--

Michael Meeropol ; "Though the capitalist mode of production had
permeated Great Britain as a result of the Enclosure Movement in the
countryside (I learned in Graduate School that capitalism was
originally agricultural capitalism long before the industrial
revolution!) there was virtually no capitalism in the US in colonial
times --- The founders were slave owners and merchants --- the system
was a particularly American version of British Mercantilism which in
fact did not transform into capitalism until the creation of the
Waltham Mills in the early 19th century. The mode of production in
the northeast and (new) midwest was closer to what Marx called an
Einifache Warenproducktiion -- a kind of "independent" mode of
production.

Jim O'Connor , later one of my UCSC Profs, and others in Monthly
Review, had an exchange over Doug Dowd's , "The Twisted Dream :
Capitalist Development in the US Since 1776, a book that was one of my
radicalizing texts in the mid to late 70's, over this question.

"This comment is not a general critique of James O'Connor's review of
The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States Since
1776 by Douglas Dowd (MR, March 1975). Rather, it is a response to a
specific, though major, disagreement between Dowd and O'Connor and to
the idea of independent commodity production as a mode of production.
O'Connor criticizes Dowd for his characterization of the United States
as capitalist from the very beginning of its settlement. In place of
this initial dominance of the capitalist mode of production, O'Connor
substitutes independent commodity production as the mode of
production. O'Connor admits that Dowd recognizes the existence of a
class of independent producers, made up of farmers, artisans,
teamsters, and small traders. The point at issue is that O'Connor
views these independent producers as constituting not simply a social
form within the emerging capitalist mode of production, but as the
basis of a distinct mode of production which constituted a serious
barrier to the development of capitalism in the United States"
https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-028-01-1976-05_5

Review of The Twisted Dream and Capitalist Development in the United
States Since 1776 by Douglas F. Dowd.
https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/MR-026-10-1975-03_4

Independent Commodity Production: Mode of Production or Capitalist
Class Formation?
Leo A. Johnson ,Studies in Political Economy , A Socialist Review
Volume 6, 1981 - Issue 1 ,
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/19187033.1981.11675702 ,
full text.

Michael Pugliese

I have been saying for years here and in other ways that the Triangle Trade was globalized capitalism, complete with a number of currency exchanges and other devices 

On Nov 20, 2022, at 5:17 PM, Michael Meeropol <mameerop@...> wrote:

there was virtually no capitalism in the US in colonial times

I don't understand. In addition to AS's point about the rum triangle, North America at least was colonized with financing from joint stock companies. Not capitalist from the get go?

Mark

I agree that the slave trade was capitalist, and there were probably a few other sectors,  finance in particular,  that might fit that description,  in pre-1870s America. But I believe capitalism  was one competing mode of production among many, and as I tried to show in my book "Looking Over the Abyss ", independent farmers and other small scale owner-operators were indeed a significant obstacle to capitalist development in the US, one overcome only by the mass immigration of mostly the European agricultural population that, lacking that very same condition of independent ownership us the vote, were expropriated en masse from the land as recounted by Oscar Handlin in "The Uprooted" and became the needed labor force denied capitalism by the power of the Populist movement.