[Marxism] Some comments on Dueling Powers and Capitalist Property in the United States

["Anthony Boynton" <anthony.boynton@xxxxxxxxx>]

*Some comments on Dueling Powers and Capitalist Property in the United
States*



I like Matt Russo's essay and think that in many ways it an advance on what
I wrote. (See "Who Gets to be a member of the ruling class?"  in the
November Marxism list archive or at
http://marxredux.blogspot.com/2008/11/who-gets-to-be-member-of-ruling-class.html
)



Here are a few comments.



When Russo talked about home ownership spreading. I think that there has
been a lot more than just "spreading". In all kinds of bourgeois political
science, economics, and especially law, there is a lot of discussion of
creating well-defined property rights where they do not, or did not exist.
The neo-cons think this is one of the keys to capitalist well-being for a
whole range of reasons, most importantly establishment of a state structure
that will protect the property they buy or steal. The reason is that
'property' owned wholly and discretely by one legal entity is relatively
new, especially and most importantly for this discussion, property in land.



In Latin America, a great deal of the social conflict that has taken place
since the Spanish conquest has been for the control of land, peasant land
invasions countered by gang terror of would be big land-owners or already
big land-owners. The "wild west" of the USA featured this kind of conflict,
too.  Buying and selling of land in an "orderly" fashion regulated by the
state is still a fiction in many parts of Colombia.



Home ownership here has  come from organized land invasions, which were
later "legalized",   as often as it  has from purchasing a plot of land and
building on it. Buying a ready made house or apartment is very new.



One point of disagreement I have with Russo concerns his characterization of
the source of the high wages of US workers at the end of the 19th century.
Russo wrote, *"*The post-agrarian successor form at the end of the 19th
century was as a component part of variable capital, coinciding with the
rise of American state power in the world system, enabling a surplus to be
redistributed by means of successful inter-imperialist competition to
workers wages in the U.S.."



I do not think that the surplus "redistributed" to workers wages resulted
from successful inter-imperialist competition by the US, certainly not
before WWI.



I think the working class of the United States had historically high wages
because of the unique labor market formed through the primitive accumulation
of land. The fact that many workers could become free-holders caused a
permanent shortage of labor and permanently high wages compared to Europe or
Asia.



Slavery, black chattel slavery, was the temporary solution to this "problem"
for southern plantation agriculture.



After the civil war the victorious alliance of northern capitalists and
free-holders both got what they wanted: the Homestead Act and open borders
for mass importation of starving workers – give us your huddled masses! The
two caused a very volatile new situation: a rapidly expanding class of
free-holders leading to rapid geographical expansion westward leading to
rapid expansion of demand for manufactured goods, leading to rapidly
expanding demand for labor, leading to rising wages, leading to a financial
crash and then renewed expansion, all of this tempered by an enormous
inflationary  influx of California gold....



Basically, the closure of the frontier signaled the coming end of the high
wage American working class, as long as immigration from Europe and Asia
continued. This was clearly understood by the privileged white,  racist,
workers, who fought against immigration tooth and nail – even when they
themselves were immigrants. (Most of the socialist left was also
anti-immigrant.)



The prospect of ending the high wage labor market through immigration was
halted by WWI. In other words, the solution envisaged by post-Civil War
Republican capitalism through massive immigration was cut short by events
outside of the USA.



Surplus value from US imperialist exploitation of other countries, in the
sense that Lenin talked about, did not become important until after the
Spanish American war, and even then was not a key to working class wages
until probably the 1950's.



I think imperialism, modern imperialism, is mostly about rents and monopoly
profits. And the most important rents have been the rent from oil and other
fossil fuel production.



US imperialism's "benefits" were first felt by US workers in the form of
cheap bananas from the United Fruit company et. al.. Imports of other
primary products before WWII, especially copper, had a contradictory impact
on US workers (e.g. cheap Chilean copper allowing copper companies to
withstand miners strikes, break unions, drive down wages, but cheap Chilean
copper also allowing for cheaper electrification of the country).



Ironically, mass production of automobiles created a strong impetus for
imperialism to reinforce the privileges of the working class which – if it
maintained its privliged position - could become the mass market for the new
product. World Wars I and II provided the means to "redistribute" surplus
value to the working class in the form of redistributing the rents from the
oil fields imperialism gained control over in the Middle East, Latin
America, Indonesia, etc. the redistribution of these rents took place
through the extremely low rents imposed on oil producing countries from the
end of WWII until 1973 and even after.



Profits from US investments outside of the US, prior to the cold war, were
not big enough to account for the high standard of living of US workers
prior to the depression. Redistribution of the rents from oil production was
the key to this imperialist redistribution. (The fact that it took place in
very different ways in Europe and the USA, does not change its overall
importance.)

Basically Russo defines "class" in two different ways: according to
relations to means of production and distribution (capitalist class), and
according to exercise of political power in the state (ruing class). My
point, probably not made clearly in my earlier document, was that sticking
to defining social class by relation to means of production and
distribution, rather than using other methods of defining social class is a
clearer, more Marxian method. (And therefore, the capitalist class is the
ruling class, in my view.)



How it rules, is another, more complex, issue. Russo's sketch and the book
by Domhoff, and a lot of sociology, define that process as it works itself
out through the different layers of the petty bourgeoisie. Which comes back
to the point above. I do not think the working class, or any segment of it,
including the petty bourgeois home-owning aristocracy of labor segment, is
part of the ruling class. However, the labor aristocracy is firmly attached
to the capitalist class by strong social relations starting with
homeownership.

* *

Anthony
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