Re: (fwd from Rakesh) reply to DMS on Post

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> nor do  you count as
> defacto slavery the labor of prisoners in the US or mineworkers in
> South Africa at the turn of the last century.
>
> Yours, Rakesh

Was the mode of production in colonial Africa precapitalist or capitalist? 
To begin with, we face something of the same problem that we encountered 
with Spanish colonialism. In Africa, the Europeans insisted on borrowing 
from the feudal lexicon, despite a clear capitalist agenda. For example, 
the French counted on corvée labor to lay railway track or perform other 
tasks associated with colonial infrastructure. Without reliable rail lines, 
crops and minerals destined for the seaports would languish at their 
source. Regardless of the label, such forced labor was not only integral to 
the colonial capitalist system, it had the same devastating impact on the 
local population as Spanish practices had three centuries earlier. Colonial 
administrator Emile Baillaud reported in 1905 that:

"At this moment in West Africa, the necessary hands . . . are easy to be 
had; and also at the coast the towns overflow with men going about looking 
for work. The captives having listened to our advice, and finding the way 
to freedom without dying from hunger, have come in numbers towards our 
enterprises, wherever it was possible to find work with the Europeans. They 
not only leave their masters, but also their countries."

Without extra-economic compulsion, primitive accumulation would have not 
taken place. The indigenous peoples would have subsisted through the means 
available to them outside of the cash economy. If the colonial powers had 
relied exclusively on market competition, the local population would have 
found ways to ignore them.

One of the most infamous colonists, King Leopold of Belgium, saw himself as 
following in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism. At the age of 
twenty-seven, he visited Seville in March 1862 in order to study court 
records preserved in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building. According to 
Adam Hochschild:

"For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold, 
silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years before 
Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be gathered in this 
building, from throughout the country, all decrees, government and court 
records, correspondence, maps and architectural drawings, having to do with 
the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Collected under one roof, these 
eighty-six million handwritten pages, among them the supply manifest for 
one of Columbus's ships, have made the General Archive of the Indies one of 
the great repositories of the world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a 
boy, with no interest whatever in art, music, or literature, Leopold was 
nonetheless a dedicated scholar when it came to one subject, profits."

When he wrote home to a friend, the monarch demonstrated that he understood 
the goal was profit, not traditional values: "I am very busy here going 
through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which Spain made 
then and makes now out of her colonies." For Hochschild, the monarch is a 
"man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century 
multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors."

For all of its devotion to British exceptionalism, the Brenner thesis would 
seem ill equipped to explain why British rule failed to abolish 
extra-economic forms of coercion in its most important colonial holding: 
South Africa. Indeed, it was here where non-market forms of exploitation 
helped to successfully propel the nation into the front ranks of capitalism 
on the continent.

In keeping with laws already enacted in the rest of the British Empire, 
slavery was abolished in 1834. But the devotion to freedom was only 
lukewarm. Great Britain soon found ways to reintroduce other forms of labor 
conscription. [I would now add that the American bourgeoisie must have 
studied this lesson and applied to the postbellum South where 
sharecropping, convict labor and debt peonage replaced slavery.]

Bristling at the abolition of slavery, Boer farmers withdrew into the east 
and northeast, where they would be allowed to pursue religious freedom 
while trafficking in human beings. Their KhoiKhoi slaves could be relied on 
for the dirty work on their farms. According to Bernard Magubane, "the 
Boers stood for outdated slavery on a petty scale, the foundation of their 
patriarchal peasant economy, the British colonist represented large-scale 
capitalist exploitation of the land and Africans."

For the British, abolitionism was not entirely altruistic. The Reverend 
Thomas Farrell Buxton, a prominent abolitionist, explained his goals in a 
letter to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the 
Civilization of Africa:

"We determined to form two associations, perfectly distinct from each 
other, but having one common object in view, putting an end to the slave 
trade. One of these associations to be exclusively philanthropic in 
character, and designed mainly to diffuse among the African tribes the 
light of Christianity, and the blessing of civilization and 
free-labour--the other to have a commercial character, and to unite with 
the above objects the pursuit of private enterprise and profit."

[I would also add that this was the mindset of many Radical Republicans.]

Emulating the old masters of the Spanish empire, British colonial 
administrators in South Africa employed indigenous feudal institutions on 
behalf of capitalist exploitation. The Spaniards made cunning use of the 
Incan 'mi'ita' while the British co-opted local chiefs to supply labor 
gangs. Peter Lionel Wickins writes:

"Some justification for the use of forced labour was found in tribal 
custom, which allowed for service to a chief (tribute labour) or to the 
community (communal labour). The purpose of tribute labour was to support 
the chief in his office and to enable him to perform his public duties, 
such as hospitality to strangers and the relief of the hungry in time of 
dearth. But with the spread of a money economy chiefs became acquisitive 
and the system was abused. Tribesmen found themselves compelled to 
cultivate their chief's land, not in the tribal interest, but purely for 
his personal gain; or even sent off to work as contract labourers on the, 
mines, either individually or, as was sometimes the case in South Africa, 
in age-regiments."

Just one year after abolishing slavery, the British colonial government in 
South Africa passed an ordinance in 1835 requiring ex-slaves to become 
apprentices to their previous owners. [When Southern Bourbons set up 
plantations in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, they set up 99 
year apprenticeships to skirt the law.] The blacks reacted by deserting or 
damaging property. The British followed up with a new ordinance in 1841 
that established criminal sanctions for breach of contract, but this 
solution proved short-lived as well. The ruling class next toyed with the 
idea of importing convicts from England, a practice that had succeeded in 
Australia. Finally, they passed an 1853 ordinance that provided means of 
subsistence and a small cash wage based on contract. Violations of the 
contract were punishable by a stiff prison sentence.

Despite verbal commitments to transforming South Africa along free market 
lines, reality somehow fell short of the ideal. As happens almost 
universally in colonial settings where there is a surplus of arable land 
and a shortage of labor, the bourgeoisie resorts to extra-economic coercion 
to extract raw materials for export. In South Africa, this took the form of 
forced migrant labor, particularly in the gold mining sector. In another 
volume, Wickins once again unveils the actual practices that evolved 
despite the British verbal commitment to free labor:

"In the later nineteenth century, when the shortage of labour for White 
enterprises was becoming acute, three forms of compulsion were attempted: 
firstly, taxation - capitation (poll) or hearth (hut) tax - which served a 
dual purpose of providing revenue and forcing Blacks to earn sufficient 
cash to meet their obligations; secondly, so-called squatters laws to 
restrict the number of Africans resident on European farms; and thirdly, 
attempts to substitute individual tenure for communal title in the 
reserves. To these forms of coercion must be added the pass laws. These 
were not conducive to the labour mobility that hard-pressed employers were 
anxious to foster, but they did give those who had labour a hold on their 
workers. This control was strengthened by other legislative measures, such 
as the Masters and Servants Laws and the Native Labour Regulation Act of 
1911. The best-known example of a labour tax was the annual poll tax (of 10 
shillings) imposed by the Glen Grey Act of 1894 in the Cape on all African 
men in certain districts who were not freeholders or regular lessees or who 
had not served a stipulated minimum period in wage labour during the year. 
The labour tax was in fact ineffective and was repealed in 1905. The Act 
also authorised the issue of individual title deeds in the Glen Grey 
district near Queenstown, at least partly with the intention of forcing on 
to the labour market those unable to acquire and exploit individual plots 
efficiently. This part of its provisions, too, did not fulfil the hopes 
placed in it. There was no marked drift from the countryside of people 
deprived of access to land by the spread of individual tenure."

The stakes were incalculable. According to South African economist, the 
Witwatersrand would have yielded 6,000 pounds worth of gold if a sufficient 
labor force had been deployed to dig it from the earth. The reserves and 
the migrant-labor system made the realization of such a bounty of surplus 
value possible. Migrant workers were snared in the same web that colonists 
had set from the very beginning whenever they initiated the process of 
primitive accumulation: they were forced to seek work in the mines in order 
to avoid arrest for failure to pay taxes. Ironically, Magubane cites 
Maurice Dobb, whom Brenner describes as a forerunner, to explain the need 
for forced labor in South Africa:

"When the supply of labor for any new enterprise was insufficiently 
plentiful, for example in mining, it was not uncommon for the Crown to 
grant the right of impressments to the entrepreneur or to require that 
convicts be assigned to the work under penalty of hanging if they were 
refractory or if they absconded."

The development of mining also created opportunities for the capitalist 
class, especially in light of the inexplicable desire of native Africans to 
subsist through farming rather than dig for diamonds or gold at a pittance. 
This led to the establishment of a mixture of wage and forced, contract 
labor. An 1872 proclamation declared that mine owners were obligated to pay 
a wage to a miner, while he would be forced to carry a pass when he was not 
at the site. Since diamonds were extremely valuable, labor conditions 
became prison-like. All sorts of extra-economic controls were instituted to 
keep workers in line. These controls were utterly necessary for the growth 
of capitalism, since free market compulsion would have not sufficed.

The biggest obstacle to the mine owners' plans, however, was the relative 
prosperity of the African peasant who was able to not only subsist on the 
fertile soil, but sell a surplus in the commercial marketplace. This 
development was most pronounced in the Cape Colony. Taking pity on the 
understaffed gold mining companies, the state enacted a migrant labor 
system in the 1890s. Contracts to work in these prison-like compounds were 
made more palatable through prostitution and saloons (shebeens). And if an 
African preferred subsistence farming to mining, legislation could bend his 
will to the greater good of capitalist development. The Glen Gray Act of 
1894 imposed a ten-shilling tax on all men in the Cape colony who could not 
prove that they had been in wage employment for three months in every year.

These sorts of laws persisted throughout the twentieth century as South 
Africa was entering the ranks of the developed world. The vast wealth of 
South Africa rests on mining and mining, which in turn rested on unfree 
labor through the 1970s. Workers who quit a contract were characterized as 
"deserters" by the authorities and subject to arrest. A boycott by American 
unions finally abolished such "master and servants" acts, but long after 
the damage had been done.

From the standpoint of class relations, contemporary South Africa and 
colonial Spain have much in common. Capitalism is not about advanced 
technology. Until relatively recent times, a miner worked with a pick and a 
shovel. Nor is capitalism about "freedom". It is about producing surplus 
value. If a work force is not available to work for a wage, then the 
capitalist state will pass laws ensuring that various forms of unfree labor 
keep the system going. It is our job as Marxists to develop a class 
analysis that can maximize the power of the laboring classes politically. 
Quibbling over whether the worker is really a worker or not based on the 
peculiarities of a given country's history not only constitutes a form of 
pedantic quibbling, it is a detour from our task as revolutionaries.

full: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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