Róbinson Rojas: Latin America: blockages to development.- Articulation of modes of production.- Sociodynamics. Thermodynamics. The Róbinson Rojas Archive.- RRojas Databank.- Information on economics, development, dependency theory, research methods, globalization, poverty, globalization, sustainability, environment, human rights, China, Chile, Asia, Africa, Latin America, America Latina, Puro Chile.

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   47

The existence of merchant's capital and the Absolutist State were crucial economic and political factors in the invasion, conquest and colonisation of the New World. They constituted the most important external pressures on the New World, creating a production system suitable for their needs, on the one hand, and for the building of the emerging unique economic and political circumstances of the New World, on the other hand.
        Mechanical conceptualising of the role of merchant's capital in colonial Latin America has led to theories which wrongly assume that merchant's capital generated capitalist relations of production in the continent, and that this was inevitable.
        For instance, one Latin American historian has written: "By multiplying mercantile capital and stimulating international trade, the commercial revolution, which had begun in the fifteenth century, lined the fate of one nation to others, intensifying economic interdependence. The type of economy which the Iberian metropolis organised was of a definite colonial nature, oriented to the Central and Western European markets. This same purpose motivated the Luso-Spanish producers in the new continent. Colonial capitalism, rather than feudalism, was the type of economic structure which appeared in America in the period we are studying...Iberian America was born to integrate the cycle of incipient capitalism, not to prolong the languishing feudal cycle..."(1)
        Sergio Bagu incorrectly assumes that merchant's capital and international commerce are both specific features of capitalism.

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   48

Disregarding international trade in Babylonian times, we should recall that during the several centuries of the Roman Empire, trade was crucial. Roman ships brought slaves, cloth and gems from the Orient, tin from Britain, and so on; and there was a very tight "economic interdependence" between many nations. Nevertheless, the slave mode of production, dominant during this period did not develop into a capitalist, but rather a feudal form.
       Such poor analysis led Bagu (and afterwards Andre Gunder Frank) to assume that "Iberian America was born to integrate the cycle of incipient capitalism". The most that can be said about this "birth" is that the Iberian American production system was a process initiated from the needs of merchant's capital in the XVI, XVII, XVIII centuries, when the FMP was still dominant in the social formation of Western Europe. This was a period in which "incipient capitalism" was trying to evolve through a class struggle against/within the FMP, with, more often than not, feudal ruling class obtaining the support of important sectors of merchant's capital in its struggle against the emergent bourgeoisie.
       Bagu, Frank et al do no take into account the fact that merchant's capital produced different effects in different modes of production. In feudal Western Europe it helped, in general, to develop capitalist relations of production, whereas in Iberian America it impaired this form of development. Merchant's capital is not, in itself capable of producing the transition from one mode of production to another.
       In accordance with Marx, "within the capitalist mode of production -i.e., as soon as capital has established its sway over production and imparted to it a wholly changed and specific form- merchant's capital appears merely as

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a capital with a specific function. In all previous modes of production, and all the more, wherever production ministers to the immediate wants of the producer, merchant's capital appears to perform the function par excellence of capital...yet its development...is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another...Within capitalist production merchant's capital is reduced from its former independent existence to a special phase in the investment of capital, and the levelling of profits reduces its rate of profit to the general average. It functions only as an agent of productive capital...On the contrary, wherever merchant's capital still predominates we find backward conditions (my emphasis, R.R.)...This is true even within one and the same country, in which, for instance, the specifically merchants towns present far more striking analogies with past conditions than industrial towns...The independent and predominant development of capital as merchant's capital is tantamount to the non-subjection of production to capital, and hence to capital developing on the basis of an alien social mode of production which is also independent of it. The independent development of merchant's capital, therefore, stands in inverse proportion to the general economic development of society". (my emphasis, R.R.) (2)
Because merchant's capital is confined to the sphere of circulation, its exclusive function consists of promoting the exchange of commodities. Therefore, its conditions of existence are solely those in which money has appeared in the cycle of simple circulation of commodities. That is why "merchant's capital, is older than the capitalist mode of production, is, in fact, historically the oldest free state of existence of capital" (3).

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   50

       Since simple circulation of commodities and money can be found in any mode of production, as soon as different communities surpass direct barter between each other, merchant's capital can exist and develop itself no matter what the basis of production of commodities which enter into the process of circulation. Merchant's capital does not create production of commodities, but, rather, promotes their exchange. It finds products as commodities "on the spot" in order to act as mediator between the two extremes between which these commodities must be moved. It is immaterial to merchant's capital whether commodities are produced in a primitive community, or slave latifundio, feudal manor or capitalist industry.
       Nevertheless, even when merchant's capital is not concerned with "the social organisation of the spheres of production whose commodity exchange" this capital promotes, it exerts pressure on that social organisation. For the "development of commerce and merchant's capital give rise everywhere to the tendency towards production of exchange-values, increases its volume, multiplies it, makes it cosmopolitan, and develops money into world-money. Commerce, therefore, has a more or less dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation, which it finds at hand and whose different forms are mainly carried on with a view to use- value. To what extent it brings about a dissolution of the old mode of production depends on its solidity and internal structure. And whither this process of dissolution will lead, in other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself. (my emphasis, R.R.) In the ancient world the effect of commerce and the development of the merchant's capital always resulted in a slave economy, depending on the point of departure, only in the transformation of a patriarchal slave system devoted to the production of immediate means of subsistence

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   51

into one devoted to the production of surplus-value. However, in the modern world, it results in the capitalist mode of production. It follows therefrom that these results spring in themselves from circumstances other than the development of merchant's capital". (4)
       During the overseas expansion of Atlantic Europe, the effects of merchant's capital on the Western European feudal mode of production and on the Luso-Spanish America were very different.
       Referring to Western Europe from the late XV century to mid-XVIII century, Magdoff writes:
       "The main features of this period of expansion -conquest of South America, exploitation of the gold and silver resources found there, and the diversion of established trade- reflect the state of the arts of the period. The relatively undeveloped means of production and the consequently small currently produced economic surplus left direct robbery, whenever practical, as one of the most effective means of accumulating wealth. Hence looting, plunder and piracy were primary agents of redistribution and new concentrations of wealth. This redistribution took two forms: (a) skimming off by the Europeans of as much as possible of the accumulated surplus of the rest of the world, and (b) conflict among leading European nations -Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England- for access to the wealth of other continents, including what they could pirate from each other on the high seas...In the long run, the flood of new products from the East, the huge flow of precious metals from America, the opening of new markets, and the demand generated by the several states in the pursuit and establishment of colonies enormously stimulated the expansion

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   52

of Western manufactures and the ascendancy of the European bourgeoisies -in short, paved the way for the global triumph of capitalism. But there was a limit to the profitability of this first wave of overseas expansion: the wealth obtained by plunder of hoards amassed over years can only be taken once."
       "...There were, moreover, further contradictions contributing to the drying up of the benefits from the first wave of overseas expansion: 1.- The handsome profits derived from taking over the trade routes of others do not grow unless the trade itself keeps on expanding, and this did not occur as long as the old modes of production remained intact. 2.- Profits from the spice trade dropped, squeezed by restricted supplies on the one side and increasing costs of defending monopolistic control against rival nations on the other. The flow of precious metals from South America declined as the richest mines became exhausted, given the backward techniques then in use, and as the labour force of the superexploited Indians dried up." (5)
       Simultaneously, the introduction into Western Europe of new products (coffee, chocolate, tea, potatoes, tomatoes, maize, etc), and the imports from America of vast quantities of gold and silver, not only enlarged the market but brought with it a huge increase in international liquidity. Springing from it there was an enormous increase in international trade with a related rapid development in the ship-building and metal-working industries. At the same time, international trade allowed a notable accumulation of money- capital, it favoured the establishment and the growth of the middle classes and stimulated the expansion and diversification of demand. Added to this, since accumulation in the feudal mode of production was based on military conquest (in its various forms of looting, plunder, robbery, piracy, etc. in the colonies and on sea routes), the wars between European nations brought forth a

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notable development of manufacturing potential (6). This pressure on the pattern of demand developed at a time when a layer of rich tenants was emerging from the feudal manor, who were utilising free wage labour as the most sensible way to increase agricultural production for the market. There was a growing tendency to create access to this wage labour through pushing poor peasants off the land. In a word, the collapse of the feudal manor was producing landless peasants, whose only way to survive without the rural areas was by seeking employment as wage labourers in the towns. On the other hand, in the towns money-capital was available for the production of the new products required by the ruling class for wars of conquest and domination. Thus, eventually, money-capital combined with free labourers in order to produce commodities for the expanded Western European market, based on capitalist relations of production already evolving from the dissolution of the feudal mode of production in the countryside.
In a word, in Western Europe the dominance of merchant's capital helped a further development of capitalist social relations of production, and pushed forward the collapse of the feudal mode of production already generating capitalist relations of production, because the FMP was unable to meet merchant's capital needs for new types of commodities in huge quantities. Eventually, this process brought forth the appearance and development of industrial capital which dominated the production system, destroying the dominance of merchant's capital and establishing itself as the core of the capitalist mode of production in the XIX century.

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   54

1.-THE CONDITIONS OF COLLISION AND DISSOLUTION

       Merchant's capital domination had very different effects in Luso-Spanish America. Concerned only with the extraction of gold and silver, it initially attempted to establish the same social relations of production that were dominant in Western Europe at the time: that of the landlord-tenant relation. However, in the Americas there were two productive systems, both based on collective ownership of the means of production. One of them, a classless society in its tribal stage, was almost destroyed by the attempt and was replaced by a system of slave production. In the other, in a transition between classless and class society, the new social organisation of labour took the form of a landlord- collective tenant relation (under the encomienda system). The inner contradiction of this basic social relation of production proved to be irresolvable, leading to the collapse of the encomienda system. Then, given the unlimited availability of land and direct labourers, a new social relation of production emerged: that of landlord-peon. That is, in Luso-Spanish America, during the dominance of merchant's capital, there was never enough free labour available to unite with money-capital and develop capitalist relations of production. Neither was there individual peasant production, which could develop into a feudal mode of production. So, the effects of merchant's capital penetration led to an attempt to develop slave production, on the one hand, and to produce a new production system (the landlord-peon) on the other hand, which eventually resulted in a specific mode of production, as I will outline further on in the next chapter.
       In other words, in Luso- Spanish America, this is a further proof of Marx's conclusion that even when merchant's capital

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   55

has a "dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation", the new mode of production which will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode itself".
       So much for merchant's capital as one of the most important external means whereby the feudal mode of production and the modes of production existing in Luso-Spanish America collided and dissolved during the colonial times. This comprised the main economic factor.
       We can now move on to the other external factor - the political: the Absolutist State.
       Under the twofold pressure of the peasant's revolts and burghers economic and political development, the FMP entered into a protracted period of crisis during the XIV and XV centuries in Western Europe. Out of this crisis the Absolutist State emerged as a new policy capable of re-submitting peasants to the feudal landlords, ensuring an alliance between burghers and landlords in order to maintain the peasantry in their lowly socio-economic position, and prevent conflicts between individuals or groups within the feudal aristocracy at a time when its economic and political power was seriously weakened.
       Conquest and colonisation of Ibero America coincided with Absolutism in Western Europe. Since the latter political organisation was feudal in character it constituted a vehicle attempting to impose a feudal organisation of labour in Ibero- America with limits laid down by the Crown's need to avoid the emergence of a feudal nobility in the region capable of disputing the former's ascendancy over the subordinate colonial ruling class.

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   56

       During the XIV and XV centuries economic and political crisis in Western Europe, the population decreased, the people became discontented , and industry and trade shrank as direct result both of the FMP's incapacity to cope with the new needs of increased productivity and natural disasters such as the Black Death in mid- fourteenth century.
       It was a period marked by a new upsurge of commerce which produced increasing monetary requirements for the feudal lords. Therefore, the manorial production system developed in a direction in which rent in money rather than labour rent and rent in kind was the dominant form. Feudal tenants were able to accumulate surplus- labour, and the individual peasant economy tended to develop further. The revival of trade and industry exerting steady pressure on serfdom as inadequate, and weakening the political power of the feudal lords as a consequence. The latter attempted to stop this trend by military force against the peasantry. As a response, peasants rose in revolt; in the town workmen fought the rich merchants who kept them in a powerless position.
       The historian H.A.L. Fisher wrote of XIV century Western Europe, that there was a "marked acceleration of that process of converting labour services into money payments":
       This change "was due to the fact that owing to the dearth of labour the peasant was able to demand a higher price for his toil, and the lord of the manor was no longer always in a position to secure the working of his demesne land save by the novel expedient of labour hired from outside. The revolutionary possibilities of such a situation greatly alarmed the governing class both in France and England. In France workmen were forbidden to take more than a third of their

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   57

former wage. In England, Parliament called labourers and artisans to their old rate of wage and forbade them to move from one country to another. Political economy, like nature, may be expelled with a fork, but it always returns. The legislation of the Edwardian parliaments was unavailing to arrest a process grounded in the economic necessities of the time. As the value of labour services to the lord steadily diminished, the convenience of a mobile labour supply, remunerated by money payments, became ... more clearly apparent. So the old manorial economy was gradually sapped by new forces, and as the villain became detached from his bondage to the soil, and began to sell his labour freely in the market, voices were raised challenging the whole social order" ...(7)
       Added to this, economic pressure forced the ruling class to accumulate surplus-labour through the feudal form of accumulation: war and military conquest. In 1337, the english king and his feudal lords initiated aggression against france, in the Hundred Years' War:
       "The burden of heavy taxation was offset for the commonality of our island not only by the glamour of foreign victory, but by the conviction that the war was good for trade, that it enabled England to sell her wool in Bruges and Ghent, to buy her wine from Bordeaux, and to find a continental market for her tin, her iron, and her hides" (8)
       In addition to the atrocities committed by the armies against the population living in the continent, there were further far- reaching consequences of this protracted continental war. As financial resources

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   58

for the war became insufficient, so existing taxes, and "new sources of revenue had to be discovered; as price levels rose, the relations between the employer and the employed, the tradesman and the customer, the landlord and the peasant became difficult and embittered. In the decade between 1375 and 1385 a wave of popular discontent passed over Western Europe. It was felt in Flanders, in northern France, in Ghent, and most seriously in the English peasant rising of 1381. Everywhere the ruling class was for a moment seriously alarmed" ...(9)
       The feudal lords were no longer in a position to maintain their status as a ruling class through their individual effort in each dominion. The merchants could not continue trading at the international level in the context of feudal insecurity; most importantly, the direct labourers constituted a threat to social organisation with the decline in the cohesiveness of the ruling class. Consequently, the royalty benefited from this situation, which led to the necessity for a centralised national state, a "redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasants masses back into their traditional special position - despite and against the gains they had won by the widespread commutation of dues", as P Anderson says, accurately adding that "the new form of noble power was in its turn determined by the spread of commodity production and exchange, in the transitional social formations of the early modern epoch"...(10)
       This was the Absolutist State, as it emerged in the XVI century in Western Europe.
       The peasantry, however was not the only force the ruling class had to contend with during the period we are concerned with. The merchant class was also a threat to noble power. Furthermore its presence

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determined in part the shape of Absolutist States, as Anderson writes:
"Simultaneously, however, the aristocracy had to adjust to a second antagonist: the mercantile bourgeoisie which had developed in the medieval towns" ...."it was precisely the intercalation of this third presence that prevented the Western nobility from settling its accounts with the peasantry in Eastern fashion, by smashing its resistance and fettering it to the manor"..."Thus when the Absolutist States were constituted in the West, their structure was fundamentally determined by the feudal regroupment against the peasantry, after the dissolution of serfdom; but it was secondarily overdetermined by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie which after a series of technical and commercial advances was now developing into pre-industrial manufactures on a considerable scale"...and again "the threat of peasant unrest, unspokenly constitutive of the Absolutist State, was thus always conjoined with the pressure of mercantile or manufacturing capital within the Western economies as a whole, in moulding the contours of aristocratic class power in the new age. The peculiar form of the Absolutist State in the West derives from this double determination"...(11)
So, although the Absolutist State constituted a strong, articulated structure limiting the individual political power of feudal lords, it was primarily a feudal state ultimately administering the feudal nobility's collective interests. During the whole period of Absolutism, the dominant class - both economically and politically - was the feudal aristocracy, the same ruling class as in the medieval age. Even when serfdom disappeared, "yet it is evident that private extra-economic coercion, personal dependence, and the combination of the immediate

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   60

producer with the instruments of production, did not necessarily vanish when the rural surplus ceased to be extracted in the form of labour or deliveries in kind, and became rent in money: so long as aristocratic agrarian property blocked a free market in land and factual mobility of manpower - in other words, as long as labour was not separated from the social conditions of its existence to become "labour-power" - rural relations of production remained feudal"...(12)
       Moreover, this rent in money was merely a change in form from rent in kind, in the same way as rent in kind was a change in form from labour rent, depending on the development of the forces of production. Therefore "the basis of this type of rent, although approaching its dissolution, remains the same as that of rent in kind, which constitutes its point of departure. The direct producer as before is still possessor of the land, either through inheritance or some other traditional right, and must perform for his lord, as owner of his most essential condition of production, excess corvee-labour, that is, unpaid labour for which no equivalent is returned, in the form of surplus-product transformed into money"...(13)
       Consequently, although Absolutism - as a policy - corresponds to a transitional stage between a dominance by a feudal and by a capitalist mode of production in Western Europe, the dominant mode of production remained feudal.
       Naturally, the transformation of rent in kind into rent in money must take place when there is a significant increase in commerce and urban manufacture, that is, in the production of commodities and hence in the circulation of money. Hence the Absolutist state's introduction

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   61

of a permanent bureaucracy, national taxation, codified law, and the beginnings of a unified market. All of these features present the appearance of capitalism.
       Nevertheless, since the social relations of production remained the same during the period - because the emergent bourgeoisie didn't succeed in overthrowing the feudal aristocracy in all nations at the same time - the superstructure of Western Europe remained feudal.
       As Engels wrote of this period: "this mighty revolution in the conditions of the economic life of society was, however, not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The political order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois"...(14)
       Elaborating on this point, Anderson states: "The specific weight of mercantile and manufacturing capital within most of the Western social formations was rising throughout this century (XVIII century), which saw the second great wave of commercial and colonial expansion overseas. But it only determined state policy where a bourgeois revolution had already occurred and absolutism had been overthrown, in England and Holland. Elsewhere, there is no more striking sign of the structural continuity of the late feudal state into its final phase than the persistence of its traditional military traditions"...(15)
       To summarise: the conquest and colonisation of the New World was determined by two major external historical conditions: the dominance of merchant's capital at the economic level, and of the Absolutist policy,

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   62

at the political level, both existing with a feudal social formation...(16)
       Consequently a feudal ideology was reproduced in the New World through the action of the conquerors. Conquest and colonisation were conducted and organised within strong seigneural structures. There was a clear attempt, from the very beginning, to impose the landlord-tenant relation as it existed in Western Europe at the time.
       Equally important for my analysis is the fact that neither merchant's capital nor the pressure of the Absolutist State on the system of production of the New World forced it in a capitalist direction. This was so because both pressures were always exerted in the direction of maintaining unfree labour and static ownership of the land, impeding manufacturing development and market enlargement.
       Last, but not least, even when the Absolutist State in Spain tried to impose feudal relations of production in the New World, the main concern of merchant's capital was not with the forms of relations of production imposed, but rather with a form of the latter capable of ensuring merchant's capital the type of commodities it required.
      Thus, the main role that merchant's capital and Absolutism played in the shaping of the New World's system of production was not that of imposing a specific structure, but of exerting pressure on the system in order to produce particular commodities at the lowest possible cost. Thus, the creation of the new system of production was an undertaking of the colonists themselves rather than an imposition by the Spanish Crown or merchants. This explains why there was no process of destruction of the indigenous system of production and its replacement

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by a western european form of feudal mode of production, as such.
The particular features assumed by the new system of production were determined by: a) the specific commodities which merchant's capital and the Absolutist State in Spain and Portugal required from the region, and b) the needs of the colonial ruling class to strengthen its dominance and reproduce the conditions of this dominance based upon a particular organisation of labour.
In response to these pressures the indigenous system of production also entered into a process of dissolution until it became a component part of the colonial system of production, as we shall see later on.
2.-THE ACTORS
No analysis is possible unless we have a clear understanding of the main aspects of the societies which played the major roles in the conquest and colonisation of the New World. The relation conqueror- conquered was between Iberian society and the indigenous societies of the New World. The actors who played out the colonial epic in the New continent had distinctive characteristics which were of the utmost importance in the ultimate evolution of the whole process.
THE CONQUERED PEOPLES - "Sixteenth-century Europeans found a flourishing and highly sophisticated agriculture in what is now Latin America. Inca and Aztec farmers produced sufficient surpluses to support large urban populations and armies. Cotton, maize, tobacco, chocolate, potatoes, yarns, manioc, quinoa, and many varieties of beans, squash and fruit, were only a few of the many crops selected and cultivated

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   64

by indigenous breeders. The llama had been domesticated on the Andean Altiplano, providing a rather unsatisfactory basis for a real livestock economy but serving nonetheless as a beast of burden and a source of meat and wool. Irrigation and fertilisation techniques were highly developed. Even in large areas inhabited by semi-nomadic tribes, agriculture was well advanced. The organisation of agricultural production for the most part consisted of plots worked by family groups on communally-owned land with many tasks such as the construction of irrigation works executed in common"...(17)
       The above description is in no way an overstatement. The American ethnographer Von Hagen writes that the capital city of the Aztec empire "formed a city one mile and three fourth square and containing upwards of 2,500 acres. This was a sizable area: Rome's wall at the time of Marcus Aurelius enclosed a city of only 3,500 acres; London in the time of Samuel Pepys was scarcely any larger"..."The great city of Tenochtitlan, wrote Cortes...'is two leagues (five miles)...to any point on the mainland. Four causeways lead to it...some twelve feet wide'..."..."The city, like Cuzco, capital of the Incas in Peru, was divided into four sections, corresponding to the causeways, which entered the city from three of the four cardinal directions. Each formal entrance to the city proper had a roadblock, where taxes were collected."..."Mexico's Tenochtitlan had no more than ninety thousand inhabitants. Even 'reduced' it was still one of the largest cities in the world: at that time London had no more than forty thousand, Paris could boast sixty-five thousand"...(18)
       And as far as the size of armies are concerned, it is known that in the Inca Empire about one tenth of the whole population was constantly serving under the Inca's flag.(19) The percentage is impressive in

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   65

an empire with a population of between 5-7 million. It is possible that the figure comprises the workers engaged in public works as well.
       At the peak of Inca civilisation, from 1450 to 1532, the empire stretched from what it is today southern Colombia (the Ancasmayo river, on 2 degrees N. latitude) to central Chile (the Maule river, 34 degrees S. latitude), i.e. approximately 4,500 km. from north to south, and around 2,250,000 square km. -quite a considerable size if we remember that the Roman Empire at its peak during Trajan -A.D. 117- covered 6,500,000 sq. km., and the entire Western Europe area is less than 5,000,000 sq. km.
       Two main roads linked the populated areas of the Inca Empire. One, the Andean royal road, was 3,250 miles in length -longer than the longest Roman road, from Hadrian's Wall in Scotland to Jerusalem- going from southern Colombia to South America's southern tip. Its width was between fifteen and eighteen feet, and until the nineteenth century, it was the longest arterial road in history. The other was the coastal road, 2,520 miles in length, with a standard width of twenty-four feet.
       "The empire did not need so elaborate a network of roads for economical reasons, since most of the provinces had considerable economic independence; for the north-south axis such a road designed for pure commerce was superfluous. In the main they were roads of conquest. Once a territory was conquered, the roads were important for control over the newly annexed territory". (20)

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   66

       In its turn, alongside the Maya civilisation, the Aztec empire comprised around 25 million people in Central America. At its peak the Aztec Empire had 371 vassal cities yielding tribute.
This digression -outlining some of the main public works of two of the major civilisations in Ibero America- was necessary in order to emphasize the existence of a significant surplus production. This mirrors the existence of an articulated organisation of labour, which played an important role in shaping the development of the colonial system of production.
       The most developed civilisations in the continent can be grouped into three zones.
       a) Mesoamerica, which comprised most of contemporary Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
       Aztec and Maya civilisations developed here, covering an area of 400,000 square kilometers each. The Spaniards established contact with the Aztecs in 1519 and with the Mayas in 1527. Big-city builders, they had written language with an extensive use of paper. Arithmetic and astronomy were highly developed. They were class societies with a strong state apparatus and a comprehensive social organisation.
       b) Caribbean America, which comprised the Antilles islands, Costa Rica, panama and the Atlantic coastal areas of Colombia, Venezuela and Guyana. These were societies at a stage of tribal organisation, classless, and, most probably influenced by the Mayas -the only maritime people in the continent,

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   67

developing a more sophisticated organisation of labour. The Arawaks, in the Antilles islands, were manioc and maize cultivators and the most developed in the area. The Spaniards had their first contacts with them in 1492; in a few years all the men had been killed and the women became slaves. The Caraib survived longer, attempting to fight against the Spanish invasion.
       c) Andean America, which comprised the Inca Empire -from Colombia to Chile, the territory between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It was the site of the most developed society of the continent before the arrival of the Spaniard conquerors. And, as in the Aztec region, the remains of their organisation survived until the XX century. A class society, it had the strongest state apparatus in the Americas. The Spanish conquerors came into contact with the Incas in 1532.
       A fourth zone must be added to the above three: the coastal areas of Brazil, the entire territory of Argentina, Uruguay, and the southern part of Chile, where nomadic hunters lived in primitive tribal organisations. Those tribes never were subjected by the Portuguese and Spanish conquerors, and armed struggle against them lasted more than three centuries, notably in the case of the Araucans in Chile, who were finally defeated around 1870.
       Although the technological level of these indigenous civilizations was very low, their standard of social organisation was high, being capable of building gigantic irrigation works, roads, cities and cultivating food surpluses sufficient for feeding a huge non-labouring class.

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As J. P. Cole stresses: "irrigation was practised in parts of Mexico, coastal Peru and Chile, and the Andes"..."towns of considerable size could be supported in all these areas"..."the technology was far behind that of contemporary Europe, China or even much of Africa. According to their physical conditions, agricultural communities depended heavily on one particular basic food: maize in Mexico, Central America, the Islands, parts of South America; roots, especially manioc, in Amazonia; and potatoes and other tubers in the Andes. Beans, cacao, groundnuts, tomatoes and many tropical fruits were also available, while cotton was used as a fibre, maguey in Mexico as a beverage, tobacco for smoking, and the coca leaf in the Andes as a special luxury for the privileged, later to be greatly abused in the colonial period. The only important domesticated animals were the dog which was widespread, the turkey in Mexico, and the llama and alpaca in the Andes. The llama was easily tamed and widely used for carrying goods, for its wool, its dung and on occasions its meat. Animals were not used for draught purposes, either for ploughing or transport, the wheel not being in use; outside the Andean region all goods were conveyed by humans, and this greatly limited the distance over which most goods could be carried. The waterways were hardly used for transport in the civilised areas, and coastal navigation was very limited"..."One great weakness of the Amerindians was their failure to develop metal goods, though bronze was made and silver and gold ornaments were widely produced. Without metal tools stone could only be shaped by harder stone and wood could only be worked with difficulty. The Andes of Peru and Bolivia were almost treeless anyway. The arms that were in use when the Europeans came were quite inadequate against the crossbow, musket, and armour of the Spaniards, while the horse gave the Spaniards great mobility and the trained hunting dog

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   69

was also used against the Indians during the decade of the conquest."(21)
       One hundred years after the first contact between indigenous societies and the Luso-Spanish conquerors -around 1600- the colonial system assumed a definitive shape, of which the former Aztec, Maya and Inca Empires formed the core of the economic activities.
       I will thus concentrate on the description of these particular amerindian societies.

THE MAYA EMPIRE

       The Maya people's development spans from c. 2000 B.C. to 1467-1482 A.D., when great hurricanes destroyed cities, houses and people, and the yellow fever decimated the population, which abandoned whole areas. Even so, the Spanish conquerors had to fight for 15 years -from 1527 to 1542- to defeat the Maya armies. From 1250 onwards, the Mayas spread into Mexico and their canoes traded from Tampico to Panama. For Maya civilisation this was the age of metals: gold, copper, silver. The great period of Maya trade expansion was from 1300 to 1440.
       In this period money -in the form of cacao beans- appeared in order to facilitate trade. The Spanish catholic bishop Diego de Landa, who accompanied the white warriors in their war of conquest wrote: "cacao was the gold of this country...and it serves for money in the plaza...of Chichen Itza"..."A rabbit was worth ten cacao beans, a pumpkin four, a slave one hundred (the amount of cacao that would make about twenty-five cups of chocolate)..."..."Maya public women, always around the markets...gave their bodies for a price...

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he who wants them for his lustful use can have a run for eight or ten cacao beans...". (22)
       The trade appears quite impressive if we think on some isolated figures. For instance post-hispanic tribute lists record that twenty-six villages in the Maya province of Mani paid an annual tribute of 13,480 cotton mantas, each 16 yards long by 24 inches wide. This was 215,680 yards of cotton fabric from this small area alone!". (23)
       The Maya had a well-defined social structure, which was mirrored in the way they built their huge cities: in the middle of the town were temples surrounded by big plazas; around this religious centre were the houses of the lords and priests, and then came the houses of the most important officials. In a third circle were the homes of the rich men. Fourth, the houses of the merchants...and at the outskirts of the town were the houses of the direct-labourers (artisans and tillers).
       There is no direct evidence concerning the form of government and social organisation of Maya society, mainly because the Spaniard catholic priests who accompanied the conquerors destroyed all Maya books and historical records which were kept in the temples. Nevertheless, it can be accurately stated that Maya society was composed of a noble class, from which all the office-holders were selected, and at the bottom, the mass of the people, along with a multitude of slaves mainly used for heavy manual labour such as fishermen, paddlers, and cargo carriers. Women slaves had to help in tasks such as drawing water, grinding maize, and dyeing cloth.

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      It is almost certain that the community was organised into clans, and that each member of such a clan was part of an earth cell. The direct labourers paid taxes -either as a portion of the crops, or through the cultivation of the fields in the form of labour tax. Judging by the size of the plots the direct labourers were assigned by the priests -four hundred square feet- it can be said that the main form of tribute was labour tax performed in noble's and priest's land. (24)
       To summarize: The Mayas regarded land as a communal property, administered by the state. Appropriation of surplus-labour by non-labourers took the form of taxes in kind or in labour. Thus, non-labourers appeared as a component part of a collective expropriator of surplus-labour: the state. At the same time, communal organisation was still partly based on kinship relations -for instance, the noble class in the Maya city-state was known by the name of "those who have father and mother", a clear reference to kinship.
       If we refer to Godelier's concept that "the very essence of the Asiatic mode of production is the existence of primitive COMMUNITIES in which ownership of land is comunal and which are still partly organised on the basis of kinship relations, combined with the existence of State power, which expresses the real or imaginary UNITY of these communities, CONTROLS the use of essential economic resources and DIRECTLY APPROPRIATES part of the labour and production of the communities which it dominates" (25), it could be said that Maya society was based on the Asiatic mode of production.

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       Furthermore, in Maya society there was a clear exploitation of man by man, and appearance of an exploiting class without the existence of private ownership of land. It is also possible to conclude that the Maya's dominant class -composed mainly of nobles and priests- developed from a minority who performed a specific social function during the existence of clan communities. That is, the warriors who defended the community from the predatory expeditions of other communities, and priests who interceded between the farmers and the gods in order to raise better crops -especially through the use of astronomical observations and the empirical study of water resources. The gradual transformation of this social function -performed by a social minority- into an exploitative function, led the classless communities towards a form of class society without private ownership of land. The emergent dominant class thus played the role of a collective exploiter, guardian and protector of the community through the use of the state.
       (Modern versions of this form of class society without private ownership of means of production (land among them), are the bureaucratic socialist systems (Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, etc.) where also we have the emergent dominant class (whose core is the membership of the communist parties) playing the role of a collective exploiter, guardian and protector of the community through the use of the state).
       "In the Asiatic mode of production, the State is the owner of the land, inasmuch as it personifies all the communities, and the exploitation of the peasants is collective. The dependence of the individual in relation to a State official is indirect and is mediated by the relationship of dependence of his community of origin to the State which the official represents" (26). In Maya society, all the officials were members of the noble class, and the priests were part of the State personified in the HALACH UINIC, who was "father and lord (god)" at the same time.
       We thus find in Maya society "the combination of communal relations of production with embryonic forms of the exploiting classes and of the State" (Godelier), which constitutes a form of transition from

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classless to class society, but, in an early stage in the Maya case.

AZTEC EMPIRE

Aztec history began rather late, when migratory tribes enter the valley of Anahuac in 1168 A.D. In 1486 there was evidence of Aztec merchants trading in Honduras and Nicaragua, and military conquests stretching into the Pacific coast of Guatemala. "The community, not the individual, owned the land"..."An Indian was born into a clan or calpulli. A calpulli was a group of families forming a clan which owned certain lands communally. A married man was lent his piece of land directly from the clan. No one had title to the land he worked, he was allowed only the produce of it"..."The Aztec clan system was not as rigid as the Peruvian system of the ayllu, which was over-organized"...But, "the calpulli, moved as a social unit"... "Taxes were paid in service"..."The tribal council divided the land among the clans and the leaders of each in turn apportioned its share among the heads of families justly and equitably". (27)
       At the time of the Spanish conquest a distinctive social stratification existed comprising two major sets: those who were taxpayers and those who were not.
       The taxpayers were the actual labourers, whose surplus-labour was capable of sustaining the entire state apparatus, the king's family, the nobility, the soldiers, the priests and a particular social sector, the merchants, who had the status of state officials, and were traders (pochtecas) who had their own guilds, their own gods, and were above

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the laws that applied to the vast majority. Commerce was exclusively the preserve of the state.
       Below the direct labourers were the mayeques (labourers from the defeated peoples) and the slaves who were the private property of their lords.
       Non-taxpayers formed the ruling class, or nobility, composed of four main groups:
1) The supreme chiefs and their sons.
2) The chief-soldiers in the service of the supreme chiefs.
3) The local administrators of communities.
4) The priests.
       Taxpayers were members of the calpulli, who did the actual work, and were divided into peasants, artists and artisans. The direct labourers were "free workers", in the sense that the expropriation of their surplus-labour took the form of taxes to the state, and not compulsive plunder. Nobility, in compensation for the services given to the supreme chief-state, were allotted land, personal services and part of the tribute in kind paid by the peasants and artisans. The artists and artisan's tribute took the form of labour put at the service of the priestly stratum.(28)
Aztec society similarly exhibited the basic features of the Asiatic mode of production: "the State and the dominant class intervene directly in the conditions of production; in the organisation of major projects, the correspondence between productive forces and relations of production is made direct"..."the special advantages accruing to this minority, nominally as a result of services rendered to the communities, become obligations with no counterpart, i.e., exploitation. The land of these communities is often expropriated to become the ultimate property

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   75

of the king, who personifies the higher community. We therefore have exploitation of man by man, and the appearance of an exploiting class without the existence of private ownership of the land." (29)
       As compared with the Mayas, the Aztecs were at a more advanced stage of subdivision of the land, appearing as a probable trend in the development of the nobility's land being transformed into private ownership, in a transition to a feudal mode of production. (30)

THE INCA EMPIRE

       The first recorded lord-Inca was in 1100 A.D., with a city-state organisation in Cuzco. By 1480, the Inca army was building roads leading into Chile, preparatory to conquest. By 1492 an area of Chile was conquered to the Maule river. In 1498, the Incas extended the conquest beyond Quito into Colombia, and completed the Andean road from Quito to Talca (Chile), a distance of 3,250 miles. In 1527 the Spanish conquerors arrived in Peru, and in 1533 they assassinated the lord-Inca Atahualpa. The most outstanding social organisation of labour in the New World thus fell instact into Spanish hands.
       Lord-Inca was the supreme chief of the State and the human incarnation of god (the Sun) on the earth. As such, he was the supreme civil, religious and military chief. The empire was divided into four provinces (suyu), which were named after cardinal points with their centre of reference in Cuzco, the capital of the empire. Four roads left Cuzco, each going to the farthest points of each province: Anti-suyu (east), which included the jungle and high mountains, was harassed by attacks from the only partially pacified tribes of the area; Conti-suyu (west), embraced the conquered coastal former empires from the now Lima Valley to Arequipa in the south; Colla-suyu (south), was

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   76

the largest province, composed of southern andean Peru, lake Titicaca, and regions in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina; Chincha-suyu (north), comprised all the land and tribes which lay to the north, up to the Anscamayo River in Colombia. Each suyu was governed by a capac, who was a relative of the Inca. The four capac formed the supreme council of the State (of the Inca). The suyu was divided into ten districts, each of them having over ten thousand workers, under a homo-curaca (district-governor). Each district was composed of many villages -tribal villages- and each village comprised a number of clans, headed by patrilineal families, named ayllu. The ayllu was the basic social unit, ruled by an elected leader and guided by a council of old men. (31)
       The economic organisation was so tight, that all manual work was assigned by the local authorities as representatives of the State. In turn the political organisation reflected the economic pattern. At the base of this pyramid was the able-bodied male worker, named a puric, literally, an able-bodied, taxpaying peasant. Ten puric were controlled by a "straw boss" (conka-camayoc in quechua); ten of these basic groups had a foreman (pacha-curaca); ten foremen were ruled by a supervisor, ideally the headman of a large village (mallcu); and ten mallcu had a district-governor (homo-curaca), who was actually the chief of the tribe. Inca officials informed the Spaniards that each tribe normally included ten thousand puric, or male workers (32). Ten homo-curaca were ruled by a provincial governor. And the four province governors were controlled by the lord-Inca.
       Alongside this decimal-shaped pyramidal pattern, the puric were classified by age, in order to assign suitable manual work to them. This immense task of organisation and supervision was carried out by

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a huge bureaucracy. According to Inca's records, there were 1,333 officials for every 10,000 people. That is, 13.33% of the population was a member of the bureaucracy! (33)
       As mentioned previously, the basic social unit was the ayllu, which had a definite territory and those living within its boundaries received "loans" of land to sustain themselves and their families. There was no individual ownership of the land.
       It is clear cut that the Inca state was not only the regulator, protector, administrator and direct manager of the social productive life of the society. It was, at the same time, a compulsive apparatus to oblige every able-bodied labourer to produce to the best of his/her ability.
       The communal organisation of the clan, the ayllu, was the basic structural unit of this compulsive system of production in which surplus-labour was appropriated by the "protectors", the men who had the social function of organising the defence, production and enlargement of Inca society. These men occupied the State and the bureaucracy -in other words, the Inca nobility, both civil and religious. For the common men and women in Inca society, the ayllu was the earth-cell where they were born, reared, and buried. There was no escape from it. The ayllu gave them security, but the price of this was absorption into the State.
       The social structure based on this particular form of labour organisation produced a society divided into two distinct strata: taxpaying and non-taxpaying. The latter group formed the ruling class. Within this stratum, there were two levels of rulers: the Incas and the Incas "by privilege" (the curacas). The Incas had their own ayllu, and the most important officials, administrators, officers and priests

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were drawn from this. The Inca ayllu had their territorial base in the capital city, Cuzco. They formed the high nobility physically differentiated from common people and lower nobility by their pierced ears.
       The lower nobility, Incas "by privilege", who were called curacas, were chosen from the upper strata of non-Inca ayllu, and from the chiefs of defeated peoples. At the same time, the members of the Inca bodyguards -about 10,000 in number- formed part of this lower nobility. They were the only professional army in the empire, and served as cadres for the agrarian militia.
The ruling class was thus a civil, military, and religious bureaucracy, which administered every detail of the system of production, having the right to appropriate the collective surplus-labour produced by the direct-labourers.
       The peasantry performed labour-service in various forms: agriculture work, artisan work, and military service.
       When the Spanish arrived, this system of production was in a process of evolution towards an increasing utilisation of a particular form of individual labour.
       Individual labourers no longer attached to their ayllu, were called YANACONAS. They probably came initially from the ranks of prisoners of war and criminals, but eventually they were farmers taken from their ayllu, to serve noble families tilling the land of the priests and high nobles. As Metraux accurately observes:
"The increasingly important part played by the YANACONAS under the empire is only to be explained on the grounds that their efficiency was superior to that obtained by the traditional system of forced

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   79

labour. By depriving them of some of their members, the Inca weakened the communities and initiated a revolution which, had it continued, might well have changed the structure of the empire. It would have tended to become, instead of a grouping of largely autonomous rural collectives, a kind of 'pre-feudal empire' in which nobles and officials would have owned great estates worked by serfs or even slaves." (34)
       We thus appear to have a transitional process of labour moving from a collective dependence to a personal dependence, as estates belonging to the Inca and his ayllu increasingly became the personal property of the nobles of the empire. This phenomenon is extremely important for understanding the evolution set in motion by the collision between Iberian and American indigenous societies in the XVI century.
       As has been previously mentioned, the mainstay of the colonial system of production was built on the territories that formerly belonged to the Aztec, Maya and Inca societies. Of these three, two -the Aztec and the Inca- played a major role in the early stages of colonial production. Thus, the features of those two societies had considerable importance on whatever appeared afterwards as new features of a novel organisation of labour in the colony.
       We have seen that both Aztec and Inca systems of production had the common characteristic of being based upon a collective ownership of the land, a strong State apparatus, and in a period of transition from a classless to class society, with a mode of distribution of surplus- labour determined by the existence of antagonistic social classes, each separately grouping non-labourers and direct labourers. These societies were thus based on a specific mode of production which we can loosely term as "asiatic mode of production". The most important

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finding, as far as the analysis here is concerned, however, is that both Aztec and Inca societies were at a stage of development in which some forms of the tendency towards a private ownership of the land and/or to personal dependence were appaearing, weakening the collective system of production. Consequently, the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived on the continent at the moment when Aztec and Inca labour organisation was in a process of dissolution. This organisation was no longer capable of supporting the needs of increased production, triggered by the development of commerce in the Aztec case, and by the needs of the ruling class in the Inca case.
The organisation of labour based upon collective dependence had reached its maximum capacity in the region and was in the initial stage of a process of disintegration. At this particular stage, the Spanish entered, and tried to base the entire colonial system of plunder of surplus-labour upon a collective organization of direct labourers in the encomienda system. The conquerors and colonisers thus pushed forward the process of disintegration, since they increased the amount of surplus-labour required from the indigeneous communities, and further weakened their provision of manpower, by diverting indian labourers from farming into mining. Consequently this system was ultimately bound to disintegrate, and there was a need to find a more suitable organisation of labour - this led to the creation of the hacienda.
To summarize, we can see from the above that the process of decline of the indigeneous system of production was another important factor in the process by which merchant's capital, together with Absolutism as a stage in the dissolution of the western feudal mode of production, played an important role in necessitating a new form of labour organisation.

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        Before going on to examine this process in greater detail in the next chapter of this first Section, we need to outline the other actor in the collision: the Iberian society in the XIV-XV centuries.

SPAIN'S ABSOLUTIST STATE.

        Seigneural Castile and Aragon were the two kingdoms upon which the Spanish Absolutist State was built. In the same year that Columbus invaded the New World (1492), the royal armies of Castile and Aragon defeated the last moorish stronghold in the Iberian peninsula and submitted the moorish peasants to serfdom and/or slavery.
         Therefore, the first decades of conquest and colonisation in the New World coincided with the stabilisation of property and the rise of the Castilian and Aragonese aristocracy. The social structure in the Peninsula was distinctly feudal, as Vives describes it:
         "More than 80% of the total Spanish population were peasants. Urban workers, including Jews, conversos, and so on, amounted to 10 or 12% before the expulsion. The urban middle class, counting citizens, merchants, and ecclesiastics, made up some 3 to 5%. And finally the nobles, taking together the aristocracy of both Castile and Aragon, represented less than 2%, divided into 5,000 magnates (dukes, counts, barons, etc.), 60,000 knights, hidalgos, and so on, and 60,000 urban patricians, or aristocrats of the cities. These 125,000 individuals were at the summit of the social scale and controlled the country from above" (35)
          The nobles owned 97% of the land, of which, "45% belonged to bishopries, high ecclesiastics, cathedral, chapters, canonries, the urban aristocracy, and the knights. The rest belonged to the grandees and formed true latifundia" ..."the remaining 3% had to be shared by

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   82

some 4 or 5 million Castilians" and Aragoneses. (36). The new monarchy thus ruled the country in a sort of partnership with the aristocratic class. The nobility, the church and the crown shared the appropriation of the surplus labour, both domestic and Spanish American taking around one third each. The most important military, diplomatic, religious and administrative positions were always held by the grandees, and the nobility and clergy were exempted from taxation. Even in the XVII century, the Crown extended seigneurial jurisdictions to the nobility, which one hundred years previously had granted the immobilisation of rural property through the device of the mayorazgo.
         In the towns, by establishing a constricting guild system, the crown weakened the development of a nascent urban industry. Conversely, it protected southern latifundists, granting wide privileges to the pastoral interests of the aristocratic wool cartel in the countryside, (the Mesta), leading to a disastrous waste of land, economic crisis, widespread unemployment, and heavy feudal rents on seigneural lands.
         Anderson aptly defines the new Spanish monarchy in saying that "no other major Absolutist State in Western Europe was to be so finally noble in character, or so inimical to bourgeois development. The very fortune of its early control of the mines of America, with their primitive but lucrative economy of extraction, disinclined it to promote the growth of manufactures or foster the spread of mercantile enterprise within its European empire"... "The Castilian State machine was rationalised and modernised, but the new monarchy never counterposed it to the aristocratic class as a whole" ..."More significant , however, was the fact that the Spanish monarchy's most fundamental victory over corporate resistance to royal absolutism in Castile - indeed its only actual armed contest with any opposition in that realm- was the military defeat of the towns (the comunero revolt

Latin America: blockages to development                                                   83

of 1520-1), rather than nobles. Nowhere else in Western Europe was this true of nascent absolutism: the primary pattern was the suppression of aristocratic rather than burgher revolts, even where the two were closely mingled. Its triumph over the Castilian communes, at the outset of its career, was to separate the course of the Spanish monarchy from its Western Counterparts thereafter" (37)
        Thus, the Spanish Absolutist State appeared to be the most feudal state in Western Europe. As such it administered its colonial empire in the New World. The mercantilist economy, common to all Absolutist State, took a particular form under the Spanish Crown: gold and silver flowed from the Americas in such amounts, permitting an aggressive Spanish foreign policy based on a permanent troop mobilisation throughout Europe. Gold and silver from the Americas financed most of the making of the Hapsburg empire in Europe, since these metals provided monetary wealth in a mercantilist world -or at least European- economy. Monetary wealth of this order meant that the Spanish monarchy became capable of financing huge armies without burdening the ruling class with more taxation. In other words without the danger of opposition to that ruling class, and, most importantly, without the necessity to develop the production of commodities to cope with the State's need for more revenue. This thereby granted the feudal aristocracy a longer span of life.
         Consequently, in Spain and Portugal, due to the existence of its colonial empire, the dissolving effects of merchant capital's domination in the western feudal mode of production were delayed. On the other hand, these absolutist monarchies depended on the inflow of gold and silver. Hence there was a constant pressure on Iberoamerican colonialists to plunder more precious metals. As a result of this, there was

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constant pressure on Amerindian labourers to move from agriculture to mining. In turn, the communal system of production in Ibero America, already in an early process of disintegration in the eve of the Ibero conquest, suffered an added stress, tending to collapse. From this, the decadence of the encomienda system, which eventually became a transitional organisation of labour between indigenous communal production, submitted to tribute by the conquerors, and the hacienda system. With this event, the mode of appropriation of surplus-labour in the colonies underwent a fundamental change, which meant that the mode of production dominant there changed, as I shall elaborate in the next chapter. (38)

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NOTES

First Section
Chapter One

1) Sergio Bagu, "Economia de la Sociedad Colonial", Buenos Aires, 1950, pp. 39-68.

2) Karl Marx, "Capital", Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1977, Vol. III, pp. 326-328.

3) Ibid., Chapter XX: "Historical facts about merchant's capital", pp. 323-337.

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4) Ibid., pp. 331-332. It is evident that by the "modern world", Marx refers to Western Europe, where merchant's capital domination actually did result in the capitalist mode of production. Giving to those words a general meaning as referring to anywhere in the world would be to misunderstand the main tenets of Marx's theory developed in CAPITAL. The most fundamental idea from the above quotation is that the process of dissolution started by the domination of merchant's capital do not lead necessarily to one and the same type of mode of production, but to different modes of production depending upon the socio-economic structures present in the social formations penetrated by merchant's capital, and the stage of development of those social formations.

5) Harry Magdoff, "Imperialism: A Historical Survey", in MONTHLY REVIEW, May 1972, p. 8.

6) "...at the same time dominance of artillery and musketry, both on the high seas and on the battlefield, meant closer links between military power and manufacturing potential" ( "The Fontana Economic History of Europe", Collins, London, 1974, Vol. 2, p. 8 )

7) H. A. L. Fisher, "A History of Europe", Edward Arnold and Co., London, 1974, pp. 320-321.

8) Ibid., pp. 314-315.

9) Ibid., p. 333.

10) Perry Anderson, "Lineages of the Absolutist State", NLB, London, 1974, p. 8.

11) Ibid., pp. 20, 23, 24.

12) Ibid., p. 17.

13) K. Marx,"Capital", Vol. III, p.797.

14) F. Engels, "Anti-Duhring", Progress Publisher, Moscow, 1947, p. 126.

15) P. Anderson, op. cit., p. 57.

16) That both were factors within a transitional period from one mode of production to another does not matter here, because in the New World there were different modes of production from those in Western Europe. Thus, the most important feature was that merchant's capital and Absolutism tried to impose on the New World the social relations of production that were dominant at that time in Western Europe, and not the social relations of production of a mode of production still not totally developed.

17) Solon Barraclough, "The Agrarian Problem", in LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN. A HANDBOOK, by Claudio Veliz, A. Blond, London, 1968, pp. 487-488.

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18) Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, "The Ancient Sun kingdoms of the Americas", Paladin, Herts., England, 1917, pp. 76-77-80.

19) See Henri Lehmann, "Les civilisations precolmbiennes", Presses Universitaires de France, 1961, Paris, p. 101.

20) Von Hagen, op. cit., p. 309.

21) J. P. Cole, "Latin America. An Economic and Social Geography", Butterworths, London, 1965, pp. 73-74.

22) As quoted by Von Hagen, op. cit. p. 156.

23) Von Hagen, op. cit. p. 155.

24) "The lower man is convinced that the gods are the owners of the land and that the priests in parcelling it out are acting on behalf of the gods. The various clans are allotted areas of land by the temple-city councillors (among the Aztecs actual maps drawn on amatl paper gave the rebus names of the owners)... Among the Mayas, each family was assigned a piece of land of four hundred square feet, a hun uinic, measured with a twenty-foot measuring tape. We are ignorant of further details. Whether the land was held in trust by the ruler, as among the Incas, and was returned to the clan on the decease of the user to be reallotted, or whether it belonged to the calpulli, as among the Aztecs, we just do not know -at least no more than Diego de Landa, who says, '...each married man with his wife... sow a space four hundred square feet...which they call a hun uinic, measured with a rod of twenty feet'...(Von Hagen, op. cit. p. 138)
Maya society was composed of a federation of city-states, as in Greece. Around A.D. 800 there were more than three million Mayas in this type of society. Maize growers, they paid taxes in the form of labour in time of peace, and as soldiers in time of war.
At the head of the Maya city-state stood a chief, called a halach uinic (the "real man", the "true man"). Even when the office was heriditary, it seems like he was not an Absolutist monarch: there existed a state council composed of nobles and priests who advised the halach uinic in his tasks of direct domestic and foreign policy, and collecting tribute, and in selecting batab, or direct village chiefs, who were in charge of local government, local collecting of tribute and the local command of the army. The batab did not collect taxes for himslef, but the community had to house, feed and sustain him and his family, along with the local military chiefs (nacom), and the police corps (tupiles).
It seems that the totality of the land of the city-state belonged to the community, but was administered by the halach uinic, who allotted land to the nobility and the priests, and the latter distributed part of this land between the direct labourers for their subsistence tilling. So, the direct labourers had

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to till their four hundred square feet plot, priests' fields and nobles' fields, and halach uinic's fields.
The direct labourers were the tax-paying citizens. The taxes took the form of labour, military services, and in some cases part of the crops.
In addition to the landed non-tax paying citizens -the non-labourers, composed of the halach uinic and his family, the nobles and priests- there were the merchants, called ppolms, who constituted an estament with their own god and had special social privileges. They operated canoe fleets and maintained warehouses for exchange along the Gulf coast and the interior of the country.
The lowest social stratum was the slaves, who generally were prisoners of war or convicts. They were treated as commodities.

25) Maurice Godelier, "The concept of the Asiatic mode of production and Marxist models of social evolution", included in "Relations of Production. Marxist approaches to economic historiography", David Seddon (ed.), Frank Cass, 1978, p. 212.

26) Ibid., p. 229.

27) Von Hagen, op. cit. pp. 36-46
Added to this, the members of the clan had to pay tribute-tax in the form of levies of manpower for public buildings and collective work in the fields of the Aztec king. Every six months, 371 vassal cities yielded tribute of products to the Aztec capital (Ciudad de Mexico), Tenochtitlan.
"Members of the clan assisted one another, and when a farmer-warrior was away to the wars, his fields were cultivated by others of his clan". The Aztec empire traded extensively but it did not utilise money, only barter. The trade of slaves -both men and women- was common. (Ibid., p. 46)
At the apex of society was "One Who Speaks", the ruler of the Aztec, who was elected from amongst the nobles. Once elected, this "king" became a semidivinity. He was high priest, supreme commander of the army, and head of state but advised by a council. At the bottom of the social pyramid were the farmers, the only tax-paying citizens, and below them, the slaves. The economy was supported by farm labour, not slave work.
Although land was communally owned, its distribution for State requirement