Henry
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Here are some notes from a discussion elsewhere.
> ____________
>
> Marx distinguished ancient from modern slavery on the basis that only the
> latter was generally undertaken for the production of exchange value. The
> exploitation of slaves on modern plantations was thus not 'restricted by
> more or less confined set of needs'.
>
> "hence in antiquity over work becomes frightful only when the aim is to
> obtain exchange value in its independent monetary shape, i.e., in the
> production of gold and silver...Nevertheless, these are EXCEPTIONS IN
> ANTIQUITY...[t]he Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union
> preserved a modernately patriarchal character as long as production was
> chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But
> in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest ot those
> states, the overworking of the Negro, and soemtiems the consumption of his
> life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and
> calculating system." Capital I, p. 345 Vintage. (emphasis mine)
>
> In my reading, modern plantation slavery is an intermediate form between
> pre capitalist and capitalist production. Slavery was pivotal in the
> creation of the world market and the primitive accumulation of capital. In
> many ways, modern plantation slavery was the "transition". Marx recognized
> this as early as Poverty of Philosophy.
>
> This said, Marx demonstrated that a social system in which exchange value
> had become the general social mediation required that free and mobile wage
> labor be at its basis (see the first section of Immediate Process of
> Production which appears as an appendix to Capital I). First universal
> dependence on the market entails that entrepreneurs be able to undertake
> the production of any and all commodities; but there is little development
> of productive credit of which entrepreneurs can avail themselves without
> the availability of free, mobile and VERSATILE wage labor, that is a
> proletarianized labor force. The attempt by the antebellum Southern ruling
> class to industrialize on the basis of slave labor was unsurprisingly a
> failed one (see Robt Starobin Industrial Slavery in the South, which I have
> only skimmed). Second, the market for commodity production can only be
> sufficiently enlarged if the workers themselves have to satisfy their needs
> through the market, i.e., they have been proletarianized.
>
> Without the destruction of slavery the capitalist mode of production could
> not have developed and thereby created its own free gravediggers and put in
> place the material foundations for communism.
>
> At the same this raises the question, posed by Rosa Luxemburg with great
> force, of why capitalism reverted to unfree labor relations throughout the
> world in the age of imperialism.
>
> What role do formally unfree labor relations play in the capitalist mode of
> production? Does the reappearance of forms of primitive accumulation imply
> that capitalism can never do without it, as Rosa argued (Grossmann
> critiqued Rosa here of course)? Are unfree labor relations under
> capitalism a barrier or an anomaly or at times a necessity? Never read the
> book by Robert Miles on the topic.
>
> Yours, Rakesh