On 2/4/21 9:31 AM, Alan Ginsberg wrote:
Genovese's "The World The Slaveholders Made" is an excellent source
for his views on the issues being discussed here. I think it's well
worth reading, whether or not you agree with his conclusions.
from http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/post1.htm
Post writes:
"A careful examination of Fogel and Engerman and other proponents of the
'planter capitalist' model's description of the plantation labour
process actually contradicts their claim that the planters responded to
competitive market imperatives in the same way as capitalists. The
labour process under slavery was organized to maximize the use of human
labour in large, coordinated groups under the continual supervision of
masters, overseers and drivers. As we shall see, the tools slaves used
were simple and virtually unchanged. Even with a detailed division of
tasks in planting and cultivation, such a labour process left the
masters few options to increase output per slave. Planters could either
increase the pace of work through punishments or rewards, increase the
amount of acreage each slave or slave-gang cultivated, increase the
number of slaves working by tapping the capacities to work of female and
juvenile slaves, or move the plantation to more fertile soil."
In the section on Genovese, we discover that his model of slavery
"derived from Weber" and that it prevented him from "developing a
consistent explanation of how slavery's social property relations block
relatively continuous labour-saving technical change." I, for one, was
rather surprised to see Genovese described in such terms because he
described himself as strongly influenced by Maurice Dobb in "The World
the Slaveholders Made". There Genovese makes the case for
"seigneuralism", a term that was meant to capture the archaic character
of the Southern plantation system but that relieved him from proving
that this super-exploitative, commodity-producing system was "feudal", a
static system based on the creation of use-values. He writes:
"Capitalism is here defined as the mode of production characterized by
wage labor and the separation of the labor force from the means of
production--that is, as the mode of production in which labor power
itself has become a commodity... Dobb, in Studies in the Development of
Capitalism, has brilliantly demonstrated the value of these definitions,
and we need not pursue the matter here beyond one point of special
relevance to the question of slavery. The great value of this viewpoint
lies in its focus on human relationships inherent in labor systems. As
such, it should be understood to transcend mere economic categories and
to define each mode of production as a social rather than as a narrowly
economic system."
For all of the seeming polarities between Engerman-Fogel and Genovese,
there were underlying affinities that Post ignores. I would suggest that
these affinities are symptomatic of an underlying malaise in a
scholarship that focuses on the ruling class, whether it is
'seigneurial' or capitalist.
The first evidence of such an affinity is a 1975 collection titled "Race
and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere" that was co-edited by Engerman
and Genovese and that contained presentations given at the U. of
Rochester in 1972 co-organized by the two professors. This is not just a
question of genial scholarly cooperation in a joint project involving
disparate interpretations. In Genovese's concluding remarks to the
conference, he leaves open the possibility that his own interpretation
could "absorb" the work of Engerman-Fogel despite some reservations
about their data on profitability.
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