From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Sep 30 2004 - 14:28:43 EDT
At 10:39 PM -0400 9/27/04, Allin Cottrell wrote: >On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Gerald A. Levy wrote: > >>As for social formations where the slave mode of production >>dominated, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the effort of >>slaves to leave one sector and enter another in search of a higher >>"return to labor." > >No, but it makes good sense (as Paul has already pointed out) to talk >about the masters' reallocating the labour of their slaves in search >of higher return. In relation to the question of whether the law of >value tends to operate, the effect is much the same. > >Allin. On this particular point of crop reallocation in response to price signals--note that I am not expressing agreement with his *Time on the Cross* reconstruction of slave culture and the conditions of slave life, in particular that of treatment of pregnant women--Fogel does present some actual evidence in favor of what Paul and Allin are saying. Switching from cotton to indigo production. In referring to the slave mode of production, I am wondering whether modes of production are to be defined by the nature of the ties between between immediate appropriators and direct producers--the legal ties of slavery, the legal cum traditional ties between lords and serfs, and the exchange mediated ties between capitalists and proletarians. Are these ties what Marx meant by relations of production? Are they what Marx meant by the respective forms in which surplus labor is pumped out in his articulation of the central dogma of historical materialism? I don't think so. How does GA Cohen define mode and relation of production? What are Derek Sayer's specific criticisms of what he considers formalist definitions?
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