Jim Devine:
>Whatever one says about academia -- and much or even most of it is really
>f*cked up -- your main kind of attack is not officially accepted as
>reasonable argumentation.
Not officially accepted? I am crushed.
>[*] A few years ago on pen-l, Gil Skillman attacked Marx's distinction
>between merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism as incoherent. His
>emphasis was really on the porous boundary between usury (money-lending
>capital) and industrial capital (arguing that even pure money-lenders with
>no monopoly or monopsony power can exploit non-proletarian direct producers
>simply by lending them money), but if his argument works, then the merchant
>capital/industrial capital boundary also collapses.
This is interesting but not what I am driving at. The mercantile model
involves the trade of luxury goods largely between empires mostly on the
same socio-economic level, with price advantages based on local
availability, monopoly control, etc. The problem is that the discussion of
such matters in v.3 of Capital largely ignores the role of labor. The
reality in Latin America is that pre-existing feudal societies were crushed
and their inhabitants turned into laborers. Throughout the 16th century,
there were steady evolutions in the form that this labor was expressed. In
the first 3rd of the century you had encomiendas, which were an
unsuccessful attempt to transplant Spanish forms. This was replaced by the
repartamento, (equivalent to the 'mita', an Indian word) in the
mid-century. But by the end of the century most Indians were WAGE LABORERS.
Throughout the entire century, however, Indians did the same thing no
matter how they were paid. They dug silver, which was transported on ships
to Europe. Nowhere else in history do you have the same kind of
socio-economic transformation. On the cusp of the capitalist dawn of
history, you find 90 percent of the indigenous peoples (those that were not
exterminated or killed by smallpox, etc.) turned into laborers. There is
NOTHING in v.3 of Capital that explores this reality--not Marx's fault
really. Nor is the subject of Gil Skillman's examination, which seems to be
an addenda to v.3. For a Marxist analysis of Latin American reality, you
have to wait until the 1950s, except for Mariategui's brilliant but
schematic investigations.
Louis Proyect
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