sartesian wrote:
No, the issue is precisely not did slavery, did looting, did murder contribute to capitalism.... no issue because there is no argument. Of course all those things did.
So the class that led the American revolution, or at least a good part of it, was not involved with capitalist production. Interesting. Very interesting. I was always under the impression that 1776 represented the vanguard of capitalist property relations. That is what Lenin thought as well.
But none of those things created the social relations of production that defines capital. None of those things created the terms of capitalist reproduction. In one of those things did the capitalist reproduce himself as capitalist, nor did the wage-worker reproduce himself/herself as wage-worker.
Let me repeat. Wage labor was not an option in the colonies. The very same bourgeoisie that was involved with large farm production of the sort that Brenner is fixated on farmed in an identical fashion in the colonies. With one exception. They used slaves rather than wage labor. It seems far-fetched to label one agrarian ruling class as "precapitalist" and the other as "capitalist", especially since this defies our understanding of the bourgeois revolution against the crown. Perhaps we should label it as a counter-revolution and characterize George Washington as the American Kornilov.
For Jefferson or any other slaveholder to engage in commercial slavery, there had to be systems that supported, absorbed commercial slavery. Feudalism was one. Absolutism another. Mercantile capitalism yet another.
Actually, Marx does not talk about mercantile capitalism. He talks about mercantile capital. As far as "absolutism" is concerned, I don't remember Engels discussing that in "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State".
In Latin America, the Philippines, Africa, and the US South agricultural production persists for centuries on a basis that is patently incapable of supporting internal capitalist reproduction. These are systems that change only through dramatic external impacts-- i.e. the mechanizationof agriculture in the US South beginning and following WW2.
We obviously have different ideas about "internal capitalist reproduction". When King Leopold terrorized the Congolese people to pick rubber to be used in Belgian tire companies, this was "internatl capitalist reproduction". The factories were in Belgium and the raw materials were in Africa, but it is all part of capitalist production. Without the press gangs in the Congo, there are no tires to be made in Belgium.
