a number of studies that explained the differences between British and American productivity almost entirely on that basis. [40] And there is no doubt that they apply with equal weight to the Russian economy today, for even if the eastern Europeans were to pool all their resources, they would still be able to command less than 20% of world production. Because of its historic relation to the world division of labour production is much more ruthlessly integrated in the remaining 80% of the world and this gives to the west an insuperable lead in productivity. Superimposed on this is the rapid centralisation – inside and also outside the state – in the west. Western capital, therefore, increasingly combines both the advantages of capital size and those of integratednot only in logic but also in time and space. Several examples immediately spring to mind in this respect. Two we have mentioned already: 19th-century American slavery and 18th-century Russian serfdom, neither of which Marx doubted to be (partially or wholly) capitalist and surplus-value producing. The fact that the cotton and the wheat were destined for sale in capitalist England, meant that the slave owners and the feudal landowners contributed to the pool of surplus products at the command of those with the money to purchase them. Through this exchange they became valorised with respect to all other commodities: the surplus products became surplus-values, and their owners became capitalists. But the workers who produced them did not thereby become wage-labourers.

The above conclusions are not just ours, but also