Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

John Paramo wrote:
> 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?

I am not sure what you are getting at here, but feudalism can also be 
described as a tributary system. It also involves what Kautsky described 
as the natural economy--in other words the creation of use-value as 
opposed to commodities. It was a highly static system. I recommend Marc 
Bloch's works for more on this.

> 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)

One of the most infamous colonists, King Leopold of Belgium, saw himself 
as following in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism. At the age of 
twenty-seven, he visited Seville in March 1862 in order to study court 
records preserved in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building. According 
to Adam Hochschild in "King Leopold's Ghost":

"For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold, 
silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years 
before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be 
gathered in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees, 
government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural 
drawings, having to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. 
Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages, 
among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made 
the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of the 
world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest whatever 
in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a dedicated 
scholar when it came to one subject, profits."

When he wrote home to a friend, the monarch demonstrated that he 
understood the goal was profit, not traditional values: "I am very busy 
here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which 
Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies." For Hochschild, the 
monarch is a "man whose future empire would be intertwined with the 
twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the 
records of the conquistadors."

full: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm

> 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.

I disagree completely with this. The "serfdom" that existed in 20th 
century Latin America, which involved debt peonage, etc., has nothing to 
do with feudalism. It is simply the way in which primitive accumulation 
was carried out in an area where arable land, game and fresh water were 
available. To tie an Indian to a mine or factory, it was necessary to 
impose feudal-like conscription. This pattern persisted into the 20th 
century. B. Traven's Chiapas novels are filled with descriptions of how 
Indians were dragooned into contract labor.

Furthermore, the origins of capitalism in modern Japan was associated 
with the imposition of feudal-like class relations in the countryside.

In "The Meiji Landlord: Good or Bad" (Journal of Asian Studies, May 
'59), R.P. Dore discusses The Iwanami Symposium on the Development of 
Japanese Capitalism, held in 1932, which marked the first scholarly 
attempt to fix a starting point for the transformation of Japan from a 
feudal to a capitalist society. Especially problematic was the role of 
class relations in the countryside, which never went through the radical 
restructuring of 16th century England.

Referring to Hirano Yoshitarö's "The Structure of Japanese Capitalism" 
Dore writes:

"Hirano's work contains a good deal of original research concerning the 
economic facts of the agrarian structure of the early Meiji, and the 
creation of a highly dependent class of tenant farmers. The landlords of 
Hirano, for example, preserved the semi-feudal social relations of the 
countryside which provided the necessary groundbase for the peculiarly 
distorted form of capitalism which developed in Japan. The high rents, 
maintained by semi-feudal extra-economic pressures, not only helped to 
preserve this semi-feudal base intact (by making capitalist agriculture 
unprofitable) they also contributed to the rapid process of primitive 
capital accumulation which accounted for the speed of industrial 
development. Thus the landlords were to blame for the two major special 
characteristics of Japanese capitalist development--its rapidity and its 
distorted nature."


> 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 won't belabor the point, but Nazism certainly was a regression all 
across the board--except when it comes to the mode of production. 
Despite the presence of free labor in Great Britain and the USA, and the 
widespread use of slave labor in Germany, capitalism existed in both 
realms, since capitalism is fundamentally about commodity production and 
nothing else.

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