[Marxism] Centrality of slavery to rise of capitalism

[Auguste Blanqui]

Well, that's the question Johnson raises in his essay (and more
implicitly in "Soul by Soul").  Both take to task the way some
historians (Genovese and Fox-Genovese most especially) have
equivocally characterized slave societies ("in but not of market,"
"seigneurial," etc) rather than mutually constitutive.  And a lot of
the stuff on the ideology of abolitionism/anti-slavery stuff also
implicitly views slavery as an impediment to capitalist development,
not part of it.

And then there's the question, which WJ also raises, of why KM himself
didn't write much sustained analysis of slavery itself in his analysis
of world market formation, even if it seems so integral to us today.
How to explain the lucanae?  The same goes for the Brenner/Wood
accounts of the origins of capitalism.  Even the early Monthly Review
school stuff doesn't theorize slavery very well -- Sweezy's responses
to Maurice Dobb, if I recall, make little/no mention of it.

I've been reading the second section of Robin Blackburn this afternoon
("SLavery and Accumulation") and find it a very useful synthesis on
scattered literature that never quite gets to the question.

On Jan 13, 2008 4:31 PM, Mark Lause <markalause at gmail.com> wrote:
> Offhand, and without getting into the holy writ, how could slavery not
> be central to the rise of capitalism?  It became key to the emergence
> of that rudimentary global economic infrastructure.  When
> industrialization really took off, it centered on textiles, made
> cotton so lucrative, and made the kind of gradual fading of slavery in
> the US a virtual impossibility.
>
> ML.
>
>
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