Jerry, You ask why I have pursued this argument with you despite having concluded that you have not been conducting the debate rationally and honestly with me, but I thought that I had made clear the importance which I attach to clarity on the issues that we are debating. The debate has implications for our understanding of the history of the capitalist system as well as present day class analysis. It is important for me to show that the positions which you are attempting to defend cannot be sustained in a rational manner. At any rate, your exit from the debate means that I shall not get a deep explanation for your own basic thesis (excuse the convoluted sentence): Despite modern slave plantation owners having appropriated surplus labor not primarily through the command of rent in kind or direct labor services which in either case would have directly satisfied the needs of the plantation owners but rather primarily through the production and sale of Commodities which embodied more new money value than the money value of the slaves' means of subsistence--that is despite the change (noted by Marx) in slavery from a patriarchal system to a system of commercial exploitation based on a voracious, if not limitless, appetite for surplus labor--these slaves still could not have produced surplus value because (and here is your argument) they were forced to perform surplus labor and produce commodities ultimately through the fear of extra-economic coercion rather than fear of the sack. So you are leaving the argument without specifying why it is exactly that the ultimate factor behind the compulsion of surplus labor determines whether that surplus labor is surplus value as well. Yet you also agree that developed capitalist exploitation has not been free of extra-economic coercion. I would like to think the break down in our argument stems in the final analysis from the analytical difficulties attendant to any liminal case-- modern plantation slavery does in fact stand at the threshold between pre capitalism and capitalism. With Nicky however I have got the sense that slavery is a liminal case because slaves themselves stand in between donkeys and humans. And yet poor old Marx's hero other than Kepler was Spartacus who was no ass. Rakesh
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