“First, capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the age-old social tendency to 'truck, barter, and exchange' It is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, reaching a point of virtual universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some transhistorical law, or of some racial or cultural superiority of 'the West', but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of motion, its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion. Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life’s basic necessities.
Second, capitalism has, from the beginning, been a deeply contradictory force. The very least that can be said is that the capitalist system's unique capacity, and need, for self-sustaining growth has never been incompatible with regular stagnation and economic downturns. On the contrary, the very same logic that drives the system forward makes it inevitably susceptible to economic instabilities, which require constant ' extra-economic' interventions, if not to control them then at least to compensate for their destructive effects.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, Verso 2002, pp. 193
Origin
Plentiful coal deposits located near cities and convenient to water transport and conquest of the Western Hemisphere—not internally generated cultural, institutional, or economic advantages—allowed England and Northwest Europe to transfer their surplus populations and secure access to sugar, timber, cotton, and tobacco that uniquely enabled them to escape the ecological cul-de-sac that previously limited all of Eurasia.”
A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, Stanford University Press, California, 2021.
What caused the transformation in social property relations
“Class struggle figures prominently in his [Robert Brenner’s] argument, as it did in Dobb's and Hilton's, but with Brenner it is not a question of liberating an impulse toward capitalism. Instead, it is a matter of lords and peasants, in certain specific conditions peculiar to England, involuntarily setting in train a capitalist dynamic while acting, in class conflict with each other, to reproduce themselves as they were. The unintended consequence was a situation in which producers were subjected to market imperatives.
The conditions of tenure were such that growing numbers of tenants were subjected to market imperatives - not the opportunity to produce for the market and to grow from petty producers into capitalists but the need to specialize for the market and to produce competitively - simply in order to guarantee access to the means of subsistence and to the land itself.
English property relations had what Brenner calls their own distinctive 'rules for reproduction'. Both direct producers and landlords came to depend on the market in historically unprecedented ways just to secure the conditions of their own self-reproduction.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, Verso 2002, pp. 52-54
“How producers were deprived of non-market access to the means of their self-reproduction and even to land itself; how landlordly forms of exploitation were transformed from 'extra-economic' surplus extraction to the appropriation of capitalist rents; how it came about that both landlords and tenants were compelled and enabled to move in response to the imperatives of competition; how new forms of appropriation established new compulsions; and how those compulsions conditioned the differentiation - and in large part the dispossession - of the peasantry. This happened through purely 'economic' pressures of competition no less than through more direct coercion by landlords with a new kind of economic interest in large and concentrated holdings . A mass proletariat was the end, not the beginning, of the process.”
Wood, 2002, p. 60 [summarising Robert Brenner’s arguments]
“He [Brenner] showed that the dynamic of self-sustaining growth, and the constant need for improvement in labour productivity, presupposed transformations in property relations that created a need for such improvements simply to permit the principal economic actors - landlords and peasants - to reproduce themselves.”
Wood, 2002, p. 66
“England was at the outset less advanced in commerce and technology than its Dutch rival, but its further development, both its successes and its failures, was shaped by a distinctive system of social property relations, which made both producers and appropriators irreducibly dependent on competitive production. These property relations would set in motion a relentless compulsion to compete, to produce cost-effectively, to maximize profit, to reinvest surpluses, and systematically to increase labour-productivity by improving the productive forces. With that compulsion came all the contradictions of capitalism.”
Wood, 2002, p. 94
“The most salutary corrective to the naturalization of capitalism and to question-begging assumptions about its origin is the recognition that capitalism, with all its very specific drives of accumulation and
profit-maximization, was born not in the city but in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history. It required not a simple extension or expansion of barter and exchange but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations and practices, a rupture in age-old patterns of human interaction with nature.”
Wood, 2002, p. 95
Key features of England that distinguished it from other European countries and contributed to the birth of agrarian capitalism
“Norman ruling class established itself on the island as a fairly cohesive military and political entity, England already became more unified than most countries. In the sixteenth century, England went a long way toward eliminating the fragmentation of the state, the 'parcellized sovereignty' , inherited from feudalism. The autonomous powers held by lords, municipal bodies, and other corporate entities in other European states were, in England, increasingly concentrated in the central state.
Already in the sixteenth century, England had an impressive network of roads and water transport that unified the nation to a degree unusual for the period. London, becoming disproportionately large in relation to other English towns and to the total population of England (and eventually the largest city in Europe), was also becoming the hub of a developing national market.
The material foundation on which this emerging national economy rested was English agriculture, which was unique in several ways.
Land in England had for a long time been unusually concentrated, with big landlords holding an unusually large proportion, in conditions that enabled them to use their property in new ways.
The concentration of English landholding meant that an unusually large proportion of land was worked not by peasant-proprietors but by tenants … This was true even before the waves of dispossession, especially in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, conventionally associated with 'enclosure'.
Landlords depended less on their ability to squeeze more rents out of their tenants by direct, coercive means than on their tenants' success in competitive production. Agrarian landlords in this arrangement had a strong incentive to encourage - and, wherever possible, to compel - their tenants to find ways of reducing costs by increasing labour-productivity.
As for the tenants, they were increasingly subject not only to direct pressures from landlords but also to market imperatives that compelled them to enhance their productivity.
The effect of this system of property relations was that many agricultural producers (including prosperous 'yeomen') became market-dependent in their access to land itself, to the means of production.
In a system of 'competitive rents', in which landlords, wherever possible, would effectively lease land to the highest bidder, at whatever rent the market would bear, they - and their surveyors became increasingly conscious of the difference between the fIxed rents paid by customary tenants and an economic rent determined by the market.
Where the extra-economic powers of feudal lords remained strong, peasants could be subjected to the same coercive pressures as before from landlords seeking to squeeze more surplus labour out of them, even if now it took the form of monetary rents instead of labour services.
The evidence outlined by Brenner suggests that it was not fixed rents of this kind that stimulated the growth of commodity production. On the contrary, it was unfixed, variable rents responsive to market imperatives that in England stimulated the development of commodity production, the improvement of productivity, and self-sustaining economic development.” Wood, 2002, pp. 98-102
“New land removed from the ‘waste’ and brought into cultivation, together with demesne land leased out by manorial lords, was increasingly subject to new forms of tenancy, different from the customary tenancies that had dominated relations between landlord and peasant and the relation of both to the land; and these new tenancies would increasingly submerge the older customary forms. Even customary leases often functioned according to the new principles, and old customary law which had placed restrictions on them was displaced by common law conceptions of exclusive private property. Leases no longer subject to the restrictions of rents fixed by custom were made responsive to the market. Landlords could vary rents according to market conditions, and they could make ‘improvement’ of land a condition of leases, which was likely to make them accessible only to already successful farmers who could undertake improvement, to enhance productivity and profit. This did not necessarily mean that rents would be very high - although the trend would be upward as land was improved. A balance could be struck between giving a tenant sufficient security to encourage improvement, and exacting a good rent (and often what amounted to the purchase of the lease in the form of an entry fine) from prosperous tenants. These tenants would, in turn, often employ wage labour - establishing the famous ‘triad’ of capitalist agriculture, the network of landlord, capitalist tenant and wage labourer - and the number of available labourers would grow, as small producers went to the wall and land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of ‘improving’ landlords and their commercially successful tenants.”
Wood, Empire of Capital, 2005 ed., p. 76
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