Modes of Slavery Re: Re: Progress (was No agrarian revo?)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Chattel slavery, indentured
> servitude, & other forms of unfree labor in the history of modern
> colonialism increasingly took on the quality that was *quite
> different* from pre-capitalist modes of unfree labor, *because* they
> were determined by the expanding reproduction of the relation between
> capital & free labor elsewhere (the expanded reproduction of the
> relation between capital & free labor & resulting rise of productive
> forces also made the main contribution to the *abolition* of chattel
> slavery -- Cf. Eric Williams).
>

You can see the difference partly in the vast difference between ancient
and modern slave insurrections. Modern insurrections oppose the slave
system itself; ancient insurrections opposed the slave status of those
involved in the struggle. Had Spartacus and his followers "won," their
victory would have been to establish themselves outside the boundaries
of the Roman Empire, where they, of course, would have become
slaveowners themselves. Another echo of the difference is to be seen in
the relative absence of defenses of slavery in the ancient world, and in
the proliferation of such defenses in the 19th century. Plato and
Aristotle casually 'defend' slavery in a few places, but it is fairly
clear that they no more thought it necessary to defend slavery than to
defend eating. Both were simply a part of life, accepted as such by
slave and freeman alike.

At least some of the 19th-c defenders of southern slavery were _not_
racists but in fact repudiated racism on religious grounds.  That is,
they attempted to maintain in the 19th century a defense of slavery
grounded in the rightness of hierarchy which modern social relations had
undermined. All contemporary 'defenses' of 'slavery' do so by denying
that it is slavery (e.g., prison labor in the U.S.). They are right in
so far as such instances of slavery do not enter into the formation of
consciousness of the entire society as they did in "slave systems"
(pre-capitalist or embodied in a capitalist world system).

Again, it seems to me that attempts to identify modern instances of
coerced labor with earlier modes reflect essentially a moralistic
(Proudhonian) opposition to exploitation and oppression. This is
essentially an anarchist rather than a marxist position, but in the
absence of a workers' movement more and more marxists are driven,
despite themselves, to rationalize their hatred of oppression on
metaphysical rather than historical grounds. The Weathermen were clear
on this: the U.S. working class (which they more or less identified with
white males) was incurably sunk in racism and no longer represented even
a potential threat to capitalism. (As one very bright young woman
declared to me: Socialism in the United States could only be built under
occupation by the P.L.A.) Capitalism disappears or is absorbed in
imperialism. (On the marxist list courrently we have a vigorous poster
from Mexico who occupies a polar position: for him imperialism
disappears or collapses into capitalism. In either case, we have the
fundamental basis for almost all modern attacks on marxism "from the
inside" -- the separation of imperialism and capitalism, the illusion
that one may fight either one without recognizing its inseparability
from the other.

Carrol