Originally Posted by
Stavros
The context is intriguing because of the ways in which Capitalism has adapted since the end of the Industrial Revolution. The Black Death in England took place when the Wool trade had created lucrative markets for English products in Italy and the Low Countries as they were known (Holland, Brabant, Flanders etc), but the depletion of so many people and the natonal income seems to have encouraged the King to raise money through taxes which in turn led to Peasant Revolts, notably that led by Wat Tyler in 1381. There is a theory that English Kings were in fact weak in this era- there were plenty of them through the Plantagenet era, not that any died a natural death, and relied too much on local Barons, who were as weakened by the Black Death as everyone else, with the additional problems that erupted in the Wars of the Roses in the succeeding century. Thus it is argued the Plague and the Wars established land as a commercial rather than a political value, based on its products, and laid the basis for the transition out of Feudalism and into mercantile capitalism which expanded in the Tudor period with Henry VIII and the effective nationalization of the Monasteries and their wealth to the King's benefit, with Henry's creation of market towns offering local people a larger share of the wealth they produced (one by-product being the school in Stratford-upon-Avon that Shakespeare attended, staffed by reasonably well-paid for the time, and well-educted teachers from nearby Oxford). The formation of the Honourable East India Company in 1600 and the previous expeditions to America thus mark the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism albeit interrupted by the Civil War of the 17th century. Barrington Moore has tried to chart the developments out of Feudalism into Capitalism in England (and other countries) in his ambitious and maddeningly long and often incoherent Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).
The big difference between then and now, is that industrial capitalism required a huge mass of workers, whereas even contemporary industry requires only a fraction of that labour -think of the car plants that employed thousands which now employ hundreds, plus robots; and the services industry which may employ substantial numbers of people in aggregate, but often in small clusters.
I am not sure what will change, but I thik we have talked before about the way Cities might change if the daily commute to an office block changes radically, and suburban areas become more important for people working from home. Interestingy, if companies survive and thrive, but don't have costs relating to the rent and utility bills of large city-based office space, does this mean the workers will receive a larger share of the company profits not spent on rent, water, electricity and gas?
A digital, online economy requires people with computing skills, but does it also mean a more alienated workforce that does not share the same space with other workers and create a sense of common endeavour? Marx's argument that the collective consciousness of the proletariat be a pre-requisite for a worker's led revolution might, as the means of production has evolved, become closer to Durkheim's concept of anomie- in the future there might be no strikes or worker's protests and marches -workers might just not turn on their computer, drop out, work at a slower rate, or give up and commit suicide.
Because I think humans are social animals, I wonder how atomized labour can be before it causes distress and mental illness. Psychologically people need human contact through family, work, friends and neighbours, and if one disappoints then the others can compensate. If none do, there is a problem. We are also living through an era when the gap between rich and poor is vast, and the argument that wealth should be re-disributed more equally written off as 'Communism' or 'socialism' -so at the moment I am not sure that the long term economic growth that followed the Black Death will follow Covid-19. Those lucrative market relations between England and Italy for example, did not survive the decline of the Port Cities or Venice and Genoa in the 16th century -at one time the Mayor of Southampton which had a buoyant trading link to Genoa was an Italian called Cristoforo Ambrosio who married an English woman and changed his name to Christopher Ambrose. The fracture in the English-European trade that resembles Brexit to an extent, also begs the question if China and the 'West' can maintain the momentum of globalization that has characterised the last 30 odd years, and right now it looks like, globally, we may be entering a decade of depression- but that's my glass half empty view.
