re 7450 Gil, I think Albritton is arguing that only with commodification of labor power does the law of value regulate production...which (as I have said) is not the same thing as saying that only fully commodified labor power can produce surplus value. Exactly why labor power has to be commodified for the law of value to regulate production is not clear in Albritton's formulation. As far as I know, John Weeks has presented the clearest defense of this thesis; it complements Brenner's analysis but is in my opinion closer to Marx's own views since Weeks engages in value theoretic reasoning. I think we would all benefit from Albritton's own summary of his argument which was presented over the course of a decade in JPStud in an unwieldly exchange with Zmolek. In my opinion, calling me the thought gestapo was an over-reaction. I shall forward my own post to Albritton, and would have forwarded my criticism of Wood to her if I still had her email address. I looked for it, and have asked a colleague offlist for it. If you have it, please pass it along. Thanks, Rakesh I had written earlier (though I now insert a couple of [proto]'s: > >I think Albritton is arguing that even though early English >capitalist agriculture, unlike the putting out system, relied on the >basis of free wage labor (Albritton also insists on the serious >qualification of this claim, which seems to have lead to Ellen >Wood's concession which I quoted earlier), it does not follow that >that the latter was any less a crucial form of early [proto] >capitalist enterprise than English agriculture organized around the >tripartite regime of landlord-tenant-wage labor. Albritton is in >fact raising questions about the relation between a pure theory of >capitalism in which labor power is fully commodified and the history >of early [proto] capitalism. He warns against using the former to >derive conclusions about the center of gravity of the latter, no?
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