re 6842 >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >From: Ian Hunt <Ian.Hunt@flinders.edu.au> >Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 14:30:53 +1030 >Subject: Re: [OPE-L:6839] Re: surplus value, commercial workers and > merchant capital > >Dear Jerry, >The distinction between surplus product and surplus value is important: >slave owners, feudal lords, tributory systems, etc have all appropriated >surplus product (and surplus labour) Ian, In Capital 1, Marx himself notes how the institution of slavery can be transformed from a patriarchal institution hemmed in by the immediate circle of needs of slave owners or masters to an expansionist capitalist institution entangled in the world market and organized around the boundless search of surplus value. Despite trying to resist this conclusion, Robin Blackburn comes quite close to it in The Making of New World Slavery, p. 374-5 "However the undoubted fact that neither the feudal estates of Eastern Europe nor the slave planations of the America can properly be regarded as capitalist enterprises should not lead us, as it has some writers, to regard them as *equivalently distant from the capitalist mode*. The feudal estates of E Europe were a product of the manorial reaction of the 14 and 15th centuries--sometimes referred to as Europe's 2nd serfdom. In the first instance they were created not in response to the dictates of cash crop production but as the lords' answer to the impact of the demographic crisis in the Eastern marchlands. Their subsequent orientation to cereal exports required very few productive inputs from the West, and encouraged no reciprocal exchange. The American slave planations by contrast were set up directly for the purpose of supplying the European market, and had not other raison d etre. In their operation, as in their foundation, they remained intimately tied geared to exchanges with European merchants and manufacturers. Even at the height of the Polish grain exports they accounted for only 10-15 0f total production, with luxury items dominating imports. In the New World by far the greater part of plantation output was exported, and many productive inputs were imported from European mfgs: equipment, implements, construction materials, clothing, foodstuffs; as for the African slaves, they also were acquired increasingly in exchange for mfg trade goods. Western Europe's trade with the slave plantations was thus less unbalanced and more conducive to cumulative, reciprocal expansion." I have posted this passage before [OPE-L:2805] Re: RE: Slavery From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@phoenix.Princeton.EDU) Date: Mon Apr 10 2000 - 17:07:55 EDT Yours, Rakesh
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