Jim gets it. Heinrich clearly distinguishes between the capitalist mode of production (depicted abstractly by Marx in Capital), and actual capitalist societies, which are messy, complicated, contingent, chaotic things, employing various forms of both free and unfree labor.
As for the "are slaves proletarian thing", the late Martin Glaberman used to attribute this to a mistaken assumption that the "good guys" are always "proletarians". Hence, in order for us to root for the slaves, or the Vietnamese NLF, or the 26th of July Movement, or the Occupy movement, they first have to be shoehorned into being "proletarian". But they don't. We can root for them because they're the good guys (or gals) and we're on their side! People who have this schematic "proletarian" orientation are obviously unfamiliar with Theodor Shanin's research on "The Late Marx." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
