Post argues that because plantation slavery was incompatible with agrarian petty capitalism in the two decades before the Civil War, plantation slavery became the major impediment to the further development of capitalism in the rest of the USA.
I find the following premises unsubstantiated: the development of agrarian petty production was the key to the further development of capitalism, specifically machino-facture, in the rest of the USA, and this key role of agrarian petty petty production was quite clear as early as two decades before the Civil War.
Lenin thought that the break of the Southern plantations allowed for the development of open competition between small farmers and the consequent emergence of large scale firms on the basis of competitive technical foundations. This was the American path to capitalism, more dynamic and technically progressive than the Prussian road (the Junkers were not expropriated and thus remained in control of large, technically stagnant farms based on the use of formally unfree labor). Post obviously does not locate the dynamism in the post plantation South (Bowman's criticism of Lenin on this point seems quite right) but in Midwestern family farming. He has thus presented a qualified Leninist view of the American path as the truly revolutionary road to capitalism.
I however do not think the evidence which he presents in this essay for said implicit premise is very strong at all. Post indicates that the evidence for this claim is in another essay which I have not yet read. But beyond the reaper we're not given strong evidence for either the the time period in which the Midwestern family farmer began to provide strong demand for Northern industry or the depth of the market which the family farm provided.
Moreover, note that Post endows small petty agrarian producers with technological dynamism. But since they already own their main means of production--the land--they wouldn't necessarily have to be market competitive in the way that Brenner and Wood underline. Hence, his relation to the Brenner thesis is unclear. He is not talking about the dynamism which a capitalist tenant has to display in order to hold on to a lease. Again I just don't see how Post's underlying framework is Brenner's.
Moreover, note that Marx himself thought that the petty producer and independent peasant were an impediment to capitalist development, not an impetus. That is, Post through a modification of Lenin seems to have reached a conclusion exactly opposite to that of Marx's.
"Two different aspects must be distinguished here.
First, There are the colonies proper, such as in the US, Australia, etc.Here the mass of the farming colonists, although they bring with them a larger or smaller amount of capital from the motherland, are not *capitalists*, nor do they carry on capitalist production. They are are more or less peasants who work themselves and whose main object, in the first place, is to produce *their own livlihood, their means of subsistence. Their main product does not become a *commodity*, and is not intended for trade. They sell or exchange the excess of their product over their own consumption for imported mgf commodities, etc. The other, smaller section of the colonists who settler near the sea, navigable rivers, etc. form trading towns. There is no question of capitalist here either. Even if capitalist production gradually comes into being, so that the sale of his products and the profit he makes from this sale become decisive for the farmer who himself works and owns his land: so long, as comparedwith capital and labour, land still exists in elemental abundance providing a practically unlimited field of action, the first type of colonisation will continue as well and production will therefore *never* be regualted according to the needs of the market--at a given market value. Everything the colonists of the first type produce *over and above* their immediate consumption, they will throw on the market and sell at any price that will bring in more than their wages. They are, and continue for a lon gtime to be, competitors of the farmers who are already producing more or less capitalistically, and thus keep the market price of the agricultural product *below* its value...
"In the second type of colonies--plantations--where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, sicne the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage labour,which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by *capitalists*. The method of production, which they introduce has not arised out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitaist and landowner. And the *elemental* [profusion] existence of the land confronting capital and albour does not offer any resistance to capital investment, hence none to the competition between capitals. Neither does a class of farmers as distinct from landlords develop here. So long as these conditions endure, nothing will stand in the way of cost price [by which we understand price of production--rb] regulating market value."
TSV, part II Moscow, pp. 301-3
As far as I know, Post does not discuss this passage, much less the logic of Marx's argument. Even if petty agrarian producers served as a deep market for consumer goods--and Post's evidence is not strong in this article--they would have undermined capitalism in the way that Marx specifies above.
Again I think the problem remains in trying to seeing the impetus of the early development of capitalism in small men who accumulate patiently and build up the world market. As I understand Marx, this is exactly the nursery rhyme about capital's origins that he was attempting to expose!
Rakesh
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