Re: RE: Re: Capitalism as slavery and colonialism

[Jim Devine]

At 09:45 AM 10/31/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Enslavement was no longer (historically!) necessary for fulfilling 
>conditions of
>capitalism's existence and reproduction, however.

I figured out why I reacted viscerally to the phrase "Enslavement was 
historically necessary to capitalism." A lot of old-fashioned crude 
Marxists of the sort that Colin seems to lump me with used to argue that 
_socialism_ was an historically necessary result of capitalism. It was 
always a BS argument. In general, there's no predetermination in history. 
As Isaac Deutscher noted (in his biography of Stalin?), it often happens 
_after the fact_ that things _look_ predetermined, historically necessary. 
But there were other paths that could have been taken.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine