Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

[Nicholas Siemensma <nsiemensma@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- Julio Huato wrote: 
> 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.

Julio repeats the scandalous Rousseauian gesture of
"setting all the facts aside."  Unfortunately, he then
forgets quite where he put them.

> 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.' 
> ...  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.... 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.

Where this is not trivially correct it is wrong. 
Obviously capitalism requires the existence of free
labour to valorise, but Julio acknowledges that
certain processes such as forced labour are complexly
articulated into the world system, forming adjuncts
and subordinate elements of accumulation within an
overdetermining capitalist mode of production. 
However, he forgets that commodities produced by
slavery/forced labour and sold on a unified world
market contain embodied surplus labour which can be
valorised as capital and invested in production in the
next cycle.  These "local" forms of labour are
progressively absorbed by capital and form part of the
overall accumulation process.  This is not what Laclau
and others in the seventies called "circulationist". 
Frank indeed did not understand the dynamics of
accumulation.  I'll expand on this below, but first a
long quote from Julio which reveals, IMHO, a lot of
problems.

> 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 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.
> ....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.  
> 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.  

For the value of labour to be commensurated within
production, for the value of labour to be known, there
must indeed be free labour and already-existing
capitalism.  Of course.  If all labour is enslaved etc
its value cannot be determined by the market,
sustained accumulation cannot occur, etc.  There is
surely not a problem for South African mines in
valorising the product directly and determining the
worker's value - ie the amount of labour embodied in
the worker.  This enables capital accumulation to
occur, self-sustained expansion, production for the
production of new value re-invested in production for
valorisation.  If the product can be valorised as
capital, what's Julio's problem?  These are necessary
adjunct forms within the global circulation of
capital, and any other talk of articulated modes
misses the point.

Capitalism is the necessary self-expansion of value
which requires valorisation in the production process,
not some categorical conception of "free wage labour."
 Julio seems to be pushing a Brennerite line that Lou
and others cannot explain in value-theory terms why
free wage labour is essential to capitalism, and why
other societies such as former colonies using forced
labour in extractive or primary commodity production,
cannot be considered capitalist, even if they arose as
part of the global circulation of capital and even if
they were an essential mechanism of accumulation.

This corresponds to a certain misreading of history
shared by others, the logic of which seems to be that
capitalism can only emerge where a free market in
labour also exists, which depends on separating
workers from means of production.  Therefore, by
definition, capitalism emerged "first" in the place
which met these preconditions: the British
countryside.  This apriori insistence on the presence
of "free wage labour" as a clue to the presence of
capitalism not only makes it impossible to account for
the actual emergence of capitalism in concrete
historical terms, it also makes it impossible to
account for the non-appearance of capitalism in
certain regions of China, Java, Japan, Bengal etc. 
Pomeranz, though not a Marxist, is good on this, and
Lou rightly cites him on English backwardness relative
to China.  Industrial capitalism arose in England
because of relations moulded and shaped by Britain's
participation in a total, already-existing
world-system.  This spatial localisation does not
disprove the influence of the specific geographies and
civilisations of other regions in Eurasia, Africa and
America.  Britain was imbricated within a world system
consisting of all different kinds of precapitalist
society, and the emergence of capitalism in England
was the result of this fact.  It is impossible to
historically justify, either factually or
theoretically or whatever people choose, the notion
that capitalism emerged in England as a result of
purely (or even largely) internal changes and
developments.  There is simply no comparison between
the Enclosure Movement on one hand, and on the other
hand the extraction of value from the Americas, Asia
and Africa, its accumulation in Europe, the 11 million
slaves exported from Africa in the Atlantic trade: the
benefits of imported capital, technology and
management skills from the colonies, the abundance of
depopulated land, the dissipation of environmental
contradictions and Malthusian crises.  And the problem
with the idea of "expropriation" is that is simply
didn't happen like that.  Gregory Clark has shown that
there was no "Agrarian Revolution", no revolution in
agricultural productivity or mass exodus from the
land. 

Obviously the complete liquidation of feudal vestiges
and the full monetisation of rural society was
important, but it doesn't alter the fact that the
birth of industrial capitalism was fundamentally a
world system event.  Why does this matter?  Because it
means that whether or not hacienda workers in Latin
America were waged proletarians is almost irrelevant
to the question of the role the hacienda system played
in protocapitalism.  Imperialism has always been the
formative influence in the creation of world-systems
and capitalism too is an imperialist world system.  

Similarly - and to finally return to Julio's argument
- capitalism has called the neocolonial, peripheral
reserve army into existence, and cannot do without it.
 Julio thinks that peasants, slaves and unemployed
people in places like southern Africa (maybe Patrick
Bond can help me - Zimbabwe's unemployment is above
50% and SA's 30%, I think) are structurally and
functionally not part of the global capital labour
pool, and are instead suffering from incomplete
capitalist development "primitive accumulation,
colonialism, imperialism, prevarication of public 
wealth, not capitalist accumulation proper".  This is
obviously untrue, however: the harrowed and hunted of
the neocolonial peripheries are part of the world's
working class, imbricated into the capitalist
world-system, connected to it by millions of threads
like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput.  Marx on relative
surplus population, "the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation", is crucial in showing how
the unemployed and underemployed are indeed part of
the "surplus population" available to capitalism,
conscripted and used just like the British Empire made
available the Irish in the 19th century, or the people
of the Indian subcontinent.  They can't do without it.

Julio also writes: 

> 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?  ...The movement of 
> the direct producers is always and everywhere rooted
> in concrete historical conditions.  

This is undoubtedly true, though I'm not sure it means
what Julio would like it to mean.  It means that - as
Jim Blaut emphasised - class struggle never occurred
or can ever occur in isolation from everything else,
like a pure strain of virus in a lab, but always has
the attributes of its place and its time, and is
always coloured by religious and ethnic forms or by
struggles for emancipation against some specific type
of hegemony, with its own specifically-internalised
mental representations, mystifications and false
consciousnesses.  This surely expresses the
fundamental idea, shared by Marx and Lenin, that the
world system is the determining last instance and sum
total of all disparate class struggles, so that class
struggle and all its forms and historical processes
are always bound up in the rivalry between nations who
can be simultaneously colonisers and the colonised, as
the thread title suggests.  As a result I don't see
how Julio can then assert that "if workers are not
free and voluntary wage workers, then that doesn't 
qualify as capitalist production".  This elides all
"concrete historical conditions" and "specific,
localised phenomena" in favour of (only
half-understood) abstract textbook definitions.

Finally, Julio keeps banging on about "the productive
powers of capitalism", its "unprecedented dynamism"
etc.  Julio continues to mistake the secular tendency
to proletarianisation with an expanded capability to
productively employ proletarians.  The fact is that
the total social product of the capitalist world
system is valorised by a few hundred million waged
proletarians, with 4 billion pauperised others just
dying to hear a rather tired rehash of isolated
tidbits from the Manifesto and German Ideology while
deepening and insurmountable (occluded) immiseration
hurls deprived pools of multimillioned masses into the
megacities of the South and provokes contemporary
tidal immigration to the North.  The great weakness of
late capitalism is the very low level of social
productivity and the underproduction of valorisable
capital, which explains the lack of effective demand
in the market: few people are employed because it is
unprofitable to employ them.  There is an
accumulation-dynamics problem producing pools of
moribund excess capital and labour everywhere; capital
cannot be profitably invested because of a lack of
surplus value arising in the process of production. 
This contradiction is sharpened by the immense scale
of human need.  

In this conjuncture, Julio's hurrah-capitalism
hucksterism seems particularly perverse.  I wonder at
the political trajectory of someone who claims that
"everyone becomes better off" as a result of
capitalist production.  Let's hope that the derring-do
of capitalist entrepeneurs and their lovably waggish
"can-do, irreverent attitude towards nature" doesn't
bequeath our planet to cockroaches, huh?  

> Cuba participates in the world market.  Thus, it is
> an element of the 
> capitalist "world system."  

One of Julio's bugbears seems to be the WST/dependency
theorists.  I also have problems with Frank,
Wallerstein and co, whose incorrigible empiricism
renders them unable to comprehend the basic Marxist
notion of an "accumulation regime".  Julio seems to
have the same difficulty.  A state can be articulated
into the world system, but not incorporated into the
world market.  You have to differentiate between the
accumulation regime which applies in a particular
historical space, and the world market which is in
fact only an epiphenomenon of the accumulation regime.
 The basis of the Cuban state is survival against
external blockade, its party and state elites
legitimise themselves internally by reference to
external enemies and confrontation with world
capitalism.  This is the form of its incorporation
into the world system.

Nick

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