Normally I'm with comrade Michael, but not this time.
On 1/11/2021 7:21 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote:
So yes, slavery, mercantile exploitation, conquest, etc. were essential to the ORIGINS of capitalism they are NOT part of the dynamic of capitalism once it gets started
I'm writing from Johannesburg, where 1/3 of the world's gold was discovered underfoot in 1886 and over the subsequent century of depletion, white mining capitalists (especially the Oppenheimers' Anglo American Corporation, originally financed by JP Morgan 104 years ago), relied very much for what became the world's most profitable system of ('Minerals Energy Complex') accumulation, upon the migrant labour system. That entailed racial, ethnic, gendered and profound anthropomorphic forms of primitive accumulation: getting 'cheap labour' to rip out the minerals - uncompensated by reinvestment in society (i.e., unequal ecological exchange) - within an 'articulation of modes of production,' as local lingo has it.
Indeed I think it's fair to say that Rosa Luxemburg first laid out the Marxist perspective on capitalism and non-capitalism's relations in this part of the world (in her 1913 /Accumulation of Capital/), relying on secondary accounts (like John Hobson's) but writing with great authority and building this evidence directly into her theory of imperialism. (Here's <https://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/RL%20Capital-africa.pdf> a book we did reviewing that legacy; the late Michael Perelman was of enormous assistance when he joined us at a 2006 Durban conference.)
What I think Michael's driving at above, is whether these relations are necessary or contingent.
Conditions of racial exploitation are always fluid - and if Ben Magubane was correct to /periodise /the kind of racism that was 'functional' for a given set of social power relations in this helpful research paper <https://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/63265CAFF973018D80256B6D005785D1/$file/dmaguban.pdf> - then that would suggest we need a /contingent /approach.
Each /conjuncture /that we can consider stable (at least for some decades) had a different race-based power on display, consistent with the kind of accumulation that prevailed here: the 1652 Dutch East India Company invasion; the systemic land dispossessions for 18th-19th c settler colonialism; the 'civilising' control and establishment of migrancy during the rise of labour-demanding mining and agricultural accumulation from the late 19th c; the emergence of differential consumption norms ('racial fordism'); the demands for urbanising black labour for early low-skilled industrial employment; the concessions made in the later 20th c for higher-skilled employment requirements; 20th c social pacification during periods of intense class conflict and anti-apartheid struggle; late 20th c international relegitimation of SA racial capitalism through 'globalisation' and sub-imperial expansion into Africa; the current neoliberal era with all manner of racialised accumulation tricks including successful co-optation of the 'Black Diamonds' (such as the current president who once led the mineworkers union and then, in 2012 as Lonmin's main local investor, emailed in to the police minister a request for what became the Marikana Massacre <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2GbCoKioEs> of 34 platinum rock drill operators); etc, etc
A theory - say, the labour theory of value - tackles laws of motion of a system, the deep-rooted patterns that explain its durability. If in the evolution of socio-racial oppressions of different sorts here and everywhere, /there is no observable 'law of motion' to explain race on its own terms, /then it's best treated as a contingent factor. And that doesn't make it any less important, of course. (While patriarchy is similar, it has a stronger theoretical grounding in social reproduction associated with all sorts of modes of production over time, so there's an easier case that men oppressing women, or human exploitation of ecologies, are both theorisable, and hugely contingent on the kind of accumulation patterns prevailing.)
I don't know, does that make sense? It's always work-in-progress, and we've had some excellent opportunities to revisit this line of argument with the student 'Fallist' movement here, including some powerful Black Consciousness and PanAfricanist currents which tend more towards race essentialism, and also with BLM in the U.S. and other sites exploring the deep roots of racism and how best to theorise settler-capitalist societies like the U.S., Israel, etc. So if you're finding other new work in the traditions of Luxemburg, Magubane, Robinson and others who have worked through the dichotomy of 'necessary' and 'contingent' explanations, I'd love to hear, thanks.
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