Meiksins Wood. Chapter 5: “The Agrarian Origin of Capitalism”

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

Chapter 5: “The Agrarian Origin of Capitalism”

1. Explain the process of appropriation of the surplus by exploiters, according to Marx. (95) 

2. Explain the French structure of exploitation: absolutism. (96)

3. Why, in the capitalist model, we cannot speak of “direct coercion”? (96)

4. Define capitalism in this context. (97)

5. Explain the capitalist logic of imperatives. (97) 

6. Why is the capitalist system in permanent expansion? (97)

7. Enumerate and explain the main characteristics of England (the “European exception): -State; Infrastructure and communications; London at the center of the national market. (98-99)  

8. Explain the relation between landlords and tenants. Why did it give origin to what the author calls “competitive production”? (100)

9. Explain the difference between market rent and customary rent. (101)

10. What was the situation in France in regards to property rights? (102)

11. Explain the relationship between a highly productive agriculture and the large wage-labour force in England. (103)

12. Explain the concepts of improvement and improver in the English agrarian context. (106)

13. Why did the traditional concepts of land property start being debated at the time? 

14. Explain the notion of enclosure in the context of the 17th century in England. (108-9)

15. Explain John Locke’s opinion about unoccupied land (in the context of the theorization of capitalist property). (110). 

16. Why does the author say that Locke justifies colonial expropriation? (112)

17. Why does the author say that, according to Locke, the master appropriates the labour of his servant?

18. Why are the employers of labour called producers, if, in fact, the producers are the workers? (112-3)

19.  Why does the author say that Locke gives us a theory of property based on capitalist principles?

20. Connect Locke’s ideas with the notion of private property. (115)

21. Why does Locke, according to the author, justify slavery? (115)

22. What is the bourgeois revolution? (118)

Meiksins Wood. Chapter 4: “Commerce or Capitalism?”

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

Chapter 4: “Commerce or Capitalism?”

1. Why should the transition from feudalism to capitalism not be treated as a general European process? (73)

2. Why is this treatment rooted in the commercialization model? (73)

3. Explain the consequences of identifying “capitalism” with “cities”. (73-74)

4. Does the emergence of capitalism bear a relationship with development in commercial sophistication, science, and technology? (75)

5. Was the autonomy of the cities a decisive factor in the emergence of capitalism?

6. What was the critical factor in the emergence of capitalism? (75-76)

7. Explain the logic of trade, according to the author (76-77)

8. Explain the difference between “profit-seeking” and “efficient” production. (77)

9. Do the “profits deriving from the advantages in the process of circulation” belong to the capitalist logic? Why? (or, why not?) (79)

10. Explain the “non-capitalist modes of exploitation” (79-80)

11. Why was the trade in grain (page 80-82) conducted according to the principles of pre-capitalist commerce?

12. Explain the productive models of Florence and the Dutch Republic. Why did they not give place to a capitalist system? (87-94)

Meiksins Wood: Chapter 3

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

Chapter 3: “Marxist Alternatives”. 

1. What is left unexplained by the transition debate?

2. Did Brenner accept the existence of a “proto-capitalism”? Explain Why. 

3. What is the “dynamic internal to feudalism” that Brenner searched for?

4. Why does he explain this dynamic in terms of lords and peasants? Analyze the importance of the concept of reproduction in his argument. (52)

5. Explain the relationship between landlords and tenants in England, according to Brenner. (52-53) 

6.  Explain the “rules for reproduction”, according to Brenner. Why do they create a new historical dynamic? (53)

7.  Explain the difference, in the text, between “compulsion” and “opportunity”. Put these concepts in the context of the “commercialization model”. (54)

8. Explain the notion of “extra-economic forms of surplus extraction”. Why, in capitalism, surplus extraction is purely economic? (55-56)

9. Why, in Brenner, it is class relations that explains the rise of capitalism? (58)

10. Explain the whole process of subjection to market imperatives, on page 60. 

11. Why does this process cause proletarianization? (60)

12. Why did England transmit capitalism to the rest of Europe (and, eventually, to the rest of the world?

13. Explain the transformation of the concept of “market”: from a familiar, physical place, into a mechanism beyond communal control, self-regulating, opaque, etc. (69).