Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 22:59:43 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


Greetings all.  Though I shall not weigh in on the interesting theoretical
debate taking place of late, I want to back Harry up vis working class
resistance and capitalist development.  In their forthcoming work on the
composition of the Atlantic proletariat in the seventeenth and eigtheenth
centuries, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh set out to demonstate
that proletarian *subjectivity*- whether of the slave, the indentured
servant, the wage slave, the domestic worker/slave, the tavern owner, the
pirate, the sailor, etc.- provides the fuel for capitalist development,
insofar as capitalist planners had to respond, at every point in the
plantation-port circuit, to proletarian counter-planning.  Rediker and
Linebaugh have amassed an impressive wealth of documentary evidence to
support their thesis, which will in any case be familiar to readers of PM
Notes "New Eclosures."  As far as I know, no one else has provided a more
convincing explanation of the nature of capitalist crises, or the means by
which they are overcome, in the early modern world.  Does it still work
this way?  I think so, but in the absence of theoretically
informed empirical studies, it seems that the question is chicken-or-egg.


Forrest


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