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Rakesh says:
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As both noted by both Kirchheimer and Rusche in *Punishment and Social
Structure* (1938?) and Henryk Grossmann in his magnum opus (see
untranslated chapter on the population problem of early capitalism), the
early stages of capitalism were haunted by an inability to secure a
proletariat for the purposes of profitable commodity production (note the
population bias of mercantalist thought). Force had to be used, whether it
was in the form of racial slavery in New World plantations or maximum wage
and vagrancy laws or galley slavery or transportation or various new forms
of penal servitude at hard labor in the Old World. Early capitalism could
never have got off the ground if it already approximated Marx's idealized
model of perfectly free exchange relations. Early capitalists were not free
to simply choose workers from a fully developed market in wage labor.
Chai-on:
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Yes. The slave production system of commodities is not the capitalist but a form of primitive accumulation.
The slave-owners are not the capitalists strictly speaking, but an independent commodity producer.
Slaves do not produce surplus value but surplus products.
In solidarity
Chai-on
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