>The dialectic of forces of production & relations of production,
>however, does not have to be reduced to economistic terms of calculus
>of profitability, and I don't think Eric Williams intended his work
>to be read in a vulgar reductionist fashion. Have you read Russell
>R. Menard, "Reckoning with Williams: Capitalism and Slavery and the
Thanks for the Menard link, which I just took a look at. I agree he makes important points, above all that Williams had his own urgent priorities, and that in 1944 his argument was a veritable voice in the wilderness, where to challenge entrenched assumptions about abolition's humanitarian motivations was almost by definition to argue economistically, in a thesis-antithesis way.
Still, fifty years later and on the shoulders of this giant, there's been more research on the interworkings of slavery, capitalism, and consciousness. There's not the same need to cast force-of-ideas vs. material forces so oppositionally. (Except, maybe, when one is arguing with a Ricardo Duchesne! Glad to hear he's residual -- though I was kinda perversely looking forward to a new beetle.)
Like Menard, I also think Williams' distinctions between Abolition and Emancipation, the latter where the actions of the slaves themselves was the most crucial factor, is a point that can't be (or at least hasn't been) made enough.
>Yes, in the USA, freedmen & their families got coerced into
>share-cropping & convict labor & Jim Crow, a result of reaction
>against Black Reconstruction.
>
>Nevertheless, one can't conflate share-cropping with chattel slavery.
Share-cropping, no. Though I'd pause before drawing too firm a line between chattel slavery and many post-emancipation forms of coercion. Including, for instance, France's cute scheme of buying slaves off the African coast, ritualistically declaring them "emancipated" on the spot, and then shipping them off to the Antilles as "free immigrant" contract workers. Or the experiences of Asian contract laborers, so many of whom had no choice but to sign on to be shipped to the West Indies, where their "contract" could be sold to a third party without their consent, where refusal to work would land them in prison with hard labor, where physical punishment was commonplace, where there was little chance of returning home...
But in general, I worry far less about share-cropping and the like being conflated with chattel slavery than the reverse: the conflation of other historical forms of slavery to chattel slavery. And boy does it happens a lot. Since slavery is the "before" and the "other" of our current ideology and system of labor control, it's still the category that animates our master one, freedom. (That particular, liberal freedom that, experienced as a universal value, helped end chattel slavery.)
Because freedom's the master construct and the set of social arrangements that we currently inhabit (reinforced by everyday social relations and discourse, etc.), it's unusually hard, as Marx's whole oeuvre attests, to grasp it peculiarities. Including its particular and narrow way to circumscribe evil. (This is one reason, too, that until the last couple decades there was much less nuanced work done on postemancipation societies in the Americas than on the societies that preceded them. The "before," plantation slavery societies, were easy to see as totalities, with socioeconomic and poltical and ideological aspects. But "after" emancipation, the varied forms of coercion could only be analyzed as "distortions" of ideal-type free labor, rather than as varied systems with distinct dynamics. Analytically, there were only two categories, slavery and not-slavery cum freedom.)
In a similar way capitalism's freedom/slavery dichotomy drains non-capitalist forms of slavery, in all their variety across time and space, of their specificities. It becomes a catch-all category, radically set apart as a form of social subordination. This despite the fact that slavery's common denominator, "subordinate outsider," has ranged from horrendously cruel and exploitative forms, to relatively benign ones that were non-labor intensive, transitional statuses on the way to full group membership, etc.
This freedom/slavery two-parter, first, conflating chattel slavery with other forms of slavery, then marking the whole category of slavery as the radical other of human history, tends to obscure the fact that its capitalism's social relations that are utterly unique, hidden, and in need of close inspection. So as I said, this is the conflation I find troublesome.
Maureen