From Charles to Jim D.:
> >Accumulation necessarily entails creation of slave-labor, in the
>>metaphorical sense, as you put it. Non-wage or "slave" labor is a
>>necessary condition or feature of capitalism.
>
>I don't accept the "metaphorical sense" of slavery (as in "wage-labor =
>wage slavery" or "non-wage labor = slave labor") as a useful
>social-scientific concept, except in terms of rhetoric. It avoids the key
>question, leading to a lack of intellectual clarity.
>
>(((((((((((
>
>CB: I do. Thanks for the exchanges. My mind is much clearer on the
>exact concepts to make the definition of capitalism to include the
>combination wage-labor + slave/colonial/ below-wage labor. And this
>discussion has pushed a number of other supports for it in Marx.
>It's not rhetoric , it is scientific, factual and theoretical.
The use of the metaphor of "wage slavery" is a tricky question.
***** _The American Historical Review_ 105.2
The Big Picture: A Comment on David Brion Davis's "Looking at Slavery
from Broader Perspectives"
PETER KOLCHIN
...In fact, [David Brion] Davis repeatedly approaches the kind of
broader contextualization that I am suggesting, without fully
embracing it. He describes his lecture course as beginning with the
study of slavery in the Bible, which was only by the most generous of
definitions a product of the Atlantic world. And near the end of his
article, he raises the question of "the great overarching issues
regarding slavery, capitalism, and modernity"; pointing to the
existence of "virtual slaves" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he
asks, "what effect, if any, have the great nineteenth-century slave
emancipations had on twentieth-century forms of unfree labor?"
Davis's question about the relationship between nineteenth-century
slavery and more recent-slave-like-forms of human exploitation
clearly calls for more than an Atlantic perspective. It also calls,
I think, for more explicit examination of the status of these
exploited workers, and of precisely how and when they can be
considered to be "virtual slaves." In short, Davis is raising here
the complicated question of the meaning-or definition-of slavery, a
question far less self-evident than it at first appears.6 Clearly,
not all poorly paid, poorly treated workers should be regarded as
virtual slaves (although at various times, both defenders of slavery
and defenders of labor have found the notion of "wage slavery" to be
useful).7 Davis's assertion that "the twentieth century has clearly
witnessed more slavery than all the preceding centuries combined"
would seem to depend on a much more liberal definition of slavery
than that embraced by most historians, a definition in some ways
reminiscent of metaphorical use of the term by eighteenth and
nineteenth-century opponents of "tyranny," including resistance by
patriots during the American Revolution to "enslavement" by the
British.8....
...Peter Kolchin is the Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the
University of Delaware. His work focuses on American slavery and
emancipation in comparative perspective. Recent books include Unfree
Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987) and American
Slavery, 1619-1877 (1993). Kolchin is currently writing a
comparative study of emancipation and its aftermath in the United
States and Russia.
Notes
...6 Scholars have differed sharply over this seemingly simple
question. Orlando Patterson, for example, has challenged the
prevailing view (often implied rather than spelled out) that being
owned is "one of the constitutive elements" of slave status;
describing slaves as quintessentially outsiders, he defined slavery
as "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and
generally dishonored persons"; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death,
17, 13. Such an approach to defining slavery is most common among
those who see it as preeminently a system of marginality rather than
of labor exploitation; see, for example, Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne
Miers, "African 'Slavery' as an Institution of Marginality," in Miers
and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthroplogical
Perspectives (Madison, Wis., 1977), 3-81. But for assertion of
ownership of human property as central to slavery, see, for example,
Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in
Africa (Cambridge, 1983), 1; and Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia,
1450-1725 (Chicago, 1982), 29. Noting that "most dictionaries define
slaves as property, but most contemporary scholars lean toward natal
alienation," Martin Klein recently proclaimed, "I think that both are
correct"; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa
(Cambridge, 1998), 15. For an essay cautioning against attempting to
distill a universal meaning of slavery divorced from concrete
historical circumstances, see Peter Kolchin, "Some Recent Works on
Slavery Outside the United States: An American Perspective,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (October 1986), esp.
768-73.
7 See Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The
Anglo-American Context, 1830-1888 (Athens, Ga., 1979); David R.
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (London, 1991), esp. 65-92; Roediger, "Race, Labor, and
Gender in the Language of Antebellum Social Protest," in Engerman,
Terms of Labor, 168-87. Defenders of antebellum slavery routinely
insisted that Northern workers were less free than the South's
so-called slaves. No one took this argument further than Henry
Hughes, who renamed Southern slavery "warranteeism" and insisted that
the North's exploited workers were in fact the real slaves, but
numerous proslavery ideologues resorted to similar word games; see
Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought
in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981),
especially essays by William Harper (78-135), James Henry Hammond
(168-205), Henry Hughes (239-71), and George Fitzhugh (272-79). See
also Kenneth S. Greenberg, "The Proslavery Argument as an Antislavery
Argument," in Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture
of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), 85-103.
8 "Virtually every form of oppression has at one time or another been
described as a form of slavery," noted Eric Foner in The Story of
American Freedom (New York, 1998): "In the [Revolutionary] era's
political discourse, slavery was primarily a political category,
shorthand for the denial of one's personal and political rights by
arbitrary government" (29). For a new study that argues that
metaphorical "use of slavery as a propaganda vehicle encouraged, and
even legitimized, white American prejudices toward black Americans,"
see Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American
Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 1998), xiv. See also Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967), esp. 55-143, 232-46; and Jack P. Greene, "'Slavery or
Independence': Some Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty,
Black Bondage, and Equality in Revolutionary South Carolina," South
Carolina Historical Magazine 80 (July 1979): 193-214.
[The full article is available at
<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.2/ah000467.html#FOOT6>.]
*****
In other words, calling free labor "slavery" or "wage slavery" may
not exactly achieve the rhetorical effect that you are aiming for.
It may backfire in many ways. For instance, as Kolchin notes,
"Defenders of antebellum slavery," just like Eugene Genovese,
Fogel/Engerman, etc. do, "routinely insisted that Northern workers
were less free than the South's so-called slaves." Also, remember
what David Roediger says about the white labor metaphor of "wage
slavery," whose dominant meaning unfortunately was to highlight the
sense of insult that white workers felt about being "treated like
black slaves." So, this metaphor has not been so conducive to
cross-racial solidarity in America.
Also, keep in mind that it was _in the name of the suppression of
slavery and the slave trade_ that American & European imperialists
ventured onto the so-called scramble for Africa. They might do it
again, in this age of humanitarian imperialism. E.g., Sudan.
Yoshie
