me:
>> Marx's last chapter of volume I of CAPITAL is about non-economic
>> coercion in the colonies.
Louis:
> Not really.
> It is instead about the clash between the "mother country" and the
> "settlers" about capital accumulation.
To choose one example, before US independence, the British imposed the
Proclamation Line of 1763 on the 13 colonies. As Louis suggests, it
represented a bone of contention between the "settlers" and the Crown.
(By the Crown, I mean not just the king but also his
capitalist/merchant allies in Parliament, and to some extent leaders
of the traditional landed mobility, which at that time had become
mixed up with the capitalists and merchants.)
But most of the settlers weren't capitalists; few people in the
colonies were, with many capitalists living in the Motherf** county.
(Most were small farmers, small merchants, craftspeople, etc.) The
Proclamation Line (to the extent that it was successfully enforced)
was a form of non-economic coercion, violating the official standards
of liberal capitalism: it forced direct producers among the settlers
to work for wages for the capitalists that were there, since it
limited their mobility, preventing them from going to "free" land
(stolen from the Native Americans, natch). It _artificially_ created a
pool of proletarians for capitalists to exploit.[*]
Clearly, the institution of slavery was a more effective way of limit
the mobility of direct producers and allowing their exploitation. The
institution of indentured servitude was less successful than slavery
at doing that, since the (generally white) servants found it
relatively easy to flee their masters and to mix in the general
population. The latter problem was one reason for the Proclamation
Line, if I remember correctly.
Marx wrote: >> The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists
in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and
every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private
property and individual
means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same
operation.<<
To clarify: by a "free colony," of course, this means a settler colony
(with residents generally on the same social level as the Mother
Country) as opposed to a looting colony (e.g., Leopold's Congo) or an
exploitation colony (dominated by plantations and the like). And in
the 13 colonies that later became the US, the problem (from the
Crown's point of view) wasn't publicly-owned land as much as
Indian-owned land.
>>This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their
>>inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is
>>very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily
>>obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects
>>the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined
>>labour at any price.”<<
Right. That's why the Crown needed extra-economic coercion, i.e.,
measures such as the Proclamation Line.
Marx attacked the pretension of the liberal political economists of
his day, who thought that labor freed on non-economic coercion
couldn't be exploited. In this last chapter of volume I of CAPITAL, he
argues that economic coercion and non-economic coercion are
substitutes: if economic coercion (centered on the reserve army of the
unemployed) failed to produce a sufficient volume of exploitable
labor, then the capitalists would use non-economic coercion (if they
could).
--
Jim Devine / "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of
support." -- John Buchan
{*] It's as if workers were fleeing California because of the
deteriorating conditions here, but Governor Brown prevented them from
exiting.
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