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I think there may be a problem of communication between Perelman and
Brewer. The word 'hunting' does not mean the same in Britain as in
America.
In Britain, 'hunting means to pursue foxes, hare, occasionally stags in
a few places, with a pack of hounds. The hunters follow the hounds
either on horseback (the gentry and the -- capitalist -- farmers) or on
foot, bicycle etc. (the lower orders). No useful food is provided for
any human by this sport, and scarcely even for the hounds.
However, a great deal of food is obtained by 'shooting' (never called
'hunting' in English). The principal targets are pheasant and other game
birds. Landlords who prefer shooting to hunting 'preserved' pheasants in
woods and copses on their estates. Sometimes they even risked grave
unpopularity in the county by allowing their gamekeepers to shoot foxes.
[Note that foxes and pheasants are subsitutes, not complements. Hence
there was/is a perpetual conflict of interest between hunters and
shooters] Pheasants in particular make a tempting target for poachers,
and it was to defend these that mantraps and spring-guns were installed,
and the Game Laws enforced.
Hunting does no damage to crops, for the season is confined to the
Winter months. But the preserving of pheasant for shooting produces a
great deal of damage to crops. There was therefore an even sharper
conflict of interest -- in early 19th C. England -- between capitalist
farmers and those of their betters who preserved pheasant and employed
the Game Laws to that end. In this context, the Game Laws were decidely
anti-capitalist -- a vestige of those 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations' to which 'the bourgoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand,
has put an end'. [I wonder if a second source of confusion may lie in
the fact that in English 'farmer' means a capitalist who hires land from
a landlord and labour from among the villagers and employs these to
produce crops for the market; whereas in American 'farmer' means a
landlord who works his own land? Neither quite fits Marx's notion of the
'bourgois', by definition an urban being.]
The situation in Scotland is quite different from that in England. There
is far less hunting (except in one or two Lowland counties such as
Ayreshire) and far more shooting. The principal targets are grouse and
similar game-birds, and deer, each of which provide valuable food. But
the shooting takes place on vast grouse moors and deer forests which are
almost completely useless for any other purpose save extensive sheep and
cattle grazing -- which can usually coexist with the brief annual
seasons on grouse and deer. Note that 'deer parks' occur not in Scotland
but in England -- as in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford -- and
are largely ornamental.
In my opinion it is impossible to write with any understanding of the
Game Laws, their economic consequences and their ideological
implications without at least this minimum of information. I do not
believe that either Marx or Engels had any knowledge or experience
whatsoever of British rural culture. There were typical urban
intellectuals. (We used to call them 'townies'.) Although he married
into an aristocratic family -- or possibly because of it -- Marx wrote
disparagingly of 'the idiocy of rural life'. What Marx and Engels knew
about was urban culture (which is far less geographically specific) and
the effects upon this of industrialisation.
Anthony Waterman
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