Paul Cockshott's message was very interesting. I know virtually nothing about
Classical slavery but North American slavery, IMHO, is a distinctly
non-capitalist mode of production which I feel BECAUSE OF ITS VERY SUCCESS
locked the south into a state of underdevelopment
I have deleted most of Paul's points but want to pick up on one:
>6) Since the remuneration of slave labour is very low, and since it
>is not paid for by the hour, the incentive to replace labour by
>machinery is not great. Thus although the large scale farms of
>Northern Gaul seem to have experimented with mechanical reapers
>and the like in the 4th century, slave economy never generated
>full scale industrial takeoff.
I feel G. Wright's _The Political Economy of the Cotton South_ provides a
framework for a mode of production analysis of the impact of slavery on the
South and the agricultural (independent) mode of production in the North
(west) [now the midwest] before 1860. Wright notes there was very little wage
labor available to family farms which meant agriculture in the north faced a
labor constraint. The availability of slave labor in the south (fueled by
population growth of slaves and the interregional slave trade as well as
migration to new, better, cotton growing land) meant no labor constraint. It
was, IMHO, this lack of labor constraint that reduced the incentive to replace
labor with machinery. Using existing techniques of production, land and labor
could expand proportionately. In the other agricultural regions, it was the
labor constraint that created the move to mechanize agriculture and search for
new technologies. In addition to this, the PROFITABILITY of using slavery in
cotton, reduced the utilization of slavery in industry. Robert Starobin's
_Industrial Slavery in the Old South_ showed that slavery was possible and
profitable in industry but unlike gang labor on plantations, free labor was a
SUBSTITUTE for slave labor in industry. So, when Cotton prices boomed in the
1850s, slaves were pulled out of industry back into cotton. There wasn't as
much demand for industrial products in southern agriculture anyway.
Wright demonstrates all this was data as well, he just doesn't formulate it in
mode of production terminology.
Mike
Mike Meeropol
(bitnet%"mmeeropo@wnec")
(in%"[EMAIL PROTECTED]")
