>No, I don't think so. Certainly I am not denying the capitalist
>character of the English slave trade and the plantation system in the
>Americas.
Jim, sorry to have misread you.
>But just as certain is that further development of industrial capital
>found the plantation system to be a barrier. It was Marx who
>characterised the plantation system a mode of production distinctive
>from the industrial capital of the north, and emphasised that it was
>incommensurable with it.
Agreed. Incommensurable with industrial capital.
>More to the point, though, the strategy of propagandising against
>capitalism by emphasising its most perverse manifestations is a mistake.
Forget the propagandising. We have a need to understand in historical terms the plantation complex that ran from the American South to Brazil for 400 years and the consequences on Africa from the depopulation by the slave trade (Coquery Vidrovitch has written carefully about this). I think there remains a lot of hangover from the past.
Yours, Rakesh