At 05:49 PM 10/19/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I've been exchanging email with Mark M. Smith, the author of "Debating
>Slavery". According to Smith, the debate is mainly between "Marxists" like
>Eugene Genovese on one side and non-Marxists like Fogel, Engerman, and
>Oakes on the other. The former tend to put forward the notion that the
>Slavocracy was precapitalist and "paternalistic". The other camp, drawing
>from econometrics, tries to show that the plantation system was both
>profitable and efficient on capitalist terms.
I'm not familiar with Smith's book, so it's possible that he's right, but I
don't think the distinction as you summarize it is very good, because there
are a lot of other points of view. For example, Gavin Wright's book THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COTTON SOUTH is both econometrics-oriented and
non-apologetic (unlike Fogel & Engerman). (Along with Mike Meeropol, I
really like that book, since it's a case of a NC economist who ends up
presenting what's a lot like a Marxian political-economic analysis, though
his emphasis is quite different.) It seems a mistake to divide the world
into two camps in this case, as Charles notes.
Genovese was a Marxist for a long time and did describe slavery as
paternalistic, but in his earlier work was very clear that slavery was
quite exploitative. Later on, he got hooked on the idea that the
pre-capitalist & paternalistic "civilization" of the slaveocrats was in
some ways superior to the anarchy of capitalist production and the
corruption of modern life.
I think it's right to describe the slave system (the slave
plantation/cotton complex) as profitable and slave-owners as
profit-seeking. A certain amount of paternalism is part of that system,
since the owners don't want their property to be unemployed or to
"depreciate" too quickly (by profitability standards). (Of course, if the
price of cotton (and similar slave-produced crops) falls, it's very hard to
make a profit off of slaves. In some places in Latin America and the
Caribbean, the slave-owners responded by deciding they didn't want to
support a lot of underemployed or unemployed slaves, so they freed them
voluntarily, though the "freedmen" didn't do well after that, since they
were often saddled with debt.)
In my opinion, antebellum US slavery was not itself a capitalist mode of
production but was part of the world capitalist system at the time. Wrote
Marx: "... as soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower
forms of slave-labor ... are drawn into a world market dominated by the
capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for
exports develops into their principal interest, the civilized [i.e.,
capitalist] horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of
slavery .... Hence the Negro labor in the southern states of the American
Union preserved a moderately paternalistic character as long as production
was chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements.
But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those
states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his
life in seven years of labor, became a factor in a calculated and
calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a
certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of
surplus-value itself." [Capital, vol. I, Penguin/Vintage, p. 345, US spelling.]
I read this as saying that these slaves produced surplus-value (i.e., that
their surplus-labor produced a commodity), but I don't see it as a form of
capitalism itself, since according to Marx, capitalism involves workers not
only being (a) free from the privileges of ownership of the means of
production, but also (b) free to move between employers, unlike under
serfdom or slavery (though obviously the existence of the reserve army
makes such mobility expensive to them).
>... While not gainsaying the enormous contribution of these two, my
>question is whether anybody knows of a Marxist study of slavery that is in
>line with Eric Williams and the Monthly Review school?
Perhaps Wallerstein has something to say. His bibliography is very
complete, so he should have some good sources of the type you seek.
>My interest in these questions is tied to research I did last year on the
>Brenner thesis and is particularly focused on the question
>whether free labor is a precondition for capitalism. Williams, who was
>strongly influenced by CLR James, argues that it was not and that
>capitalism and slavery were inter-related....
These are two different points. Marx, Brenner, I, and many others see
capitalism and slavery as inter-related, while Williams cites Marx as
saying that slavery promoted the primitive accumulation of capital. The
issue of whether or not "free labor" (with the dual freedom mentioned
above) is a precondition for capitalist development is another issue, a
very contentious one. It divides those who define capitalism simply as a
system of markets (as most NC economists do, if they use the c-word at all)
and those who define capitalism as a special kind of commodity production
-- generalized commodity production -- in which labor-power is a commodity,
as Marx, Lenin, Brenner, and I do. ("Generalized commodity production" is
Lenin's phrase. It differs from slavery in that under slavery, it's the
worker him or herself that's a commodity, as opposed to labor-power. For
labor-power to be a commodity, its owner must be free to sell to whomever,
while the worker must be its formal owner.)
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
