[lbo-talk] US not a private enterprise system

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 28 13:52:21 PDT 2009


James Heartfield --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is true that British capitalism used slave money to get going, that it used the anti-slavery campaign as a cover for colonial conquest http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/heartfield260107.html and that indentured labour continued to be a means to seize raw materials by force into the 20th century. On the other hand, free labour was a lot more productive for capitalism than forced, which is why Marx relegates the discussion of slavery to Capitalism's pre-history, seeing free exploitation as more typical.

^^^^

Yes , he saw free exploitation as more typical. Here are a few more of his thoughts on the "one hand".

In Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote:

"Slavery is an economic category like any other. . . . [We] are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

"Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm#s4

And then his discussion in _Capital_ is not quite confined to capitalism's pre-history.

"In Capital, Marx distinguishes between a patriarchal form of Black slavery and a capitalist form, where the capitalist form intensifi es the misery already evident under patriarchy."

He writes, But as soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor . . . are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc. Hence the Negro labor in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately 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 to those states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labor, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.56( Marx, Capital 1, p. 345.)

https://secure.pdcnet.org/8525737F00587132/file/C25B90A72F1C42B0852573FC0060C643/$FILE/radphiltoday_2007_0005_0000_0083_0106.pdf

Marx, in _Capital_ says that slaves produce surplus-value in the era of full blown capitalism. "Value" and "surplus-value" are technical categories of analysis of the capitalist mode.



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