Re: the role of forced labor

["Lou Paulsen" <wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>


> Marx
>emphasized wage labor not because he was unaware of the roles played
>by forced labor in the development of capitalism, but because he
>thought that (1) it is the logic of M-C-M' rooted in "Freedom,
>Equality, Property, & Bentham" that distinguishes capitalism from
>other modes of production; and (2) the exploitation of free labor --
>unlike slave labor -- under market discipline tends to compel
>capitalists to extract relative (as opposed to absolute) surplus
>value through rising productivity via technological innovation.

This is not intended to be a tendentious question, but why would (2) be the
case (in your opinion and/or Eric Williams' or Marx's)?  The cost of the
slave's labor-power is the cost of keeping the slave alive and able to work
and of reproducing the next generation of slaves.  The cost of the
proletarian's labor power tends to be exactly the same thing.  Why would
"market discipline" induce technological innovation more in the case of
'free' labor?  (Of course there is the argument that angry slaves will
sabotage machinery, but I've always been a little skeptical; of course they
will, but so will angry proletarians, and in any case, there is a lot of
technological innovation that can be done before you get to the stage of
delicate machinery.) (This question relates to the use of slave labor within
a money economy to produce commodities for exchange, not to hypothetical
'pre-feudal-stage' slavery.)

Are there studies of slavery-using enterprises (cotton plantations in the US
south, West Indian sugar plantations, etc.) which look at the question of
whether technological innovation took place there or not?

Lou Paulsen