Julio:
You've written a lot on that. For at least half a decade, you've been arguing that the essential nature of modern capitalist production is extra-economic exploitation, colonial pillage, slavery, etc.
Not really. I have stated that capitalism can involve market forces, as Brenner and Wood focus on, and it can also involve extra-economic forces such as the corvee in much of French colonial Africa, King Leopold's semi-slavery in the Congo, apartheid South Africa with its pass laws, Nazi Germany, etc. As a rule of thumb, when there is an ample supply of labor, it is more efficient to allow market forces to exert the whip. When there is an inadequate supply, you need the actual whip.
I'm sure Marx lacked detailed knowledge of many things. But how does that refute his general conceptualization of capitalist production? Based on your much greater knowledge of colonial Latin American history, how did Marx get wrong the essence of capitalist production as production of surplus value by free wage workers -- free in the sense of lacking wealth and of not being extra-economically tied to their exploiters?
Marx was simply describing the pure form that existed in Great Britain. I simply don't think that he gave much thought to how capitalism functioned in Latin America or would begin to function in Africa after he was dead. As I pointed out, what he wrote about Asia was wrong. I see capitalism as a global system that was initially fed by three tributaries. One, the internal changes in the European countryside that are associated with the Brenner thesis. Two, the expansion of manufacturing and a growing division of labor in the old guild systems of the Middle Ages. Three, the rape of Africa and Latin America which provided the silver and gold and other key resources (timber, fur, tobacco, sugar, etc.) that fueled economic growth in the mother countries. It was a perfect storm.
