Re: [Marxism] Comment on Political Marxism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Another interesting comment from Dermokrat: Marx certainly thought that slavery involved surplus labor (albeit disguised due to the property relation): “The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, in fact, he works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm).” I think Orlando Patterson offered a pretty good critique of Brenner, Post et al’s line of argument with respect to the “slave as constant capital” formulation (albeit originally made in reply to Hindess and Hirst): “[T]here is no slave society in which, in practice, slave-owners are not fully aware of the distinction between the labour input of their slaves and other factors of production, and in which, further, there is not a clear calculation made on the basis of this distinction between the maintenance costs of a slave and the revenue he generates. These distinctions are used by the slave owner to make calculations as to expected rates of profits in exactly the same manner as does a capitalist operating in a ‘free’ labour market.The slave’s maintenance cost is his wage; the worker’s wage is,from the systemic point of view, his maintenance costs. Systemically, there is no qualitative difference between the two. The occasional appearance on the books of the slavemaster-capitalist of slave labour as a fixed capital cost is an accounting procedure resulting from the fact that the slave belongs to an individual capitalist whereas the worker belongs to the capitalist class as a whole. The argument that, with respect to the forces of production there ‘is a contradiction between the slave as a form of property (with a value in circulation) and the slave as direct producer’, simply makes no sense to me. What they are getting at is that the slave is a form of fixed capital, ‘unlike the wage laborer’. This is trivial. A buoyant internal market for slaves usually exists, and is theoretically always possible. The purchase of a slave does involve the risk of the slave dying before his earnings compensate for these costs. But there is absolutely no difference between these risks and those taken, say, by a model capitalist firm such as I.B.M. which invests huge outlays in training graduates to become efficient salesmen of their machines only to find that they quit their jobs before their earnings compensate for the cost of training. As with I.B.M. the risks are always well worth taking if, on average, slaves live long enough for the master to realize the enormous profits to be made by exploiting the slaves in a context where the economies of scale and high labor intensity make a rigidly controlled labour force desirable. Incidentally, it should be noted that there are many highly capitalistic enterprises and entire capitalist formations where the labour force is far more ‘fixed’ than was ever the case in either the proletarianized sectors of the ancient economies or those of American slave capitalism. The case of the relation between labourers and capitalists in most large Japanese firms immediately comes to mind.” (http://newleftreview.org/I/117/h-orlando-patterson-slavery-in-human-history). In his essay “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?”, Sidney Mintz reminds us that slaves were very often provisioning themselves and their surrounding communities, which suggests that surplus labor under slavery was likely very high indeed. In fact this is an important aspect of peripheral labor regimes – one that scholars working in the world-systems tradition have taken great pains to analyze. From a theoretical standpoint, capitalists are not keen to have achieve full proletarianization of the workforce, since that leaves them in the position of having to provide wages that fully cover a worker’s reproduction. When analyzing the issue of class, we need to consider not the individual worker but the household that he/she lives in. Within this household you generally have a lot of pooled income from various sources (c.f. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, pp. 32-38). In a core country these might be wages, state transfers, and possibly petty commodity production. On top of that you have the unremunerated labor of
Re: [Marxism] Comment on Political Marxism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 10/16/14 8:23 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: This point is particularly important in the periphery where the workers are generally drawn from rural areas. In other peripheral zones of the capitalist world-economy, capitalists have benefited from a situation of semi-proletarian labor, whereby peasant (originally men, but now increasingly women) are forced (usually by imposition of monetized taxes; e.g. the “hut tax”) to engage in wage labor in a mine, plantation, or factory, while their families (the wife/wives and children) engaged in the labors of social reproduction that made their labor in the capitalist enterprises possible. Yes, I have commented on the same tendency: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm Was the mode of production in colonial Africa precapitalist or capitalist? To begin with, we face something of the same problem that we encountered with Spanish colonialism. In Africa, the Europeans insisted on borrowing from the feudal lexicon, despite a clear capitalist agenda. For example, the French counted on corvée labor to lay railway track or perform other tasks associated with colonial infrastructure. Without reliable rail lines, crops and minerals destined for the seaports would languish at their source. Regardless of the label, such forced labor was not only integral to the colonial capitalist system, it had the same devastating impact on the local population as Spanish practices had three centuries earlier. Colonial administrator Emile Baillaud reported in 1905 that: At this moment in West Africa, the necessary hands . . . are easy to be had; and also at the coast the towns overflow with men going about looking for work. The captives having listened to our advice, and finding the way to freedom without dying from hunger, have come in numbers towards our enterprises, wherever it was possible to find work with the Europeans. They not only leave their masters, but also their countries.12 Without extra-economic compulsion, primitive accumulation would have not taken place. The indigenous peoples would have subsisted through the means available to them outside of the cash economy. If the colonial powers had relied exclusively on market competition, the local population would have found ways to ignore them. One of the most infamous colonists, King Leopold of Belgium, saw himself as following in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism. At the age of twenty-seven, he visited Seville in March 1862 in order to study court records preserved in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building. According to Adam Hochschild: For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold, silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be gathered in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees, government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural drawings, having to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages, among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of the world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest whatever in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a dedicated scholar when it came to one subject, profits.13 When he wrote home to a friend, the monarch demonstrated that he understood the goal was profit, not traditional values: I am very busy here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies. For Hochschild, the monarch is a man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors. For all of its devotion to British exceptionalism, the Brenner thesis would seem ill equipped to explain why British rule failed to abolish extra-economic forms of coercion in its most important colonial holding: South Africa. Indeed, it was here where non-market forms of exploitation helped to successfully propel the nation into the front ranks of capitalism on the continent. In keeping with laws already enacted in the rest of the British Empire, slavery was abolished in 1834. But the devotion to freedom was only lukewarm. Great Britain soon found ways to reintroduce other forms of labor conscription.14 Bristling at the abolition of slavery, Boer farmers withdrew into the east and northeast, where they would be allowed to pursue religious freedom while trafficking in human beings. Their KhoiKhoi slaves could be relied on for the dirty
[Marxism] Comment on Political Marxism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (From Dermokrat) Louis, If you haven’t done so yet, check out Tom Brass’ Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century (Chapter II in particular). He has a very good discussion of Marx/Engels’ views on unfree labor (e.g. slavery) within capitalism (spoiler alert: Marx was entirely comfortable referring to plantation owners as capitalists). I also recommend these articles by Phillip McMichael: 1)(1987)“Bringing Circulation Back into Agricultural Political Economy: Analyzing the AnteBellum Plantation in its World Market Context,” Rural Sociology, 52, 2 2)(1988) “The Crisis of the Southern Slaveholder Regime in the World Economy.” In Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Contradictions and Movements, (ed.) Francisco Ramirez (Westport, Conn: Greenwood). 3) (1991) “Slavery in the Regime of Wage – Labor: Beyond Paternalism in the U.S. Cotton Culture,” Social Concept, 6, 1. 4) (1991) “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U. S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture” Theory and Society Vol. 20, No. 3, Special Issue on Slavery in the New World (Jun., 1991), pp. 321-349 (http://author.cals.cornell.edu/cals/devsoc/research/research-projects/upload/slavery-in-capitalism-T-S-91.pdf) You may also be interested in Wilma Dunaway’s The First American Frontier, which examines the incorporation of Appalachia into the capitalist world-system, Tomich’s Through the Prism of Slavery, and David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Lastly, I think Jason Moore showed just how simplistic the Brenner thesis was re: the transition to capitalism in this long essay for Review: http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/Moore__Nature_and_the_Transition_from_Feudalism_to_Capitalism__REVIEW__2003_.pdf But to chime in on the debate above, Post/Brenner have a very simplistic formula capitalism = capitalist mode of production = free wage labor. That simply cannot explain the persistence of unfree labor relations within the US and other advanced economies today. The relations of production under capitalism will be decided by a multitude of factors within any given social formation – the size of the reserve army of labor in particular. And once any given mode of production moves from being one primarily geared toward the production of use values to one exclusively concerned with exchange values, we’ve certainly moved away from “pre-capitalist”… Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
