RE: Re: Precapitalist South Africa?

["michael pugliese" <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

      Weird. All of a sudden I get a dozen or so pen-l posts
from JUNE! Michael Pugliese
>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
>To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Date: 6/17/01 1:27:24 AM
>

>Lou says:
>
>>As Colin Leys correctly noted in his silly 1978 Socialist Register
article
>>on the "bourgeois revolution" sweeping Kenya, the availability
of 'free'
>>labour is key for Brenner. Without wage labor bought and sold
on the
>>marketplace, there is no capitalism. In Great Britain, labor
had to be free
>>because feudal ties to the land stood in the way of deployment
for factory
>>labor. It was more efficient to build factories in coastal
cities, where
>>ships could carry manufactured goods overseas to markets. If
somebody was
>>tied to the land, they couldn't very well be forced to move
to the city in
>>order to work 14 hours a day. They had to be free first.
>>
>>However, under other circumstances force was required to make
the hapless
>>peasant from a feudal or communal village do their duty on
behalf of
>>capitalist civilization. This was especially true when the
peasant was
>>native to a colonized country and knew his way around in the
forests or
>>fields where he could hunt and fish in order to survive. Under
these
>>circumstances it was necessary to pass laws that forced the
indigenous
>>peoples to stay put and not run away from their duty. With
these laws in
>>place, work gangs could now extract minerals from the soil
or pick crops on
>>a plantation for the rest of their life, now that they were
wedded to an
>>estate or corporation. This is not feudalism. It is called
chattel slavery
>>or indentured servitude.
>
>What was the cause of chattel slavery?
>
>>The entire history of South Africa has been about how to force
the
>>indigenous population to be successfully exploited by the white
capitalist
>>class, when all sorts of obstacles presented themselves, starting
with the
>>abolition of slavery in 1834 in keeping with laws already enacted
in the
>>rest of the British Empire.
>
>What was the cause of the white capitalist class?
>
>Yoshie
>
>