> On Wed, August 26, 2009 5:32 pm, Matthias Wasser wrote:
>
> > Of course (not that they were different in all respects.) Stealing land
> > was an obvious one. Tarrifs were very important and more or less
> coincided
> > with the conditions that allowed Big Business to develop in the first
> > place. And you had purposes served under the antebellum South, although
> > I'd say that
> > doesn't count, since it was neither capitalist nor liberal.
>
> Ah, but the South *was* capitalist, through and through. Not industrial
> capitalism, true, but plantation/mercantile capitalism -- slaves were
> commodities with price tags, and their labor-power and production were
> sold on world markets. Plantations were the first global factories
> (Rediker and Linebaugh's "The Many-headed Hydra" makes this point
> somewhere).
Capitalism isn't just markets and property rights, though. A slave by definition doesn't own her labor power, a master can't quickly change the amount of labor he has available, &c.