The Origins of Specie? And the ascent of capital?

["DMS" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I stated to LP earlier that I would not attempt to resubscribe, but the
discussion about the origins of capitalism is worth the breaking of a
promise.

I think Comrade Diego hits it directly on the head regarding Catalonia.  In
essence Catalonia, the treatment of Catalonia by feudal Spain proves the
point.

Comrade Diego's remark that the extraction of gold and silver served as a
brake is precisely correct.

The issue for me is that Marx defines capital as a precise social relation
of labor organized as wage-labor and the means of production organized as
private property separate and apart from the wage-laborers.  Each, capital
and wage-labor exists only in the other.  Wealth, neither in mass nor type
(gold, silver, pearls, iron bars, cowery shells) is not the determinant, the
ignition of capitalism.  The extraction of wealth devoid of the radical
capitalization of agriculture does not create capital.

Eric F. Williams, brilliant writer, historian, thinker that he was, author
of two of the truly great, mistaken, works of this century is able to detail
the impact of slavery on the accumulating wealth of the Britain and France
but he does not show the precise changes in the organization of production
and the formation of classes in those countries precipitated by the owners
of that wealth.

Nothing can diminish the importance of the new world in the establishment of
the world market to developing capitalism, nothing can deny the ability, the
need, for capital to fasten itself, based on its existence as private
property, to other forms of exploitation.  It is in fact that attachment to
those forms of property that acutely describes the limits of capital, that
provides for the "advancement of underdevelopment."  But that attachment is
not the source of capitalism itself.

dms