Jim Devine:
>with regard to the case of contemporary Africa: in the world system,
>merchant capital has become subordinated to industrial capital (part of a
>unified system), so one might say that Africa is dominated by industrial
>capital even if it isn't part of it.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
>The "stoop labor ... under conditions of widespread coercion" is exactly
>the kind of forced-labor mode of exploitation that isn't true
>proletarianization, isn't part of full-blown industrial capitalism in
>Marx's terms. My statement started with "if merchant capitalism ... were
>the same as industrial capitalism" because I _reject_ that premise.
Neither does this.
>I used that phrase simply because I rejected the premise. In fact, it seems
>to me that A.G. Frank leans toward the capitalism = market (industrial
>capitalism = merchant capitalism) perspective, so this ahistorical vision
>seems to have its adherents.
Yes, much of what you argue reminds me of A.G. Frank from a reverse mirror
standpoint. The notion that there is this thing called 'mercantile
capitalism' that existed in ancient Babylonia and in contemporary Congo is
essentially ahistorical.
>Right, but one can be exploited in the production of use-values. Marx makes
>the point that this kind of exploitation has natural limits, whereas
>exploitation for exchange-value does not [see chapter 10, section 2, of
>volume I], but that doesn't mean that exploitation in the production of
>use-values doesn't happen. After all, in the "natural economy" phase of
>feudalism, most of the exploitation was done to produce use-values.
Feudal exploitation? Like turning over a percentage of one's crops to the
Lord so he could feed his soldiers? Methinks this is not what was going on
in 18th century Jamaican sugar plantations.
>it's a phrase, one that indicates that I don't have the time to look this
>issue up, but that since you seem to have a lot of Latin American history
>on tap, you could do so.
I already did coming home on the bus. James Lang states that by the 1700s
Spanish colonial haciendas were involved in large-scale production of
cotton that were used in local 'obrajes', the original textile sweatshops.
I guess this was mercantile capitalism also.
>What I was saying is that debt peonage (which typically is much more than
>debt peonage, because the creditors are in league with the landlords,
>merchants, and the state) is not the same as proletarianization as Marx
>defined it (involving the double freedom, i.e., freedom from direct
>coercion and from direct access to the means of production and subsistence).
So the characters in Traven's novels who received a wage for chopping down
a mahogany tree were "proletarian," while those who stood next to them
chopping the same trees in order to pay off a debt were "nonproletarian"?
Were these debt peons and hundreds of thousands of others like them in
Mexico who rose up against the government in 1910 just under an illusion
that they were confronting the capitalist system? The Mexican revolution of
1910-1920 was one of the greatest anti-capitalist struggles of this
hemisphere. If we can't recognize this, then we have no business in politics.
Louis Proyect
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