The transition to capitalism: is it in our genes?

Dr. Gregory Clark: purveyor of sociobiological claptrap

I have begun reading Eric Mielant’s “The Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West.” The book reminds me that the “transition debate” is not just about dry, academic disputes over whether turnips were more critical to the rise of capitalism than sugar. As should be obvious from the title, “the rise of the west” addresses the question of how Great Britain and then the United States became hegemonic. Bourgeois historians and sociologists prefer to talk about the “internal” factors in Europe–Great Britain in particular–that supposedly led to capitalism. To admit that the rise of the west was accomplished by stepping on the backs of slaves and the corpses of indigenous peoples crosses the boundaries of what is ideologically acceptable, to put it in Chomskyan terms.

In the 19^th century, when social Darwinism was at its peak, the rise of the west was explained in terms of the survival of the fittest. There was a certain genius to northern Europe that helped it to dominate the rest of the world. In the 20^th century, particularly under the impact of the colonial revolution, it was no longer impossible to be so crass. Instead, there were efforts to be more “scientific”. For example, Jared Diamond wrote “Guns, Germs and Steel” in order to show that the Europeans were not more intelligent or creative than those they came to rule, only more resistant to germs. You find a similar approach with Robert Brenner, who tries to prove that an accident of history–namely the rise of lease farming in Great Britain–led to the rise of capitalism and hence the rise of the west.

The latest explanation for the rise of the west is about as “internal” as you can get. As reported in today’s NY Times , Gregory Clark, a historian at U. of California/Davis, says it is all in our genes!

If the Industrial Revolution was caused by changes in people’s behavior, then populations that have not had time to adapt to the Malthusian constraints of agrarian economies will not be able to achieve the same production efficiencies, his thesis implies.

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

Gosh, some people have all the luck. The British rose to the top of the heap because it was in their genes. In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote “The Bell Curve” to demonstrate that genetic differences between Blacks and whites accounted for economic and social inequality. I doubt that Clark is as reactionary as these two bastards, but he does seem to have it in for any attempts at a class analysis of the rise of capitalism. In his review of Michael Perelman’s “The Invention of Capitalism,” Clark dismisses the idea that game laws were used in order to force British peasants off the land:

Exhibit A in Perelman’s indictment of the Classical mob is the case of the Game Laws. The Game Laws banned the landless and small owners in the countryside from taking game animals. Thus in England by the laws of 1670 to take game even on your own land a person had to meet a very substantial property qualification. In both England and Scotland these laws became more severe as the eighteenth century progressed, and more people were convicted under the laws. Why, asks Perelman, did the new capitalist class and their PR agents, the Political Economists, support these feudal restrictions in favor of the country squires? They did so because it took away the sources of support that kept the poor in the countryside from the factory door. They did so because a hunting peasant was an idle peasant and an insolent peasant, not a docile and dependable worker.

(I should mention that Michael’s book is excellent in all respects, but that it too tends to identify primitive accumulation strictly in terms of the “internal” changes taking place in the British countryside. Perhaps he might consider writing a follow up one day that is inspired by the other aspect of primitive accumulation, namely the slave trade and the expropriation and murder of indigenous Americans.)

Clark’s general perspective is that before capitalism mankind lived in an undifferentiated mass of squalor and hunger. Malthusian law dictated that for every advance in farming technology (including the agrarian revolution’s turnip), there was an increase in population that always outstripped the food supply. It was only with the advent of the industrial revolution that the supply finally could exceed the demand. This thesis requires Clark to reject out of hand the notion that peasants could have been better off in some ways under feudalism than they were under capitalism. While Perelman never romanticized life under capitalism, he certainly made the case that it was better to be a self-husbanding farmer with hundreds of religious holidays in the medieval period than it was to be a starving landless peasant roaming the British countryside in search of work.

Unfortunately, the NY Times article is so poorly written that it is hard to determine what Clark’s thesis is all about down to its squalid core, but I will attempt a running commentary on the ideas and the personalities referred to therein.

To start with, Clark is at odds with the Brennerite insistence that British agricultural breakthroughs created a fat and happy work force up to the task of running the new machines of the 19^th century. Apparently, these British workers were just as hungry as the French, although according to some accounts they would at least have enough tea and sugar to get them through the day–like Bolivian miners dependent on their coca. The NY Times states:

This income was pitifully low in terms of the amount of wheat it could buy. By 1790, the average person’s consumption in England was still just 2,322 calories a day, with the poor eating a mere 1,508. Living hunter-gatherer societies enjoy diets of 2,300 calories or more.

“Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800,” Dr. Clark observes.

Of course, Great Britain was busily at work destroying hunter-gatherer societies so as to make the British dining table more ample, but that is obviously a topic that neither Clark nor the NY Times is interested in pursuing.

When the topic turns to “survival of the fittest”, either Clark’s explanation is incoherent or the NY Times reporter was drunk when he gave his version of it:

In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, , but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

I honestly can’t figure out what Clark was trying to say, except that the average British citizen of today is descended from the aristocracy. Is this supposed to be a key to success? I don’t think so, based on the evidence of a recent Radar Online article:

The 7th Earl of Lucan (Richard John Bingham) 1934 – ? Lord Lucan appeared to be the epitome of an upright British aristocrat, what with his family home in Westminster, regal bearing, and sexy mustache. The dashing fellow also had a taste for speed boats and gambling, and after a particularly successful run in the casinos gained him both a sizable sum and the nickname “Lucky,” he dropped his other career pursuits to become a professional gambler. He ended up having a rough go of it and eventually found himself living the life of a drunken, debt-ridden, wife-beating gambler. Perhaps in an effort to reduce his expenses and secure sole custody of his children, he hatched a plot to kill his mentally fragile wife. But Lucky Lord Lucan, a direct descendant of the man responsible for the famously doomed “Charge of the Light Brigade” somehow botched the job, brutally killing his children’s nanny instead of his wife. Lucan has not been seen since that night in 1974, and his whereabouts remains the subject of much speculation.

Clark also makes the startling discovery that the industrial revolution came about because the British were thrifty: “Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.” Impulsive, violent and leisure loving? I would love to see the good professor’s scholarly citations for this. What was he reading to come up with this conclusion? It sounds like the sort of thing that you hear about the Black community in the pages of the National Review today.

More nonsense follows. Clark says that the Industrial Revolution did not occur first in China or Japan. Why? Because the richer classes “were surprisingly unfertile” and couldn’t bequeath their “good” genes on the rest of society. How this crap gets taken seriously in the academy is beyond me. As Doug Henwood just observed on the LBO Talk mailing list, “How can anyone take seriously a purported evolutionary change that happens over the course of a couple of hundred years? If Ward Chuchill had written something so ridiculous, he’d have gotten fired.”

The article concludes with verdicts from three big name scholars. Kenneth L. Pomeranz, the author of “The Great Divergence,” a book that tries to explain China’s lagging behind Great Britain in terms of a lack of coal rather than cojones, says that Clark’s argument “is significantly weaker, and maybe just not necessary, if you can trace the changes in the institutions.” Weaker? How about just plain idiotic.

Robert Brenner says that Dr. Clark’s idea of genes for capitalist behavior was “quite a speculative leap.” Indeed, so was the Bell Curve.

Sam Bowles, a Santa Fe economist who had morphed from a kind of weak tea Marxism into mainstream liberalism, says that he was “not averse to the idea” that genetic transmission of capitalist values is important, but that the evidence for it was not yet there. “It’s just that we don’t have any idea what it is, and everything we look at ends up being awfully small.” So, apparently, are the brains of big-time academics.