Marx:
In the period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time.
"The period of manufacturing properly so called" predated industrial capitalism in England and pretty much the rest of the world. The political economy of these times was mercantilism, the doctrines that Smith and Ricardo refuted. I don't know about Brenner. I confess I have never read him. But Louis Proyect's argument that slavery and servitude under colonial (or, more recently, Apartheid rule) were directly and immediately forms of capitalist production insofar as they were subsidiaries to European industrial (or, in the South African case, 20th century's) capitalism and reinforced the accumulation of capital in the European metropolis is not persuasive. If the distinction between (1) a general mode of production and (2) a concrete social-historical formation dominated by that mode of production is to be useful (and without this distinction Marx's work doesn't make sense), then the denomination of *capitalist production* excludes the extra-economic exploitation of labor. Including those other forms under the rubric of *capitalist production* dilutes its "specific essence" -- to use Marx's formula. Louis seems to believe that Marx drew this distinction because he lacked a proper understanding of the conditions outside Europe or its overseas Anglo offshoots. But Marx's distinction is sufficiently general to withstand corrections to alleged lacunae in his knowledge of universal history. All along his intellectual life, Marx kept correcting himself as his knowledge of political economy and history deepened -- yet the distinction between mode of production and a historically concrete society can be found in his earliest works (e.g. the German Ideology, where the category of mode of production is first introduced in its full generality). Of course -- if one so desires -- this can be reduced to a mere terminological dispute. And everyone is free to choose a different content for categories that Marx used to denote very specific phenomena (that have co-relatives in today's capitalism). Each of us can have her/his own private terminology, not necessarily self-consistent or consistent with Marx's usage. But then the communication of ideas among people who use Marx as a reference becomes impossible.
