Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The discussion will bear little fruit if basic issues of method are ignored.
 I cannot post consistently.  So I'll focus on what I believe is the main
point: not the debate on history, but on the logic to sort history out,
grasp its trends, and guide ourselves.

Marx distinguished between a concrete society in its complexity (a social
formation) and the cellular social structures that make it up --
particularly the relations of production or 'economic structure'.  Any
serious attempt to examine a social formation in its concrete historical
evolution requires that we take it apart artificially, study the functioning
of its cells separately, and then try to put it all back together.  If we do
it well, the concrete mental image thus built will help us trace out the
actual social formation and enhance our ability to steer it.

As a social formation, 'capitalism' is a 'world system.'  But this doesn't
imply that each and every part of the social formation is capitalist, or
that everything in the system results from the logic of capitalist
production.  To key facts are that (1) most parts of the world economy are
linked one way or another to the world market and, (2) through competition,
the prices in the world market (and the quantities traded) are ultimately
dominated by the conditions of capitalist production, the inner logic of
surplus value production and profit rate equalization.  Domination yes, but
domination is not identity.  Capitalist production is the core of the world
market, but there are parts of the world market where capitalist production
has little or no root, and each one has its own logic.

Cuba participates in the world market.  Thus, it is an element of the
capitalist "world system."  To do the best they can, Cubans must take into
account technological standards of production, world prices, and political
constraints that are dictated by advanced capitalist production.  But it
doesn't follow that the economic structure in Cuba is 'capitalist.'
Capitalist production exists concretely or not.  It requires conditions to
exist.  If the conditions are not there -- or don't reach a certain measure
-- then capitalist production is not there either.

There may be many examples.  Vast masses of producers in the Third World do
not participate directly in capitalist production or are subject to the
process of capitalist accumulation proper.  Even if the development of
capitalist production here is temporarily slowed down by its development
there, why should we discard Marx's distinction between "suffering from the
development of capitalist production" and suffering from the "incompleteness
of that development"?  "Alongside the modern evils -- wrote Marx -- we are
oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive
survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their
accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations."  How do
the letters Marx wrote to Danielson or Zasulich change this?

Louis Proyect, who -- by his own admission -- has not duly studied Marx's
Capital (nothing wrong with that), believes that mining in South Africa by
slave workers was capitalist production because it was driven by
competition, subject to the demands of a capitalist-dominated world market.
It was capitalist production... regardless of the specific type of relation
between the direct producers, the owners of the mines, and the owners of the
capital used to exploit them.  Well, this is not the way Marxists
characterize a specific social formation, e.g., South African mining.

I call 'capital' the means of production used in the mines while I challenge
Louis' contention that mining with slave labor is capitalist production.
But this is no contradiction.  Owning capital is never a sufficient
condition for capitalist production to exist.  Capitalist production is a
specific, localized phenomenon.  The broader social context matters,
particularly because the legal and political conditions impinge upon the
effective rights of ownership.  But the way we study the historical
emergence and presence of a mode of PRODUCTION is by looking at the places
where PRODUCTION takes place.  Here and now, in this very plantation,
sweatshop, office, chip factory, virtual network, etc. -- what kind of
specific relations connect the workers and the owners?

Capitalist production is not only production for the market.  It is
production that presupposes a certain type of nexus between the 'objective'
and the 'subjective' conditions of production -- between means of production
and direct producers.  In a broad sense, for capitalist production to exist
in a place, the regular, systematic connection between workers and means of
production needs to be economic, i.e., mediated by the market.

As David Schanoes has suggested, Marx's 'primitive capital accumulation'
denotes mainly the historical split between the direct producers and the
ownership over the means of production.  Workers and owners must appear as
opposite poles in an economic transaction as a necessary premise for
production to happen.  And the market transaction has to be replicated over
and over, regularly.  (Large stocks of accumulated wealth, even in societies
that had relatively widespread commodity production, were not uncommon in
the ancient world; yet they did not lead to capitalism.  Why not?  Because
wealth inequality only leads to capitalist relations of production under
certain productive conditions.)

In actual history, there will always be diverse arrangements that -- add and
subtract a little -- are legitimate versions of capitalist production.  But
the main criteria must exclude systematic forced labor.  It must: If the
systematic connection between direct producers and owners is overt forced
labor, extra-economic force, etc., then that cannot be capitalist
production.  Call it 'feudalism', 'slavery', 'tributary system', or
something else.  Likewise, if the accumulation of capital does not occur
within a properly capitalist reproductive cycle but instead results from
forceful appropriation or expropriation, that can be 'primitive
accumulation', 'colonialism', 'imperialism', 'prevarication of public
wealth', etc. but it is not capitalist accumulation proper.

Why is this so important?  Well, it is a practical matter.  The movement of
the direct producers is always and everywhere rooted in concrete historical
conditions.  And as we live and struggle, we need to grasp the 'laws of
motion' that drive this concrete, complex historical process in which we
participate -- passively or actively.  We need to know what we are facing
because how-effective-our-actions-are depends on the conditions that enable
and constrain us -- whether natural or historically inherited.  In the
tentative sense of the social sciences, we need to try and discern the main
trends in the historical process.

Broadly speaking, the issue is whether the main source of dynamism in modern
history is forced labor, primitive accumulation, colonialism, imperialism,
-- extra-economic exploitation of one sort of another -- OR capitalist
production.  Why?  Because if we don't sort this out, we will draw the wrong
practical conclusions and will limit our ability to steer the historical
process in the right direction.  We need to know what we have, so that we
know what exactly we can build with it.  We can always build something, but
what we build is not entirely up to us.

Sharp contemporary analysts of the economic history of capitalism (e.g.,
William Baumol from NYU) have spent some time thinking about the reasons why
the specifically capitalist type of production arrangements have such
powerful dynamic effects in production and productivity.  Well, it seems to
me that Marx had reasonable ideas about it.  He believed that the main
characteristic of capitalist societies was capitalist production.  In other
words, the main economic driving force of these societies is surplus value
production -- not the direct and forceful appropriation of surplus product
or surplus labor, but its indirect appropriation as surplus value via the
market mechanism.  The apparently innocuous distinction between forceful
appropriation and voluntary exchange, when deepened and extended to the
point of turning labor-power into a commodity makes a huge historical
difference.  It becomes a tremendously effective carrot-and-stick mechanism
that unleashes human productivity like nothing else known to history.

No surprise.  Capitalist production is based on generalized commodity
production and exchange.  And commodity production and exchange is no
accident.  It is a historically widespread social-evolutionary outcome that
-- as Lenin repeatedly noted in his writings on the NEP -- arises
spontaneously under a broad array of economic circumstances, out of sheer
social necessity.

Simply put, it is an uncoordinated, free, and voluntary way to reshuffle
property in such a way that people discard things that don't meet their
wants and get those that do.  This type of reshuffling taps human
productivity when the network grows large enough to provide continuous
incentive to production.  Its inherent lack of coordination, coupled with
its drive to continuously revolutionize the conditions of production, sets
the 'system' up for recurrent crises and leads to all sorts of social ills,
but after each purge it raises again.  While the reshuffling is not very
likely to change drastically your relative wealth position at the outset, on
the use-value side of the equation, everyone becomes better off.  This is
the germ of truth in the economists' emphasis on the welfare properties of
'market general equilibrium.'  Apparently when it encompasses labor-power,
the free (an adjective Marx used with no quotation marks) and voluntary
element in the transaction makes the big difference. And it promotes the
can-do, irreverent attitude towards nature and the bequests of history that
-- while implicit in human labor since the origins of humanity -- has come
to be associated with capitalist entrepreneurs.

(Louis Proyect dislikes statements of fact of this sort.  He thinks this is
a fetishization of the productive powers of capitalism.  It is instead a
basic sense of reality.  How will we build any alternative society without a
Marxist -- Keplerian at least -- sense of reality?)

Marx showed that, deep down, the market process was a conduit for the
exploitation of the worker by the capitalist.  The freedom of the worker was
in part her dispossession, which "forced" her to sell her labor power. In
many ways, the worker was like an slave -- something that those who believe
capitalism is unqualified forced labor won't dispute.  Except that the
"legal fiction" -- as Marx noted -- was not irrelevant.  It amounts to a
substantial change in the economic conditions in comparison to forced labor.
 The free and voluntary character of the labor-capital relation is a
fulcrum that gives capitalist production its unprecedented dynamism.

As a rule, societies that appropriate surplus product or surplus labor in a
direct, non-economic manner are not nearly as dynamic or revolutionary as
capitalist societies.  Capitalist societies contrast in many ways with
noncapitalist societies.  Among other things, a capitalist society
necessarily generates a critical mass of highly productive and
interconnected workers whose working and living conditions enables them to
unite and reorganize society.  Societies based on direct forced labor cannot
generate this revolutionary element.  This is one of the things that singled
out Marx's kind of socialism.  The turbulent dynamism of capitalist
societies (in the sense of continuously shaking production and living
conditions, turning science into an instrument of production, dissolving
rigid social forms and prejudices, etc.) was -- in Marx's view -- inherent
to this mode of producing.

In my opinion, this is a valuable kernel of Marxist thought.  And there is
no reason now to discard it.  Anyone with a sense of evolution and history
understands that capitalist production, emerging in the Middle Ages as a
tiny plant in a few scattered spots in the coastal areas of Italy, Holland,
and England, surrounded by pesky weeds, parasites, and other forces of
nature, could not just dissolve preexisting or coexisting modes of
production all of a sudden in the rest of the world.  Even after capitalist
production conquered ideological respectability and wielded political power,
its enlightened or unwitting promoters had to accommodate other social
structures (and deal with the growing challenge of workers) -- confident or
not that over time competition would undermine them (never entirely
complacent about the workers' movement).

Necessarily, capitalist production entered lasting symbiotic relationships
with other structures (e.g., slavery) and fed itself with the spoils of
colonialism, imperialism, and all sorts of forceful appropriation and
expropriation.  At times, capitalist production reinforced these forms; but
-- as a rule -- it was a dissolvent and eventually conflicted with them
violently.

[Note that before 1914-1918, this was Lenin's view.  Lenin's early economic
works emphasized Marx's insights in Capital. It was during WWI, a massive
and virulent conflict involving all major European nations and then more,
that Lenin shifted his views and developed a theory of imperialism as
necessary higher stage in the capitalist social formation.  He was under the
impression that extra-economic exploitation had gutted out standard
capitalist accumulation and capitalism had reached its terminal phase.
However, as a testimonial to his hard-nosed sense of reality, Lenin did
change his mind -- gradually but significantly -- in the early 1920s.  Don't
take it from me -- compare Lenin's writings before 1914 to, say, State and
Revolution, and to his pamphlets on left-wing communism and the NEP.]

Yes, capitalists driven by their perceived interests will use their
grandmothers -- not to mention outright extortion and force -- to
single-mindedly pursue profits.  Competition puts them blinders.  But, the
development of capitalism is less a conspiracy of the selfish and more a
process of "natural history."  In other words, it is spontaneous to a large
extent -- with nobody deliberately enforcing its coherence or promoting its
long-term interests, yet with a discernable inner logic.

In an immediate and urgent sense, individual capitalists are on their own --
driven by the pursuit of individual profit.  And the bounds within which
they operate -- whether imposed by natural laws or by history (including
their own previous actions) -- are just obstacles to be overcome in the
quest for profits.  However, it would be a mistake to turn the logic of
individual profit making into a micro representative of the macro logic of a
capitalist society as a whole.  This is the fallacy of composition that
people who conflate imperialism and capitalism make.  And that misleads them
fatally.

Marx was always clear (Jurriaan recently reminded us of this) that -- in
spite of the huge superstructures of fictitious capital recurrently built on
the basis of capitalist production although increasingly detached from it --
the law of value underlies them all and asserts itself forcefully by
occasionally pulling the rug off their feet.  Of course, we know that there
is no Hegelian, meta-historical 'law of value' out there.  What asserts
itself is the aggregate outcome of the actions people take, each person in
her own context, and the inescapable physical fact that no society can
consume more than it produces.

Analogously, when we look at imperialism in present times, we need to
discipline our analysis and see beyond the epiphenomena, assess to what
extent Bush's version of imperialism in the current context is consistent
with the fundamental logic of capitalist production (still the main driving
force of the world market and capitalism as a world formation), and to what
extent it conflicts with it -- and how we can leverage our understanding of
the situation to advance.  We cannot take for granted that whatever Bush
does is the direct expression of the logic of capitalist production.  That
would be a caricature of Marxism.

Again, the workers' movement deals with the specific historical conditions
at hand and -- if history is any guide -- the process will be long and will
require a lot of maneuvering.  That is why this assessment is a strategic
need of the movement.  In my opinion -- ruling out a catastrophe of global
proportions -- all the indications point to the fundamental logic of
capitalist production reasserting itself again.  Will it do it sooner or
later, after taking a long catastrophic detour a la 1914-1945?  What we do
may not be irrelevant in determining the answer.  I am well aware that
pinning down the overall trend of the world social formation is of little
political help.  Previewing the twists and turns of history, anticipating
the timing of events, is what we need.  Abstract thinking can only carry us
so far.  This is self-evident, but if the method is not straightened out we
tend to turn conjuncture into structure.

The historical evidence that Louis Proyect needs to produce to refute what I
have called "a kernel of Marxism" is not that showing that in Spain, Japan,
or anywhere else the symbiosis between capitalist production and other types
of production (integrated in the capitalist-dominated world markets) has
existed or still exists.  That can be taken for granted.  What is required
is historical evidence that demonstrates that the main sources of social and
economic dynamism between the 16th and the 21st centuries have been -- not
capitalist production proper -- but colonialism, imperialism, and
extra-economic exploitation.  In other words, that the main dynamics of the
capitalist world system has been for the most part that of a zero-sum game.

Louis Proyect will fail to find such evidence and we will be better off by
sticking to Marx's insights.

Julio

_________________________________________________________________
Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger:
http://messenger.yupimsn.com/