No society is or even in principle could be purely capitalist, and in fact even in the U.S. an enormous amount of human activity is 'outside' capitalism. Several current tendencies are efforts to bring capitalist relations to areas of human activity that have always been non-capitalist: the schools, the state, the military (KP is a commodity now). Petty producers (whether impoverished or wealthy) are not capitalist. In the past if a person wanted to hire someone to clean his/her house, there were independent cleaning women: they were not part of capitalism. But now such firms as Merry Maids have turned house-cleaning into a commodity. Beginning in 2015 certification of teachers by ISU will become a commodity. Much testing in colleges has been commodified.
Lou & Graeber will not acknowledge this, but that is because they have ceased to believe in the existence of capitalism, using the term to describe any sort of exploitation. They are unable to understand the first sentence of Vol. I of Capital, or commodity fetishism or alienation. Carrol P.S. I still have immense respect for David Graeber, both for his role in organizing the first Occupation and for much in this book, which brings out the current _political_ importance of debt. As a metaphor "peonage" does help illuminate the politics of student debt. Failure to understand Marx or capitalism is trivial in comparison to this. If he thinks that schools are part of state power, that is sad, & can be disruptive. But no one's perfect. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2012 12:47 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] David Graeber on capitalism and unfree labor Louis Proyect wrote: > For all of its devotion to British exceptionalism, the Brenner thesis > would seem ill equipped to explain why British rule failed to abolish > extra-economic forms of coercion in its most important colonial holding: > South Africa. In general, it's wrong to expect any "hypothesis" to explain everything. You can't use Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain the laws of physics. In fact, any theory or hypothesis that purports to explain everything is _prima facie_ wrong. In any event, there's nothing in Brenner's thesis that says that capitalist-British rule should "abolish extra-economic forms of coercion" all around the world, not to mention in South Africa. The process of primitive accumulation in England (for example, described by Marx in his CAPITAL) is not about capitalists _consciously_ fighting to abolish extra-economic coercion. Instead, it's a matter of a series of real-world events such as King Henry VII's expropriation of Church lands and the lords' grabbing of peasants' [*] collective property (the commons) and turning it into their own personal property (one aspect of the Enclosure Movement). These events were not intentionally aimed at abolishing extra-economic coercion and creating a "free class of proletarians." Instead, these events had the _unintended effect_ of "freeing" British peasants from various non-economic bonds left over from the feudal period and (more importantly) from having direct control over the means of subsistence and the means of production needed to create them (while destroying peasants' collective organization). The latter "freedom" meant that the peasants became totally dependent (in their efforts to survive) on the newly capitalistic landlords and later the urban capitalists. Given this total dependence, extra-economic coercion wasn't _necessary_ to the existence of exploitation of labor by capital. Move from Marx's social perspective to an individual capitalist perspective: if extra-economic coercion is _profitable_ , it is engaged in (if the state allows). If organized capital (the British Parliament, etc.) found that it helped the their class as a whole (and more powerful interest groups within that class), they would allow, support, and even encourage individual capitalist decisions to engage in non-economic coercion. Coming to South Africa, for example, the British (and before them, the Dutch) took over preexisting systems of bondage and transformed them to serve capitalist goals (instead of transforming them into capitalist organizations). They also used new methods such as the head tax to force conquered peoples into the capitalist labor-power market. Again, it was individually profitable and seen as collectively beneficial to the capitalists, so systems of non-economic coercion were grafted onto the capitalist world market that centered on the full-scale or pure capitalism in Northern Europe (which had "doubly free labor"). BTW, competition from the "unfree" labor in South Africa and elsewhere in the global periphery could easily undermine the bargaining power of the "free" labor in Britain and the rest of the center, though this phenomenon has become important only relatively recently. Marx's last chapter of volume I of CAPITAL is about non-economic coercion in the colonies. Non-economic coercion seems to fit well with colonization by capitalist countries. Capitalists -- as individuals and as a group -- were quite willing to sacrifice their officially-state "liberal" principles if it was profitable to do so. Some Marxists argue that over the centuries, the mix of pure capitalism and non-economic coercion doesn't work, so that pure capitalism's system of doubly-free labor takes over. (The COMMUNIST MANIFESTO suggests as much.) But that's a completely different issue. FWIW, Brenner didn't (and as far as I can tell, doesn't) advocate "British exceptionalism" if that phrase means that Britain is somehow better than the rest of the world (or that Brits are better than other people). The "Brenner thesis" (shared by Marx, in his CAPITAL) is that Britain represents the geographic origin of the disease called capitalism (defined, in its pure form, as a exploitative system in which workers are "doubly free"). That doesn't say that Britain was "better" than the rest of the world. BTW, as a professional historian, if given empirical evidence, unless he is a total dogmatist (which I don't think he is), Brenner would agree that pure capitalism (as defined above) was _also_ created in some other places in the world. (Marx would probably agree too.) Even though Brenner is much more theoretical in orientation than other historians, for that group, empirical evidence rules. Besides, his thesis is about contrasting France and England; it's not about England versus the rest of the world. Or maybe I'm defining the "Brenner Thesis" inaccurately. What is your definition, Louis? -- Jim Devine / "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support." -- John Buchan [*] I'm using this term loosely to refer to rural direct producers. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
