Re: emancipation and the american revolution

["dms" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry about the previous, empty page-- hit the wrong button.
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Well, there are important historical points to be made, and some have been
made, but the critical support to King George is definitely not one of them,
nor is the speculation about slavery ending sooner if the British had
defeated the colonists.

What is an important point is that while the Governor of Virginia might talk
about freeing this or that slave if he stepped forward to fight,  the Union,
as a union, had to destroy the institution of slavery to win its war.  The
Union then engaged in a collective, social, let's say CLASS struggle against
the South, the South being dominated not by plantations as such but by
SLAVERY.  There was significant industrial and commerical slavery in the
South-- steamboats, railroads, mines, mills, construction, smelters,
foundries, shipyards all employed slave-labor, sometimes alongside free
white and free black labor, sometimes not.  But slavery dominated the
confederacy.

There seems to be some illusion in the democratic nature of the emerging
bourgeoisie and their "revolutionary" impact.  The illusion is that some
expect that impact to extend to an equality of all despite the economics of
the property and labor systems.  But that's exactly what Marxism is supposed
to remedy.  That capital, constituting itself, at its origin and its core as
the separation of the laborer from the means of subsistence and the means of
production, and then the exchange of the "denatured" detached labor power
with those means which are constitued as private property, is IMMEDIATELY
and eternally faced with the conflict between its own impulse to
generalized, social production and reproducing its existence as private
property.  Do we really need to reexamine Cromwell's treatment of the Irish
during and after the Glorious Revolution, or the French expeditions in
defense of slavery, or even the Union's extermination of the native people's
to see just how unfree, undemocratic, the expansion of free, exchangeable,
property-- the essential bedrock of capital-- can be?

In its origins and existence, capital initiates revolution only to draw back
in fear, terror; securing its own existence as private property only through
the accommodation of other pre-existing, archaic forms.  And this conflict
exists even as capital destroys those forms-- reconstituting them, that
private property in a form absorbed in, intelligible to, capital's network
of exchange, in esssence capital gives these forms, these indentured
categories in the South, the Philippines, Mexico, Indochina, an "as if"
existence, "as if " they were modern forms of capitalism.

That's a historical and theoretical framework for a defense of "Brennerism,"
or "modified Brennerism."

Regarding the contribution of slavery-- in my readings of Brenner, and my
personal communications with him, I haven't seen or heard him deny the
contributions of slavery.  What he is stating is that the social relation of
production that Marx abstracts from capital, which gives capital its logic,
its contradiction, its propulsion, and its negation and overthrow, does not
have its origin in simple demographics, simple economic expansion of
markets, nor in the growth of slavery.

Eric Williams says a lot more than what Lou says he says.  Williams isn't
arguing that without slavery British capitalism would never have triumphed,
Williams is saying that without slavery there would have been no British
capitalism. Period. And that's where he's wrong.  In his great works, and
they are truly great, mistaken, works, he never shows the social transition,
the changes in class relationships, that make the mercantile and slave based
accumulation of wealth into the origins of British capitalism.

In reality, the British dominance of the slave trade and of the Caribbean
colonial area is not established until after 1713.  In fact it is between
1720 and 1730 that
the initial explosion of British slave commerce (including trade other than
the slave trade) occurs.

As for the United States, the real growth of slavery as a contributor to
development occurs after 1730.  Georgia didn't even allow slavery until
1749.

But by the middle of the 18th century, the groundwork for capital, the basis
for capitalist social relations of production is already defined and
developing in both the North of the US and in England.  The capitalization
of land has already occurred in both area.  Wage-labor is already
established in manufacturing and construction.


So what can we say about slavery and the world market.  Not that they are
the origins of capital--not that they are the secret to primitive
accumulation-- we can say what Melvin said so accurately and precisely-- not
primitive accumulation but part of the breathing, living substance of
developing, and established capitalism.

More to come...

dms