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

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx 06/20/01 07:23PM >>>



I don't see any meaningful sense in which this is true. What
'pre-capitalist' m of p or social formation *effectively* or *meaningfully*
EVER confronted capitalist states? I can't think of one. There was no
confrontation of historical equals, there was a total world historical
process.

Your entire conception of the 'emergence' of capitalism into a
non-capitalist or precapitalist (precapitalist, in some teleological sense?)
is entirely post hoc reasoning. What Louis and I and others are asserting
and attempting to prove both in theory and empirically, is that capitalism
was a product of a total, pre-existent world system.

((((((((

CB: It would seem  that one of capitalism's emergent or qualitatively new characteristics was and is the globalism of its totality.  For example , the Romans had almost no contact whatsoever with the Mayans.

(((((((((

So the fact that its
appearance was first of all spatiotemporally localised does not alter the
fundamental feature of capitalism, which is that it is an inflection or
product of a world system which was already there, and which may have had
many contingent forms of appearances, many layers of instantiation, but
nevertheless was already a totality. Without this particular totality,
capitalism could never haved 'emerged' in the 'English countryside' or
anyone else specific. That indeed is exactly what is meant by coevality and
by viewing the subjects of the world-historical process as sharing the same
historicity. Without the totality which included the specific histories of
Eurasian, African, American cultures and civilisations etc, and without the
specific geographies and endowments of these regions, and without the
specific prior development of commodity production, capitalism would not
have appeared. All talk of articulated modes etc, simply misses the point;
and this is why we insist on (a) uneven and combiend development as the
characteristic dynamic, the key word being *development* and the key
descriptor being *imperialist*.

Mark