On 4/26/2012 2:40 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: > Graeber seems to generalize from an inadequate number of sources, and > those sources not even named.
Graeber's book is actually heavily sourced. It is possible that I skipped the citations since I didn't see any point in scanning the footnotes section of the book as well. In terms of free labor, I would remind people that most of 20th century capitalism has operated on the basis of what Ellen Meiksins Wood calls political coercion as opposed to the coercion of the market. For the past 200 years or so the state rather than the market dictated class relations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. One of the best examples is King Leopold's Congo. Without the use of taxes and state terrorism, the native peoples would have never picked rubber. Of course, the automobile tire companies in Europe were based on free wage-labor but were only part of the picture. Capitalism in its essence is free labor in the metropolitan centers and forced labor in the periphery. Wallerstein said it and I believe it. If you limit the capitalist sphere to Western Europe, where it conformed to the model laid out in Capital, you are not only operating on a false premise, you end up with bad politics. If the assumption is that there is "precapitalism" in Leopold's Congo, then the bourgeois revolution is on the agenda--a will-of-the-wisp if there ever was one. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm Was the mode of production in colonial Africa precapitalist or capitalist? To begin with, we face something of the same problem that we encountered with Spanish colonialism. In Africa, the Europeans insisted on borrowing from the feudal lexicon, despite a clear capitalist agenda. For example, the French counted on corvée labor to lay railway track or perform other tasks associated with colonial infrastructure. Without reliable rail lines, crops and minerals destined for the seaports would languish at their source. Regardless of the label, such forced labor was not only integral to the colonial capitalist system, it had the same devastating impact on the local population as Spanish practices had three centuries earlier. Colonial administrator Emile Baillaud reported in 1905 that: "At this moment in West Africa, the necessary hands . . . are easy to be had; and also at the coast the towns overflow with men going about looking for work. The captives having listened to our advice, and finding the way to freedom without dying from hunger, have come in numbers towards our enterprises, wherever it was possible to find work with the Europeans. They not only leave their masters, but also their countries."12 Without extra-economic compulsion, primitive accumulation would have not taken place. The indigenous peoples would have subsisted through the means available to them outside of the cash economy. If the colonial powers had relied exclusively on market competition, the local population would have found ways to ignore them. One of the most infamous colonists, King Leopold of Belgium, saw himself as following in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism. At the age of twenty-seven, he visited Seville in March 1862 in order to study court records preserved in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building. According to Adam Hochschild: "For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold, silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be gathered in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees, government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural drawings, having to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages, among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of the world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest whatever in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a dedicated scholar when it came to one subject, profits."13 When he wrote home to a friend, the monarch demonstrated that he understood the goal was profit, not traditional values: "I am very busy here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies." For Hochschild, the monarch is a "man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
