Capitalism, slavery and the Brenner thesis

I have written a number of articles that challenge Charles Post's article 
in the recent Journal of Agrarian Change that tries to apply the Brenner 
thesis to American slavery as an alternative to interpretations by Genovese 
and Engerman-Fogel. Post gave me permission to put his article on the 
Marxmail website that I invite subscribers to check out:

http://www.marxmail.org/post.pdf

My series articles, which are not yet finished, can be read at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/post1.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/post2.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/post3.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/villard.htm

Basically I argue that if the Brenner thesis is about the transformation in 
class relationships from one involving "extra-economic coercion" to one 
based on market relations, especially in wage labor, then it certainly 
doesn't apply to the postbellum South. Unfortunately, Post does not write 
about this period and this suggests to me a kind of "tunnel vision" that 
Blaut identified in Brenner himself, who chose not to write about post-1492 
colonialism in the New World.

Beyond this, I have an interest in challenging the notion that the Civil 
War was a "bourgeois-democratic revolution", using some of the ideas found 
in Comninel's book on the French revolution, but really owing much more to 
Marx's writings on the German revolution which led him to the conclusion 
that a "bourgeois-democratic revolution" was impossible. Only communism 
could truly achieve full democracy, land reform and national unification.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org