[lbo-talk] vaca reading

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Mon May 9 13:54:14 PDT 2011


Chuck Grimes

I don't see slavery and colonialism as inherent in the logic of then new wage-labor/capital relation. cb

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I don't know about that.

There is a kind of capitalist logic in slavery and colonialism if you consider how much labor power was required to extract wealth from the land, particularly in planation crops like cotten, sugar cane, coffee, or mining for precious metals and gem stones.

^^^^^^ CB: It's a good thread to have.

The rate of exploitation is higher, so more bang for their bucks. However, it puts a limit on how well trained the workers can be.

Here's the sort of counter argument. If u take capitalism to be defined by doubly free labor ( wage labor) , then sort of by definition capitalism is free, not slave labor. I think of it as capitalism cheating on it's on basic logic in order to get that big accumulation of wealth in its primitive accumulation. This is the way Marx analyzes it in his chapter/section on primitive accumulation.

Also, the reason capitalist slavery was ended finally in the US was because of competition from wage-labor organization. Furthermore -and this is important - capitalism must have a mass of consumers, which is the other hat that wage-laborers wear. Slaves aren't paid any wages so they can't be consumers. The more slaves there are the more ready the crisis of underconsumption , because of lack of people with money to buy the mass of personal consumption commodities produced. Autoworkers have money to buy cars. Slaves don't have money to buy cotton products.

Capitalist slavery was a good way to jumpstart ( primitively or originally accumulate capital) capitalism, but it did so by cheating on the basic property relationship of capital i.e.the wage(free) labor/ capital relationship.

Anyway, I think it's a good theoretical debate to have.

^^^^^^^^

These are so labor intensive that it's difficult to imagine how to extract a profit from them in a wage system. The old capitalist bastards must have realized this. They tried the peasant system with indentured labor before they decided slavery was the way to go...or at least I think so considering the Hacienda system in New Spain...I mean California.

And, there were the Arabs and their big cash crops in cotton, cooking oil, barley, wheat, etc to wonder about. How did the Ottomans configure their economies of scale? I don't know. A guess, they used a feudal landless peasant system to supply product to a merchant class, who were under central control of provincial governers backed by armies, or something like that...

There is a dialectic between peasant, slave, and economy that I don't really know much about. It would be interesting history to study in anticipation of our collective future.

CG



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