Jim wrote:
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.
Right. However, for me the origins of capitalism--what is called primitive accumulation--are not localized to the British countryside. They are also found in North and South America. The act of dispossessing a feudal serf from his land and forcing to become a wage slave or dispossessing a Bolivian Indian to become a miner in Potosi seems part of the same process. If there were a shortage of laborers in Great Britain, they might have been reduced to "extra-economic" coercion there as well. Wage labor is not essential to capitalism. It is strictly a function of local conditions of supply and demand. If King Leopold had put out a sign advertising for natives to pick rubber, I doubt he would have found any takers. So what did he do? He imposed slave-like labor conditions in order to supply the input to Belgian factories. The idea that there was capitalism in Belgium and not in the Congo seems unlikely to me.
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.
Well, the problem is that Marx never really thought much or wrote much about the third world--except for Ireland that is. If you are looking for textual support in Marx for a challenge to the Brenner thesis, you won't find it--as I mentioned to Charles. You have to look in Eric Williams et al.
