Lowering opportunity costs through destroying opportunities.

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

________________________________
Paul P:
I don't disagree with Charles at all on these points except, perhaps, to say
that we must distinguish between slavery of the capitalist kind, and slavery
in pre-capitalist formations, rather than just to refer to 'slavery' per se.
My point is that the literature on slavery generally doesn't distinguish.
There are also some grey areas.  In Greece the slaves in the silver mines
were similar to the plantation slaves of the Southern US and the Caribbean,
but not the skilled workers.  Yet they all had the same legal status.

^^^^^^
CB; I just read something emphasizing how ancient Greece was a trading port
especially, with some relationships anticipating those in capitalism.
Perhaps this explains somewhat the "affinity" between modern capitalist
countries and ancient Greece, culturally and philophically, the importance
of Classical Greece in the bourgeois academy ( that is is an "academy"),
etc.

^^^^^

Domar and Pentland and others that deal with the question in North America
tend to use the term "unfree labour" (as opposed to "free" labour) which
doesn't really solve the confusion above but it does allow one to analyse
the contradictions of unfree labour within capitalist relations regardless
of whether it refers to serfdom, slavery, indenture, debt peonage and even
sharecropping.

^^^^

CB: Yes, I think various discussions on this list have pointed to unfree or
"oppressed" labor forms other than the extreme enslavement of Africans. You
mentioned indentured servants. Hell, people forced to work for the minimum
wage in the U.S. are not being paid enough to reproduce their labor power at
the modal,mean or median standard of living.



Domar suggests that the costs of supervision and the low motivation of slave
workers in the plantation system meant that the surplus value was quite low
for the planter class, particularly if the merchants by control of the
cotton market in Europe could  "buy cheap and sell dear" thereby
expropriating much of the surplus.  Also, if as argued by some, the
productivity of the soil was declining due to overutilization, the slave
productivity would also be declining reducing the surplus.  Which also leads
to my final comment, the northern industrialists opposed the
slave/plantation system precisely because it didn't provide a market for
industrial output and thus opposed the extension of slavery to the new areas
expropriated from the aboriginal population, the major factor leading to the
Civil War.  If I remember correctly, Balwin's article "Patterns of
Development in Newly Settled Areas (sic)" is quite good on this point.

^^^^^
CB: Yes, I definitely believe that capitalist slavery was ultimately in
contradiction in the system. I think there may be a classical dialectical
structure here At the origin of capitalism, slavery was exploited as part of
the primitive accumulation to help jumpstart capitalism. But this was a
unity and struggle of the opposites slavelabor vs wagelabor. Eventually,
this contradiction reached a point where the wagelabor aspect of the
contradiction overcame and suppressed its opposite , the slavelabor
relations. However , capitalism has developed other forms of cheating on the
pure wage labor form, as discussed earlier on this thread.

^^^^^^^6

In any case, I don't think Charles and I really disagree on fundamentals but
rather that the exchange has originated mainly out of different conceptions
of the term slavery which I interpreted within the larger context of legal
ownership of labour and Charles was interpreting within the more limited
context of slave labour under capitalist market relations.

Paul Phillips

^^^^^^^
CB; Ditto. Cheers !