Jim Devine says:
>Ellen M. Wood writes:
>>The point of Marx's critique of "the so-called primitive accumulation" ...
>>is that no amount of accumulation, whether from outright theft, from
>>imperialism, from commercial profit, or even from the exploitation of
>>labor for commercial profit, by itself constitutes capital, nor will it
>>produce capitalism.
>
>Louis writes:
> > REPLY: The "exploitation of labor for commercial profit" is obviously a
> > reference to the sort of thing that transpired on Jamaican sugar
>> plantations and Bolivian silver mines in the 17th century when the
>> largest labor force in human history was amassed in order to produce
>> commodities for the world market under the auspices of companies traded
>> on the London stock market. This has nothing to do with capitalism in
>> Wood's eyes. Actually to be fair, Wood and Brenner have simply ripped off
> > Laclau who developed this bizarre analysis first. At least Laclau had the
> > forthrightness to call this feudalism while Wood prefers vaporous
>> formulations like "exploitation of labor for commercial profit." One would
>> assume that she believed that North American slavery was precapitalist as
>> well, by this logic.<<
>
>Did Wood and Brenner plagiarize from Laclau? do you have evidence to back
>up this accusation?
>
>I think one of the problems here is that Louis is using a different
>theoretical apparatus that Wood or Brenner. The "exploitation of labor
>commercial profit" seems to be shorthand for the exploitation of labor
>under either slavery or feudal relations of production (or something like
>those) under the aegis of what Marx termed commercial or merchant
>capitalism (an incomplete version of capital).
***** Mari�tegui
...Mari�tegui's "Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality" (U.
of Texas, 1971) is a masterpiece of Marxist thought that analyzes the
class structure of Peru as well as its religion and literature. His
major concern in these essays is with the oppression of the
Quechuan-speaking Indian, the descendants of the Incas.
He argued that Peru was simultaneously communal, feudal and
capitalist. The Peruvian government might have represented itself as
a modern democratic republic to the outside world in the 1920s, but
Mari�tegui saw beneath the surface. What he saw was feudal property
relations in the countryside and Indian villages that clung to ayllu
collectivism. He proposed that the vast feudal estates be broken up
and that the land be turned over to the Indians to reinvigorate the
ayllus. The ayllus would form the basis of a new revolutionary
society. Without showing any evidence of direct influence,
Mariategui's program for revolution in Peru bore a striking
resemblance to the proposals that Marx made to his followers in
Russia in 1880. He urged them to support the Populist struggle to
turn the peasant communes into building blocks for a socialist
society....
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/mariategui.htm> *****
When one seeks to understand a given social formation (after the
emergence of capitalism), one may very well see a mix of communal,
feudal, & capitalist relations, as Mari�tegui did, instead of seeing
it as either purely communal, purely feudal, or purely capitalist, as
Lou now would have us do. That's a different question from that of
how capitalist relations of production arose to begin with. Brenner
& Wood say contingent outcomes of class struggles in the countryside
were the key to the emergence of capitalism. Jim Blaut argues that
the key was the geographical location of "Europe" that enabled it to
conquer & plunder the so-called New World. Where Lou stands on this
is not clear to me.
Yoshie
