Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect says:

> So what would you call the DeBeers diamond cartel? A fiefdom? In any case,
> the issue is not slavery. It is forced labor. This can take a variety of
> forms, up to and including chattel slavery.

I may not be qualified to characterize DeBeers, but I can say that, if they
use some type of forced labor systematically in the production of diamonds,
if workers are not free and voluntary wage workers, then that doesn't
qualify as capitalist production.  I don't care how rich the owners of
DeBeers are or what their lifestyle is.  This is a matter of observation and
measurement of conditions of production that we may not be able to settle
here.

If historical materialism is an iterative interplay between history and
logic, shouldn't we allow for categories to evolve in their content?  Why
retain the old content of the category of 'capitalist production' when we
can widen it to include forced labor?

I don't think so.  Wage labor and forced labor have coexisted, interbred,
and conflicted in history for a long while.  These phenomena were around at
the time the categories were coined.  By reading Marx's work, one gets a
good sense of how much historical knowledge and hard thinking is embedded in
the refinement of the category.  Still, 'capitalist production' should not
be seen as a frozen category.  We should enrich its content constantly to
keep up with the real world.

But here I think of the evolution in the conditions of surplus value
production, the new modalities of the wage relation, novel forms of labor
exploitation mediated by a free and voluntary transaction between labor and
capital.  I believe the category should continue to exclude forced labor.
Else, we should be persuaded that, by widening the category and making it
conform to Louis' interpretation, our understanding will advance.  I don't
see how mixing wage labor and forced labor in the same category helps us.

I wrote:

> I call 'capital' the means of production used in the mines while I
> challenge Louis' contention that mining with slave labor is capitalist
> production.

Louis replies:

> I always thought that capital was a social relation.

'Capital' means several things.  Marx coined new terms but he also used
preexisting ones, while he expanded its content.  The term 'capital' dates
at least from the times of the Roman empire.  Certain forms of 'capital'
(accumulated wealth) predate capitalist production.  Marx called them the
antediluvian forms of capital.

Precisely, these distinctions are important because deep down capital is a
social relation that appears as accumulated wealth.  The point is, if there
is a large mass of accumulated wealth ('capital' in the vernacular that Marx
adopted and adapted), is that evidence of the existence of capitalist
production?  The answer is no.

Unlike me, Louis says, most members of the list associate imperialism to
capitalism.  I don't know.  But the issue is how we should link imperialism
and capitalism.  Is imperialism the necessary form of capitalism in the
highest and last stage of its development?

Louis makes a derisive remark on my description of commodity exchange (a
topic that occupied Marx's mind and notebooks extensively) and then says:

> I don't think capitalism is productive at all. Even with all its
> inefficiencies, the USSR had the fastest economic growth rate in the world
> during much of the 1950s and 60s.

Many different things.  Capitalism is not productive at all.  The USSR was
more productive than the capitalist world in a certain period.  What do you
mean "capitalism is not productive at all"?  Since the 16th century?  In the
1950s and 1960s?  In the last decade?

In response to my assertion that capitalism is different from formations
based on forced labor because it is more dynamic and revolutionary, and that
its revolutionary character is witnessed by the fact that it supplies and
prepares its gravediggers, Louis says that this is Kautsky's old argument.
But then he clarifies what he means by Kautsky's argument, i.e. that
socialism in Russia requires certain preconditions.  Not what I said, but
wasn't that obvious to Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

Let me address this constant allusion to Kautsky in Louis' responses to my
views.  In my understanding, Kautsky's main points in his 1918 book on
Soviet Russia were that, (1) since the Bolsheviks could not implement their
full economic program immediately in the conditions of Russia, they had no
business leading the country.  And that (2) the Bolsheviks had no business
leading the country *in the particular way* in which they were leading it,
i.e., suppressing political opposition and dissolving the institutions of
bourgeois democracy.  I happen to believe that both, (1) and (2), are crap.

Item (1) because if you are a serious socialist in the most economically
backward country in the world and struggle under the worst conditions, you
still have the responsibility to do the best you can with what you have.
Building communism is not a task to be carried out only when you have the
best conditions.  Even my daughters understand that you cannot seriously
like camping on the premise that mosquitoes and ticks don't exist.  There
are always plenty of things to do for a socialist if she happens to be at
the state's steering wheel.  But it does not follow from this (as Lenin
clearly knew) that you can build socialism out of thin air.

In item (2), I also reject Kautsky's critique of the Soviets and the
Bolshevik leadership.  The Bolsheviks made choices under duress and --
retrospectively and/or from an abstract point of view -- it is easy to
second guess them and poke holes in their rationalizations.  This doesn't
mean that our retrospective judgments are invalid.  They may be right.  But
that's irrelevant in Kautsky's case.

For what I know, Kautsky said or imply that the Bolsheviks were inclined to
authoritarianism and that there was a slippery slope to tyranny, and that
the economic tasks in Soviet Russia required democratic institutions like
the irrelevant Constituent Assembly of January 1918.  Of course Kautsky had
a point (every nice person may become nasty, if circumstances push him) and
historical experience should make Marxists mindful of democratic 'forms'.

But the real reason why I reject (2) wholesale is the form.  It's because
Kautsky presented his views publicly at a time when the Bolsheviks were
battling the Whites and their international sponsors.  Kautsky's views
carried a lot of weight internationally.  So he objectively helped the
reaction.  The Bolsheviks were struggling and had to take chances to survive
and advance.  I tend to favor the accounts of the Russian revolution given
by Lenin, Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, Deutscher, Hill, and others, who were not
very sympathetic of Kautsky's book.  And I have no reason to change my views
now.

But, again, the fact that socialism requires highly productive producers as
a precondition should be obvious to anyone.  The view that socialist
building needs preconditions is not peculiarly Kautskist, but generally
Marxist.  It is plain common sense.

Louis writes:

> Unfortunately, societies such as Czarist Russia or Julio's native Mexico
> never had such a bourgeoisie nor will they. They prefer to unite with the
> gentry and US imperialism against the workers and peasants, rather than to
> allow a revolution to challenge their wealth and power. Marx saw exactly
> this process in the German revolution of the 1850s. He said that the
> workers and the peasants would have to carry out a "permanent" or
> "uninterrupted" revolution in order to finally get rid of feudal remnants.

That is, Louis equalizes, on the one hand, leading a political revolution
and holding to power TO, on the other hand, building socialism.  Although
they are obviously related, they are definitely different.  Socialists try
to take power under many conditions, in some cases where the degrees of
freedom are scant.  (If you don't think you can do things better than the
rulers, why do you care to challenge them in the first place?)  But what
socialists can do with political power depends on many concrete things --
most crucially, it depends on the existing productive forces.

Just because a government is socialist doesn't mean the society is
socialist.  For example, as far as I know, Cuba is led by communists.  Yet
it is not a communist country in the economic sense of the term.  It is not
even socialist.  It is in the Cuban constitution -- not that Cuba is a
socialist country -- but that it is a society 'in transition' or in the
process of 'building socialism.'  Marx's document on the role of the German
bourgeoisie as a counter-revolutionary force following the 1848 revolution
supplies no argument in favor of building socialism without a highly
productive collective worker.  Later remarks on the topic by Marx, whether
in Grundrisse, Capital, or the Critique to Gotha's Program, supply no
argument either.  Duly read, Marx's letters to the Russians are also aligned
with this, as should be clear to read them or at least read Engels'
description of the context and update on them in a further prologue to the
Manifesto.  Again, it is common sense.

I say that societies based on production by forced labor do not generate
massively a force, a social agent capable of eliminating human exploitation.
 Louis responds:

> No, but the "turbulent dynamism" of capitalist societies in Europe were
> very much dependent on the debt peonage of Mexico or apartheid in South
> Africa.

In other words, since capitalist societies in Europe were fed by the spoils
of forced labor, then production based on wage labor and production based on
forced labor are the same?

Thanks for Traven's citation.

Julio

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