======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
On 10/16/14 8:23 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
This point is particularly important in the periphery where the workers
are generally drawn from rural areas. In other peripheral zones of the
capitalist world-economy, capitalists have benefited from a situation of
semi-proletarian labor, whereby peasant (originally men, but now
increasingly women) are forced (usually by imposition of monetized
taxes; e.g. the “hut tax”) to engage in wage labor in a mine,
plantation, or factory, while their families (the wife/wives and
children) engaged in the labors of social reproduction that made their
labor in the capitalist enterprises possible.
Yes, I have commented on the same tendency:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm
Was the mode of production in colonial Africa precapitalist or
capitalist? To begin with, we face something of the same problem that we
encountered with Spanish colonialism. In Africa, the Europeans insisted
on borrowing from the feudal lexicon, despite a clear capitalist agenda.
For example, the French counted on corvée labor to lay railway track or
perform other tasks associated with colonial infrastructure. Without
reliable rail lines, crops and minerals destined for the seaports would
languish at their source. Regardless of the label, such forced labor was
not only integral to the colonial capitalist system, it had the same
devastating impact on the local population as Spanish practices had
three centuries earlier. Colonial administrator Emile Baillaud reported
in 1905 that:
"At this moment in West Africa, the necessary hands . . . are easy to be
had; and also at the coast the towns overflow with men going about
looking for work. The captives having listened to our advice, and
finding the way to freedom without dying from hunger, have come in
numbers towards our enterprises, wherever it was possible to find work
with the Europeans. They not only leave their masters, but also their
countries."12
Without extra-economic compulsion, primitive accumulation would have not
taken place. The indigenous peoples would have subsisted through the
means available to them outside of the cash economy. If the colonial
powers had relied exclusively on market competition, the local
population would have found ways to ignore them.
One of the most infamous colonists, King Leopold of Belgium, saw himself
as following in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism. At the age of
twenty-seven, he visited Seville in March 1862 in order to study court
records preserved in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building. According
to Adam Hochschild:
"For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold,
silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years
before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be
gathered in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees,
government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural
drawings, having to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages,
among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made
the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of the
world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest whatever
in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a dedicated
scholar when it came to one subject, profits."13
When he wrote home to a friend, the monarch demonstrated that he
understood the goal was profit, not traditional values: "I am very busy
here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which
Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies." For Hochschild, the
monarch is a "man whose future empire would be intertwined with the
twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the
records of the conquistadors."
For all of its devotion to British exceptionalism, the Brenner thesis
would seem ill equipped to explain why British rule failed to abolish
extra-economic forms of coercion in its most important colonial holding:
South Africa. Indeed, it was here where non-market forms of exploitation
helped to successfully propel the nation into the front ranks of
capitalism on the continent.
In keeping with laws already enacted in the rest of the British Empire,
slavery was abolished in 1834. But the devotion to freedom was only
lukewarm. Great Britain soon found ways to reintroduce other forms of
labor conscription.14
Bristling at the abolition of slavery, Boer farmers withdrew into the
east and northeast, where they would be allowed to pursue religious
freedom while trafficking in human beings. Their KhoiKhoi slaves could
be relied on for the dirty work on their farms. According to Bernard
Magubane, "the Boers stood for outdated slavery on a petty scale, the
foundation of their patriarchal peasant economy, the British colonist
represented large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and Africans."15
For the British, abolitionism was not entirely altruistic. The Reverend
Thomas Farrell Buxton, a prominent abolitionist, explained his goals in
a letter to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the
Civilization of Africa:
"We determined to form two associations, perfectly distinct from each
other, but having one common object in view, putting an end to the slave
trade. One of these associations to be exclusively philanthropic in
character, and designed mainly to diffuse among the African tribes the
light of Christianity, and the blessing of civilization and
free-labour-the other to have a commercial character, and to unite with
the above objects the pursuit of private enterprise and profit."16
Emulating the old masters of the Spanish empire, British colonial
administrators in South Africa employed indigenous feudal institutions
on behalf of capitalist exploitation. The Spaniards made cunning use of
the Incan 'mi'ita' while the British co-opted local chiefs to supply
labor gangs. Peter Lionel Wickins writes:
"Some justification for the use of forced labour was found in tribal
custom, which allowed for service to a chief (tribute labour) or to the
community (communal labour). The purpose of tribute labour was to
support the chief in his office and to enable him to perform his public
duties, such as hospitality to strangers and the relief of the hungry in
time of dearth. But with the spread of a money economy chiefs became
acquisitive and the system was abused. Tribesmen found themselves
compelled to cultivate their chief's land, not in the tribal interest,
but purely for his personal gain; or even sent off to work as contract
labourers on the, mines, either individually or, as was sometimes the
case in South Africa, in age-regiments."17
Just one year after abolishing slavery, the British colonial government
in South Africa passed an ordinance in 1835 requiring ex-slaves to
become apprentices to their previous owners. The blacks reacted by
deserting or damaging property. The British followed up with a new
ordinance in 1841 that established criminal sanctions for breach of
contract, but this solution proved short-lived as well. The ruling class
next toyed with the idea of importing convicts from England, a practice
that had succeeded in Australia. Finally, they passed an 1853 ordinance
that provided means of subsistence and a small cash wage based on
contract. Violations of the contract were punishable by a stiff prison
sentence.
Despite verbal commitments to transforming South Africa along free
market lines, reality somehow fell short of the ideal. As happens almost
universally in colonial settings where there is a surplus of arable land
and a shortage of labor, the bourgeoisie resorts to extra-economic
coercion to extract raw materials for export. In South Africa, this took
the form of forced migrant labor, particularly in the gold mining
sector. In another volume, Wickins once again unveils the actual
practices that evolved despite the British verbal commitment to free labor:
"In the later nineteenth century, when the shortage of labour for White
enterprises was becoming acute, three forms of compulsion were
attempted: firstly, taxation - capitation (poll) or hearth (hut) tax -
which served a dual purpose of providing revenue and forcing Blacks to
earn sufficient cash to meet their obligations; secondly, so-called
squatters laws to restrict the number of Africans resident on European
farms; and thirdly, attempts to substitute individual tenure for
communal title in the reserves. To these forms of coercion must be added
the pass laws. These were not conducive to the labour mobility that
hard-pressed employers were anxious to foster, but they did give those
who had labour a hold on their workers. This control was strengthened by
other legislative measures, such as the Masters and Servants Laws and
the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911. The best-known example of a
labour tax was the annual poll tax (of 10 shillings) imposed by the Glen
Grey Act of 1894 in the Cape on all African men in certain districts who
were not freeholders or regular lessees or who had not served a
stipulated minimum period in wage labour during the year. The labour tax
was in fact ineffective and was repealed in 1905. The Act also
authorised the issue of individual title deeds in the Glen Grey district
near Queenstown, at least partly with the intention of forcing on to the
labour market those unable to acquire and exploit individual plots
efficiently. This part of its provisions, too, did not fulfil the hopes
placed in it. There was no marked drift from the countryside of people
deprived of access to land by the spread of individual tenure."18
The stakes were incalculable. According to South African economist, the
Witwatersrand would have yielded 6,000 pounds worth of gold if a
sufficient labor force had been deployed to dig it from the earth. The
reserves and the migrant-labor system made the realization of such a
bounty of surplus value possible. Migrant workers were snared in the
same web that colonists had set from the very beginning whenever they
initiated the process of primitive accumulation: they were forced to
seek work in the mines in order to avoid arrest for failure to pay
taxes. Ironically, Magubane cites Maurice Dobb, whom Brenner describes
as a forerunner, to explain the need for forced labor in South Africa:
"When the supply of labor for any new enterprise was insufficiently
plentiful, for example in mining, it was not uncommon for the Crown to
grant the right of impressments to the entrepreneur or to require that
convicts be assigned to the work under penalty of hanging if they were
refractory or if they absconded."19
The development of mining also created opportunities for the capitalist
class, especially in light of the inexplicable desire of native Africans
to subsist through farming rather than dig for diamonds or gold at a
pittance. This led to the establishment of a mixture of wage and forced,
contract labor. An 1872 proclamation declared that mine owners were
obligated to pay a wage to a miner, while he would be forced to carry a
pass when he was not at the site. Since diamonds were extremely
valuable, labor conditions became prison-like. All sorts of
extra-economic controls were instituted to keep workers in line. These
controls were utterly necessary for the growth of capitalism, since free
market compulsion would have not sufficed.
The biggest obstacle to the mine owners' plans, however, was the
relative prosperity of the African peasant who was able to not only
subsist on the fertile soil, but sell a surplus in the commercial
marketplace. This development was most pronounced in the Cape Colony.
Taking pity on the understaffed gold mining companies, the state enacted
a migrant labor system in the 1890s. Contracts to work in these
prison-like compounds were made more palatable through prostitution and
saloons (shebeens). And if an African preferred subsistence farming to
mining, legislation could bend his will to the greater good of
capitalist development. The Glen Gray Act of 1894 imposed a ten-shilling
tax on all men in the Cape colony who could not prove that they had been
in wage employment for three months in every year.
These sorts of laws persisted throughout the twentieth century as South
Africa was entering the ranks of the developed world. The vast wealth of
South Africa rests on mining and mining, which in turn rested on unfree
labor through the 1970s. Workers who quit a contract were characterized
as "deserters" by the authorities and subject to arrest. A boycott by
American unions finally abolished such "master and servants" acts, but
long after the damage had been done.
From the standpoint of class relations, contemporary South Africa and
colonial Spain have much in common. Capitalism is not about advanced
technology. Until relatively recent times, a miner worked with a pick
and a shovel. Nor is capitalism about "freedom". It is about producing
surplus value. If a work force is not available to work for a wage, then
the capitalist state will pass laws ensuring that various forms of
unfree labor keep the system going. It is our job as Marxists to develop
a class analysis that can maximize the power of the laboring classes
politically. Quibbling over whether the worker is really a worker or not
based on the peculiarities of a given country's history not only
constitutes a form of pedantic quibbling, it is a detour from our task
as revolutionaries.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
