RE: Re: S. Africa/mode of prod. debate

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi:

>
> This is such a delightfully funny post with a great punch line that I
> hate to spoil it with a reply, but let me say this.  Enclosure alone
> would not have done the job but for a multitude of other conditions
> existing then.

This "multitude of other conditions", if it means, on a world-scale, and not
some set of imaginary circumstances allegedly existing uniquely and arising
spontaneously and due to endogenous causes, in England, is surely true.

>Besides, the emergent capitalist relations would have
> been buried if many other conditions had not followed its emergence.
> What if indigenous peoples had not been susceptible to smallpox & the
> like?  What if all tribes & kingdoms in Africa had together fought
> against Europeans, instead of fighting one another?  What if
> working-class emigrants from England, etc. could make a common cause
> with enslaved Africans & Indians, instead of shoring up the ruling
> class of slave owners & capitalists?  And so on.  And so forth.

Then we would not have got the capitalism we did get, just as we did not get
it on many previous occasions when some but not all the preconditions were
available; there were occasions in the the Ancient World when critical mass
was tantalisingly (in hindsight) within reach, but it didn't happen and we
got a 1000 year depression instead. Life can be like that.

Mark