Charles:
>On the theory, I am giving you a theoretical , not post hoc imagery
>history of the causal relationship between slavery/colonialism and
>the origin of capitalism: Capitalism, theoretically is, wage-labor +
>accumulation + competition. This was true right at the rosy dawn of
>capitalism. The competition means that if any capitalist can find a
>way to exploit oppressed-labor (unwaged women's, slave, corvee,
>indentured servant, any labor which as a cost significantly
>oppressed below the prevailing wage), that capitalist will. This is
>a theoretical, not empirical, explanation as to why slavery and
>colonial labor (forms of oppressed labor that they could get going)
>was combined with wage-labor at the origin of capitalism.
>
>Basically, a capitalist will maximize profits by any means
>necessary. They are not concerned that the whole system can not
>operate on oppressed-labor. There is a tendency for some capitalists
>to seek and some capitalists will seek ways to exploit oppressed
>labor.
***** The South was being outpaced by the West in manufacturing,
though both sections were far behind the Northeast. On the
assumption that wage labor was concentrated in the Northeast, we can
conclude, once again, that the slave economy was increasingly
diverging from a free labor economy, as free labor came to mean wage
labor.
The data on industrialization demonstrates that a gap was opening up
between the sections. This conclusion indeed is shared by all
scholars, even those most firmly committed to the view that the South
had a successful capitalist economy.
Correlations, however, are not causes and we need to establish the
reasons for the slower pace of southern industrialization and
urbanization. According to the neo-classicists, the reason is
simple: the South's comparative advantage lay in agriculture and thus
it was entirely rational for southerners to concentrate on farming
rather than commerce or industry. Unfortunately this view now lacks
empirical foundation. According to the most definitive work on
southern manufacturing, rates of return in manufacturing in the South
were extremely good. "The average for all southern manufacturing,"
according to historians Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, "was 28
percent in 1860 and 25 percent in 1850." And prospects did not vary
greatly from subregion to subregion. Moreover, these rates of return
"were not simply high, they were substantially above the returns
earned from slavery and slave-based farming." Why did southerners
not engage in manufacturing to a greater degree? There can be only
one answer (though it is one which Bateman and Weiss will not
accept): they were not profit-maximizers in the way that
neo-classical economics postulates. This is no small matter; it
suggests a catastrophic weakness in the entire neo-classical approach
to the southern economy. For it reinforces the possibility that a
slave-based economy cannot industrialize....
Let us now see if the Marxist approach fares better. Is there reason
to believe that the pursuit of self-interest was mediated or
structured by the exigencies of the master-slave relation? Indeed
there is. For manufacturing posed special problems for the masters,
problems that had no real equivalent on the plantation or in an
agrarian society generally and which were also less severe (or absent
altogether) in a wage labor economy. An overwhelming amount of
evidence can be cited in support of this proposition. Before we
examine this evidence, however, we should note the root cause of the
master's difficulties. As we shall see, the problems stemmed from
the fact that so many slaves did not wish to be slaves, did not wish
to see the fruits of their labor appropriated by another and
therefore attempted, in various ways, to resist this exploitation. In
so far as the evidence demonstrates that slave resistance (in its
many forms) constrained southern economic development, it compels us
to acknowledge the vital importance of class interests. _In
inhibiting the development of industry (and of cities) in the South,
the slaveholder was simultaneously advancing a class interest_.
As we shall see, _the southern failure to industrialize or to
urbanize cannot be explained without reference to this class
interest_. Of course such an interest was, to a considerable extent,
an economic one, since the slaves were themselves the source of the
economic well-being of the masters. But it was not an economic
interest of the kind which modern neo-classical economics envisages:
it was not a profit-maximizing impulse. For the slaveholders'
pursuit of wealth and prosperity was subject to a complex series of
mediations. _Here the relations between the contending classes
assume the utmost importance. The desire to maintain their slaves
and thus their class position constrained the slaveholders' response
to commercial opportunities, allowing and encouraging certain
activities at the expense of others. And the need to take account of
the non-slaveholding whites, whose loyalty was essential to the
maintenance of their regime, in turn constrained the defense of
slavery, again encouraging certain activities rather than others_.
The problem with the neo-classical approach is not its assumptions
that slaveholders were acquisitive or self-interested but its refusal
to accept the existence of these filters, as it were, through which
self-interest was perceived or interpreted and then pursued.
(emphasis mine, footnotes omitted, John Ashworth, _Slavery,
Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum South_, Vol. 1: Commerce
and Compromise, 1820-1850, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 90-93)
*****
What do you think of John Ashworth's work?
Nestor said on Lou's list:
>These reasons are quite simple: modern slavery, while furthering
>accumulation _abroad_, hinders accumulation _on the spot_ and thus
>_hinders the global expansion of the full set of social relations
>that define capitalism and, most important for us, proves a strong
>counter to the TRPF!_. In fact, slavery is a simple device through
>which a non-investing ruling class can make its way through
>capitalism without caring about permanent modernization of the
>methods of production, competition, and so on.
>
>Under adequate conditions, the same goals can be obtained WITHOUT
>slavery. Slavery, serfdom, latifundiary ownership of particularly
>fertile tracts of land, are for this kind of "capitalism" simply
>means to _avoid_, and not to _promote_, accumulation. What we are
>facing in these formations is a _rentistic_ and, in this sense,
>deeply _antibourgeois_ ruling class. Thus, even though _of course_
>modern slavery cannot but, as anything else trapped in the net of the
>world market, become a "capitalist enterprise", it is _not_
>capitalist in the full sense of the word, it is at best peripherical
>capitalist. But this is not a matter of location. I mean peripherical
>to the core set of social relations that define modern capitalism.
Both Nestor and John Ashworth discuss how the peripheral ruling class
(in the antebellum South, in Latin America, etc.) preferred slavery
and other kinds of unfree labor which _retarded_ economic development
and social modernization _at home_. Thus both refuse to describe
modern slavery as "capitalist in the full sense of the word," while
acknowledging it was a capitalist enterprise in the sense of
promoting accumulation at the core. Unless we grasp this point, we
can't make a distinction between progressive and reactionary
nationalisms on the periphery.
Yoshie
