======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
(From Dermokrat)
Louis,
If you haven’t done so yet, check out Tom Brass’ Labor Regime Change in
the Twenty-First Century (Chapter II in particular). He has a very good
discussion of Marx/Engels’ views on unfree labor (e.g. slavery) within
capitalism (spoiler alert: Marx was entirely comfortable referring to
plantation owners as capitalists).
I also recommend these articles by Phillip McMichael:
1)(1987)“Bringing Circulation Back into Agricultural Political Economy:
Analyzing the AnteBellum Plantation in its World Market Context,” Rural
Sociology, 52, 2
2)(1988) “The Crisis of the Southern Slaveholder Regime in the World
Economy.” In Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Contradictions and
Movements, (ed.) Francisco Ramirez (Westport, Conn: Greenwood).
3) (1991) “Slavery in the Regime of Wage – Labor: Beyond Paternalism in
the U.S. Cotton Culture,” Social Concept, 6, 1.
4) (1991) “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U. S.
Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture” Theory and Society Vol. 20, No. 3, Special
Issue on Slavery in the New World (Jun., 1991), pp. 321-349
(http://author.cals.cornell.edu/cals/devsoc/research/research-projects/upload/slavery-in-capitalism-T-S-91.pdf)
You may also be interested in Wilma Dunaway’s The First American
Frontier, which examines the incorporation of Appalachia into the
capitalist world-system, Tomich’s Through the Prism of Slavery, and
David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986.
Lastly, I think Jason Moore showed just how simplistic the Brenner
thesis was re: the transition to capitalism in this long essay for Review:
http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/Moore__Nature_and_the_Transition_from_Feudalism_to_Capitalism__REVIEW__2003_.pdf
But to chime in on the debate above, Post/Brenner have a very simplistic
formula capitalism = capitalist mode of production = free wage labor.
That simply cannot explain the persistence of unfree labor relations
within the US and other advanced economies today. The relations of
production under capitalism will be decided by a multitude of factors
within any given social formation – the size of the reserve army of
labor in particular. And once any given mode of production moves from
being one primarily geared toward the production of use values to one
exclusively concerned with exchange values, we’ve certainly moved away
from “pre-capitalist”…
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
