[PEN-L:11685] Rakesh on Slavery & the Origins of the Proletariat

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 11:26:00 -0400 (EDT)
To: lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: reparations

Jim H wrote:

>The slave mode of
>production was a barrier to the development of capitalism, and so it was
>abolished.

My goodness, Jim. No wonder you did not translate Grossmann's chapter on
the population probelm of early capitalism (nor the concluding chapter on
wage theory and the increasing misery thesis which you also do not
understand). Here he argues that early capitalism was haunted by an endemic
labor shortage (as a consequence of accumlation on the basis of constant
technique; of course as revoltions in technique become endemic, then
slavery becomes a fetter but capitalism predates the Industrial
Revolution). Just like Kirscheimer and Rusche in Punishment and Social
Structure, he underlined that the population bias of mercantalist thought
reflected this endemic labor shortage in early capitalism; thus capital was
required to rely in Europe and without on all forms of coercion (slavery,
maximum wage laws, harsh vagrancy laws) to secure a labor force for the
purposes of profitable capitalist commodity production. The proletariat was
born in black and white across national boundaries at its origin. Jairus
Banaji and Alex Callinicos have both made the argument in sophisticated
theoretical terms. For example, the latter notes that since many forget
that Marx analyzes capitalism in terms of purified model of completely free
exchange relations, they often mistake the model of reality for the reality
of the model; consequently, they can only find the proletariat at the
inception of capitalism that most closely resembles Marx's model (e.g.,
agricultural workers in England) and forget that much of proletariat, viz.
the plantation proletariat, was secured coercively.

Perhaps we need to return to the classic works of Marxism, along with
contemporary works like Paul Loverjoy and Nicholas Rogers, ed. Unfree
Labour in the Developmnt of the Atlantic Work.

I think many find quite comforting a Eurocentric myth of the origins of the
proletariat; as all myths of origins, it works however implicity to inform
present practice.

Yours, Rakesh