A POST on Post, and vice versa

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A compact digression into History and Class Content

Caveat Emptor:  Responsibility for all mistakes contained herein resides
solely with dm schanoes.


Although some lengthy expositions have appeared regarding the "Brenner
thesis," and the article by Charles Post, "Plantation Slavery and Economic
Development in the Antebellum Southern United States," is identified as a
casus belli, very little of those expositions has directly dealt with
Brenner's thesis or Post's article.

Post is not one to abstract Southern slavery for the historical circumstance
of its existence.  He acknowledges immediately slavery's existence and
import within and  to the triangle trade, and the motor effect the trade has
on the development of wage-labor capitalism.  At no point will Post argue
that slavery is not part of the world market and not part of the substance
of developing capitalism.

Post does argue that two primary analyses of slavery, "the
planter-capitalism" theory of the comparative advantages of slavery, and the
"non-bourgeois civilization" theory of "lack of motivation" of slaves, are
inadequate to the task of explaining the growth, decline, the role, and the
predicament of the plantation slave economy in the world market.  Post
argues that both theories share a failure in their reliance on the
subjective motivation of the participants in the system, and share a failure
in attributing either/or the "success" and "failure" of the system to
"economic rationality."

Post argues, from an apparently classic Marxist position, that history of
the slave system must be analyzed on the basis of its property relations, on
its organization of labor, on its distinction, or lack thereof, between the
living and dead elements of production.

In response to the arguments concerning "comparative advantage," Post
clearly and correctly identifies that the profits of the slave system were
not based on the relations of its internal components of production, its
creation of a market, nor its own expanded reproduction.  Post determines
that the profits were the result of the world market demand, the demand of
industrial capitalism. Always being one to go further, I would  argue that
the profit obtained is not only the product of comparative exchange with
industrial capitalism, but is a portion of the profit generated by
industrial capitalism and then distributed throughout its network of
exchange.  For the slave system, profit is determined externally, and award
internally.  (But I do not say that is Post's argument.)

Like profit, technological innovation in the slave economy is an external
input.  Analyzing Cuba, whose technical advances in sugar harvesting,
processing, transport were financed, engineered, introduced by US and
British industrial capitalism, and brought to fruition in construction and
operation by slave labor, Post  clearly shows how the technical innovation
became a static component, never precipitating a sustained technical advance
beyond its original "benchmark."  What has occurred is the technical
grafting or implementation of the products of wage labor into the social
relations of the plantation economy, and thus, it is that relation, that
property relation that encapsulates and constricts further innovation.

Similar circumstances surround slave production in the Southern US.   And
going one step further as we should always do, in fact the source of this
constriction is that in the slave organization of production there is no
distinction between the mule, the plow, the slave. Consequently,  the labor
extracted beyond the costs of replacement and the surplus realized in
exchange with industrial capital never bears the burden of reproduction of
the entire system.

Post then concludes this analysis of the planter-capitalist with the
assertion that should put an end to all those who wish to claim that the
Brenner thesis consigns pre-capitalist formations, the periphery, slavery,
etc. to non-essential status.  Says Post:  "Plantation slavery in the
Americas was the creature of the capitalist world market and was subject to
its imperatives of cost cutting but rested on non-capitalist social property
relations."

Turning to the "non-bourgeois civilization" analysis, Post is able to show
how the recalcitrance of the slave-laborer vs. the free wage-laborer is
mistaken.  Indeed, the Southern journals of the first half of the 19th
century are filled with article of the comparative advantage (!) of slave
labor vs. free labor in the industrial processes of the slave economy, in
road construction, in railroad maintenance and construction, in
transportation, in extractive industries, in manufacturing.  And despite
that advantage, Southern industry falls behind that of the North.

In his book, Industrial Slavery in the Old South, Robert Starobin gives a
remarkable, and concise, exposition of the entire predicament of the South:
START
--While the reasons for this [why southern industry did not develop more
rapidly] are...complex, an explanation seems to rest on the limitations of
the southern markets,  the South's difficulty competing with northern and
foreign producers, unfavorable balances of southern trade, and, perhaps most
important, inthe ability of southern agriculture to outbid industry for
investment capital.

  The slow development of southern industries stemmed from the various
restrictions on consumer demand. [my note:  and what is this, but the result
of a restrictive property relation, confining production and consumption to
a sphere not requiring expanded reproduction?].  Slaveowners usually
maintained their slaves at subsistence living standards, and some of the
largest plantations were almost entirely self-sufficient.  The poor whites
lacked purchasing power because they did not produce for regional markets.
Isolated from transportation facilities, yeoman farmers produced only for
limited markets and had difficulty competing with the more efficient
planters.  Moreover, the South lacked urban markets, since by about 1860,
only about 10 percent of its population live in cities, compared to the
Northwest's 14 percent and the Northeast's 36 percent....

...Compared to northern and foreign [industrial] producers, Southerners had
less experience, less efficient management, smaller markets, inferior
technology, poorer transportation, ....and, perhaps most important, smaller
capital resources.  Credit arrangements and unfavorable trade balances
drained plantation profits northward and permitted northern merchants
increasingly to dominate the commerce in cotton...   ...capital acccumulated
by northern merchants, bankers, and insurance brokers tended to be
reinvested in northern industries and transportation enterprises. [my note:
as did British investment capital]

...from the 1780s to about 1815, southern planters had been investing much
of their surplus capital in industries and transportation projects. During
these years, southern industrial growth seemed to be paralleling that of the
North.  After 1815, however, southern industries waned as the rapidly
developing textile industry of Britain and New England demanded cotton, the
invention of the cotton gin simulated short-staple cotton cultivation, and
the fertile southwestern plantations yielded quick profits.....

  As a result of this process, by the 1830s key slave-state industries were
already a generation behind those of the free states.... By 1860, the South
had only one-fifth of the nation's manufacturing establishments and the
capitalization of southern factories was well below the national
average.......

However, it must also be understood that, in the long run, extensive
industrialization would have been difficult if not impossible under the the
rigid slave system.  To develop according to the British or northern
pattern, the rural population of the South would have had to be released
from the land.... END

And so we see here a confirmation of the "backwardness" of the South as the
product of its property relations, of  its historical, and thus historically
limited importance to developing industrial capitalism.

We also see in the South the backwardness that is so typical of colonies,
the lack of a domestic market, production directly for export, the lack of
internally generated requirements for technical innovation, and expanded
reproduction.

Post states, "Under slavery, the master is unable to distinguish capital
invested in objects and instruments of production from that invested in
reproducing his laborers.  Both the laborers and land, tools, and the like
appears as fixed and inflexible costs to the planter."   And I would go
another step further and add, the profit achieved is solely a profit
allotted by industrial capital, and never appears to the owner of the
property as a result of relations between the components of production,
between the dead and the living, and thus without the appearance of such a
relation, there appears no need for expanded reproduction other than as a
mechanism for preventing the advance of industrial capital.