Cotton and Scarcity

["David Schanoes" <dmsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry about that, forgot to clip previous message.


My thanks to CJ for bringing me out of my slumber--, so much for milk and
cookies and a good night's sleep.

And I do mean my slumber.  Fascinated as I was by M. Perelman's discussion
of Marx, Malthus, and the rate of profit, I overlooked what was the most
obvious-- namely the cotton famine.

 Talk about missing the weak point in the line... I did but CJ did not.
Precisely this: there is nothing about the cotton crisis of 1860-1865, nor
its pre-history that can qualify it as a resource scarcity.  Cotton is not a
natural resource.  Famine is not a natural, but a social phenomenom. Marx's
discussion is a discussion of the results of the shortages and overages in
production.

The cotton crisis simply cannot be abstracted from the social organization
or disorganization surrounding its production, its supply, and that of
course is the US Civil War.

In Vol 3 of Capital, Marx makes no bones about it, this is a social
scarcity, not a natural one.  He discusses previous overproduction.  He
states in his entry for April 1863. "A very serious inconvenience in the
employement of East-Indian Cotton, such as the factories must use at this
time [!!-DMS] is that the speed of the machinery must be considerably
reduced..."   This is an analysis of a shortage of a type of cotton due to
certain conditions and the drawbacks of substituting another type of cotton.

The death knell to the slave- plantation system of cotton production in the
US was social and not natural.  More precisely, ever increasing inputs of
"capital", land and slave-labor, were required to maintain production, much
less increase it.  The  relations of that production did not allow, could
not afford to support those increasing inputs in infrastructure, land, or
labor.  In its misery, the South sees the growth of population in the North,
the growth of a laboring population in the North, and the social relations
that allow  expansion to new territories as its mortal enemy.   And the
South was right, and it secedes from the Union, an anti-expansionary move if
ever there was one.


Thank you, Charles

DMS


----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Jannuzi" <b_rieux@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 5:03 AM
Subject: Re: Oil and Overproduction


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