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Louis,
As always I think you misunderstand the point of Political Marxist
understandings of the development of capitalism. The point is that
while a country may be subject to the vicissitudes of a world capitalist
market (if one even exists at the historical conjuncture examined, which
at 1920 one can certainly assume), and the pressures of the relativity
(late) development of the internal relations of capitalism outside of
England, the Congo is precapitalist precisely because the Congolese were
not yet market dependent (The peasants were not workers, thus for sure,
the "native" landowners were not market dependent). The horrific
relations of non-capitalist imperialism and colonialism, even if
somewhat undertaken through capitalist fdi of Belgium (?, I'm assuming
there was some), does not mean that the Conogolise depended on the
market for subsistence. Quite the contrary, the description quoted
would seem to describe the process of "early" primitive accumulation in
the Congo, but this is not quite the formal subsumption of labour to
capital, and for sure not the real subsumption. So, in short, while the
end product was a capitalist commodity (tire), the way the commodity was
produced was not through either absolute surplus value extraction and
was for sure not through relative surplus value extraction, thus the way
the "surplus was pumped out of the producers" was not capitalist surplus
value extraction, precisely because those who got the rubber were not
workers, the way that capitalist social relations use labour. Ten
million Cologolise can die in pre-capitalist imperialism and
colonialism, and as part of the historical development of the
"world-system" of capitalism, but this does not mean that the ten
million died under capitalist social relations in the Congo.
in sol,
Jeremias
On 2017-07-02 13:26, marxism-requ...@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote:
Message: 7 Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2017 21:07:10 -0400 From: Louis Proyect
<l...@panix.com> To: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Subject: Re:
[Marxism] Capitalism and under-development Message-ID:
<05f4c956-3613-c175-aed3-ca9812426...@panix.com> Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed On 7/1/17 8:19 PM, Philip
Ferguson via Marxism wrote:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/how-capitalism-under-develops-the-world-2/
"The Belgian colony of Congo offered one of the most elaborate ?models?,
so to speak, of colonial exploitation ? a ?model? nevertheless quite
comparable to what was going on in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. The
Congo was turned into a huge labour camp ruled by terror. A common
practice when farmers failed to collect enough rubber from wild rubber
trees, was to take their families hostage, or to kill them and put their
severed hands on display in the village as a warning. It was estimated
that over the 4 decades until 1920, ten million Africans died in the
Belgian Congo ? half of the initial population. Over the same period,
companies exploiting concessions which often covered tens of thousands
of square miles, multiplied their original investments 20-fold!"
I was always appalled me by the tendency for the Political Marxists to
describe the Congo as "precapitalist" because labor was based on
coercion rather than markets.
What do you think the rubber was being used for? Automobile tires,
that's what. Without forced labor in the Congo, Belgium would not have
been able to supply tires to Renault.
In a word, Political Marxism has failed to understand capitalism
dialectically.
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