Jim Devine wrote:
>Please don't bother me with fictional letters from Marx. Pen-l deserves
>better than efforts to deflect discussion with lame efforts as humor.
>Besides, I don't care about "what Marx said" (since no thinker is totally
>consistent and all can be quoted out of context). Instead, I see Marxian
>political economy as a living tradition and debate in social science, not a
>matter of dead texts.
Sorry, I see it differently. Marx never wrote about the 'mita'. That was
the point of my joke. The problem we are dealing with here is that all
sorts of attempts are being made to understand such phenomena without
engaging with Latin American history. That was the role of the scholars
just mentioned by Ricardo, to understand this reality. It makes no sense to
invoke v3 of Capital since Marx had virtually no knowledge of Latin
American society. The mercantilism he discussed was not only--in
distinction to his examination of the rise of capitalism in England in
v.1--highly schematic, it was also prompted by the sort of relations that
existed between Europe and China, or Europe and India, for example. To use
this as a heuristic for understanding 16th and 17th century Peru and
Bolivia is a dead-end.
Louis Proyect
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