Comments on: Sweetness and Power

By: steve heeren

steve heeren — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 03:56:29 +0000

OT (not quite):

warren buffett must have stolen his comment about cigarettes from a play I had a role in in high school (1955!) called “The Curious Savage” where all the action takes place in a looney bin. One of the inmates says, “I’d like to invent something that could be made for a dime, sold for a dollar and was habit-forming.”

Mr. Buffett: you’re a thief!

By: Graeme

Graeme — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 01:20:48 +0000

Very good. I am learning a great deal from this website.

In 1288, the royal household consumed 6,258 pounds of sugar. (Does this explain the hit-or-miss quality of the British smile, one wonders.)

That was funny.

By: louisproyect

louisproyect — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:51:45 +0000

Sugar under feudalism was a luxury item. In the primitive accumulation stage of capitalism, it was a commodity for the working class and peasants. This is an important distinction. As far as Brazil and Portugal (and Mexico/Spain) are concerned, their role in the emerging world capitalist system was subservient to Great Britain but necessary. Without Iberian colonialism, British industry and finance would have withered on the vine. Despite the fact that Spain and Portugal lagged behind Great Britain socially, they were key links in the chain. As Karl Marx stated, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” His words support my approach (and Maurice Dobbs’s, btw), not Brenner or Wood’s.

By: s.artesian

s.artesian — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:10:34 +0000

Whatever sugar’s role in the development of capitalism, it played that same role in sustaining feudal, and semi-feudal regimes sworn, and acting to inhibit the growth of capitalism…

But the first point that should be made is that Brenner specifically does NOT regard an “agricultural revolution” in England as being the source for the development of capitalism. Let’s look at what Brenner really says in his paper “Low Countries In the Transition to Capitalism.”

Brenner writes: “Neither a revolution in technology (like ‘the agricultural revolution’ or even the ‘industrial revolution’), nor an ‘original accumulation of capital’ for investment (as was derived, e.g., from the gold and silver mines of the Americas or the African slave trade), nor the rise of an elaborate interregional/international division of labor (such as structured both the European medieval and Wallerstein’s early modern world system) has in itself sufficied to catalyze self-sustaining development….”

We can go on in this vein, but more important is to actually look at where sugar-slave economies existed and what social relations of production those economies created. And let’s be clear, sugar is an article, an object; it sugar is to become wealth and if the system producing sugar is to produce capitalism, capitalist relations of production, we have to look at the conditions of labor and the results of the conditions of labor. .

Look at the results of slave production, the wealth transferred to Spain and Portugal without engendering substantive changes in semi-feudal relations of land and labor much less unleashing chain reaction capitalist development.

But more than that, look at Brazil, which constituted itself as an empire, first as a refuge (taxes and transfers paid in full by the British) for the Portuguese monarchy from the revolutionary impact of Napoleon’s invasions; and then apart and against Portugal itself when republican stirrings in the mother country jeopardized the privileges of the planters, the merchants, and the monarch.

So where was the great enabling power of sugar there and then for the timid, trembling, shadow of a bourgeoisie in Brazil?

By: whenelvisdied

whenelvisdied — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 19:48:20 +0000

With the recent linguistic turn in anthropology, modern anthropologists tend to poo-poo Mintz and the other Marxists that you mentioned as dated or, worse, simplistic in their conceptions. I have very little time for those people, as Mintz and especially Wolf have remained foundational for me as an anthropologist. Mintz studied capitalism, but he managed, in a superb fashion, to continually keep its economic, political, and cultural aspects in a dialectical unity, never sacrificing any one for the others, and he did it in a clear, concise, and powerfully evocative style. I’m glad to see that he is read and studied beyond the all-too-often narrow confines of academic anthropology.