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An article from Historical Materialism. 2013, Vol. 21 Issue 4 that
finally is available to me from the Columbia library electronically but
not unfortunately to the unwashed masses. This HM issue is devoted to a
symposium on Jairus Banaji's "Theory as History". Banaji is a critic of
Political Marxism.
The article was written by SeĢbastien Rioux, one of a legion of other
such critics. The abstract states:
"The theory of social-property relations, or political Marxism, has
argued that in contradistinction with pre-capitalist forms of
exploitation, capitalism is characterised by the separation of the
economic and the political, which makes surplus appropriation under this
system uniquely driven by economic coercion. In spite of political
Marxism's various strengths, this article argues that the paradigm puts
forward an ahistorical and sanitised conception of capitalism typical of
bourgeois economics, which is an outcome of its formal-abstractionist
approach to the concept of the mode of production and the separation
between theory and history that it operates. A more satisfactory
solution to political Marxism's inability to make sense of past and
present forms of coercion and violence under capitalism can be found in
jairus Banaji's emphasis on Marx's historical - rather than formal -
conception of the mode of production."
This was something that struck me the first time I began reading Robert
Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. The idea that 'extra-economic" coercion
is "outside" of capitalism that relies on market coercion struck me as
nonsensical when you consider the rise of modern South Africa as I tried
to point out in one of my first forays into this debate:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm
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.
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