>I think CC is on the right track. The history of capitalism, of the world
>market, is the history of the movement and exploitation of black labor.
Obviously that is not the whole truth. Unless you are arguing that only blacks are exploited and moved about by capitalism. If not, I'm not with you.
> As
>an aside, we have Marx, producing Capital, as the fruit of his research and
>development of historical materialism, and producing it at the same time as
>a work regarding capital as abstracted from its real evolution with the
>slave trade, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, producing,
>paradoxically, Capital almost ahistorically, as a separate analysis of
>labor process.
European capitalism, in its early formation, was more than the African/American slave trade. That was evidently one way to get fabulously rich of course, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, there was what a capitalist did once he got fabulously rich. Mostly he would sail back to Europe to invest his new capital in something steady, like manufacturing and trade. Great wealth was being extracted from the English and Scottish working classes through manufacturing as well. They too had been driven off their lands and been herded into crowded cities to work as wage slaves.
Meanwhile of course, European colonies were being established in lesser-known parts of the globe such as Asia, extracting just as much profit without bothering with slavery. Eventually, even US capitalists realised that slavery wasn't a very efficient way to extract profits and abolished it.
> It's not as if British capital would have ever developed
>beyond mercantilism without the slave trade.
Your reasoning?
>Dr. Eric F. Williams in two
>fantastic books, Capitalism and Slavery, and From Columbus to Castro,
>provides the necessary historical material detail for "fulfilling" the
>Marxist exposure of capitalism.
Not with you?
>In the US, it is almost, more than almost, that we have, not two different
>working classes, but a working class that has two separate historical
>origins, with black labor representing the underpinning of capital in its
>role as a pre-industrial proletariat in the plantation economy. The
>"non-black" portion has a different history, and the inability of workers
>movements in the US to even pose the question of power when it was posing
>the question of power--i.e the great workers struggles in Toledo, Flint,
>Twin Cities, San Francisco in the 30s was a manifestation of its inability
>to strike at the core of US capital, racism.
What does "pose the question of power" mean? I gather you are arguing that this inability to "pose the question of power" (whatever it means) somehow demonstrates your argument that black labour has a different history (and origin) to non-black labour? I'm not sure that it is necessary to prove that point though, since that is fairly obvious. But I'm not sure what difference it makes.
The only real significance of this different history is that it means that blacks are somewhat more likely to be working class than those of European origin. In other words there are a smaller percentage of blacks who are capitalists, because of historical circumstances and discrimination.
A historical injustice to be sure, but it would seem perverse to pause and try to right that wrong by struggling to create more black capitalists. In the name of creating the conditions for socialism. Sure, it ain't fair, but capitalism isn't a fair system. That's the whole fucking point! Its a terrible shame that many potential black (and women, etc) capitalists have been robbed of their chance to join the ruling class, have been discriminated against, we can sympathise, but what would it achieve to stop and try to give them a leg up?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas