Barabara Fields

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Wed Jun 23 18:29:08 PDT 1999



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>http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~south/archives/threads/bfields.html

Kirsten,

Lost in the idle chatter of class vs race or idealism vs materialism, the discussants here seem to have missed Fields' argument. Fields is concerned to show how only as people became accustomed to free wage labor--in particular the notions of juridical equality, freedom in contract and absence of extra economic extraction of surplus on which free wage labor relies--did a need arise to rationalise the unfreedom of the enslaved. For example, one could argue that despite the immensity of slave latifundia in the ancient world a dehumanising racial ideology did not arise then to make sense of enslavement (except for Aristotle slavery was often believed to be against nature); slavery did not appear as an anomaly that required the elaboration of racial ideology to rationalise since there was no development of those conceptions of juridical equality, freedom in contract, uncoercion, etc. that arise daily and repeatedly out of and indeed make possible generalisation commodity production on the basis of free wage labor. Fields is joined by Oakes (The Ruling Race) and Ellen M Wood (Democracy against Capitalism) in making such a complicated argument to which I have not done justice here. I see no trace of it in this exchange.

Yours, Rakesh



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