Re: Re: Re: Re: the mita

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine:
>Merchant capital = buying & selling consumer and producer goods on the
>market, M-C-M. As Marx argues, it's impossible (for a system of merchant
>capital as a whole) to extort surplus-labor -- and produce a
>surplus-product -- simply through buying and selling such goods.[*]

Look, Jim, Karl Marx had very little understanding of the rest of the world
in terms of "modes of production". He theorized something called the
"Asiatic Mode of Production" that had no correlation with reality. He knew
little about Africa or Latin America, which is understandable given the
fact that solid information was not easy to come by and even it if did,
there was no compelling political reason for him to examine it. Marx and
Engels, when they did write about Latin America, wrote howlingly ignorant
things. Marx wrote that Bolivar was a bandit. Engels supported the USA
against Mexico in the war of 1847 based on a basically racist attitude
toward what he regarded as "unproductive" (ie., lazy) Mexicans.

Mercantile capitalism nowhere addresses the specific forms of value
creation in places like Peru and Bolivia. It rather is concerned with how
capital is exchanged by those at the top. For example, Mandel notes that
piracy is a key element in the development of mercantile capital. What is
missing from this picture is how silver got out of the ground originally
before Francis Drake got his hands on it. It took a PROLETARIAT to get it
out of the ground, didn't it? The 'mita' was an early form of capitalist
exploitation of labor. I will deal with this at some length in my final
post on Brenner/Wood. If you want to get up to speed on the scholarly
material, I'd recommend Steve Stern's "Peru's Inidan Peoples and the
Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640."

>in fact, it's part of the same bureaucratic apparatus. Many merchandising
>efforts today involve more that just buying and selling and are thus kinds
>of industrial capital (something is actually produced, rather than titles
>to property being transferred). (Being in a separate bureaucracy often
>promotes profits, however. For example, merchant capital describes the such
>companies as Kelly Services, which facilitates the purchase of labor power
>by industrial capitalists.)

Mercantile capital describes the Kelly Services? Only on PEN-L, I'm afraid.
Most everybody else would call this "services," or the temporary labor
sector of American industry.

>Instead, I want to make Brenner's point -- which builds on Marx -- about
>the difference between the situation where workers are subject to direct
>coercion (by the boss, not just by the state) and true proletarianization
>(the double freedom). I think this is the essence of Brenner's theory, even
>though it's been largely ignored in recent pen-l discussions.

No, I have referred to it from the beginning. In essence it defines
capitalist class relations as those that prevailed in 19th century Great
Britain. Thus, based on this Aristotelian formal logic approach, everything
that does not fit into the category is characterized as "non-capitalist" or
"pre-capitalist". Except when Marx himself described slave plantations as
CAPITALIST. In which case it is conveniently ignored by you.

>political fragmentation and constant wars. (Slavery also discourages
>technical progress, since slaves resist any but the simplest kinds of work.
>I know that if I were a slave, I'd act dumb and break the boss-man's
>equipment.)

Slavery might discourage technical progress, but it facilitates capitalist
progress. Without slavery and other forms of unfree labor in the New World,
the "free labor/rapid technological progress" paradigm of 18th and 19th
century would have never taken shape. The capitalist SYSTEM is like a huge
factory, with smart white people running complicated machines and people of
color sweeping the floor.

>Under full-blown or industrial capital, on the other hand, the ability to
>apply direct coercion is severely limited, while the production process is
>under tremendous amount of direct control by the capitalists' proxies.

Why do you insist on repeating things that everybody understands? This
debate is not about the outcome of the industrial revolution, but the much
more complex and harder to define process of early capitalism in the
colonies which Marx never addressed.

>I don't know about the Congo, but saying that mercantile capital existed in
>ancient Babylonia is simply saying that markets existed back then. If I
>remember correctly, some of Hammurabi's code referred to market
>transactions. If there any experts on this subject reading this, please
>correct me if I'm wrong.

I am an expert. You are wrong.

>That doesn't contradict what I've read. My interpretation is that these
>_obrajes_ probably did not truly involve proletarian labor because the
>workers were peons and were competing with those under slave-like
>conditions. (I don't have enough information, though, to be conclusive.)

Your interpretation is wrong. They did rely on wage labor of the same type
that existed in England. Wage labor became generalized in colonial Peru
long before it did in much of Western Europe.

>I think it's a mistake to emphasize individuals in this context. The
>_system_ in which they worked was semi-proletarian. Instead of encouraging
>"relative surplus-value extraction," the system encouraged the bosses to
>use more direct coercion.

There is no such thing as a "semi-proletarian" system. This term makes no
sense. There IS a system called capitalism. When the capitalist can not
procure free labor, he will use indentured servants, slavery or whatever.
In fact the capitalist of the 17th and 18th century made no real
distinction between black slaves picking cotton in Georgia and the white
men and women in Manchester making finished final textile products from the
cotton. If the factory workers had a means of escape and fertile land to
work, they would have been enslaved as well.

>the U.S.) My impression was that people weren't fighting for socialism.
>Most rural rebels of the lower classes were fighting for land of their own
>-- what became the ejidos -- and freedom from debt. I don't have the
>details in my working memory at this time, but Eric Wolf's PEASANT WARS OF
>THE 2OTH CENTURY had a lot of good stuff on this subject.

Actually, the goals of the Mexican revolution were identical to those of
nearly every 20th century revolution. The problem is that anarchism rather
than Marxism was the main political current on the left. One of Zapata's
major bases of support was the textile workers, who were turning the cotton
picked by debt peons into finished products in much the same manner that
was the case for the prior 250 years. To understand Mexico, I'd advise you
to read Adolfo Gilly's "Mexican Revolution" or John Mason Hart's
"Revolutionary Mexico".  Here is a little bit from Hart that should show
you that the revolution was not just about resentful peasants:

In February 1915 a Casa delegation traveled to Veracruz and met with
Carranza and Obregon Salido representatives. Their results committed the
manpower of organized labor to the Constitutionalist military effort. The
delegation?s explanation for this commitment went beyond the condemnation
of the campesmo Villistas and Zapatistas as "the reaction" or the bizarre
allegations of "Church and banker" support for the peasants. The Casa
leadership had no illusions about the "bourgeois alliances" of President
Carranza but reasoned that the Constitutionalist movement, which had
received Veracruz from the American government and masses of armaments
through that port and Tampico as well as Pacific ports, was a likely winner.

The Casa leaders reasoned that their participation ushered in a new era of
syndicate organizing and working-class power. They provided the
Constitutionalists with the personnel needed to operate the newly acquired
American weapons, the Veracruz origins of which they may have known about.
The anarchosyndicalists interpreted the pact as a contract giving them
authority to organize workers throughout the country. The Casa intended to
organize the working class and then to confront the divided
Constitutionalist movement with its mutually antagonistic Obrcgonista
radical pequena burguesia and the conservative Carrancistas. In that
confrontation the Casa leaders counted on "Jacobin" support, including that
of Obregon Salido.

Casa delegates to Veracruz, representing 50,000 workers in the cities,
correctly assessed the disaffection between the bureaucracy of the
Convention government and the campesino armies of Villa and Zapata as
indicative of their eventual defeat. They recognized their own importance
to the weak Constitutionalist movement and clearly felt in control of the
situation. An agrarista minority of the Casa leadership dissented but with
minimal impact because the leadership clearly expressed its intent to
incorporate agrarian reform and the militant peasantry to its ranks after
victory, and because the important figures Huitrón and Diaz Soto y Gama,
who favored alliance with the rural working class instead of the Jacobin
and radical pequena burguesia of Obregon Salido, had already left Mexico
City during labor?s confrontation with the ruthless Huerta regime in order
to join in the creation of the Zapatista Comuna de Morelos.



Louis Proyect
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