Reading guide for The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. Meiksins Wood.

 Reading guide for The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. Meiksins Wood. 

Chapter 2: “Marxist Debates”. 

1. Why does the author speak about the old models of capitalism as a paradoxical blend of transhistorical determinism and free market voluntarism?

2. What is the model (antithetical to the old models) that the author is searching for? How does she define it? 

3. Explain Marx’s two different narratives about the origins of capitalism. 

4. Explain the “commercialization model” (page 35). 

5. Explain why, in the commercialization model, capitalism is just a quantitative expansion of commerce and wealth. 

6. What transformed wealth into capital, according to Marx? And why? (page 36). 

7. Where did capitalism begin, according to Marx? 

8. What is the central question posed by Sweezy and Dobbs about the transition from feudalism to capitalism?

9. Dobb and Hilton explain this transition in terms of a “liberation of petty commodity producers from feudal exploitation”: does this explanation belong to the commercialization model or not? Why?

10. What is, for Sweezy, the reason for the transition from feudalism to capitalism? (page 40). 

11. What does Sweezy say about the inability of the ruling class to maintain control over the labor power? 

12. Explain the idea of capitalism as an economic model already present in the simple commodity production (42). 

13. What is “serfdom” according to Perry Anderson? 

14. Where is the “new economic sphere”, not controlled by aristocracy, according to Perry Anderson? 

15. What is “absolutism”, according to Anderson? Why does it fracture the unity that characterized the feudal system? 

16. Is Anderson’s explanation about the origin of capitalism compatible with the commercialization model? Explain.