Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

[John Paramo <albatrosrojo2000@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lou:

Thanks for you patience on this exchange. It is
valuable to clarify my own ideas in respect a number
of historical points. I hope I can clarify some points
as I write this in a haste. 

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?

Lou:
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.

JP:

My point was that the waste found by Kautsky and
others re: religious holidays, etc under feudalism is
a phenomena we find under all systems as they became
contradictorily a barrier for the development of the
productive forces. The same ritual waste was found
under slavery during Roman and Greek times, on in
Egypt and Euphrates/Tigris intermediate civilizations
before them.

This waste, as occurred before in other societies,
increases as the system in place deepens its crisis of
lack of development or, more accurately, when it
becomes more and more, progressively, a barrier for
society.  It respond to a need to ideologically /
politically / militarily / religiously justify the
survival of the system rather than an intrinsic value,
or lack thereof, of its productive development.

In present society that waste is shown i.e: in the
ever increasing expenditure of labor in the
?destructive forces? (as opposed to the productive
forces) of society. 

Lou:

?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":

(snipped)

?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."*** (underlined by JP)

Comment by JP:

Yes, absolutely. The Democratic Republic of Congo
today bears witness of the effect of such
*combination.*  I think we have no disagreement
whatsoever on this.  But you are talking now the mid
19th century.  European colonialism had *evolved* as a
whole from its previous stage in the 16th, 17th and
18th centuries.  He certainly learnt (Leopold, I mean)
about the *profit* nature of the Spanish ?conquest?
rather that the export nature of ?principles? and
certainly had a good use for it.  

In many aspects the nature of today?s Belgium economy
is determined by Leopold?s colonialism ? so is the
state of disarray and collapse of the DRC.  But I
think we are digressing from the discussion of Spain
in the 16th and the 17th century and the nature of its
?colonization? of America.

JP:
> 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 parts 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:

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.

JP:

The elements of ?serfdom? that remained in the 20th
century in Latin America was the result of the
*evolution* of the feudal serfdom imposed upon the
colonies by Spain.

?Debt peonage? (the law of the Capangas in Northern
Argentina and the region around it, the Gamonales in
Peru or the well described elements in Travis? novels
about Mexico, etc) were the result of the *gradual*
and slow adaptation of 16th, 17th and 18th centuries
feudal mechanisms exported by the Spanish into new
forms ? not content ? determined by the also gradual
primitive accumulation and transformation of the
states, the social classes, etc.

They were *significantly* different from the serfdom
of the 16th and 17th centuries and in the 20th century
reflected the primitive accumulation that *followed*
independence from Spain.  In other words, they were
different, in a process of changing quantitatively,
not yet qualitatively.  In previous exchanges we were
talking about 16th and 17th centuries in Latin America
in which conditions of serfdom were different than in
the 19th and 20th centuries.

Debt peonage , just to cite one form, was an step
*up*, a transition if you wish as compared with the
serfdom in the mines and lands during the last leg of
colonial times and the first post-colonial period.
During the 16th and 17th centuries debt was not
necessary as the ?legal? explanation for forced labor
at the mines or lands. Natives were just forced to do
that, in masse or face the perspective of fleeing to
the interior provinces or the jungle.

That started to change at the end of the 18th century
with the increasing concentration of industry,
primitive accumulation and the slow *evolution* of
political systems.  The increasing demand for
proletarians for industries, including some
agrarian-based industries (mechanization of certain
works in the countryside, the setup of basic food
industries, even sugar refineries to certain degree)
exerted pressure over the old forms of serfdom and a
more ?legalistic? reasoning was required to force
peasants ? particularly ? tied to the lands.

Debts incurred at the company stores (where articles
were sold to peasants and agricultural workers on
credit at exorbitant prices) was one of them.  A
capitalist form of exchange only in form
(theoretically was just the credit given against the
?paychecks?) but in practice the survival means given
in the form of a payment which only guaranteed the
meager means of sub-subsistence.  It is curious to
note that after the ?Estatuto del Peon? (Peon?s
Statute) granted by Peron (1945?)to agricultural
workers, an struggle ensued in the Yerba Mate
plantations based on the fact that the formal ?checks?
(in reality debit forms issued by the company) were
never ever produced in the previous decades by the
Yerba Mate moguls.

I recently read that Lula?s government just passed the
equivalent of the Peronist ?Estatuto del Peon? in the
Brazilian Congress legally banning what is even today
the continuation of certain forms of evolved
slavery/serfdom in certain areas of the countryside.

This *slow* evolution of serfdom is the inheritance of
the methods imported into the colonies by Spain and
the lack of capitalist development that occurred
during colonial times.

One of the contributions of the Peruvian Marxist
Mariategui - who was certainly wrong about the role of
his own social strata but right on the money on the
crucial question of indegenous peoples' serfdom - was
that he started to unravel this process of slow
evolution of serfdom in relationship with the
indigenous peoples.

IMO, the discussion you bring up about Japan, while
very interesting and educational, is unrelated to the
Spanish ?conquest? and as an analogy present us with a
significant difference with Latin America: the
transition from ?feudalism? to capitalism was done
under complete different conditions, without a passage
through though being a colony and mostly done as a
?political? revolution from above.

John Paramo:

> 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 were a phenomena of bringing colonialism
into
> the continent of the colonial powers.

Lou:

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.

Comment:

We agree that Germany and Italy under fascism remained
capitalist as ?democratic? Britain or the US.  That is
why I stated that Nazism was a ?regression to previous
forms of *exploitation*? and not an qualitative change
in the commodity production process.

I would add, however, that all commodity production
processes were accompanied (not necessarily
simultaneously) by political forms, modifications of
the classes and the state that in turn were modified
through evolution ? advances and regressions ? that
affected the commodity production process. Otherwise,
IMO, we would adopt some kind of economic reductionism
in studying social changes through history.

Nazism, in its social and political regression was
threatening the very existence and maintenance of
capitalism, at least in the forms we are used to know
it in the 20th century.  It re-introduced the role of
the state in production, the extreme militarization of
industry, the re-introduction of slavery and
colonialism in the heart of ?civilized? Europe and the
abolition of bourgeois democracy, etc

All those ?modifications? of capitalism only reached
quantitative levels because the defeat of Nazism.  At
one point, however, they were one of the two
fundamental aspects of the ?death agony of capitalism?
(the other being the international working class
revolutionary upsurge.)

That ?death agony? was only overcome in favor of
capitalism in its bourgeois democratic forms by the
unity of one of the two poles of the crisis (the
workers? revolution) to the ?democratic? capitalist in
the form of capitulation of the leaderships of the
working class.

JP


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