywhere preferred the commons and subsistence farming. Resistance was powerful in areas where older social and political structures were resilient, including much of the European countryside, the west coast of Africa, almost all of Asia, and indeed much of the world. Global capitalism was neither a natural state of things nor a straightforward undertaking—the restructuring of ever more parts of the world and of social life along a capitalist logic was, in fact, exceedingly difficult and took centuries to unfold. It took even longer to reach a state in which this peculiar way of organizing economic life seemed ‘natural.’
“This is why the first significant commercialization of the countryside unfolded on islands—some metaphorical, some real—areas where social and political opposition were least pronounced, areas that were either unpopulated (such as Barbados), occupied by nomadic people who had little ability to resist, as in the Bajio, or where social structures were severely weakened (as in feudal Europe). But even in these places, people resisted dispossession, proletarianization, enslavement, and the commodification of their lives.
“The world in which capital owners increasingly ignored the preferences of peasants and tributary rulers was a scene of global social struggle: Capitalism resembled a state of war. As with most revolutions, it rested on an enormous degree of coercion, and even when it succeeded, its offspring, a rapidly growing group of propertyless workers—some enslaved, some indentured, others enserfed or hired for wages—frightened those who drew on their labor. The countryside became the site of struggles, with peasants, indentured servants, feudal elites, wageworkers, and slaves resisting the revolutionizing agenda of early capitalists.
“This was true everywhere. Ottoman rural cultivators, for example, threatened with losing control over land as urban capital gained power, sometimes resorted to court battles, but at other times took up arms or turned to banditry to assert their claims and rights.British rural cultivators revolted against enclosures for three centuries. Already in 1548, in an expostulatory tract titled An Infarmacion and Peticion Agaynst the Oppressours of the Pore Commons of This Realme, Robert Crowley had warned land reformers about the consequences of dispossessing farmers of their lands:....
....MUCH MORE
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