Jim:
Mat wrote:
>Did I ever say that "slavery was necessary for capitalism"? I may have
>said it was *historically necessary*, which is not the same thing (and is
>also not "empiricism").
What is meant by "historically necessary"? I know what "necessary" means
(as in oxygen being necessary to fire). What's the difference? are you
saying that if there had been no (En)slavery, there would never have been
capitalism? were there no substitutes (like grabbing the land and resources
from the first Americans)? [on this see below.]
Jim, your natural science analogy (repeated over and over again) is really
lousy. You know well that social phenomena do not operate like natural
phenomena. Social reality is historically contingent and complex in ways that
are not fairly described by such natural science "laws." So, let's suppose there
is some social phenomenon that has conditions of existence and conditions of
production and reproduction. But there may not be one rigid, fixed set of
specific conditions. I think I described exactly what I meant by "historically
necessary." I said that the Enslavement Industry satisfied certain conditions
for capitalism's existence and reproduction, but that they *might* have been
satisfied in other ways, but in history they were not, and we do not *know* that
they could or woud have been met otherwise, although it is possible, we can
imagine a reasonable scenario in which they might have been met. So, the
Enslavement Industry was not peripheral or marginal (in the everyday meaning of
these terms, not in the sense of "core-periphery" or any other technical usage
of these terms of which I am well aware, so choose any other terms you like with
the same meaning). The Enslavement Industry did in history satisfy certain
conditions for capitalism's existence and reproduction at a certain stage in
capitalism's development. It was therefore historically necessary. It was not
necessary like oxygen is to fire, but if you could imagine situation in which
either oxygen or helium or nitrous oxide were all capable of producing some
phenomenon, and in a particular instance oxygen produced that phenomenon, then
it was necessary in that historical case, because in its absence (and without
assuming the presence of one or more of the alternative possible substitutes for
it) that phenomenon would not have appeared, although we can imagine a case in
which oxygen was absent and in which one of the others was present, but we
cannot assume that one of those would have been present, and in the case of the
Enslavement I am arguing that we cannot even assume that an imaginable
substitute would have been sufficient for capitalism, whereas in my analogy
nitrous oxide or helium would have definitely served as a substitute.
Do you understand what I am saying (as opposed to agreeing with me)?
Thanks, Mat
later on in the missive, Mat answers:
>To say that it was "historically necessary" means that certain conditions
>of reproduction and conditions of existence of the capitalist mode of
>production were met historically by the Enslavement Industry, but that
>they *might* have been met in other ways (maybe, maybe not), but they
>weren't, AND that these conditions were not comprehensively met in their
>entirety by other institutions. So we can imagine the possibility that
>capitalism might have been able to get up and going through another set of
>institutions and circumstances, although we will never know for sure, but
>the Enslavement Industry served these purposes in
>historical capitalism--this is what I meant when I said that it wasn't
>peripheral, marginal, etc.
I'm not clear why the word "necessary" plays a role here. But I don't want
to quibble about the meaning of words any further.
BTW, "peripheral" and "marginal" in the literature refer to being
dominated, not to being unimportant. (It's like those who lambaste Brenner
for seeing capitalism as arising in W. Europe, assuming (falsely) that he's
saying that the rest of the world is trivial or that W. Europe was somehow
morally superior.)
>And it certainly was not in contradiction with capitalism.
No-one on pen-l said that slavery was in contradiction with capitalism,
though that was a very common view among the Abolitionists.
A thought: I think that it's quite possible that without the New World and
the conquest thereof, capitalism may not have needed the Enslavement. After
all, the unintentional result of grabbing all that land and killing off the
Indians (directly and through disease) was a situation which makes it hard
to have proletarian "doubly free" labor. (Marx is clear about this general
concept in the last chapter of volume I.) Free proletarians want to go off
the frontier, undermining the class relationship. As people like Evsey
Domar point out, some sort of effort to tie labor down is needed (though if
I remember correctly, he doesn't cite Marx). Maybe this was one of the
reasons why the British prevented the colonists in the 13 colonies from
moving west (causing conflicts that helped bring about 1776). The
institution of indentured servitude didn't work (because the whites among
the indentured servants could appeal to the Mother Country and later the
Continental Congress about how they were white people too and couldn't be
treated that way!) So the Enslavement filled the gap, at least in what is
now the US.
What this suggests is that the Enslavement wasn't really "needed" except
for the fact that Western Europe conquered the New World. Of course, since
we can't get in a time machine to see what would have happened if the
Europeans hadn't invaded the New World, this is the kind of question that
can't be answered.
>What I have been arguing from the beginning is that the Enslavement
>Industry and Trade was part of capitalism, and not some other mode of
>production (what Marx called the slave mode or ancient society or antiquity).
This Industry was often organized in a capitalist way -- with overseers,
kidnappers, etc. being proletarians, wage laborers -- whereas that Trade
can either be part of merchant capital (an incomplete form of capitalism)
or part of industrial capital (the complete form). The latter depends on
historical conditions.
One problem is that the existence of slavery limits the size of the
proletarian labor-force. If I'm the boss and I can grab a lot of
surplus-product off the backs of the slaves on the cheap, why should I hire
free proletarians. This phenomenon is the basis for the idea that there's a
threshold size of the proletariat for full-scale "industrial" capitalism to
take off.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
