ABSTRACT
The labor of the three is divided into necessary labor and surplus labor. Each mode of production – and of exploitation of labor – involves relations of production that are inherent to it, governed by their own, unmistakable laws. A “feudal/slaveholding” mode of production is merely a classificatory hybridism that circumvents the theoretical difficulty at issue. Stranger still is for someone to study the modes of production and to adopt as their primary criterion not the relations of production and productive forces, but the behavior of dominant classes in and of themselves. Preoccupied primarily with the various abolitionist processes, his view of slavery in the Antilles and Latin America is the result of a unilateral analysis based on the attitudes of the slaveholding classes. It is incoherent to overlook the fact that the objective laws of the slave economy in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were necessarily the same objective laws of the slave economy in Brazil and the Southern United States.
