Doug,
I am impressed, but shouldn't be surprised, of your memory of Volume One:
The footnote you refer to occurs on pages 219-20 of my old Modern Library edition of _Capital_. "It is the same edition I used in high school and the only one where I can find a quote that I want."
A very long footnote so I didn't want to copy it out. But the amazing internet worker ants at marxist.org did all the work for us.
A comment on this passage. Marx in the crucial sentences assumes the point of view of the slave __the instrument with a voice__ of the ancient slave master. The slave shows he is a human by showing that he does not have to care for beast or tool and can choose to treat them in such a way not in his master's interest. But my real question about it is to wonder if it is true or not. I certainly have always accepted it to be true, or at least a general tendency of the way a slave would treat the instruments, whether semi-vocal or mute, of his master.
But since I read this passage carefully I have read a lot about slavery in Rome during the time of the Repubic and empire and I have to say it does not match what I have read. Perhaps it is true of only agricultural workers? But I am not sure of that. In Rome their was for one a great amount of gradation between slaves and their is a lot of indication that it was slaves themselves who monitored other slaves. Greek slaves also often performed clerical functions very well, etc. No doubt some slaves treated the instruments of their masters in such a way as to destroy them, but two kinds of questions immediately occur to me:
1) Was this a general norm of most slaves? Only a general norm of slaves in certain sectors of production? (There were slaves who were architects and slaves who were mixed and poured cement, for instance, and it is my opinion that they seemed to do a pretty good job. On the other hand we know less about the daily life of the lowest agricultural slaves in ancient Rome than other types of slave.) Or was this kind of destruction of beasts and tools an exception? From my reading of slave and slave control in the late Republic and early empire I don't think it was as necessarily as prevalent as one might think. I am not sure though. I would have to do more research to actually answer the question.
2) Maybe this phenomena that Marx mentions is primarily true in a situation where their are viable alternatives to slave labor or at least a viable alternative that the slave can imagine. Thus my second question would be, assuming the factuality of the phenomena Marx observes, is the phenomena a result of the particular social system in which slavery exist and how the slave system itself was organized.
Jerry
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First an excerpt from the passage that leads to the fn. Then the fn.
"Then again, the labour-power itself must be of average efficacy. In the trade in which it is being employed, it must possess the average skill, handiness and quickness prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist took good care to buy labour-power of such normal goodness. This power must be applied with the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as careful to see that this is done, as that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought, the use of the labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He has no intention of being robbed. Lastly, and for this purpose our friend has a penal code of his own, all wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is so wasted, represents labour superfluously expended, labour that does not count in the product or enter into its value. [17]"
"[17] This is one of the circumstances that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The labourer here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale, from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale, and from an implement as instrumentum mutum. __But he himself takes care to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore. Hence the principle, universally applied in this method of production, only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness.__ In the slave-states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead of making furrows, were alone to be found. Conf. J. E. Cairnes. "The Slave Power," London, 1862, p. 46 sqq. In his "Sea Board Slave States," Olmsted tells us: "I am here shown tools that no man in his senses, with us, would allow a labour, for whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with; and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used with us. And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia comficid-much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours. So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get from negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while mules will bear cudgeling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected or overworked. But I do not need to go further than to the window of the room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer owning them in the North.""