Re: [PEN-L] Eurocentrism and capitalism

[Waistline2]

> On the last, someone on the list said that the idea that antebellum Southern slavery is "not very controversial." It is with me. Slavery -- even when embedded within a capitalist social formation and dominated internationally by capitalist social relations -- is not capitalist. It is not an example of the capitalist mode of production.  The direct producers were not "free in the double sense," which Marx saw as the _differentia specifica_ of capitalist social relations. That is, though the slaves were free from direct ownership of the means of subsistence and production (one type of freedom), they were clearly not free from bondage (the other type).   The slave-owners may have thought like capitalists (as Fogel & Engerman argued) but that doesn't mean that they _were_ capitalists. Instead of considering ways to control workers via mechanization, for example, they thought about the costs and benefits of whipping the slaves (at least according to F&E). One's status of being a "capitalist" depends on the societal context, not on one's self-perception or way of thinking (at least in Marxian political economy). <   Comment   American Marxists have argued this issue for one hundred years. The question as I see it is:   1. Was Southern slavery a bourgeois property relations as distinct from capitalism in the laboratory sense?   2. Was the slave himself a commodity brought and sold on the market?   3. Does the political character of ones labor - free or unfree, determine a qualitative description of the character of production? That is to say the clear domination of the production of exchange value as distinct from use-values.   4. "Capitalist social relations" means nothing if not relations of production. In my opinion the meaning of "social" in "capitalist social relations" is a connection through the market where values are exchanged.  What were the economic content of the relations of production of Southern slavery if not bourgeois exchange relations?  Surely these social relations of production appeared as material relations between things being exchanged.   5. Southern slavery was not industrial bourgeois production. Yet,  the slaves were not simply commodities, but also capital in the same sense of a machine. Southern slavery was a form of bourgeois production and that is why it was called the peculiar institution.   6. Southern slavery was not economic feudalism. The primary form of wealth was not as landed property but movable property . . . a real commodity that was a slave, who also functioned as capital in the exchange relations in the world market. This slave form of bourgeois production, the domination of the production of exchange value as distinct from use-value, contain its own inherent barrier to the revolutionizing of the means of production.   7. Southern slavery was not a form of the primitive accumulation of capital that leads to the formation of the capitalist class.     Melvin P.