WEBVTT NOTE 32. Mercantilism, Merchants, and "Class Conflict" 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.500 Volume 1, Chapter 32, Mercantilism, Merchants and Class Conflict 2 00:00:07.500 --> 00:00:13.000 The economic policy dominant in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.500 and christened mercantilism by later writers, 4 00:00:16.500 --> 00:00:25.000 at bottom assumed that detailed intervention in economic affairs was a proper function of government. 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:32.080 Government was to control, regulate, subsidize and penalize commerce and production. 6 00:00:32.080 --> 00:00:38.660 What the content of these regulations should be depended on what groups managed to control 7 00:00:38.660 --> 00:00:41.000 the state apparatus. 8 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:46.940 Such control is particularly rewarding when much is at stake, and a great deal is at stake 9 00:00:46.940 --> 00:00:51.060 when government is strong and interventionist. 10 00:00:51.060 --> 00:00:56.140 In contrast, when government powers are minimal, the question of who runs the state becomes 11 00:00:56.140 --> 00:00:58.300 relatively trivial. 12 00:00:58.300 --> 00:01:04.000 But when government is strong and the power struggle keen, groups in control of the state 13 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:10.080 can and do constantly shift, coalesce, or fall out over the spoils. 14 00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:15.400 While the ouster of one tyrannical ruling group might mean the virtual end of tyranny, 15 00:01:15.400 --> 00:01:22.960 It often means simply its replacement by another ruling group employing other forms of despotism. 16 00:01:22.960 --> 00:01:28.600 In the seventeenth century the regulating groups were broadly feudal landlords and privileged 17 00:01:28.600 --> 00:01:35.440 merchants with a royal bureaucracy pursuing as a super feudal overlord the interest of 18 00:01:35.440 --> 00:01:37.080 the crown. 19 00:01:37.080 --> 00:01:42.760 An established church meant royal appointment and control of the churches as well. 20 00:01:42.760 --> 00:01:49.160 The peasantry and the urban laborers and artisans were never able to control the state apparatus 21 00:01:49.160 --> 00:01:56.420 and were therefore at the bottom of the state-organized pyramid and exploited by the ruling groups. 22 00:01:56.420 --> 00:02:02.240 Other religious groups were, of course, separated from or opposed to the ruling state. 23 00:02:02.240 --> 00:02:07.440 And religious groups in control of the state, or sharing in that control, might well pursue 24 00:02:07.440 --> 00:02:13.800 to not only strictly economic interest but also ideological or spiritual ones, as in 25 00:02:13.800 --> 00:02:20.560 the case of the Puritans imposing a compulsory code of behavior on all of society. 26 00:02:20.560 --> 00:02:27.680 One of the most misleading practices of historians has been to lump together merchants or capitalists 27 00:02:27.680 --> 00:02:35.280 as if they constituted a homogenous class, having a homogenous relation to state power. 28 00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:40.960 The merchants either were suffered to control or did not control the government at a particular 29 00:02:40.960 --> 00:02:47.960 time. In fact, there is no such common interest of merchants as a class. The state is in a 30 00:02:47.960 --> 00:02:54.160 position to grant special privileges, monopolies and subsidies. It can only do so to particular 31 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:00.360 merchants or groups of merchants and therefore only at the expense of other merchants who 32 00:03:00.360 --> 00:03:15.360 who are discriminated against. If X receives a special privilege, Y suffers from being excluded, and also suffering are those who would have been merchants were it not for the state's network of privilege. 33 00:03:15.360 --> 00:03:39.360 In fact, because of a, the harmony of interest of different groups on the free market, for example, merchants and farmers, and b, the lack of homogeneity among the interest of members of any one social class, it is fallacious to employ such terms as class interest or class conflict in discussing the market economy. 34 00:03:39.360 --> 00:03:45.200 It is only in relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded 35 00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:51.800 into classes, for state action must always privilege one or more groups and discriminate 36 00:03:51.800 --> 00:03:53.800 against others. 37 00:03:53.800 --> 00:03:59.280 The homogeneity emerges from the intervention of the government and society. 38 00:03:59.280 --> 00:04:04.920 Thus, under feudalism or other forms of land monopoly and arbitrary land allocation by 39 00:04:04.920 --> 00:04:14.840 by the Government, The Feudal Landlords, Privileged by the State, Become a Class or Cast or Estate, 40 00:04:14.840 --> 00:04:22.040 and the Peasants, Homogeneously Exploited by State Privilege, Also Become a Class, for 41 00:04:22.040 --> 00:04:27.880 the former thus constitute a Ruling Class and the latter the Ruled. 42 00:04:27.880 --> 00:04:34.080 The differences between the Marxian attribution of classes to the market and the confining 43 00:04:34.080 --> 00:04:49.360 Contrast the confusion in Lenin's attempt to defend the Marxian jumble of estate and 44 00:04:49.360 --> 00:04:53.960 non-estate groups by the same concept of class. 45 00:04:53.960 --> 00:04:58.660 Even in the case of land privilege, of course, the extent of privilege will vary from one 46 00:04:58.660 --> 00:05:09.660 Merchants were not privileged as a class, and therefore it is particularly misleading to apply a class analysis to them. 47 00:05:09.660 --> 00:05:15.660 A particularly misleading form of class theory has often been adopted by American historians. 48 00:05:15.660 --> 00:05:25.660 Inherent conflicts between the interests of homogeneous classes of merchants is against farmers and of merchant creditors versus farmer debtors. 49 00:05:25.660 --> 00:05:31.940 Debtors, and yet it should be evident that these disjunctions are extremely shaky. Anyone 50 00:05:31.940 --> 00:05:37.820 can go into debt, and there is no reason to assume that farmers will be debtors more than 51 00:05:37.820 --> 00:05:43.500 merchants. Indeed, merchants with a generally larger scale of operations and a more rapid 52 00:05:43.500 --> 00:05:50.060 turnover are often heavy debtors. Moreover, the same merchant can shift rapidly from one 53 00:05:50.060 --> 00:05:57.060 from one point of time to another, from being a heavy net debtor to net creditor and vice versa. 54 00:05:57.060 --> 00:06:04.060 It is impermissible to think in terms of fixed persisting debtor classes and creditor classes 55 00:06:04.060 --> 00:06:08.060 tied inextricably to certain economic occupations. 56 00:06:08.060 --> 00:06:14.060 The merchants or capitalists being the peculiarly mobile and dynamic groups in society 57 00:06:14.060 --> 00:06:25.060 that can either flourish on the free market or try to obtain state privileges are then particularly ill-suited to a homogenous class analysis. 58 00:06:25.060 --> 00:06:37.060 Furthermore, on the free market, no one is fixed in his occupation, and this particularly applies to entrepreneurs or merchants whose ranks can be increased or decreased very rapidly. 59 00:06:37.060 --> 00:06:45.060 These men are the very opposite of the sort of fixed status imposed on land by the system of feudalism.