The slave mode of production was a barrier to the development of capitalism, so it was abolished.
Maybe I'm being dim, but I don't see what your difficulty with that statement is. Or perhaps you think that the slave mode of production is intact?
In message <v02130501630bdecd1964@[128.112.71.88]>, Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes
>Jim H wrote:
>
>. 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
>
>
-- Jim heartfield