Re: Re: emancipation and the american revolution

[DMS <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

LP's last post I think helps to clarify the terms of disagree-
ment and agreement.

For one, LP says "The big issue is not how capitalist property
relations first appeared, but how Europe in general and Great
Britain in particular came to dominate the world."

Fair enough.  But for Brenner, and the Brenner debate at its
origins, the big issue is exactly that, how capitalist
property relations FIRST APPEARED.  That's the focus of
his work.  Extrapolating from that original issue, it can
be argued, or at least I would argue, that it is the specific
origin of those specific property relations that allows
Britain to leap ahead, to make "use," actually to make money
from the plantation system as it has established in its
economic organization the basis for determining equivalents,
for the growth of exchange, for the conversion of commodities
into money, thus no longer bound to the extraction of simple,
immediate money equivalents like gold, silver, pearls as
the Spanish were. (Let's not forget that the importance of
Santo Domingo and later Cuba in sugar production comes in the
18th and 19th centuries, and not at the origin of capitalism).

I think the issue of slavery's non-revolutionary disappearance
in the British colonies is truly a function of metropolitan
Britain's preponderant economic and territorial force.  The
colonists of the Caribbean were fundamentally incapable of
sustaining their own system, much less raise an army, a navy,
and bear the costs of insurrection.  The US South was in
a qualitatively different position, although in this case, the
incapability of self-reproduction led it initiate the war.

I'm no expert on Brazil either.  Hell, I'm no expert on any-
thing, except railroading.  So I have to really study that
element before shooting my mouth off.

At least there is one point of agreement, the pivotal issue
of black labor, but I'm sure as we progress this we'll be able
to overcome that obstacle to our never ending opposition.

The point that I see is that capital is identified by Marx
as a specific social relation of production between labor,
constituted as wage labor and the means of production consti-
tuted as private property.  This identification of the
essence of capital does not preclude manifestations that have
"deviations," "impurities,"  etc.  Just the opposite, it is
precisely this social relation that gives these other elements
"life," that gives capital its remarkable elasticity in
absorbing the very elements it also destroys.

best,
dms