Mandel was true to the lead of the Old Man , who said in _Capital_, Chapter XXXI: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, entombment in mines of the aboriginal population the beginning of the conquest and looting of East India, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins ,signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation..." Followed by more specifics such as Mandel describes. Charles Brown >>> Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 09/15/99 01:46PM >>> quoting Mandel: 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. -clip- 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.
