[PEN-L:11339] Re: Person work hours at the dawn of capitalism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 09/20/99 12:50PM >>>
At 08:33 AM 09/18/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>Charles: In other words, you would have to be claiming that the European
>total work hours of the European workers was greater than that of the
>non-European slaves and semi-slaves at the rosy dawn of capitalism. Do you
>have studies comparing the numbers of person hours worked by both ?
>
>LNP: This is the main bone of contention Blaut has with Brenner. Brenner
>does not view slave labor as indicative of capitalist property relations.


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Jim D:
There is a very simple solution to the issue of whether or not slavery was
indicative of capitalist property relations. The answer is "yes and no."


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Charles: Seems clear that Marx's attitude (see below and other discussions of modern slavery by Marx) on this issue was that modern slavery did produce surplus value that was convertible in the capitalist system into capitalist profit.  The slave owners in the U.S. South were capitalists.

 However, The fall of modern slavery was due in part to the contradictions that Jim D. discusses.  Seems to me these contradictions are mainly an aggravated form of the problem of crises of overproduction/underconsumption. Since slaves have no wages, they cannot buy any commodities, which is a problem for capitalism which  relies on the mass consumption of wage laborers to realize surplus value/profit.


         From "The British Cotton Trade"
                   (Vol. 19 Collected Works M&E page17)

        ....English modern industry, in general,
relied upon two pivots equally monstrous. The
one was the potato as the only means of feeding
Ireland and a great part of the English working
class. This pivot was swept away by the potato
disease ad subsequent Irish catastrophe. A larger
basis for the reproduction and maintenance of the
toiling millions had then to be adopted. The second
pivot of English industry was the slave-grown cotton of
the United States.The present American crisis forces
them to enlarge their field of supply and emancipate
cotton from slave-breeding and slave-consuming oligarchies.
As long as the English cotton manufactures depended
on slave-grown cotton, it could be truthfully asserted
that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery
of the white man in England and the direct slavery
 of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic.
Sept. 21, 1861 written
New York Daily Tribune 10/14/1861