sartesian wrote:
There is a signature characteristic to capitalism, to private property as capital, to wealth as capital and that is a social relation separating labor from the means of labor. Now if slavery was capitalism, either contained that social relation in itself, or created that social relation somewhere else, then it would seem capitalism really predates....just about everything including feudalism.
As a system, capitalism has always involved market and "extra-economic" coercion. After Africa was colonized, there was virtually no markets in labor and trading companies styled after the East India Company enjoyed monopolies in countries run by Viceroys. African capitalism did not function like West European capitalism but it was capitalism all the same. Raw materials tended to be extracted from countries where "extra-economic" forces dominated. The reason for this is simple. Indigenous peoples were not interested in wage labor and the juridical forces that worked in Great Britain to produce a proletariat would not work in Africa (or Latin America for that matter.) Indigenous peoples had the ability to fend for themselves by growing their own food or hunting. So you had "corvees" and "mitas" and all these other odd forms of labor discipline that were nominally feudal but functioned in the same way that the market worked in Great Britain, namely to provide labor power. Whatever Robert Brenner has said, I reject the notion that the British countryside was more "capitalist" in the 16th century than Potosi, especially since there was no proletariat to speak of in Great Britain while the Bolivian miners numbered in the thousands. Bolivia and Peru were on the leading edge of the capitalist transformation of later centuries, not some farms where laborers were relatively few in number.
We all know that the US War of Independence was noway nohow a bourgeois revolution, nor a capitalist revolution. And we've all been taught, that the US Civil War is about as close as US gets to a revolution, only to capitulate before the counterrevolution against Reconstruction, finding once again that private property is thicker than social transformations of production.
So I guess Washington was the American Kornilov.
But the bottom line is really the bottom line, and the thing about the slave trade, about gold, about looting, etc., it did not, and does not, in and of itself create, more than create, exist in and depend upon the organization of its own negation. And I know Marx said that.
No, the slave trade, etc. did not create the capitalist system. The capitalist system grew out of changes taking place internally in Great Britain and other European countries and externally (slave trade, East India, etc.) It is Wood's "contribution" to Marxism to treat the external elements as incidental, and Brenner's to ignore them entirely. This is Eurocentrism plain and simple.
