----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I too would like to thank Anthony Waterman for his clarification, though I don't think the differences between Michael Perelman and me were mainly due to confusion over the words hunting and shooting. There are several issues involved. (1) Did the game laws, by prohibiting the taking of game for food by poor people, play a significant role in the development of capitalism in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I think not, on the grounds that game could not have been a significant food source in a densely populated countryside, and on the grounds that making life worse for the rural poor would not have helped capitalism (see below). (2) Were the game laws a sufficiently important issue for the silence of many classical economist on the issue to be a sinister sign of their collaboration in oppressing the rural poor? This seems to be where the damage done by game and by hunting comes in. I don't know how significant the damage really was, but I argue that the classics, given their concern for food supplies and diminishing returns in agriculture, could not have thought damage to agriculture to be other than a bad thing. My guess is that either they didn't think it significant or they took it as a given of rural life. I don't think the game laws can be used as evidence against the classics in the way Michael does. (3) Lying behind these differences is a deeper one, which surfaces in Anthony's comment that Marx's bourgeois is an urban being. It seems that Michael thinks of capitalism as essentially urban, and of primitive accumulation as forcing the rural poor into the towns. I don't think Marx saw it quite that way - as I read the chapters on primitive accumulation in Capital, he was much concerned with the replacement of feudal relations with capitalist farming. Be that as it may, the classical economists clearly saw capitalist farming as the norm, with a farmer who paid rent to a landlord and employed wage labour. There is a lot of evidence that wage labour was widespread in the countryside in England from the later middle ages onwards. This debate, as I see it, is ultimately about the position taken by the classical economists, and it is over that that I disagree with Michael. Tony Brewer ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]