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>>>yes,. But his "labor-power" wasn't a commodity that he could sell, so he wasn't a proletarian. <<<
I have used various descriptions of the slaves of the Plantation south over the years. They were most certainly slaves, drawn into the vortex of commodity production as a bourgeois property relations. Their labor power or ability to work was sold all at once and other resold.
That is the contradiction of this form of labor sitting on the bourgeois property relations.
>>>The fact that the slave mode of production discouraged mechanization (and technological progress) in the Southern slave system is an important thing that distinguishes it from capitalism. <<<
I am not sure if I would call it a slave mode of production, although this bourgeois property relations was driven by . . . a "slave mode of laboring/production."
Apparently every couple of years these same question surface. I absolutely agree that the Slave Oligarchy was hit and doomed by history. The Slave form of labor is the death of the intensive development of means of production or as you state it "discouraged mechanization (and technological progress)."
In many respect the sharecropper of the late 1890s and early 1900s live a life worse than that under slavery when the slave himself was a form of capital. Before the overthrow of slavery lynching was not a mass ritual directed at blacks. Master did not take kindly to anyone "messing with" and injuring his property unnecessarily. At the time of Emancipation the outlawing of slavery liquidated some four billion dollars in capital in the form of the slave.
Perhaps two years ago on Pen-L or Marxmail an intense debate involving DMS, CB, myself and others took place on the form of the laboring process that was slavery and its inherent barrier to revolutionizing the means of production. The is contradiction was an enormous impulse for imperial expansion by the Slave Oligarchy or securing fresh land. There were other factors like soil rotation.
Perhaps, "the peculiar institution in the plantation South" was in fact a "peculiar institution."
Today, I shudder at the implications of the growing use of prison labor or the labor of incarcerated proletarians. Capital will adapt to any form of the laboring process that promises a profit. Once the economically less developed peoples are drawn into the vortex of capitalist production, everything changes and as they say . . . that's history.
My vote? Southern plantation slavery was a bourgeois property relations. Southern plantation slavery was not formally the capitalist mode of production, but the money and profits, capital in land and slaves, was not only geared to the capitalist market but predicated upon it.
What did Marx say about slavery being the pedestal the wage slavery stand upon?
The quote from Marx is also one of my favorites. Here is another.
Marx writes the following in his famous Poverty of Philosophy.
"Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say, we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.
"Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. "Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy â the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. [*1] Yea, it was the peculiar institution. It wasn't feudalism or the Asiatic mode of production Marx mentions that has caused 150 years of headaches! Plantation slavery was not a form of primitive accumulation of capital. The labor force was managed on the basis of scientific organization of manual labor. Being "sold down the river" . . . "that mutherfucker sold me down the river" . . . had a dreadful meaning to the slave. The river was the mighty Mississippi and into the heart of cotton country where ones working life span was an average of seven years of hard labor. Bourgeois property relation is my vote. No . . . not formal capitalism, which after the defeat of Reconstruction made matter a lot worse. Crazy history. Melvin P. |
