Jim:
No, it's not a matter of "oberta dictum." It's more a matter of
definition. Proletarians are free in the double sense, i.e., free of
"extra-economic" coercion and free of direct access to (and control
of) the means of production and subsistence. Slaves, on the other
hand, are directly coerced.
Now, anyone is free to use other definitions.
Actually, I would shy away from definitions as such. This belongs
much more to the world of Aristotelian logic than Marxism. When
Trotsky was pressed to "define" the USSR, he gave a definition that
ran counter to expectations of those who think in Aristotelian terms.
It was neither capitalist nor socialist. I would suggest that you
have to approach the early period of capitalism in the same way. It
is of course much easier to compare a fully developed capitalist
society with a precapitalist society. Let's say, for example, that
Japan had been successful in keeping outsiders out. Then, an
anthropologist could visit Japan today and say, "This is a
precapitalist society". But you certainly can't approach 17th century
Bolivia in that fashion. It was stamped by capitalist class
formations just as Leopold's Congo. It is the onus on you to describe
the Belgian Congo as "precapitalist". If you are comfortable with
that definition, be my guest.
But both of those countries had a lot of free proletarian labor. The
government of Nazi Germany, say, was extremely and horribly
repressive. But most workers outside of the armed forces could quit
their jobs if they wanted to.
So Krupp was not a capitalist firm. Interesting.
As usual, NG and apartheid SA were complex societies. Each involved
proletarian wage labor _and_ other types of work relations. In
Althusserian patois, they represented articulated combinations of
different work relations.
It seems most unlikely that the crowning heights of the South African
economy was non-capitalist. When you end up with describing DeBeers
as "non-capitalist" and some machine shop with 100 highly paid white
workers as "capitalist", then your definition is not very useful.
