I wrote:
>"zero workers"? you mean proletarians (waged, non-slave, non-serf)? I >think Brenner's point is that the process he describes _produced_ the >proletarians as a class.
Louis:
Yes, but that is after the fact. It is the commercial leasing of land under the whip of competition that he characterizes as the beginning of capitalism. This is a capitalism that only includes big farmers who rent land and small farmers who they exploit (not in the technical sense of the word.) No workers here at all. A capitalism without workers? Unlikely, to say the least.
Your "capitalism without workers" is a contrast to the real world capitalism in which there are a lot of proletarians. But Brenner, as I understand him, is talking about what started the system going. We rightly associate capitalism with proletarians, just as we associate measles with red spots on the skin. But Brenner is talking about the etiology of the disease. One can have the measles virus before the red spots come. me:
>I think the point is that the existence of proletarians there (who >were free of the bonds of serfdom and slavery) was totally dependent >on the existence of an industry (mining) that depended entirely on the >existence of non-proletarian labor.
Louis:
What is the source of your information about Bolivia? ...
It's been a long time since I read about this. But Galeano and many other _dependistas_ write about this. In addition, there was more than one article in LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES (which I gave away, alas). It's clear that the mines as Potosà never attained the critical mass to transform Bolivia into a capitalist system. This is partly for dependista reasons: the benefits of the mines were exported to Spain. (I've said it before, but I don't see the Brenner, Dobb (etc.) vs. dependista (Sweezy, AG Frank, etc.) controversy as embodying a dichotomy or duality. Brenner _et al_ are good at pointing to class relations within countries, while Frank _et al_ are good at emphasizing relations between countries. Neither perspective is without limits.) -- Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.
