Date:         Thu, 21 Jan 1993 21:47:46 EST
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <[email protected]>
Subject:      Slightly more conscious discussion of WS theory in time
  Chris Chase-Dunn deserves a more serious response than I was able to give
last night on account of not-quite-conscious condition, but at least I have
the post as rough notes for what should be said. First, a word about the
methodological propriety of posing the counterfactual. Those who loved David
Hackett Fischer's Historians Fallacies, 1970, will recall that hardly anything
was as strongly tabooed as the counterfactual. But one respects no less Stony
Brook's own Professor Ian Roxborough teaching historical sociology to History
Department graduate students, leaning back in his chair, and solemnly giving
the order: "Always pose the counterfactual."

  I must go with my lineage, who were sociologists for nearly a decade. What
I suggest is, we have neither the right nor the opportunity to say that the
variant of capitalism we have got is the only one we could possibly have got.
Beyond that, is the version we did get the *cheapest*? the *safest*? the most
*efficient*? the *freest*? the *fairest*? the most *civilized*? the most
*rational*? the most (and this is not the same thing) *reasonable*? A safe no
to each. And, even given we got what we got, could the product have been
improved had historical actor X not screwed up the big scene with social
movement agent Y.

  If there is to be a capitalist world market coeval with, and permeating, the
economic life of a *state system*, we know that the pious incantation asserting
that peaceful trade by pacific businessmen (the gendered variant valid till
recently) following sound business practices should prove most assuredly
conducive to peace among princes or nations are a crock. War is somehow
contrived to go on, as war is what the state does some of the time, and
instilling the fear of the state such that the ruled pay for protection
war by the state against themselves in the interest of girding the state
for war against the external enemy is what it does all the time. Or as Skocpol
is quoted by everyone, "The state is Janus-faced."

  It follows that in the capitalist core area, at least, or most clearly, the
bourgeoisie or capitalist class has been bifurcated, for centuries, into its
entrepreneurial specialists and its politico-military specialists. Poulantzas
characterized this situation as "disunity in structure," which if it does not
clarify anything very much, certainly lends awesome theoretical majesty to the
most sordid and porous, yet notionally indispensable, frontier within the
dominant-cum-exploiting class in terms of occupation or career specialization.

  In the Early Modern period, states contracted their recruitment of their
armies and the government of remote territories to entities which, if holding
official sanction as a charter from the sovereign, were also private profit-
making enterprises and, with institutional development, joint-stock limited
liability companies. There were indeed a dynasty of Lords Baltimore; a Penn
who owned the rectangular region south of Immanuel Wallerstein, and a "John
Company" exercising imperial sway over hundreds of millions till 1857.

  At the other end, in the Latest Modern, we have, alongside Insider Trading
laws stringently as depleted personnel permits enforced by the SEC, and
Conflict of Interest laws now snagging the Atty. Gen. designate for saving
two "undocumented workers" from starvation, a nuclear-military-industrial
complex wherewith the US regime partially privatizes its most awesome dimension
of foreign policy and spews deadly poisonous radioactive contamination in far
greater quantity than was dreamt of by protesters of the local Shoreham
Nuclear Power Plant.

  The boundary of criminality itself is blurred today in the macrosocial and
macroeconomic policies of the state, where by allowing bizarre and insane
speculation in real or unreal estate, unsound yet far from silent specialized
banks for financing of the preceding, and accelerated depreciation allowances
for more efficient new models of machinery used for unproductive purposes such
that the accountancy profession is given scope for creative genius does not
alter the idee fixe of corruption in the minds of the masses whose minds
compartmentalize the universe into public and private sectors. We have
scandals wherein legislators stand accused of writing bad checks for free
spending money, which all corporate CEOs may acquire legally and indeed are
even at lower levels of management must flant in the form fo thousnads of
dollars of currency falling out of pockets in order to arouse credibility
along with cupidity in clients or customers.

  This bizarre set of customs and traditions withal performs the fundtion of
generating and sustaining a subculture within the tiptop class such that there
are more important things than money and it is right and honorable to do things
which are lousy for business. The soldier despises the profiteer, unless he in
turn gets a crack at the gravy savored during exposure of life and limb to
hostiles. Look at Ulysses S. Grant. Who stole but died poor, unlike today's
soldier who defers huge income until after career termination. The same holds
for career civil servant practicing law to influence peddler in private
practice. Somehow, the wars still manage to get fought, and domestically they
are good for business for at least one side.
  The exquisite euphemism coined by Carlo Cipolla, "negative production," was
surely, prior to the most egregious ravages of trade cycles of quite recent,
i.e., post-industrial-revolution, times, the principal mechanism for the
devalorization of capital. This was, however, necessarily in conscious intent
the devalorization of the enemy state's capital. The "fortunes of war," in the
state system format, nevertheless ensured that even the best planned agressive
wars of adjoining beliggerents would distribute the devalorization burden in a
pattern dismaying to the capitalist and financier element whose support for the
war had been thought desirable. The formation by the state-system-wide wars of
the eighteenth century of military establishments of hundreds of thousands in
France, Austria, Spain, and Russia; tens of thousands in England, The United
Provinces, and Prussia nevertheless placed in being the coercive means for
sustaining the rapacity of fiscality till one side or the other was ruined and
exhausted. Then, key governmental posts would revert to the proponents of the
peace and holders of debt anxious that there be no more debt to be held.

  The world-empire manages business and state affairs unitarily. The regulated
private sector with associated specialized state officials supervising the
minute details under the Song, whose regime was inseparable from the laudatory
usage, "economic revolution," where the dynasty's name adjectivally modifies
the latter, was one possible resolution. The succeeding wide-open boomtown
economy of the Yuan, where entrepreneurial activity was stimulated further by
the long shutdowns of the Confucian-literary-metaphysical degree-granting
civil service examinations, and of those that were held, foreigners including
Arabs, Persians, and Russians could compete, and at that in specially easy
tests in recognition of their caste status as Mongol allies (semin). The salt
industry was, however, transferred from closely-supervised private firms to
huge state-owned and state-operated salt factories. Where I read that in one
of these, of the 17,000 employed therein in 1342, 7,000 died that year, I
suspect not Mongol beastliness, as the author intends I should, but the visit
of *Pasturella pestis*.
  The dynamic involved was the circulation of paper currency. Salt and iron
production had been state monopolies under the Han Dynasty, the Chinese
Classical Antiquity analogue of the Roman Empire (which by Chinese standards
was too administratively slovenly to permit ambitious schemes on such a scale),
such that today Chinese are sons of Han much as Byzantine Greeks were Romaioi.
The first unifier of the Warring States was like Rome a marcher state, Qin,
notable prior to unification to Roman-analogous fetishizing of Law (the
court-sponsored doctrine was Legalism) and military roads. Steven Sage,
Sichuan and the Unification of China, 1990, says that Qin's laws gave property
rights less definition than Roman, but Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity
to Feudalism, has heightened our awareness of the contribution of the law of
slavery to that of quiritary property; and in the Warring States the peasanmt
masses were never slaves.
  Paper was introduced under the Han and printing under the Song 800 years
later. This expeditied the payment of the elite guild of salt merchants by
certificates of standardized denomination called "flying money." Taxes on
business and, even more so, land (meaning large estate) taxes, were evaded
or were politically problematic. The state increasingly turned to forced sales
of salt, even to tenant-serfs on great estates and wage-laborer households. On
the eve of revolution compulsory sales of salt amounted to 80% of funds raised
for state expenditure and wholly backed the paper currency. Business remained
good through the first third of the fourteenth century; population reached a
record 125 million; the incompetents and idiots on the throne did no damage.
  Bernard Lewis tells us that Chinese were racially stereotyped by the Arabs
as gifted contrivers of gadgets.

  The Chinese world-empire, even after it had lost its technical dynamic such
that its resumed marketization was called "involutional" by Philip C.C Huang
(that is, the more efficient the market mechanism, the less the merchant had to
do with the labor process and the more labor intensive household labor became
on lower margins) reproduced till the 1911 revolution and beyond the
correlation of education, wealth in land, and political power derived from
"degrees": The latter were at once certificates of academic achievement and
entitlements to office pending good behavior to offices at the lowest of the
ranks (the *churen*[?] or "masters" degree) or the highest (the *jinshi* or
"doctorate"). In theory, mere moneygrubbers, next to soldiers, were lowest
forms of life, but the burning of paper money and wishes for luck in pecuiary
form or "good fortune" in the same sense in popular Chinese religion indicated
otherwise.
  Our own WORLD-L listmember, Gil Hardwick <[email protected]> inquired
Wed, 20 Jan 1993 10:03:38 WST regarding "the chronic nervous energy which is
characteristic of large industrial cities,..." I can only refer our friend to
Scripture, where in the Grundrisse makes straight in once sentence,
"Industriousness is the artifact of the generalization of the circulation of
commodities," that which Max Weber would spend a lifetime in the effort to
make crooked again. And as in the lands of developed industrial capitalism
the Chinese, too, imbibed a cerebral psychostimulant of the xanthide family,
the active ingredient of tea, as are related xanthides the active ingredients
of coffee and cocoa. Psychostimulands that which in time and place are "speed,"
"our divine nicotain" as the 16th century Allen Ginsberg precursor put it, has
been the chemical Spirit of Capitalism since time out of Wallerstein. Before
the Americans were in such a hurry they had first been speeding, which habit
the British wrongfully taxed from being loaded to the gills with overstocked
tea, whence America. You ever hear the expression, "what's this got to do with
the price of tea in China?" as a byword for irrelevance? Back then that price
was the most important price on earth.

  Even in the last Dynasty, the Qing, when factories wholly consisting of
imported Western industrial equipment were imported, as part of the "self-
strenghthening" movement, the perfectly-natural-considering-the-precedents
seamless web of publicprivate sector devised for running the enterprises so
as to make money in the national interest was called *official supervision
merchant management*. (Had to memorize it for the Test in Chinese History,
aced it too.)

  Now comes the hour when I must, morpheus calling, decide what if any point
tonight's data entry has had. By Jove, I think there is one, you will disagree.
It's this: There's more kinds of state you can get with anything vaguely like
or structurally (even if you have to use a little topology to make out the
relatedness of the structures, whatever structures are but a mixed metaphor)
bearing family resemblance) *a capitalist-ish Thingie* than Social Scientists
may dream of in your philosophy, you bunch of Poloniuses, you. (Note: Polonius
was, it is true, a Polish joke of Shakespeare's, assuming he didn't pick it up
from an even older source. But prior to the rise of the vast US philosophy
industry, Poland was, since the Polish Renaissance if not before, and till the
days of Kolakowski today, the principal European source of philosophers as an
export commodity. To the Russians, Poles were always too smart by half.) We
are in a sense only acquainted with the *nationally advertised brand* of state
in capitalist condititons, that is, the state which *does its thing* in both
the capitalist world-economy and the state system (*mistakenly*, I think,
associated with the former in a determinate fashion). A capitalism not
encumbered with a *European* state system, but blessed with a 1335-ish East
Asian one would b a horse of another kettle of fish, it would combine public
and private sectors wherefor no demarcation line had ever had to have been
drawn. Just f'r instance.

Respectfully,
[also, God Is Large!],
Daniel A. Foss
<Where will this **** end! you say. Lookit, here is what you do. DELETE
anything I post, because I haven't got the ideas in order yet. Don't read
until it's safe. How will you know when it is safe? The following persons
are *authorized* to tell you when it is safe:
  <1. Douglass St. Christian. He has my respect for tellimg me what I write
is "pure crap!" and he has been correct on all trial writings he has called
"pure crap!">
  <2. Chris Chase-Dunn. Self-explanatory.>
  <3. IRENA SUMI, Ljubljana, Croatia. [email protected]>
  <4. Haines Brown. Self-explanatory.>
  <5. [name withheld by own request] [email protected], not in the
WORLD-L list file, so this approval unlikely.>
  <6. Karen E. Haynes, 1LIKEK@UTSAVM1, included because of deep and undying
contempt which would have to be overcome before she'd give good reviews: This
writer epitomizes all the evil she's exercised willpower, selfdiscipline, and
good clean living to overcome. Someone please explain, what's willpower, self
discipline.>
  <7. [Name Withheld], Director of Psychiatry, Brookdale General Hospital,
Brooklyn, New York City NY. Included exclusively on account of ownership of
Mercedes Benz, which is the signifier of "entitlement-to-be-heard" in our
culture.>

  <The above are a jury of, well, their own peers which I'd feel safer at a
Stalin show trial than around them, so you can believe.>
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Date:         Thu, 21 Jan 1993 23:09:33 -0800
Reply-To:     World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history
             <[email protected]>
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             <[email protected]>
From:         [email protected]
Subject:      Ljubljana
Comments: To: WORLD-L%[email protected]
To:           "Daniel A. Foss" <[email protected]>

is in Slovenia.
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Date:         Fri, 22 Jan 1993 02:32:52 EST
Reply-To:     World-L - Forum on non-Eurocentric world history
             <[email protected]>
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             <[email protected]>
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <[email protected]>
Subject:      Slovenia
To:           "Daniel A. Foss" <[email protected]>

Omigod, yer right! Did I really screw that up, I communicated with Irena
Sumi & the Anth. Dept. at Ljubljana for months, even read a book, Misha
Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, this morning, and I could screw up like
that, well, I gotta hang my head in shame, better yet, go to sleep, but
cannot get up off this chair....  Thanks.

God is Large! Island is Long!
DAF