It is one thing to recognize slavery as providing a critical input to the growth of industrial capitalism. It is quite another thing to claim that a)the class relations, the relation of labor to property expressed in slavery, is the source of the social relations that define capital or b)identical to the social relations that define modern capital.
Again, Brenner analyzes precisely those conditions that created the fundamental separation between the means of production and the labor of production. Such separation is not and cannot be simply a result of trade, surplus transfer, or "wealth." Marx states that slavery is as much a pivot as machinery, credit. And indeed it was. But neither machinery as such, nor credit as such defined modern capitalism, and made it distinct from earlier systems. Neither machinery, credit, nor slavery was, is capable of reproducing the economics of capital by itself, or themselves. The organization of the means of production as private property requiring the continuous aggrandizement and expulsion of wage labor; the organization of the means of production as capital in, by, and through the organization of wage-labor does that. And for that to happen the population must be productively dispossessed from agri- culture, and from its own means of subsistence. The agricultural producers must be producing, not for themselves, and not for use, but for the market, for exchange value. If slavery, the class relation of slavery, was more than a pivot, more than an input, but defined capitalism, then it would need to reproduce itself, and be reproduced in the circuits of capital. But it is not. In fact the opposite took place. It was destroyed by capitalism. -----Original Message----- >From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: May 11, 2007 6:24 PM >To: [email protected] >Subject: [PEN-L] More on Transition, Brenner, Allen, Productivity > >* From: "s.artesian" > >Marx is very clear on the difference, the critical, crucial, necessary >difference to capitalism, between "free" which means stripped of all >uses save its use in exchange, and slave labor. > >^^^^^ >CB: He's also very explicit that British _capitalism_ was built on the >double pivot of slavery in the U.S. South, peasant labor in India, Irish >oppressed free labor. > >Also, he uses the slang "wage-slave" which blurs the distinction in one >moment of the dialectic. > > > >Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industry today as machinery, >credit, etc. Without slavery no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry. >It is slavery which has made the colonies valuable; the colonies have >created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale >machine industry. Thus, before the traffic in Negroes began, the colonies >supplied the Old World with only a few productes and made no visible change >in the face of the earth. Slavery is therefore an economic category of the >highest importance. >- Karl Marx to Pavel Yasilyevich Annenkov, December 28, 1846
