Ricardo wrote: >I don't think arguments a la Ernest Mandel will do today. Have they been superseded or something? What's your objection to the following: (From V2 of "Marxist Economic Theory") In the decisive formative period of the capitalist mode of production, extending from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the creation of the world market was of crucial importance. Its main results for the primitive accumulation of capital in Western Europe have been examined above. But all through this period of the birth of capitalism the two forms of surplus-value appeared at each step. On one hand, it was the outcome of the surplus labour of the wage workers hired by the capitalists; on the other, it was the outcome of vales stolen, plundered, seized by tricks, pressure or violence from the overseas peoples with whom the western world had made contact. From the conquest and pillage of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards the sacking of Indonesia by the Portuguese and the Dutch and the ferocious exploitation of India by the British, the history of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is an unbroken chain of deeds of brigandage which were so many acts of international concentration of vaIues and capital in Western Europe, the enrichment of which was for, in the literal sense of the word, by the impoverishment of plundered areas. It can be stated unhesitatingly that the contribution made by this capital was decisive for the accumulation of the commercial capital and money capital which, between 1500 and 1750, created the conditions which proved propitious for the industrial revolution. It is difficult to calculate the total amount involved, but if one takes into account only the most substantial contributions these add up to a staggering sum. Hamilton estimates at over 500 million gold pesos the total amount gold and silver exported from Latin America between 1503 and 1660. According to Colenbrander, the total value of the dividends, officials' remittances and cargoes of spices taken out of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company amounted to 600 million gold forms for the period 1650-1780. On the basis of the calculations made by Father Rinchon, we know that profits from the slave trade amounted in eighteenth-century France to nearly half a billion livres tournois (without including the profit arising from the work done by the slaves, which came to several billion livres).' The profits obtained from the labour of the negroes in the British West Indies amounted to �200 to �300 million. Finally, even if estimates differ markedly on this point, it is not exaggeration (see the work of a high colonial official, a firm defender of the Empire, Sir Percival Griffiths: The British Impact on India) to estimate at �100 to �150 million the outcome of the British plundering of India between 1750 and 1800. The total amount comes to over a billion pounds sterling, or more than the capital of all the industrial enterprises operated by steam which existed in Europe around 1800! We do not allege that all this wealth went directly to nourishing European industry. A large share of it did nourish this industry indirectly, through the luxury expenditure of the rich, whether new or old, through State expenditure financed by public loans and paid for out of colonial revenues. But the historical connections between this influx of capital into Europe and the conditions favouring the industrial revolution are undeniably direct. Father Rinchon remarks regarding the enrichment of France in the eighteenth century: "The growth in colonial establishments, the progress in trade and transport, and rise in power, wealth and reputation of the metropolitan country, all these resulted from the slave trade. France's external trade in the eighteenth century enjoyed a favourable balance of several million livres, and this was due to the export of colonial products which were the fruit of slave labour." G. Martin observes, even more precisely: "Every port to which the slave-ships returned saw the rise of manufactures in the eighteenth century--refineries, cottons, dyeworks, sweet-making--in increasing numbers which testified to the advance of business and industry. In Nantes, for instance, there were founded in the course of the eighteenth century 15 refineries, 5 cotton manufacturers . . . , two big dyeworks, two sweet-making establishments . .. Industries created, private fortunes increased, the public wealth of the cities transformed, the flowering of a new class--the big merchants eager to play a part in public affairs--these are the essential features with which the slave trade marked the evolution of France in the eighteenth century." And Brooks Adams defines the direct relationship between the plundering of India by the East India Company, after the battle of Plassey, and the beginning of the industrial revolution: "Very soon after Plassey the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to have been instantaneous, for all authorities agree that the 'industrial revolution', the event which has divided the nineteenth century from all antecedent time, began with the year 1760 (the battle of Plassey occurred in 1757) .. . At once, in 1759, the bank (of England) issued �10 and �15 notes (for the first time)." The writer recalls that Burke estimated at �40 million the British extortions in India between 1757 and 1780. H. V. Wiseman estimates that between 1770 and 1780 the labour of slaves in the West Indies brought another �40 million to Britain. Around 1770 the value added annually (wages plus profits) in the whole of British industry was put at only �24~5 million in the well-known writings of Arthur Young (Political Arithmetic, etc.). It can be concluded without exaggeration that for the period 1760-1780 the profits from India and the West Indies alone more than doubled the accumulation of money available for rising industry. Thus, even before industrial capitalism had developed in England, the exploitation, whether casual or systematic, of overseas countries was one of the chief sources of Europe's wealth. And the chief victims of primitive accumulation were, more than the yeomen driven from heir farms by sheepraising or the journeymen of the crafts left without work in the towns and forced to work for a miserable pittance in or-relief workshops, the indios condemned to mita (forced labour), the Bantu sold as slaves, the wretched inhabitants of the Hongy Islands, terminated by the expeditions of the Dutch East India Company, the people of the decadent Mogul Empire, pitilessly plundered by the agents of the British East India Company. It was this systematic plundering of four continents, during the commercial expansion of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, that created the conditions for the decisive lead acquired by Europe from the industrial revolution onward. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
