(fwd from Rakesh) DMS/Rakesh exchange

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(DMS, etc.)
>To begin at the beginning, check out Felix Hernandez's
>Rhythm Revue Dance Party held at the Roseland ballroom
>if you want to find out how "down" I am period. As a lad,
>I actually had to learn the dances, and learn them right, if I
>wanted any chance at all at something more than a handshake good
>night at the end of the evening.  What we won't do for sex,
>know what I mean?

(Rakesh, etc.)

  Ok, whatever. You got that up on me, I am sure.

>But to Post... yes reread the section you are referring to,
>and Post is indeed reiterating the reality and the obvious
>element of the conflict between the North and the slave
>holders-- expansion into the  midwest, Kansas, near west,
>Colorado,into the far west,California.  Whatever I think of
>Post's exposition of the requisites for accumulation, i.e
>domestic market, there is no doubt about the slaveholders'
>desperate attempts to restrict the North and the Northwest
>from further expansion.  See, for example, Bloody Kansas.

Well yes but why. Was this a struggle by the South to maintain and improve
the balance of political power or by North to open up the swelling Kansas
market for its mfgs? This whole emphasis on market outlets seems overdone.

>Post says: "As a result, plantation slavery's further westward
>expansion during the 1840s and 1850s would have severely
>retarded the development of the rural 'home market' for
>capitalist manufacture and industry."  That's a point of
>contention?  How can anyone argue with that?

Two things. 1st this would  have had to have been crystal clear well before
the Civil War if Northern industrialists were fighting the Civil War for
market outlets as such rather than a large protected market. Now I do agree
that a large integrated market is cause and effect of the economies of
scale by which capitalists reduce unit values in the attempt to increase
the mass of surplus value. But the problem is not necessarily that
slaveowners would have throttled the market per se but the market for
Northern mfgs in particular. That is, the plantation owners would have
resisted Northern tariff and immigration policy demands and remained tied
to England.

There are a lot of things American industrial capitalism would like to
forget: its dependence on genocidal violence against the Native Americans,
its origins in profiting from slavery, its imposition of tariffs which it
now denies to others, its reliance on master-servant law in its direct
exploitation of the early industrial proletariat (see Robert J Steinfeld).
Post writes the economic history of the US in a way that forgets much too
much, in my opinion. Violence, extra economic coercion and the state all
recede in the background. It's an economistic Marxism.

  Second, what we need is data for the total market provided by the
plantations and the Midwestern family farm for the North's mfg goods. Again
you have provided no such data; nor does Post in this article.

>Check out growth and capitalization of
>manufacturing establishments for both North and South prior
>to the war.

Yes the difference is not in doubt. But didn't you yourself point out that
slaves were rented out to mfg establishments in the South? This is
Starobin's book, right?


>And please check out the value of machinery
>utilized in agricultural production for both North and South
>prior to the war.


But this does not seal the case. Yes the North and West were better markets
for the reaper but that does not mean the Midwestern family farmer provided
a better market overall for industrial goods than the Southern plantations.

>Re: minimizing the role slavery played in the industrial
>revolutions:  I do not want to minimize nor exaggerate the
>role of slavery.  As Post says it was a pivot that became a
>fetter.  Besides what I want to do isn't the issue.  Post's
>paper is, and in that paper he is not minimizing the role
>of slavery in anything.  Let's stick to the actual content
>of the paper. Re: Post's paper,he says right from jump street that slavery
>was the central motor of the Triangle Trade of the Atlantic
>economy (p.290).  US merchants participated in that triangle
>trade as the molasses was processed into rum in the New England
>states, traded the rum (after watering it down) for slaves,
>trading the slaves for...etc., and reversing parts of the
>triangle, trading manufactured items, and foodstuffs to
>the Caribbean, using the profits of that trade to outfit
>slave ships, selling shares in the ships to investors who
>realized their return in the slave trade expeditions of
>the ships.

And in the actual content of the paper these few lines in the introduction
are completely downplayed, if not  forgotten, in the last section which
sets up the strawman  of Douglas North who is then torn down. The paper is
contradictory, and one is left with the last impression. Moreover, Post
seems only willing to recognize these linkages in the case of England's
relationship to the West Indies, not New England's relationship to the US
South. Thus, the absence of citation to Ronald Bailey is important.


>Post's paper is limited to the topic of US plantation slavery
>and the two dominant themes in the analysis of slavery's
>economic development.  To then state as you do that he
>doesn't avail himself of Inikori's work on slavery and the
>industrial revolution, or Bailey's  misses the point of his
>analysis-- which is the limitations and contradictions of
>the Southern plantattion economy.


By not drawing on said research, Post cannot provide an accurate picture of
slavery's place in North America's total economic development. Again by the
last section he has withdrawn that opening paragraph which only applied to
the West Indies and England, anyway. I can't imagine black people are
dancing in joy about that.


>Regarding your position on the disincentives of slavery to
>technical improvement and expansion-- yes, you stated, if this
>is what you are referring to that Post's argument --
>capitalism "expels" labor from the production process-- is
>mistaken, because actually capitalism adds to the overall
>labor used in the production process.

Well if you would parse my posts and respond, then you wouldn't have to
mis-state what I say. Why not take advantage of this medium to have a
systematic discussion?


>But you miss the point and Post didn't.  It's not the overall
>mass of labor, it's the relationship between the components,
>dead and living, that is critical, and in capitalist manu-
>facturing, and capitalist agriculture, that relationship
>is constantly altered to reduce the proportion of labor so
>engaged as a ratio of total capital employed.  This is clearly
>the case with the development of Northern agriculture and
>and manufacturing.

If plantation capitalists using gang labor couldn't have relied on free
wage labor then they had to turn to slave and other forms of formally
unfree labor even if these forms of exploitation hindered continuous
mechanization. Which wouldn't have been true when the turn was made
especially after Bacon's rebellion to slavery because the technical
possibilities for continuous mechanization did not even then exist. At any
rate, slavery does not make this plantation agriculture in land rich,
malarial  zones any less capitalist, any less profit oriented, any less
dependent on the valorization of capital due to the monetization of the
inputs than what you are calling capitalist agriculture. In fact plantation
slavery was more capitalist in character than Midwestern family farming as
Marx recognized in that passage which Post for obvious reasons does not cite.

Let's be clear about why this denial of the capitalist character of slavery
is important: exactly because American slavery was ruthlessly capitalist
rather than non capitalist and paternalist as Ulrich Phillips and Eugene
Genovese (Philips in Gramscian clothing as Clarence A Walker has put it)
would have it did slavery gave birth to humankind's most monstrous ideology.

Finally, I shall say again: it's not clear why property in persons--rather
than some other factor--explains the slower capitalization of Southern
plantation agriculture than Midwestern wheat farming in the antebellum
period; after all, slave plantations had once been among the most
technically progressive enterprises.


Yours, Rakesh




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