******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
Historical Materialism 21.4 (2013)
The Fiction of Economic Coercion: Political Marxism and the Separation
of Theory and History
by Sébastien Rioux, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
It is estimated that some 27 million 'unfree' labourers are living in a
myriad of forms of subjugation in poor and rich countries alike: forced
labour, bonded labour, child labour, slave labour, famine slavery,
indentured servants, involuntary domestic servitude, sexual servitude,
child soldiers, and the like. Given the nature of the problem, this
remains a conservative figure. Some have been tricked by the promise of
a better tomorrow; others, desperately seeking to flee chronic poverty,
have migrated only to end up being caught in relations of power and
dependence; others, faced with starvation, have willingly entered into
such relations; others still have been trafficked, their bodies sold,
like any other commodity, often to satisfy the sexual appetites of a
growing desire industry. From cacao plantations in West Africa to
agriculture in the United States (US) to seafood production in Thailand
and the waters off New Zealand to the use of civilians who are forced to
work at gunpoint to mine gold, diamond, coltan and various other
minerals by the various parties involved in the conflict in the eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo, more and more commodities traded on world
markets are produced under highly coercive relations of production,
including cotton, steel, tantalum, clothes, shoes, timber, iron, sugar,
fruit and fish, to name but a few.
Although there is a rich and extensive literature in Marxist
historiography documenting and theorising the constituent role of direct
coercion in capitalist history and development,' there has been a
general stagist tendency on the part of many streams of Marxism that
relies on the notion that as capitalism spreads, so-called
extra-economic relations should disappear. The theory of social-property
relations, or political Marxism, centred on the works of Robert Brenner
and Ellen Meiksins Wood, perhaps best exemplifies this general trend.^
In contradistinction with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, it has
argued that capitalism is characterised by the separation of the
economic and the political, which makes surplus appropriation under this
system uniquely driven by economic coercion. According to political
Marxism, then, so-called 'unfree' labour or 'extra-economic' coercion
are antithetical to capital's logic of accumulation and therefore
non-capitalist by definition.
(clip)
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm
While Robert Brenner is associated with the controversy over his 1998
New Left Review article on the world economic crisis, there is an
earlier "Brenner thesis" that likewise appeared in the NLR and which
also continues to generate debate.
Despite the tendency to look at the two theses separately, Brenner sees
them as complementary. Defending his 1998 NLR article against critics
John Bellamy Foster and David McNally in the December 1999 Monthly
Review, Brenner restates his original thesis on the origins of capitalism:
"[I]n economies where they are free from the extraction of their
surpluses by extra-economic coercion (emphasis added), but do not
possess their full means of subsistence (especially the land), direct
owner-operator producers have no choice but to seek to sell
competitively by maximizing their price-radio via specializing,
accumulating their surpluses, and innovating to the extent they can."
In other words, capitalism, innovation and competition enjoy a symbiotic
relationship. Competition not only explains the global economic crisis
of 1998, it also serves as a sine qua non for capitalism origins.
Without marketplace competition, a feudal ruling class is free to
maximize its profits through war making, while their subjects might end
up "choosing leisure instead of work." The key element is
"extra-economic coercion," namely the marketplace. If profit
maximization occurs as a result of forced labor (corvée, etc.) rather
than the "invisible hand," precapitalist social relations must still
dominate. To show how committed Brenner is to this approach, he even
states that the presence of wage labor is itself no proof that
capitalism has taken root:
"It should be emphasized that non-capitalist economies with substantial
amounts of wage labor are not uncommon in world history (European
feudalism being a good example). The point is that, in such economies,
the employers (e.g., feudal lords and sometimes large peasants) who
exploit wage labor are shielded from competition by their possession of
the means to provide their own subsistence directly."
The purpose of this article is to challenge the ties between capitalism
and competition, especially a free market in labor. While accepting the
noncompetitive nature of the feudal system, does the absence of
competition prove that capitalism does not exist? Whatever purpose the
Brenner thesis might serve in distinguishing 16th century Great Britain
from 12th century Great Britain, can it adequately explain societies
where extra-economic coercion is almost totally lacking, but where
commodity production for the world market has begun in earnest?
If extra-economic coercion was not present in 16th century Spain or its
colonial territories in the manner understood by Brenner, can we
conclude that precapitalist class relations existed? Also, if
extra-economic coercion is a sine qua non for capitalist accumulation,
then how would we describe the mode of production in much of Africa well
into the twentieth century, including South Africa--its most advanced
sector--where forced labor under virtually monopoly conditions was the norm.
(clip)
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
