“, I have a few comments on slavery, valorisation and imperialism. ”

Mark Jones is really writing brilliantly on PEN-L. I have got to rejoin that list. CB ((((((((( > > > RE: Re: Progress (was No agrarian revo?) by Mark Jones 17 June 2001 18:22 UTC < < < Thread Index > > > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > Within a given social formation which has come under the hegemony of > the capitalist mode of production, a variety of modes of surplus > extraction (chattel slavery, indentured servitude, petty commodity > production, wage labor, etc.) can exist. "Under all forms of society > there is a certain industry which predominates over all the rest and > whose condition therefore determines the rank and influence of all > the rest. It is the universal light with which all other colours are > tinged and by whose peculiarity they are modified. It is a special > ether which determines the specific gravity of everything that > appears in it" (_Grundrisse_). Chattel slavery, indentured > servitude, & other forms of unfree labor in the history of modern > colonialism increasingly took on the quality that was *quite > different* from pre-capitalist modes of unfree labor, *because* they > were determined by the expanding reproduction of the relation between > capital & free labor elsewhere (the expanded reproduction of the > relation between capital & free labor & resulting rise of productive > forces also made the main contribution to the *abolition* of chattel > slavery -- Cf. Eric Williams). Coming from this discussion, I have a few comments on slavery, valorisation and imperialism. Marx wrote: "in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro...became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no long a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself." When Marx said the slave is sold only once, but the worker sells himself anew each day, he pointed to the fundamental difference between capitalism and precapitalism, which makes capital a self-expanding accumulation process, where precapitalism never is. A society of self-expanding accumulation can never be based on slavery and this is the reason why antiquity was unable to create true world-systems. Slavery cannot form the inner logic of accumulation because the equilibrium point of the slave economy is determined not by an average rate of profit but by the average rent of a slave. This average rent determines the market value of the average slave in comparison with other rent-producing assets (land etc). It is rent (time-discounted) which determines slave market clearing-prices. This prevents proprietors from accumulating since productivity increases will be reflected in increased market-values of slaves. This makes slaves themselves a principal store of value and predisposes the system to the centralisation of wealth and power among slave-owning elites and to renewed territorial aggrandisement and to warfare and plunder as the principal mechanism of wealth increase. Thus it is true that capitalism requires the existence of free labour in order to valorise. With respect to slavery as an adjunct within an over-determining capitalist mode of production, however, it is clear that goods produced by slaves and sold on a unified world market, contain embodied surplus labour which can be valorised as capital. That is uncontroversial and even trivially true. Slavery is not only an important part of the prehistory of protocapitalism, it exists and will always be reproduced as an essential but subordinate element of global accumulation processes. Some labour processes remain outside the global circuits of capital and are local or national in character. Polish estate labour took a feudal form until well into the 19th C. Domestic outwork performed by women under patriarchal supervision is another obvious case. So is slave-labour in US cotton plantations or American silver mines. The value of this labour is nonetheless progressively absorbed by capital, and forms part of the overall accumulation process. Even subsistence labour for self-consumed products which never enter the market, can serve to create a submerged, often ruralised, population which is potentially part of the reserve army of labour available for capitalist exploitation. Subsistence non-market production also created secondary forms of exchange and markets whose products, which otherwise would not exist, are absorbed by the world market. Subsistence non-cash-crop farmers may produce commodities which later enter exchange, and even though no capitalist labour process is involved, the flow of such commodities from the peripheries to the centre forms part of the process of unequal exchange between the neocolonies and the metropoles. The consolidation of the world market occurred before capitalism emerged from protocapitalism, but there too, many of the attributes of capitalism existed often in a highly developed form. Accumulation took place, money functioned as store of value as well as means of exchange and commensuration. Even in classical antiquity capital was invested in large-scale production processes, and not always worked by slave labour but, even in ancient Rome, by waged proletarians. The emergence of credit money, paper money and financial markets which operated on the basis of true market-clearing prices, can also be traced back to classical antiquity, as A G Frank has argued. China operated with paper money from the 13th C. "The first capitalists already encountered wage labour as a form", Marx said, "but they found it as something ancillary, exceptional or makeshift, a point of passage." [Marx, _Pre-Capitalist Economic Formation_ 1964 p.59, which contained the first excerpts from the Grundrisse to appear in English. Incidentally, in his introduction to this book, Eric Hobsbawm discussed Marx's attitude to the Asiatic Mode of Production (Marx did not believe it existed), Marx's views on indigenous peoples (we should learn from them) and the late Marx's view that socialism in Russia did not need a 'detour' through capitalism. Despite the plain evidence of Marx's actual writings, thirty five years after Hobsbawm's edition of the "Formen", we continue to plough over the same ground.] Despite the appearance of large pools of undifferentiated wage labour, for example in 17th C England, industrial capitalism did not yet exist. As I have argued before, such pools of wage labour had existed at least from the mid-14th C. But the existence of a proletariat is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of capitalism, which ALSO requires/entails the appearance not just of long-distance trade and of such instruments, essential to trade, as discount-bills and commodity markets capable of establishing clearing-prices. Only if production *must* expand for it to continue at all, can we say capitalism truly, exists i.e. where it is no longer true that surplus can be absorbed other than by [some proportion] being reinvested in new production; surplus value must be reinvested in production for valorisation, broadly-speaking, to take place at all (obviously I am abstracting from such questions as luxury-goods production) Only when production is for the production of new value, can the value of labour be commensurated within production as a whole, instead of just at the margins where long-distance trade operated between different states or social formations. For the value of labour to be known, there must already be capitalism, i.e. self-expanding value. Thus prior to capitalism, pools of 'free' waged labour were always social aberrations, and seen as such, hence legally or administratively circumscribed or institutionalised by guilds and other self-regulatory means. When labour is enslaved or subject to feudal duress, its value cannot be determined by the market *even if the entire product is realised by sale as commodities*. This is so even though the price of all inputs, their amortisation etc, might be known and subject to exact calculation, including that of slaves. If the slaves were purchased, together with all other inputs: tools, means of subsistence etc., then the expected return over the lifetime of the slave could be worked out. Complex formulae were used in the New World slave economy to make such calculations. But the very existence of such inevitably arbitrary means of commensuration points to the eventual demise of such systems as cotton slavery, however fruitful they may once have been. The essentially parasitic quality of plantation slavery, in world-system terms, is a function of this failure to valorise the product directly. Thus the price of the average slave will, over time -- and other things being equal -- reflect not the slave's value (i.e., the amount of labour embodied in the slave, or the costs of producing another slave with the same strength, skills etc.) but the capitalised rent the slave represents, i.e., the slave's discounted rate of return. This is why slaveholders actually form a rentier class, and are not capitalists, and this is so even in the case of complex estate production systems employing extensive machinery, a detailed division of labour etc. The purchaser of slaves buys from the slave-seller not so much human beings but a predictable quantity of rent income. That there is both a market and a source of supply for slaves can only be because of what in effect are externalities, i.e., contingent accidents. Such a mode of production may continue for long periods of time but can never become a mode of self-sustained expansion, i.e. capital-accumulation. This would be true even if slaves were reared expressly for sale, for these slaves could only be sold not for their value, which cannot be determined since the value of labour inputs is by definition unknown, but instead for a price derived from their internal rate of return. This rate would always be a function of the availability of captive slaves on the market (supply depressing prices, scarcity raising prices) and the availability of land through conquest. Slave modes of production are self-limiting; shortages or surpluses of slaves may result in windfall profits and losses but will not produce sustained accumulation. The demand for slaves will always be set by externalities, for example, given constant supply, prices will fall if territory is lost or rise if territory is gained through conquest, etc. Production will expand only because of contingent factors, i.e., increase of territory/capture of slaves. Increases in productivity will be fragmentary and accidental. Where productivity increases occur their effect is to increase (not reduce) the value of slaves. A general increase in social wealth therefore will take the form of an increased centralisation and concentration of wealth and power in the slave-owning elite, whose only use for newly-accumulated wealth will be ostentation, luxury consumption, and renewed territorial aggrandisement through war. Capitalism, which also depends upon plunder and conquest not merely in the period of so-called primary accumulation, but continuously, nonetheless is driven by a different dynamic to that of plunder. Since workers' wages are set not by the assumed rental of labour as with slavery, but by the actual (historic) value of labour-power, capitalists have an incentive to seek productivity increases systematically and imperatively. Competition imposes this imperative on capitalists as a law. What was accidental and contingent becomes law-governed, axiomatic, and the core dynamic of the capitalist accumulation-regime. Thus slave modes of production never rise above their origins in booty, plunder and piracy, and the contradictions which accumulation produces drives them on to feudalism or some other form of precapitalism or protocapitalism. Slavery in post-Columbian America was extensive and often highly capitalised (rice, tobacco, corn, silver and cotton production). Successive waves of slave production in the New World genocidally exploited the original inhabitants. African slaves were imported to replace them in the 16th-18th centuries. The number of workers in the British North American colonies - slaves, indentured and free wage workers -- totalled over 3m by the early 17th century, when the British population itself was little more than that. The stimulus to European protocapitalist development of New World exploration and exploitation was enormous, and European capitalism would not have happened without it. Slavery was intensely profitable, but did not replace free wage labour as the necessary and sufficient condition for capitalism. Booty is one source of primitive accumulation, but it is not capitalism. This is so even though capitalism depends upon plunder, upon the theft of unpaid labour-time, and on, as Immanuel Wallerstein has said, on 'not paying its bills' to the workers, or to the natural environment to which it externalises many of its costs in the form of pollution, uncontrolled exploitation of resources etc. In precapitalist modes of production, value, price, profit, commodity exchange and the various categories of capitalist commodity production are present only in accidental, marginal and transient, undeveloped forms, if at all. It is not only because slavery is inherently inefficient, as Marx pointed out [Marx [1976] p.303-4], and not even because slavery is inherently unsuited to intensive accumulation based on machinery and increased productivity, which Marx considered the essential basis of capitalism, that capitalism must be based on free wage labour. Capitalist accumulation is possible if and only if workers and capitalists confront each other as free agents, the worker as independent seller of a commodity (his/her labour-power) and the capitalist as buyer of labour-power. The value of labour-power, as with the value of any other commodity, is the cost of its reproduction, i.e., the socially-necessary labour-time it embodies. But since all commodities are products of labour, this means that the magnitude of socially-necessary labour power embodied in a commodity can never be established in precapitalist societies even when market-clearing prices obtain. Prices remain relative. Prices originate at the margins, at the rubbing edge between settled, non-commodity producing societies which have become linked by long-distance trade. The emergence of free labour entails (and is a condition of existence for) a civil society, abstract rights, personal sovereignty, independence of society from state etc. The Enlightenment and the Weberian state are coterminous with capitalism and depend upon it for their rational as well as historical existence. Without free labour ("wage labour, i.e., capital": Marx) capital accumulation cannot be a self-sustaining, autonomous dynamic. Capital, as noted, may accumulate throughout a precapitalist system, producing pockets and of centralised wealth at different locales, and such a mode of production may be monetised to a high degree. But the accumulated value does not become valorised as new productive capital but instead either forms stagnant pools of monetised wealth or is dissipated (warfare, state expenditure, luxuries) or invested in trade ventures or land, but none of these permits sustained, self-developing capital accumulation, even where private property in land exists. The price of land is a function of rent, but land cannot valorise capital but only serve as a store of value. European protocapitalism might seem an exception to this rule; but such long waves of accumulation are common in all historical spaces and eras. They are always bounded by the Malthusian conditions of existence of precapitalist modes of production, which are given by the extensive, not intensive, contingent, not metalogical, form which accumulation in them invariably takes. Per contra, capitalist expanded reproduction beginning with the Industrial revolution escaped the Malthusian trap which by the 1770s was sucking Europe into a vortex of crisis and revolution and would have aborted the preceding wave of accumulation as Malthusian limits always had before. This was because what was an initially accidental or fortuitous set of circumstances combined with good luck and with some specific features of European protocapitalism to produce the take-off in to sustained growth. Once accumulation began it became self-sustaining, and by the 1820s a logic of innovation, investment in plant and machinery, risk-acceptance and productivity-seeking behaviour, combined to launch industrial capitalism. Mark Jones Previous message: Disability rights Next message: Mark Jones on PEN-L Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the Marxism mailing list Sent from my iPhone