Re: Re: Re: Re: Precapitalist South Africa?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Justin:
>postwar era were both workers and in a sense unfree labor. But unfree labor,
>people constrained by direct coercion to work, has been with capitalism all
>along.

With capitalism? I am not sure what this means. For example, there were
peasant communes in Russia that co-existed "with capitalism" but then, as
Lenin documented, were destroyed by capitalism. Is this the sense that you
mean that conscripted work gangs were "with capitalism"? In other words,
pockets of noncapitalist class relations within capitalism worldwide or
nationwide? Belgians set up textile mills in Kinshasa that paid wages,
while the plantation hands who picked cotton for these mills were
conscripted. Is this like the United States before the Civil War? Genovese
states that Dixie was feudal. Is this what you are trying to say? That
conscripted work gangs that built railroads in the Congo were feudal?

>I believe that there are two main lessons to be drawn from this: one, with
>respect to the elements of proletarian status, is is that the key thing is
>not "free labor," in the sense of being constrained to work by nothing but
>economic coercion, but wage labor, working for wages. The slaves of the US
>South did not do this. They were fed and housed, often rather poorly, but
>not paid. They didn't have to be, they were owned. English day laborers and
>Black South Africans were paid rather than directly fed, housed, and owned.
>The other point is that proletarian status is not readable off a short list
>of necessary and sufficient conditions. It has to be inferred from a theory
>of the social system in which the mode of extraction of surplus is located.
>This, of course, goes by the lofty and abstract name of dialectics.

I guess this is what you are saying. Why not go ahead and call the south
feudal, as Genovese does. Or as Laclau called Latin America in the NLR in
1972. I guess the reason is that I have made abundantly clear that the term
is inappropriate. It is far, far better to describe unfree labor as
characteristic of the primitive accumulation phase of capitalism, which
typified Europe in the beginning as you point out, but which persisted in
the colonial world into the 20th century. In any case 'feudalism',
'precapitalism', 'noncapitalism', 'mercantile capitalism',
'commerce'--terms that Wood uses depending on her mood apparently--do not
apply.



Louis Proyect
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