On 1/19/15 10:50 AM, Carrol Cox wrote: > Capitalism hurts people. Who would have thought it! Wow!
I doubt that Carrol has been keeping up with the scholarship around capitalism and slavery but the point in my posting this was to illustrate the growing consensus that applying the Brenner thesis to the civil war is a mistake. Here is Paul LeBlanc weighing in as well: http://nblo.gs/12Gqy6 Capitalism has been defined by some recent Marxists in a very particular way. For example, in his outstanding study The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post has offered a definition that can be summarized as follows: an economic system in which private owners of the economy – the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) – control the means of production (land, raw materials, tools/technology, etc.) and buy the labour-power of basically propertyless wage-workers (the proletariat), in order to produce commodities (products produced for the market, by labour-power being turned into actual labour) that are sold at a profit. A similar approach can be found in a number of other Marxist works – for example, Segmented Work, Divided Workers by David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, which succinctly defines capitalism as “a wage labour system of commodity production for profit.”[4] This seems a reasonable description of what happens under capitalism. There is, however, a problem that develops when this definition is applied to history. For example, before the American Civil War (1861-1865) a majority of the labour force in the United States was not made up of wage-workers. The Southern economy was predominantly agricultural, and the bulk of the Southern agricultural labour force was made up of slaves. Combined with the large number of poor white farmers, the great majority of labourers consisted of those who did not sell their labour-power to capitalists – so by this definition, the Southern economy could not be termed capitalism. For that matter, a majority of the Northern labour force from colonial times down to the Civil War was made up of small farmers, artisans and craftsmen, small shopkeepers – only a minority were wage-workers. By definition, it could be argued, capitalism simply did not exist in the United States until 1820s or 1840s or 1860s (which is the position of the afore-mentioned volumes). (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
