[OPE-L:7446] slavery and the shell of natural economy

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: slavery and the shell of natural economy

re 7442

Gil,

my mistake was to pose the question in terms of whether forms of exploitation other than wage labor are consistent with the production of surplus value rather than in terms of whether the law of value comes to regulate production at both the level of the enterprise and the mode of production only with the generalization of wage labor. Weeks is best understood as making the latter argument. If you have time, may I recommend that you consult the original, especially chapter 2 of Capital and Exploitation. The title of the chapter is Value as a Social Relation, but even you won't find this discourse on value to be mumbo jumbo, I believe!

> I'm also not entirely sure how this follows.  In addition to the
> costs of overseers, the slave owner unlike the capitalist producer
> had to pay for slaves up front as capital assets, and arguably slave
> labor is not the most productive form of labor process.  Thus it
> is not at all evident to me that slave owners were "under no
> compulsion to produce competitively" etc.

But once the purchase price of slaves has been amortized--and let's assume that through cash crop production this could be accomplished in well less than a year-- why not turn slaves back to self-supply and patriarchal economy? If slave self supply is more or less adequate, then there is no need to secure on the market subsistence goods  the monetary cost of which then need not be valorized through the production of new commodities. To be sure, plantation owners may command slave labor to produce cash crops after the subsistence needs of slaves, slave masters and slave drivers have been met in order to diversify the luxury goods available to the ruling plantation strata, but while the market does present an opportunity here, it may well not operate coercively (as Ellen Wood may put it) on slave owners.

This is roughly how I understand Weeks' point:   when and only when labor is doubly free does the capitalist find that he can only secure labor power for exploitation through the ongoing payment of a monetary wage which as variable capital then has to be valorized through the competitive production of commodities sold tendentially at prices of production if the capitalist is to have command over surplus labor time at all, and be in a position to accumulate so as to achieve the ongoing viability of his enteprise.

There is thus a link between the payment of monetary wages and the compulsion to produce and sell commodities at prices of production which implies the regulation of production by the law of value since price of production is a transformed value.

Of course I would maintain that many plantations were not set up to be or even capable of being largely self sufficient estates (Braudel is quite clear about this) and thus inextricably tied in to the world market such that the means of subsistence were in fact monetized to the extent that it was profitable in a calculating and calculated plantation business.

All the best, Rakesh

 

>  To the contrary, if slaveowners
> were competing against dynamic capitalists who *did* continually
> introduce such improvements, it seems to me that they would soon find
> themselves forced to compete in the manner you suggest, even if they
> didn't start out that way.
> I agree that slavery is *compatible* with C-M-C, but for reasons
> suggested above I don't think it is at all *incompatible* with
> M-C-M+, even if it would not have been as dynamic as capitalism based
> on wage labor.
> Gil