Reading guide for The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. Meiksins Wood.
Chapter 3: “Marxist Alternatives”.
What is left unexplained by the transition debate?
Did Brenner accept the existence of a “proto-capitalism”? Explain Why.
What is the “dynamic internal to feudalism” that Brenner searched for?
Why does he explain this dynamic in terms of lords and peasants? Analyze the importance of the concept of reproduction in his argument. (52)
Explain the relationship between landlords and tenants in England, according to Brenner. (52-53)
Explain the “rules for reproduction”, according to Brenner. Why do they create a new historical dynamic? (53)
Explain the difference, in the text, between “compulsion” and “opportunity”. Put these concepts in the context of the “commercialization model”. (54)
Explain the notion of “extra-economic forms of surplus extraction”. Why, in capitalism, surplus extraction is purely economic? (55-56)
Why, in Brenner, it is class relations that explains the rise of capitalism? (58)
Explain the whole process of subjection to market imperatives, on page 60.
Why does this process cause proletarianization? (60)
Why did England transmit capitalism to the rest of Europe (and, eventually, to the rest of the world?
Explain the transformation of the concept of “market”: from a familiar, physical place, into a mechanism beyond communal control, self-regulating, opaque, etc. (69).
No comments:
Post a Comment