Louis Proyect wrote:
But their implication is that the mode of production in the South was not capitalist.
History is complicated. I'm no expert in the history of the South antebellum, but I can safely say this: The Southern plantations that used slave labor were plugged to a world market dominated by capitalist production. They supplied the world market and depended on it for inputs. In the context of a world market dominated by capitalist production, Southern plantations owners had to manage their business with not a small measure of bourgeois rationality. Moreover, they advanced money expecting a profit, so they were capitalists! However, they used *slave* labor! The *relations of production in the plantation* were, in many ways, colored by the logic of capitalism, but they remained *non-capitalist*! The workers weren't free. They didn't sell their labor power in a market. They didn't own themselves, so you couldn't even say that they were dispossessed. They themselves were commodities. They were forced to work, not by economic necessity but by shackle, chain, and whip. So, it was like in the ancient world... *except* that slavery in the Southern plantations was *fundamentally* different from slavery in the ancient world. The slaves' surplus labor wasn't immediately surplus value. It was nonetheless a source of profits and the incomes of other parasites (and some non-parasites as well, I know). *This* slavery was inserted and replicated itself in an entirely different context, a context that re-assigned it a role, a context overall dominated by a revolutionary and more dynamic mode of production, a context that would wind up finding it inadequate. Why is it so hard to deal with this complexity? I mean, you can have a clunky, primitive piece of software installed in a machine with a dual-core processor and a zillion gigabytes of RAM. Still, your software sucks! You may keep upgrading your hardware without facing to the fact that your application sucks. But at some point, you're going to realize that it is the software that limits the ability of your computer to perform the tasks you want it to perform. Something has to give. You either downgrade your tasks (unlikely) or wind up getting rid of your sucky software and installing something up to the task (likely). You seem to think that just because your hardware is of a newer vintage, you can deny that your software is below standard. But you can't!
