On 12/12/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim, What do you make of the fact that Marx refers to slavery and colonialism as the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism ? Doesn't that mean that Marx's thesis is that capitalism started both in the English countryside and in the colonies ? Both, not just in the English countryside.
the now-ancient engine metaphor helps. In my interpretation of Marx (and to a lesser extent of Brenner), slavery and colonialism provided fuel for the capitalist engine. But the engine was created in the English countryside. Once the engine started going (involving the accumulation that Marx describes in much of CAPITAL), eventually it didn't need fuel from slavery and colonialism. It could switch to other fuel supplies, such as the surplus-value produced domestically. of course, that metaphor isn't reality. No metaphor is. -- 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.
