Julio Huato wrote to Louis Proyect and the list at large:
And your confusion arises from not understanding the distinction between a general mode of production and the concrete society in which a mode of production dominates. So the matter is not, mainly, one of historical knowledge, but of method.
I had an exhaustive --- and exhausting --- discussion with Louis awhile back about these matters. The difference between his view and (what I view as the) Marxian view of all of this can be summed up in moralistic/legal terms: Louis thinks that capitalism did the crime (of slavery, etc.) The Marxian view (which centers on the "distinction between a general mode of production and the concrete society in which a mode of production dominates") sees capitalism as benefiting from -- and abetting -- the crime. In my mechanistic Marxian metaphor, capitalism -- the mode of production that Marx analyzed in CAPITAL -- is the engine, while slavery (etc.) provided the fuel for starting that engine. One difference between this view and the dependista view that Louis seems to embrace is that to Marx, once the engine starts going (so that there is the "real subordination[*] of labor by capital") it doesn't need the same kind of primitive accumulation (and the slavery etc. which fueled it) to keep going. To Marx, relative surplus-value extraction (real subordination, machinofacture or modern industry) keeps capitalism going even without the exploitation of external areas. In the dependista/third worldist view, capitalism _always_ requires the exploitation of the third world or some third-world-like area. [*] in the more academic-sounding Vintage/Penguin translation, this is "subsumption." -- Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.
