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ABSTRACT.
Marx once characterized the economy of the North American colonies as one of simple commodity production. Historical research shows that simple commodity production there was a type of "moral economy" in which the labor theory of value fails to explain the market prices at which commodities exchange. This should not surprise; the "law of value" and the labor theory are theoretically suited to explain exchange ratios only in capitalism and in no other mode, historical or hypothetical. The first three chapters of Capital therefore explicate the labor theory in the context of a capitalist economy and not, as many interpreters of Marx have it, in the context of simple commodity production. Yet Marx elsewhere applies the "law of value" to precapitalist economies, including simple commodity production, thus engaging in an apparent contradiction. This inconsistency only disappears if he is read "dialectically" - with a heady dose of Hegelian teleology. This, however, comes at the considerable cost of substituting metaphysical for scientific explanation. The Analytical Marxists' aim of expunging Hegelian influences from historical materialism thus appears to be justified.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)
MARX ONCE DESIGNATED THE "mode of production" or "economic system" of the North American colonies as precapitalist, a mode or system in conflict with capitalist development. He wrote:
In the [Nordi American] colonies ... the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the small producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labor, employs that labor to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems manifests itself here periodically in a struggle between them. . . . The same interest which compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother country, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes of production. . . . The essence of a free colony . . . consists in this - that the bulk of the soil is still public property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and their inveterate vice - opposition to the establishment of capital....