Hans wrote in 7211: > > >It is a too optimistic view to think that only internal >contradictions are relevant for the downfall of capitalism. And to change the subject: Were only internal contradictions relevant for the downfall of feudalism? Or did "trade" act as an external dissolvent? Dobb vs. Sweezy, Brenner vs. Rudra. I have been arguing that the setting up by modern slave plantations under the aegis of merchant capitalism--and this was a revolutionary undertaking in the sense that merchant capital did not simply latch onto independent producers and formally subsume them but financed enterprises organized around a large scale, cooperative and gang organized labor process which forced proletarians in, say, Barbados to be more productive than they were anywhere else--was a crucial critical *external* dissolvent of feudalism in the fillip it provided to several industries which could then entice away peasants and serfs and thus accentuate the internal crisis of feudalism (Albritton argues that the demand for wool from the putting out system also acted as an external force for enclosures and the reorganization of rural relations). But... this raises the question of why slavery (sugar plantations in particular) did not lead to full scale capitalist agriculture and industry in Spain and Portugal as it did in Britain. Which then leads to the conclusion that only where the internal contradictions of feudalism were of such a nature could there have been a transition to capitalism. So the primacy of internal contradictions are reasserted in quite a reasonable manner by Brenner and Ellen Wood, and I am thinking about a reply to this. But a Marxist metaphysics about the primacy of internal contradiction may bias the way in which Marxists understand the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Plantation slavery may not have been sufficient but it does not mean that it was not necessary in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rakesh
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