. The slave mode of
>production was a barrier to the development of capitalism, and so it was
>abolished.
My goodness, Jim. No wonder you did not translate Grossmann's chapter on the population probelm of early capitalism (nor the concluding chapter on wage theory and the increasing misery thesis which you also do not understand). Here he argues that early capitalism was haunted by an endemic labor shortage (as a consequence of accumlation on the basis of constant technique; of course as revoltions in technique become endemic, then slavery becomes a fetter but capitalism predates the Industrial Revolution). Just like Kirscheimer and Rusche in Punishment and Social Structure, he underlined that the population bias of mercantalist thought reflected this endemic labor shortage in early capitalism; thus capital was required to rely in Europe and without on all forms of coercion (slavery, maximum wage laws, harsh vagrancy laws) to secure a labor force for the purposes of profitable capitalist commodity production. The proletariat was born in black and white across national boundaries at its origin. Jairus Banaji and Alex Callinicos have both made the argument in sophisticated theoretical terms. For example, the latter notes that since many forget that Marx analyzes capitalism in terms of purified model of completely free exchange relations, they often mistake the model of reality for the reality of the model; consequently, they can only find the proletariat at the inception of capitalism that most closely resembles Marx's model (e.g., agricultural workers in England) and forget that much of proletariat, viz. the plantation proletariat, was secured coercively.
Perhaps we need to return to the classic works of Marxism, along with contemporary works like Paul Loverjoy and Nicholas Rogers, ed. Unfree Labour in the Developmnt of the Atlantic Work.
I think many find quite comforting a Eurocentric myth of the origins of the proletariat; as all myths of origins, it works however implicity to inform present practice.
Yours, Rakesh