From: Louis Proyect :
With all due respect to Charles, I don't think it is profitable to
find support for arguments against Brenner in Marx's writings. (By the same
token, there is little support for Brenner's thesis as well.) Marx simply
never wrote much about the colonial world, especially about Latin America.
And what he wrote about Asia was completely wrong. I keep expecting Jim to
get into the details of Latin American history, but judging from his last
post, that was
another country and besides the wench is dead.
^^^^
CB: I'm thinking he writes ( and knows) sufficiently about the key thing:
All the booty brought back to Europe and accumulated there to get things
going.
Plus, Brenner's basic concepts as to what capitalism is come from Marx so
there's an argument that Marx is an expert witness on the subject matter.
Is the below not accurate ?
Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of
Christianity, says: "The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called
Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people
they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any
other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy
and of shame, in any age of the earth." [4] The history of the colonial
administration of Holland and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of
the 17th century "is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery,
bribery, massacre, and meanness" [5] Nothing is more characteristic than
their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were
trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were
the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young
people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they
were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says: "This
one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible
than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny
fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families." To secure Malacca,
the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in
1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to "abstain"
from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set
foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java,
in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet
commerce!
The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the
political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as
of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from
Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as well as
the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employés of the
company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were
inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employés themselves fixed the price and
plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The Governor-General took part in this
private traffic. His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby
they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes
sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without
the advance of a shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such
cases. Here is an instance. A contract for opium was given to a certain
Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a part of
India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one
Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate
purchaser who carried out the contract declared that after all he realised
an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the
Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians as
gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up
all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices. [6]
The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in
plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies,
and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that
were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the
Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those
sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by
decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and
every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744,
after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the
following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new
currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50,
for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial
system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who
had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English
pay they were tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed
bloodhounds and scalping as "means that God and Nature had given into its
hand."
