Re: Unfree Labor, Subsistence, & Dependent Development (was Re Postscript...)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

> in an excellent post, Yoshie wrote:
> > Haciendas & like forms of landlordism -- & plantation owners' class
> > power -- were much harder to ruin than free peasantry under market
> > discipline (who, to reproduce themselves as peasants, had to
> > succeed in market competition -- most of them failed, thus becoming
> > proletarians).
>
> I think it's easy to underestimate the resiliency of a free
> peasantry. Many follow a totally risk-averse strategy of
> self-sufficiency, allowing their independence to survive for
> generations. This can actually block capitalist development, if the
> Renegade Brenner is right: he argues that the power of the French
> peasantry did so for quite awhile.

Right.  I went too fast in my post.  For market discipline to do its
work, it first had to be created, by cutting off peasants' ability
for self-provisioning: enclosure, game laws, poor laws, etc.  Cf.
Michael Perelman, _The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political
Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation_ (2000).

> Of course, a lot of this is political: the reason why hacienda and
> plantations were able to block the development of industrial
> capitalism was because they usually controlled the government (until
> after the liberal/conservative civil wars that plagued Latin
> America). On the other hand, peasants were sometimes able to assert
> power and achieve some victories, as with the Mexican Revolution
> after 1911 or the French Revolution of 1789.

Michael Perelman writes that "one of the first acts of the
revolutionary government [in France] was to repeal the Game Laws"
(47).

> One reason we have to avoid over-emphasizing the problems of
> peasants under market discipline is because there are often
> "internal contradictions" in peasant agriculture (under some systems
> of property rights). For example, peasant holdings often become
> divided up and thus very small and vulnerable to market forces
> because almost every family has more than one son. (Of course,
> daughters are excluded...)

Therefore, the first wage laborers were often women in many nations
where male primogeniture was practiced.

Also, French peasants (especially well-to-do ones) practiced birth
control, to avoid subdivisions:

*****    Western women traditionally began their birthing careers
rather late and widely spaced their pregnancies, but in
eighteenth-century France the widespread employment of birth control
was aimed at reducing family size. By 1830 the country's birth rate
dropped below thirty per thousand, and the term 'French family' was
henceforth discretely employed by the English when referring to the
two-child household....In France, limitation of family size was
attributed from the eighteenth century on to the peasantry's intent
to avoid diving land between heirs and the bourgeoisie's efforts to
maintain a civilize life style....
<http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/mclaren.html>   *****

> The power of "market competition" shouldn't be exaggerated.

I agree.  Michael Perelman says that at the beginning of capitalist
agriculture, the superiority of large-scale commercial farming to
small-scale farming was not at all self-evident, especially in an age
when transport & distribution technologies were not well developed.:

*****   In truth, the traditional sector was not nearly as
inefficient as many writers would have us believe.  Scott Burns
(1976), for instance, has published a useful, though unscientific
catalog of activities in which households can still provide for many
of their own needs far more economically than the commercial sector.

Gardening represents one of the most efficient cases of
self-provisioning.  Even the Physiocrats, vigorous advocates of
large-scale commercial farming, acknowledged the productivity of
traditional methods of producing food.  They estimated that the spade
husbandry of the peasants returned twenty to thirty times as much
grain as had been planted.  Cultivation with the plow returned only
six times the amount....Part of the advantage of self-provisioning is
due to the avoidance of the need to transport and market produce,
which generally grows near the point of consumption.  Even if growing
vegetables takes less direct labor on a farm than in a household
garden, when we take account of the complexities of the marketing
system and the labor embodied in the farm inputs, self-provisioning
may well turn out to be superior (see Perelman 1977).  Perry Duis
(1998, chap. 5) reported that in late-nineteenth-century urban
Chicago, lack of refrigeration and an inefficient distribution system
made gardening an efficient method of providing for food....   (p.
95-6)   *****

Further, politics often tipped the scale in favor of large commercial
farms -- for instance the Corn Laws: "The Corn Laws were doubly
effective in turning the terms of trade against small-scale
production.  First, this legislation directly encouraged grain
production, contributing to economies of scale in farming.  Second,
because the typical small-scale farmer had to purchase grain for
personal consumption, the Corn Laws directly struck at the economy of
small-scale agricultural production" (Perelman, pp. 297-8).

Yoshie