On 12/11/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Brenner dates the origins of capitalism to the late 14th century. It was a function of changes in the countryside driven by historically contingent factors (plague, etc.) that resulted in the creation of profit-driven farming based on leases. In this agrarian universe, there were zero workers--zero.
the plague isn't actually contingent in his schema if I remember correctly. Rather, it's the normal result of the "Malthusian" cycle which ended with the rise of capitalism: the plague arose because of the pressure of population on the land rather than being an exogenous event. "zero workers"? you mean proletarians (waged, non-slave, non-serf)? I think Brenner's point is that the process he describes _produced_ the proletarians as a class. The whole business about (the so-called) "primitive accumulation" is about structural change more than immediate empirical results.
Meanwhile a little more than a century later the largest concentration of laborers anywhere in the world was in Potosi, Bolivia.
I think the point is that the existence of proletarians there (who were free of the bonds of serfdom and slavery) was totally dependent on the existence of an industry (mining) that depended entirely on the existence of non-proletarian labor.
Wood does not believe that there was capitalist production there, however.
are Brenner and Wood joined at the hip? Maybe I'm wrong, but I've found major theoretical differences between them.
Brenner never writes about Latin American so I don't know exactly what he thinks.
If he hasn't studied it, perhaps he has no thoughts at all aobut it. -- Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
