me:
>That is, in PotosÃ, "slavery and other forms of bondage" were dominant >social relationship that the direct producers were involved in. This >is neither a petty-bourgeois nor a lumpen social relationship. It's a >non-capitalist one, i.e., non-proletarian.
So what were the dominant classes in Potosi? Lord and serf?
no, there are other kinds of non-free (non-proletarian) labor. That's what haciendas and encomiendas were about.
>But in the Spanish New World, in place like >PotosÃ, as you say, bondage was the rule.
Actually, bondage was not the rule. There was a mixture of wage labor, bonded labor and self-employed petty producers.
I mentioned the wage labor later in my missive, in fact in the very next paragraph.
>Further, there's a question of what do we mean by a surplus of >workers?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear. If an Indian can run into the forest and hunt game, there will be a shortage of workers. Such conditions obviously did not exist in the British countryside. If they did, they would have introduced chattel slavery or indenture.
obviously? after the Black Plague there was no shortage of workers? anyway, my point was that the concept of a "shortage of labor" depends on property relations. If the forests are turned into nobles' (or other rich folks') hunting grounds and the "Indians" are kept from running off into them using anti-poaching laws, then that _creates_ a surplus of labor. The surplus of labor is a social creation, not a given fact of life. and it's not so obvious that the ruling classes "would have introduced chattel slavery or indenture." The workers fight back sometimes, you know. Sometimes they win for awhile. In any event, they did have various types of indenture, up until the 19th century, though those forms did not dominate the labor markets after the creation of a mass of proletarian labor-power via enclosures and the like (including anti-poaching laws). The old guild system also involved (non-capitalist) indenture. But that was either abolished forcibly (via combination acts) or avoided, as when capitalist manufactures avoided guilds and their laws by operating in places like Manchester, where the rootless proletarians could be exploited.
>But a surplus of labor can be _created_ (as it was in England) if the >class of smallholders is destroyed and/or prevented from coming into >existence on a large scale. The surplus is created -- people are >thrown off their land and have to live on their own personal resources >-- and this provides the key basis for capitalist accumulation.
You are ignoring Marx once again. He did not restrict this process to England. He included the New World as well. It is all part of primitive accumulation.
"primitive accumulation" is one big undifferentiated mass? so we can ignore the different parts of Marx's analysis or treat them all as playing exactly the same role? the expropriation of English agriculture producers is the same thing as the looting of the Incas? of course I didn't ignore the non-English part. Look at my other missives. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
