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On 1/15/15 2:04 AM, glparramatta--- via Marxism wrote:
http://links.org.au/node/4251
Very good analysis from Paul:
Capitalism has been defined by some recent Marxists in a very particular
way. For example, in his outstanding study The American Road to
Capitalism, Charles Post has offered a definition that can be summarized
as follows: an economic system in which private owners of the economy –
the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) – control the means of production
(land, raw materials, tools/technology, etc.) and buy the labour-power
of basically propertyless wage-workers (the proletariat), in order to
produce commodities (products produced for the market, by labour-power
being turned into actual labour) that are sold at a profit. A similar
approach can be found in a number of other Marxist works – for example,
Segmented Work, Divided Workers by David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and
Michael Reich, which succinctly defines capitalism as “a wage labour
system of commodity production for profit.”[4]
This seems a reasonable description of what happens under capitalism.
There is, however, a problem that develops when this definition is
applied to history. For example, before the American Civil War
(1861-1865) a majority of the labour force in the United States was not
made up of wage-workers. The Southern economy was predominantly
agricultural, and the bulk of the Southern agricultural labour force was
made up of slaves. Combined with the large number of poor white farmers,
the great majority of labourers consisted of those who did not sell
their labour-power to capitalists – so by this definition, the Southern
economy could not be termed capitalism. For that matter, a majority of
the Northern labour force from colonial times down to the Civil War was
made up of small farmers, artisans and craftsmen, small shopkeepers –
only a minority were wage-workers. By definition, it could be argued,
capitalism simply did not exist in the United States until 1820s or
1840s or 1860s (which is the position of the afore-mentioned volumes).
The problem is that Marx and Engels themselves believed capitalism did
exist in the United States not only after the Civil War, but before –
and not only in the ante-bellum “free-labour” North but also in the
slave-labour South. Of course, Marx and Engels were only human and could
be wrong – although it seems ironic that those who first developed
Marxist theory would be so fundamentally wrong in their understanding of
how to apply that theory. The problem deepens when we realize that what
was true in the United States was true in most of Europe as well, with
the exception of England. This was the case when the two revolutionaries
wrote the Communist Manifesto, when they were helping to organize the
International Workingmen’s Association, and when Marx was writing
Capital. It could be argued their analyses of capitalism represented a
forecast of the future rather than a prescription for the present – but
this is not how they themselves characterized their work.[5]
An additional complication is posed by the question: if it wasn’t
capitalism, what form of economy was it? In the slave-plantation South
the dynamics of the economy were different from those of the ancient
slave economies, nor did they conform to the dynamics of feudalism. Was
it some form of economy that Marx and Engels did not conceptualize?
(Post thinks so, presenting it as a theoretically revised variant of
what the late historian Eugene Genovese termed “pre-bourgeois
civilization.”) The same question can be posed regarding the form of
economy in the pre-Civil War North and in nineteenth-century Europe.
(The above two volumes tag it as a non-capitalist economy of
“petty-commodity production”). It is possible to argue that there are
better ways of understanding the world than the way Marx and Engels
understood it in their day, that they were living – contrary to what
they seemed to believe – in a fundamentally pre-capitalist reality. But
this suggests a certain incoherence in how this particular definition of
capitalism connects with the overall perspectives of Marx and Engels.
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