Jim:
That is, in PotosÃ, "slavery and other forms of bondage" were dominant social relationship that the direct producers were involved in. This is neither a petty-bourgeois nor a lumpen social relationship. It's a non-capitalist one, i.e., non-proletarian.
So what were the dominant classes in Potosi? Lord and serf?
But in the Spanish New World, in place like PotosÃ, as you say, bondage was the rule.
Actually, bondage was not the rule. There was a mixture of wage labor, bonded labor and self-employed petty producers.
Further, there's a question of what do we mean by a surplus of workers?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear. If an Indian can run into the forest and hunt game, there will be a shortage of workers. Such conditions obviously did not exist in the British countryside. If they did, they would have introduced chattel slavery or indenture.
But a surplus of labor can be _created_ (as it was in England) if the class of smallholders is destroyed and/or prevented from coming into existence on a large scale. The surplus is created -- people are thrown off their land and have to live on their own personal resources -- and this provides the key basis for capitalist accumulation.
You are ignoring Marx once again. He did not restrict this process to England. He included the New World as well. It is all part of primitive accumulation.
