Louis writes:
>... The mercantile model involves the trade of luxury goods largely
>between empires mostly on the same socio-economic level, with price
>advantages based on local availability, monopoly control, etc. The problem
>is that the discussion of such matters in v.3 of Capital largely ignores
>the role of labor.
Volume III doesn't ignore the role of labor. One of Marx's clearest
statements of historical materialism appears here: the "specific... form in
which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of the direct producers" reveals
"the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure
and... the corresponding specific form of the state" (p. 791-2 of the
International Publishers' 1967 edition). I'd say that one of Marx's key
points (which is totally consistent with Marx's "volume I" theory, which
appears in a much more finished form) is that it's a mistake to focus
solely on the circulation of commodities (in markets) and that we need to
look at relations of production.
But you should remember that I have never restricted myself to the "volume
3" theory. Instead, I apply recent theories and discussions of "merchant
capital," which see it as merely "articulating" different modes of
exploiting labor -- until it gets submerged in the circuit of industrial
capital. Merchant capital doesn't simply work between empires of similar
socio-economic levels, but within such systems as the "triangle
trade," which included what Mat F. calls the Enslavement industry. If
slave-owners are extorting labor out of their slaves, and they sell their
product and buy luxuries and the like from others, merchant capital
arranges the deal.
There's a lot of disagreement about the nature and impact of this
"articulation," but most people who study this stuff follow Marx to agree
that merchant capital is not the same as full-blown or industrial
capitalism (which involves mass proletarianization). (The big debate is
whether merchant capital dissolves or preserves non-capitalist modes of
labor exploitation. I think it depends on how internally resilient the
non-capitalist mode is.)
If merchant capitalism (market activity) were the same as industrial
capitalism, we have had industrial capitalism since several centuries
B.C.E. In that case, nothing special happened to Western Europe around 1500
in terms of changing systems of labor exploitation. So one might say that
the Western European conquest of most of the rest of the world was simply
an extension or a continuation or a development of the previous
market-centered kinds of conquest (like the Ancient Roman sort). In this
view, economic history is just a matter of markets gradually growing more
and more important in organizing human life, a process that's sometimes
reversed because of people's opposition to markets (as in John Hicks'
neoclassical THEORY OF ECONOMIC HISTORY).
>The reality in Latin America is that pre-existing feudal societies were
>crushed and their inhabitants turned into laborers.
It's a matter of taste whether the pre- or non-capitalist modes of
production in LA should be called "feudal" -- it's no big deal unless one
likes endless debates about the meaning of words. (I'd prefer
"non-capitalist modes of labor exploitation" or "forced-labor modes of
production" or something like that, since European and Japanese feudalism
were so different from other social systems based on forced labor. However,
Brenner sometimes fuzzes up the distinctions between different kinds of
forced-labor modes of exploitation (like slavery and serfdom) and you may
be following him on that path.)
Whatever the terminology, I doubt that it's true that none of these
inhabitants were "laborers" before the Conquest. Labor seems pretty
universal in human history so far. Further, many of them produced
surplus-products for the tributary empires such as the Incas and Aztecs.
>Throughout the 16th century, there were steady evolutions in the form that
>this labor was expressed. In the first 3rd of the century you had
>encomiendas, which were an unsuccessful attempt to transplant Spanish
>forms. This was replaced by the repartamento, (equivalent to the 'mita',
>an Indian word) in the mid-century. But by the end of the century most
>Indians were WAGE LABORERS.
Of course, by 1600, full-blown capitalism had already arisen in English
countryside, at least according to the people you lambaste. Wood, for
example, sees the agrarian development of industrial capitalism in England
as already occurring in a big way by the 16th century. (Here, she's simply
popularizing Brenner, IMHO.)
Also, I'd bet that if you study the relations of production in Latin
America in 1600, you'd find that the rural proletarians were a relatively
small percentage of the total.
In addition, like the freed slaves in the U.S. after 1865, I think you'd
find all sorts of direct use of force against the Indians. The government
was in league with the land-owners, who were in league with the merchants
and the money-lenders (and in fact many of these were the same people or of
the same family), as part of a 4-sided bloc that imposed such fates as debt
peonage on the native inhabitants. Like the freed slaves, they were
prevented from becoming true proletarians, since extra-economic force
(including linked monopoly/monopsony positions) was being applied. Further,
a lot of had very small plots of land (minifundia), usually on infertile
ground, on hill slopes, etc., that weren't big or productive enough to
support them but were big enough to keep them around as a labor supply for
the latifundistas. Their direct access to means of subsistence, however,
makes them semi-proletarian.
>Throughout the entire century, however, Indians did the same thing no
>matter how they were paid. They dug silver, which was transported on ships
>to Europe. Nowhere else in history do you have the same kind of
>socio-economic transformation. On the cusp of the capitalist dawn of
>history, you find 90 percent of the indigenous peoples (those that were
>not exterminated or killed by smallpox, etc.) turned into laborers...
Again, "laborers" is not the same as proletarians. Further, the ease with
which the Indians went from wage labor to forced-labor jobs (like working
in silver mines) suggests that they were doing "wage labor" in a situation
in which direct force -- and monopoly/monopsony power -- was applied
regularly to them. This in turn suggests that they weren't true proletarians.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
