Capitalism and Freedom

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

[sorry -- catching up on over a month of postings:]

Yoshie,

A while ago you forwarded from another list:

>the point remains that Europeans enslaved a people who were not yet
>conscious of their freedom.

and:

>history in which what counts as a world-historical event consists in
>its contribution to the rise of freedom, then we can say that, at
>some point in world history, it was Europe that cultivated the kinds
>of reflective institutions necessary for the progressive realization of
>freedom. Insofar as other societies ceased to cultivate this self-
>understanding, they ceased to have history.

Yeeeeow.  My impression's that even most right-leaning EuroAmericans don't
entertain 19th century views like these.  So it's pretty astounding that
stuff like this would show up on a left-list.

Which leads me to wonder if there's some strand in left thought that
actually incorporates these views.  I know there are many
salvage-the-Enlightenment projects, but this is so out there it's got to be
coming from a different place than the usual ones.  If this view is part of
a left-current I'm not aware of, could you situate it a bit more?  I guess
I'm interested in a beetle-in-jar way.


Also, after pointing out to the poster that the "freedom" that motivated
abolition was a particular, bourgeois notion of freedom, related to wage
labor, you went on:

>When production based on chattel slavery & mercantilism ceased to be more
>profitable than production based upon free labor & Laissez Faire for
>British capitalism, as Eric Williams argues
>[...]
>Capitalism came to outgrow chattel slavery & mercantilism which had
>helped it develop in its infancy.  The development of forces of
>production broke the fetters of now antiquated relations of
>production.

While William's larger point (that the end of slavery was related to
transformations in capitalism) is roundly accepted, I don't think most
historians interpret slavery's demise in his reductively economistic terms
(calculus of profitability, etc.)

The abolition movement wasn't particularly in the class interest of its
founders, and more tellingly, emancipation for the most part wasn't
followed by free labor.  Instead various systems of coerced labor developed
-- systems tjat capitalists and statesmen spent a lot of anxious energy
trying to convince everyone, including themselves, were really "free"
"contractual" relations of "choice."  (This utterly ritualistic effort
shows up in their labels for the new arrangements: former slaves in the
Carribean became "apprentices" (like Jamaicans needed to learn how to cut
cane); France's indentured and forced laborers were "libres engagés,"
Portuguese libertos, etc.)

Moreover there doesn't seem to have been particular confidence among
capitalists that emancipation would be profitable.  The whole question was
actually a source of unease to both capitalists and parliamentary
committees at the time of Britain's abolition act.  Granted the worries
were expressed in bourgeois ideological terms: whether it could possibly be
hoped that freed blacks, with their African proclivities to irrationality
and sloth, would acquire European industriousness, discipline, and
self-possession and hence become universal humans. But the profitability
worry was a real one.

And for good reason.  If I'm remembering right, production dropped off and
the cost of sugar in Great Britain rose by half in the first years of free
labor sugar production.  This because former slaves populations often had
recourse to land, not to mention ideas of their own about economic and
communal life, thus often could afford to be strategically selective in
their relationship to the labor market.  In other words, and in contrast to
Britain's great unwashed, capitalists couldn't as effectively subject many
postemancipation societies to "the rational predicament" (= work, on
capital's terms, or utter starvation).

But since it wasn't capitalism's humanity and rationality that was on trial
but  the slave's, freed blacks by and large "failed" the European test of
self-possessed rationality.  Which reinscribed ideas about African
difference, which justified various forms of coerced labor.

(The pattern repeated itself in much of colonial Africa, btw, where the
very rationale for colonial conquest had been to free Africans ("not yet
conscious of their freedom").  But since Africans by and large didn't
cooperate with European aspirations to turn them into disciplined wage
laborers (most colonized Africans, too, had material options that stopped
short of "the rational predicament"), their "liberators" were frequently
compelled to turn to forced labor.  This too was accompanied by ritual
reassurances that the labor wasn't _really_ forced; it was just that these
benighted Africans didn't yet know how to work reliably. but once European
values and discipline were properly instilled in them, the unfortunate
practice would be stopped...)

The larger point: though abolitionism may well have been shot through with
opportunism, its existence as a larger social phenomenon transcended narrow
class interest or calculations of profitability.  Its emotive power was
linked to the larger reconstitution of society and subjectivity taking
place with the rise of industrial capitalism.  These transformations
involved profound deliberations about the nature of value, property,
society, interest, humanity, nature, and so on.  A whole ontology, whose
hegemonic liberal categories both both gave meaning to and reflected
concrete experiences and activities under capitalism.  To the very extent
that liberalism's particular ideas of freedom, self-possession,
self-determination were becoming deeply meaningful ways of understanding
the world, they also became difficult to reconcile with the co-existence of
slavery.

Of course, capitalist ontology defined unfreedom in teh most sharply
bounded of ways, allowing all labor-arrangements that weren't "slavery" to
fall under "freedom."  And granted abolitionism, tied to this
understanding, had the larger effect of lending moral legitimacy to
capitalism.  But this just reinforces the point that abolitionism
ultimately wasn't so much a vehicle for conscious class or material
interests as it was one terrain on which capitalism's deeper ontology
became naturalized, for capitalists and workers alike.

So naturalized in fact that in Anno Domini 2000 one can still find enslaved
Africans described on left-listservs as peoples who were "not yet conscious
of their freedom."

Maureen