sartesian wrote:
Move the discussion of improvement forward, for the US, and you will see where Jefferson's, or the plantation "productivity," ends, it runs up against its limits, limits that at the same time prevent it, based on internal dynamics, internal class relations, from transforming itself into modern agricultural production units.
But I am focusing on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. If the plantation system in North America was a more backward mode of production than the one found in the mother country, then perhaps a crown victory over Jefferson and Washington would have been more "progressive". I find all sorts of inconsistencies in the Brenner-Wood approach. When Wood writes about John Locke in the British context, he is the quintessential bourgeois philosopher of "improvement". But in the New World, he helps to draft the constitution of the Carolina colony, which enshrines private property in slaves. None of this is difficult to understand if you accept the early stages of capitalism as combining markets, wage labor and "extra-economic" factors. It is only when you try to superimpose current understandings of capitalism, with its high degree of relative surplus value, upon the past that you get into trouble. This is not to speak of modern day capitalist societies that depended almost exclusively on extra-economic coercion. This includes just about all of colonial Africa. When Cecil Rhodes set up the trading monopoly for Rhodesia, he used the bylaws of the 17th century East India Company as a model. This was the same Cecil Rhodes who Lenin singled out as an examplar of the *latest* stage of capitalism. Marxism is all about contradiction and you'd better get used to it.
