Re: Sharecropping and wage labor

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 7/30/03 3:55:08 PM Pacific Daylight Time, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx writes:

> This coercive mode of labor control gave southern agriculture its 
> distinctive character. Sharecropping was a form of "bound" labor, with 
> restrictions on the free market in labor that did not prevail in fully 
> developed capitalist societies such as that of the North. There, the market 
> mechanism allocated "free" labor; capitalists competed freely for labor, 
> and laborers were free to move in response to better offers. The 
> sharecropper was not fully free in this sense, and thus was distinct from 
> both the northern proletarian and the free capitalist farmer. Similarly, 
> the planters' more directly coercive methods of labor allocation and 
> control marked them off from a genuine bourgeoisie.


Sharecropping may not sound like a business but it is. That is to say the sharecropper is no a proletarian but a petty capitalist, that disposes of a portion of his product on the market or who alienates a portion of his product on the basis of exchange. The proletariat - wage worker, social position prevents him from disposing of products as such. 

How much the sharecropper receives is a question of the politics of the society and how his right to disposal is protected. The point is that a sharecropper represents in history and real political economy a different class formation than a proletariat - not simply an industrial worker. 

"Coercive mode of labor " does not describe the economic content of the labor activity of a class but rather the character of the "political democracy" - which is most certainly important.  

>The division of this centralized unit into small tenant farms, the substitution of family labor  for gang labor, the end of constant supervision by overseers and the 
substitution of intermittent visits by the landlord himself, the loss of 
economies of scale and the end of centralized management all these marked, 
not the creation of large-scale, thoroughly capitalist farms, but precisely 
a move away from a mature capitalist organization of agriculture 
development that preserves and intensifies the authoritarian and repressive 
elements of traditional social relations.<

A "mature capitalist organization" of agriculture demand that one define the meaning of "mature capitalism" and then mature organization in as much as the evolution of the instruments of production constitute "mature organization." 

"Mature organization" of agriculture on the basis of the bourgeois property relations in the years 1865-1866 can be ascertained based on the state of development of mechanical devices and their implementation. The gasoline powered engine driving mechanical devices was still some years away and its universal implementation decades away. 

What constitute the maturity of capitalism in agriculture is first and foremost the property relations or towards what purpose the mobilization of the land is carried out. American agriculture in the South may have looked like a semi-feudal relationship but looks are deceiving. The wealth of the plantation system in the South prior to the Civil War consisted not in the land as the primary form of wealth but the slave and his product that entered the world of exchange. This is a contradiction that is the absurdity of American history, but it is no more absurd than the excellent article you forwarded 7-29-03 concerning ex-slaves and wage labor, wherein the penal system is examined from the stand point of a value producing system. That is the deployment of prisoners to create products and services that enter the world of exchange. 

>Too much of the recent debate has treated southern economic and political 
development as separate questions. The South's characteristic poverty and 
political oppression arose out of the same social relations: the Prussian 
Road, with its dominant planter class and its labor-repressive system of 
agricultural production, which posed a major obstacle not only to economic 
development, but also to democracy, to the political freedoms present in 
the North and so glaringly absent from the South.<

Any impartial investigation of the plantation belt of the South after the Civil Wall will reveal who owned what. Wall Street imperialism owned the vast majority of the land, possessed the capital and political will - but not the physical organization to administer the defeated South. The "labor-repressive system of 
agricultural production," in the plantation area, after the Civil War is the result of Wall Street - Yankee, imperialism. 



Melvin P.