On 12/17/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But their implication is that the mode of production in the South was not capitalist. One of their supporters, a sociologist named Charlie Post, tried to apply the Brenner thesis to the American Civil War. I totally disagree with this analysis
why is the idea that US slavery wasn't capitalism _prima facie_ wrong? Is it because anything (in the post-1492 world, at least) that's exploitative and immoral has to be capitalist? At least for Marx, slavery was _not_ a form of capitalism (and he's clear about it). One of his rhetorical points was that capitalist social relations were _like_ slavery (thus "wage slavery") and in some ways _worse than_ slavery. (Slave-owners at least tried to keep their chattel alive when they weren't needed in production, while capitalists dump their employees into the reserve army.) This brings back Julio's point about the distinction between capitalism as an (abstract) mode of production and the concrete (empirical) society it exists within. In Althusserian jargon, the antebellum US had a capitalist social formation which involved a variety of different modes of production (capitalism, petty commodity production, slavery) but was dominated by the capitalist mode of production. -- 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.
