Robert Brenner: "...a few questions need to be asked (about Caribbean sugar production). First, how was the 'so-called primitive accumulation of capital' accomplished? In other words, did the actual separation of the population of small farmers from the land actually take place? Had these producers actually owned the land?" ==== Sidney Mintz, "Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History" But first some more must be said of the plantation system itself, grounded as it was in the use of forced labor, even though the stimulus to its growth originated with far-off European entrepreneurs. Like proletarians, slaves are separated from the means of production (tools, land, etc.). But proletarians can exercise some influence over where they work, how much they work, for whom they work, and what they do with their wages. Under some conditions, they may even possess a great deal of influence. Of course, slaves, too, may have some freedom of maneuver, depending upon the nature of the system they live in. Yet because they were them- selves chattels—property—slaves in the New World during the period when plantations operated with feverish intensity could exercise their will only in the interstices of the system. Slaves and forced laborers, unlike free workers, have nothing to sell, not even their labor; instead, they have themselves been bought and sold and traded. Like the proletarians, however, they stand in dramatic contrast to the serfs of European feudalism, and they are propertyless. These two great masses of workers had noticeably different histories, and the forms of labor exaction they embodied, during most of the 380-year period concerning us here, evolved in different parts of the world. At the same time, their economic functions in the world trade system, especially from the mid-seventeenth to the mid- nineteenth century, were overlapping, even interdependent. The linkage between Caribbean slaves and European free laborers was a linkage of production and hence also of consumption, created by the single system of which they were both parts. Neither group had much to offer productively but its labor. Both produced; both consumed little of what they produced. Both were divested of their tools. In the views of some authorities, they really form one group, differing only in how they fit into the worldwide division of labor others created for them. Putting things this way may oversimplify what was the complex evolution of a modern world labor force, let alone the diversified capitalistic economy that both created it and was serviced by it. maturing of a plantation system based on slavery in the Caribbean region came with, and was partly preconditioned on, the development of powerful commercial and military navies in western Europe. It meant the funneling of great quantities of commodities (rum, arms, cloth, jewelry, iron) into Africa for the purchase of slaves--an investment that did nothing for Africa’s development but stimulated more slave raiding. It led to enormous outputs of wealth in the metropolises to garrison the colonies and to ensure the coercion and control of the slaves. To maintain the mercantiljst premises of the system—that the colonies buy from and sell to the motherland only, and that trade be carried only in the motherland’s ships was expensive for each national system, though of course certain groups inside each system profited greatly from it, as we have seen. The creation and consolidation of a colonial, subordinate plantation economy based on coerced labor stretched over four centuries. the system in the colonies changed little, relative to the tremendous changes in the European centers that had created it. It is common to describe the period 1650—1750 as one of mercantile, trading, or commercial expansion, and to treat only industrial phase beginning with the late eighteenth century as "capitalism. " But would this mean that capitalism somehow existed before the capitalist mode of production? The plantations that supplied Europe with sugar, tobacco, etc., were presumably noncapitalist, for their labor force was enslaved, not proletarian. But this way of putting things is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it leaves us in the uncomfortable position of being unable to specify what sort of economic order gave rise to the plantation system. Banaji, in a stimulating critique, points out that many Marxist writers, even including some classical figures such as Lenin and Kautsky, had trouble making sense of modern slave economies and their place in world economic history. Marx himself did not always seem to know how to fit slave plantations into his picture of capitalism. Of the West Indian colonies, he wrote that their settlers acted "like people who, driven by motives of bourgeois production, wanted to produce commodities.... " The plantations were enterprises of "commercial speculation," in which "a capitalist mode of production exists, if only in a formal sense. ... The business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists." Yet elsewhere he wrote, "The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour." Later writers attacking the same issue showed some of the same uncertainties. Eugene Genovese, for instance, says at one point that "the slave regime in the British Caribbean bore the clear stamp of capitalist enterprise," and that sugar was grown on "large plantations of a decidedly bourgeois type" operated by "capitalist slaveholders. " But Genovese’s earlier work (dealing, to be sure, not with West Indian plantation sugar makers but with U.S. plantation cotton growers) says "the planters were not mere capitalists, they were pre-capitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners who had to adjust their economy and ways of thinking to a capitalist world market." One might ask what difference it makes whether one calls the plantation system "capitalistic" or not. The question matters because it has to do with the ways economic systems grow and change, and with the chain of causation that leads from one stage of development to another. I have argued that the plantations were themselves precocious cases of industrialization. But this does not necessarily mean that the European economy that gave rise to these plantations was capitalist. As we have seen, slave labor is so contrary a form of labor power to be associated with "the capitalist mode of production," which is always described as based on free labor, that even Marx himself seems uncertain how to treat it. Yet there is no question of the importance of plantations to the metropolitan economies, or of the tremendous economic activity they stimulated, both by their production and by the market their consumption needs afforded the metropolis. In Banaji’s view, plantations were capitalist enterprises, all tightly linked to European centers, fueled by European wealth, returning some portion of that wealth to metropolitan investors in various forms, and functioning as centers of "commercial speculation," Marx’s words. Yet the investment they represented took a fairly static form—so much for land, for slaves, for equipment—that not significantly vary for centuries. They generated profit, which could be increased by increasing the scale of the enterprise—two produce twice as much as one, or possibly more—but only in very limited fashion by improving the technology or by raising productivity. Hence they were at once speculative enterprises and conservative enterprises: one gambled on making money from sugar production, but the way one produced sugar was virtually unchanged, including the coercion of the labor force, for centuries. Of this curious blend of slavery and the expanding world market for plantation commodities—what the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams once called a system combining the sins of feudalism with those of capitalism, and without the virtues of either—Banaji writes, "This heterogeneous and, as it appears, disarticulated nature of the slave plantation generated a series of contradictory images when the early Marxist tradition, not equipped with the same abundance of material available today, attempted its first characterizations." My own sense of it is that those "contradictory images" persist. It is true that much of the wealth invested in the plantation system did not result in high levels of accumulation, and that for centuries the relations among land, labor, and technology on the estates did not much vary. In these ways the plantation system surely differed from capitalism in its late, productive, and industrial phase. It also true that the plantation mode of production before 1850, based as it was on slave labor, differs greatly from the so-called capitalist mode of production, the labor power of which is purchased on an impersonal market, as are the other factors of production, and it would be wrong to treat the plantation system as "capitalistic" in the same way that the British factory system of the nineteenth century was capitalistic. Yet to detach the plantations from the emergent world economy that spawned them, or to rule out their contribution to the accumulation of capital in world centers, would be equally mistaken, I believe. Scholars who demonstrate that European capital invested in the West Indies might actually have earned more if invested elsewhere or otherwise—who conclude the whole plantation phenomenon ended up losing money for the English economy, say—are usually ready to admit that this phenomenon nonetheless made an immense amount of money for some Englishmen, even if it proved prohibitively expensive for others. Nor did that money stop "working" once it was made. And perhaps that is the principal point. Early in the seventeenth century, some people in power in Britain became convinced that commodities like sugar mattered so much to their well-being that they would politick fiercely for the rights of capital invested in developing the plantations and all that went with them. If these people were not capitalists, if the slaves were not proletarians, if mercantilism rather than a free economy prevailed, if the rate of accumulation of profit was low and the organic composition of capital static—if all of these things were true, it also remains true that these curious agro-industrial enterprises nourished certain capitalist classes at home as they were becoming more capitalistic. Later we shall see how they also nourished the emerging proletarian classes, who found sugar and kindred drug foods profound consolations in the mines and in the factories. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
