You know the conversation has hit the wall when you start hearing..."That's what Lenin believed, too." And, "Funny, I don't remember Engels saying that." Well, I'm sure you didn't hear it here first, but Lenin believed a lot of things, and a lot of them were wrong. He even wrote them down. And they were still wrong...look at his Imperialism-- right in its polemic against Kautsky and wrong in everything else. (You know, I bet if you pay attention and sift through VL's Development of Capitalism in Russia, checking it with the data we now have, you're going to find some wrong things there, too).
But let's review: The issue is the origin of capitalism. The usual explanations are a breakdown of feudalism due to repeated Malthusian crises, and the "barter, truck, trade" impulse to capitalism that we all carry in us, coded somewhere in some part of our primordial soup DNA. Go forth and multiply! Create 2,3, many Companies of Merchant Adventurers. There is a signature characteristic to capitalism, to private property as capital, to wealth as capital and that is a social relation separating labor from the means of labor. Now if slavery was capitalism, either contained that social relation in itself, or created that social relation somewhere else, then it would seem capitalism really predates....just about everything including feudalism. In the case of England, capitalist relations of agricultural production are established, and well-established, before the colonies contribute mightily to the English workshop or national coffers, before England enters the slave trade, before England wins the asiento, before India is brought to the edge of destruction. Now regarding the US... really as revolutions go, the US wasn't. Simply wasn't. I hope that doesn't make me appear any less unpatriotic than I am glad to be, but on the scale of things.. a revolution? War of Independence? Well, hell, that's what they, I guess not including Lenin, call it. And dadgummit, I think they, whoever they are, got it just about right. We all know that the US War of Independence was noway nohow a bourgeois revolution, nor a capitalist revolution. And we've all been taught, that the US Civil War is about as close as US gets to a revolution, only to capitulate before the counterrevolution against Reconstruction, finding once again that private property is thicker than social transformations of production. But the bottom line is really the bottom line, and the thing about the slave trade, about gold, about looting, etc., it did not, and does not, in and of itself create, more than create, exist in and depend upon the organization of its own negation. And I know Marx said that. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2007 6:40 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What Marx meant by primitive accumulation > sartesian wrote: > > >No, the issue is precisely not did slavery, did looting, did murder > >contribute to capitalism.... no issue because there is no argument. Of > >course all those things did. > > > > > > > So the class that led the American revolution, or at least a good part > of it, was not involved with capitalist production. Interesting. Very > interesting. I was always under the impression that 1776 represented the > vanguard of capitalist property relations. That is what Lenin thought as > well. >
