Yoshie:
>that offered in a single footnote. Mintz also points to the fact
>that although employing slave labour, the agro-industrial
>organization of sugar plantations prefigured in many respects later
>industry in Europe. But despite their many capitalist features, he
>correctly argues that the plantations were not capitalist enterprises
>although they clearly contributed to the development of industrial
>capitalism.
This does not capture Mintz's argument at all. In fact he writes that the
problem with analyzing plantations in Marxist terms is that there is a lack
of clarity in Marx's writings. In fact to make sense of the review, it
should be written "that the plantations were not capitalist enterprises [in
strict Marxist terms]". However, this must be considered within the context
of an almost near absence of analysis of the plantation and mining
operations that typify the New World economy in Marx. He simply lacked the
motivation to examine them in any kind of depth and even if he had,
scholarly material was in short supply. Marx and Engel's understanding of
the politics and economics of the New World was severely limited. In an
article for an encyclopedia, Marx described Bolivar as a mixture of a
bandit and a caudillo. Engels argued that it would be best if the US
defeated Mexico since the backward looking hidalgos needed a firm
Anglo-American hand to drag them out of the dark ages. This, of course,
went hand in hand with Oriental despotism and all the rest. In general, it
is best to read Mintz's book than rely on tendentious reviews for what he
supposedly says. As far as Wolf is concerned, he has many interesting
things to say on Latin American history but much of his analysis rests on a
fairly straightforward dependence on Brenner that he openly admits. Wolf's
relation to Marxism was always tenuous at best. His last book, written
before his untimely death by cancer last year, made astonishing ahistorical
analogies between the Aztecs and the Nazis, etc. If you want to get a broad
overview of the development of colonialism in the New World, Wolf's "People
without History" is a good place to start, but it is no substitute for a
careful reading of Steve Stern, June Nash, Thomas Patterson and a host of
other specialists.
Louis Proyect
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