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Capitalism, slavery and the Brenner thesis
by Louis Proyect
15 September 2003 14:42 UTC
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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


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