Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized/New World Slavery and Marx

[MARIPOWER716@xxxxxxx]

>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.  <


Comment

"Wage labor and forced labor," pose the question incorrectly because at first
glance one knows that "wage" is an economic category and "forced" - coercion,
is a political category.


Let us begin at the beginning with Marx.

"In the second type of colonies - plantations- where commercial speculation
figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the
capitalist mode of production exist, although only in a formal sense, since the
slavery of Negroes precludes free wage laborers, which is the basis of
capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by
capitalist (italicized capitalist in original)."  (Theory of Surplus Value 
Volume
2).

Further Marx says,

"Where the capitalist outlook prevails, as on American plantations, this
entire surplus value is regarded as profit . . ."  (Capital Volume 3 page 804.)


What is peculiar in "American" development is our specific capitalist
development. This peculiar development calls for - nay demands, an 
indigenousness and
militant Marxism.

Here at one blow, Marx clearly sets forth the character of capitalist slavery
in North America. Marx says:

"It is however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where
not the exchange value but the use value of the product predominated, the
surplus labor will be limited by a given set of wants, which may be greater or
less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus labor arises from the nature
of production itself. Hence in antiquity, overwork become horrible only when
the object is to obtain exchange value in its specific independent money-form;
in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the
recognized form of over-work." (Capital Volume 1).

Marx further explains why slavery in America was a peculiar form of
capitalism:

"But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower form of
slave labor, corvee labor, etc. art drawn into the whirlpool of an
international market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the sale 
of their
products for export becoming the principle interest, the civilized horrors of
overwork are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slaver, serfdom, etc. Hence the
Negro labor in the Southern states of the American Union preserved something
of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to
immediate consumption. But in proportion as the export of cotton become of vital
interest to these states, the over working of the Negro and sometimes the using
up of his life in seven years labor becomes a factor in a calculated and
calculating system."  (Capital Volume 1)

Above Marx described why and how American slavery was a value producing
system operating on the basis of bourgeois property relations.

In the Poverty of Philosophy Marx shows the decisive role of slavery in the
USNA in the development of capitalism:

"Direct slavery (repeat: D-I-R-E-C-T S-L-A-V-E-R-Y MP.) is just as much the
pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you
have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that
has given the colonies their values; it is the colonies that have created world
trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.
Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

"Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries would be
transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of
the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete decay of modern commerce
and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map
of nations."

Further in Capital Volume 1, Marx continues:

"Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in
the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less
patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the
veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery
pure and simple in the new world."

The industrial revolution began as the result of European landing in the
Americas. The significance of transforming wealth from ownership of land to
ownership of gold is world historic and what really broke up feudalism, by 
creating
the condition for the universal exchange of commodities - the role of money.
Ship building, iron and steel industries and the enormously profitable slave
trade not only accelerated the system of capital credit but developed to further
exploit the riches of the Americas.

What is being outlined is a real world process driven by slavery on the one
hand and the transition in the form of wealth from landed property to movable
property - gold, which makes the universal exchange of products possible, in
the context of the "discovery of the Americas.

Capitalism is the commodity producing society where human labor itself
appears on the market as a commodity - free labor or wage labor - a commodity 
to be
bought and sold. Free labor is not the antithesis of forced labor. Free or
free labor means divorced from means of production, or hurled unto the market
unattached - free, of ownership of "means," and not "politically free."  The
slaves were proletarians in chains. Simply because this slave labor was sold all
at once - in the form of the slave who is sold to an owner of capital, does not
change the character of the exploitation of that labor. This is a
peculiarity. The slave was in fact sold as a commodity, which is the economic 
meaning of
chattel slavery. This is also the absurdity.

Marx points out:

"The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity of the
labor-process and the process of creating value, is the production of
commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labor process and 
the
process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of production, 
or
capitalist production of commodities."  (Capital Volume 1)

There is nothing wrong with using categories to describe process. Southern
slavery became a value producing society and its prime product was cotton. This
cotton was produced exclusively for its exchange value property and entered
the cycle of capital reproduction. This absurd form of capitalism could not
stand and was burst asunder at the point of the North's industrial capacity
outstripped the consuming capacity of the South. Industry develops faster than
agriculture and the slaveholder was doomed. One should not seek laboratory 
purity.

Melvin P.