Re: marxism-digest V1 #6013

[John Paramo <albatrosrojo2000@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> John Paramo wrote:
> > 
> > At the same time, Spain *did not export* to Latin
> > America proto-capitalist forms of production, but
> > decaying feudal practices and even slavery.  If
> > anything, the most "advanced" -- but improductive
> > forms they exported were the "encomiendas."

Lou:

> If extra-economic coercion was not present in 16th
> century Spain or its 
> colonial territories in the manner understood by
> Brenner, can we 
> conclude that precapitalist class relations existed?

Comment: IMO, extra-economic coercion was present in
both 16th Century Spain *and* its colonies.  But I
don't think that was the essential characteristic of
its feudal nature, but a combination of system wide
techniques, existentce of a particular set of state
institutions and the overall situation of Spain in
regards to France and Britain.

Lou:
> Also, if 
> extra-economic coercion is a sine qua non for
> capitalist accumulation, 
> then how would we describe the mode of production in
> much of Africa well 
> into the twentieth century, including South
> Africa--its most advanced 
> sector--where forced labor under virtually monopoly
> conditions was the norm.

Comments: I'm not sure what is the time you use as an
anlogy in South Africa, so I'm not going to jump into
conclussions.  But, I don't think "extra-economic
coercion is a sine qua-non for capitalist
accumulation."  In fact, my position is that may be or
may be not.  There are many other aspects to consider.
 Extra economic-coercion with which objective?
Certainly the same level of extra-economic coercion
would have different impact towards accumulation
whether is directed towards extracting wealth (Spain
in Latin America) or developing the means of
production, cash crops for the world market, etc (US).

Lou:

> Perelman identifies just one of among the many
> features that militated 
> against the full exploitation of labor and raw
> materials:
> 
> "Although their standard of living may not have been
> particularly 
> lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern
> Europe, like most 
> traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free
> time. The common people 
> maintained innumerable religious holidays that
> punctuated the tempo of 
> work. Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth
> and early seventeenth 
> centuries, about one-third of the working days,
> including Sundays, were 
> spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more
> extravagant estimate 
> that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval
> Lower Bavaria."2


Comments: but arent't other historians that argue this
was due to the decaying nature of European feudalism
and was a phenomena also marked in other societies:
the gradual increase of the religious rituals and the
time consummed by them was necessary wasted labor to
preserve the status quo?

Lou:

> Did any such wasteful practices exist in the New
> World? Were Spanish 
> lords this lenient with their indigenous subjects?
> Complicating these 
> sorts of questions is the fact that the Spanish used
> a feudal lexicon, 
> referring to the 'encomienda' or 'repartamiento'
> (kinds of vassalage or 
> fiefdom respectively) in the same manner as in
> earlier periods.

Comments:

The Church and its encomiendas - and I would say some
layers of the church and their encomiendas - clashed
with the mining operations.  It was of course easier
to get wealth from a mine than from subsistence
activities in the encomienda.  This led to many
conflicts between teh Church and representatives of
teh Crown or the adventurers, militarymen and
adelantados (depending in which epoch).

There was waste of profit-making levels in the
encomienda as compared with the mines and wasted labor
in the religious rituals.  From the perspective of a
native, however, religious rituals were part of their
labor. That was the case before the "colonizers"
arrived and continued to be ever since.

Lou:
The 'mita' was based on the Incan
> 'm'ita,' a form of labor 
> servitude that existed in the Incan empire, itself a
> legitimately feudal 
> system with its own characteristics.

Comments:

I think one of the problems is trying to make
analogies between the societies encountered in latin
America and Africa, for example, and make them fit in
the European model of stages (slavery, feudalism, etc)

The Inca's society was not by any strecht of the
imagination a "legitimately feudal system with its own
characteristics."  Property, labor and the functions
of the state and the state strcuture had little, if
any resemblance with European feudalism.

The Incas were, if you wish, in an intermediate
society, well on their way to profound changes (as a
matter of fact when the Spanish arrived the Incas were
at the beginning of a civil war or conflict to try to
resolve their own contradictory developments.)

Some historians has revived the Asiatic Societies
model mentioned by Marx in Capital and Engels in the
Anti-Dhuring  but inexplicably left out of "Origin..."
by Engels to try to find a closer aproximation to the
Incas, Aztecs, Mayans and other pre-colonial Latin
America.  You inclusion of Steve Stern's description
of the Incan mita would itself give some clues, even
though it is a very rigid and incomplete description. 

Lou:

> The Spanish 'mita' had virtually nothing in common
> with this. When a Spanish lord dragooned an Indian
into the mine or 'obraje' (early sweatshop,
particularly for textile manufacturing), he set
production quotas at a level beyond what a 'mitayo'
worker ncould produce through his own labor. In order
to meet them, the Indian would have to bring his 
> children into the mine or 'obraje' to work, just as
> is the case in places like Bangladesh today.

Comments: These were some of the characteristics to
which you have to add that mine property included the
Indians working there as much as the land property
included the serfs, very much as the feudal system. 
In fact, this serfdom subsisted in poarts of Latin
America until very recently, in some places softened
by the passage of time and influence of social
changes, in some remained brutal as it was under
feudalism.

Lou:
In extreme cases, the working conditions in New Spain
(Mexico), Peru and Bolivia anticipated Nazi slave
labor camps of the twentieth century. Operating
ostensibly on the basis of feudal social institutions,
sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish 
> colonies were actually in the process of removing
> all of the "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations"
that Marx referred to in the Communist Manifesto.

Comment: I think I have a double disagreement here,
not sure.  First Nazi slave camps were not anything
new but a *regression* of capitalism to previous forms
of exploitation as Nazi invasion of other European
countries was a phenomena of bringing colonialism into
the continent of the colonial powers.  I always
considered Marx assertions about the "idyllic"
relations under feudalism in the same way I too the
"paternalistic" relations under slavery: the
ideological explanation rather than the actual
practice of the systems.


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