Re: [PEN-L] Eurocentrism and capitalism

[Devine, James]

Melvin P.   comments: > American Marxists have argued this issue for one hundred years. The question as I see it is:     >1.  Was Southern slavery a bourgeois property relations as distinct from capitalism in the laboratory sense? <   Nothing in history is defined in a "laboratory sense."   > 2. Was the slave himself a commodity brought and sold on the market?  <   yes. But his "labor-power" wasn't a commodity that he could sell, so he wasn't a proletarian.    > 3. Does the political character of ones labor - free or unfree, determine a qualitative description of the character of production? That is to say the clear domination of the production of exchange value as distinct from use-values.  <   the slave system involved production of exchange-value (cotton, tobacco, rice, for the market). However, internally each slave plantation produced a lot of food and the like (for the slaves) that was not sold on the market unless there was a surplus. Internally, use-value production dominated, with an effort to be autarkic except when the main export crops and luxury goods were concerned.   > 4. "Capitalist social relations" means nothing if not relations of production. In my opinion the meaning of "social" in "capitalist social relations" is a connection through the market where values are exchanged.  What were the economic content of the relations of production of Southern slavery if not bourgeois exchange relations?  Surely these social relations of production appeared as material relations between things being exchanged.  <   In Marx, "social relations" refer to not only relations in the market for commodities (or whatever the institution was used to distribute product) that were produced, but also relations between classes.  It's not just the horizontal societal relationship between factories, farms, and plantations, but also the vertical relationship between the bosses and the direct producers. In the latter, we see the production of a surplus, which Marx saw as the secret for understanding a mode of production (as he says in volume III). (The  "specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers" is the basis for the "entire formation of the economic community," revealing "the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure ... the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence ... [and] the specific form of the state." ch. 47.)   Under the slave system, the "horizontal" social relation of the distribution of products was bourgeois (marketized, commodified) -- except for the fact that the plantations leaned toward autarky for luxury goods and export crops. Here, "social relations of production appeared as material relations between things being exchanged." The system of social relations was thus mystified and fetishized.   On the other hand, the vertical relationship between boss and the direct producer was one of the direct application of force. There was no fetishization inherent in the relationship. The master/slave relationship was obvious to those directly involved (though not to the ideologists of slavery, who compared it to that of ancient Athens, etc.)   >5. Southern slavery was not industrial bourgeois production. Yet,  the slaves were not simply commodities, but also capital in the same sense of a machine. Southern slavery was a form of bourgeois production and that is why it was called the peculiar institution.  <   Under capitalism _per se_, the direct producers are proletarians, not commodities or treated like machines. One thing is that under capitalism,  a boss can fire a worker so that the latter suffers the cost. This does not happen under New World slavery except when free labor is already in abundance.   >6. Southern slavery was not economic feudalism.  [right!]  The primary form of wealth was not as landed property but movable property . . . a real commodity that was a slave, who also functioned as capital in the exchange relations in the world market. This slave form of bourgeois production, the domination of the production of exchange value as distinct from use-value, contain its own inherent barrier to the revolutionizing of the means of production.  <   I'd say that in the US South, the primary form of wealth was landed property _plus_ slaves.  The two were complementary: It's similar to the way in which, under feudalism, control of a territory gave a lord access to the product of the serfs' labor, but the land was useless without the serfs. (Slavery and serfdom differ in other ways.)   The fact that the slave mode of production discouraged mechanization (and technological progress) in the Southern slave system is an important thing that distinguishes it from capitalism.   >7. Southern slavery was not a form of the primitive accumulation of capital that leads to the formation of the capitalist class.  <   I agree. The way it worked out, a lot of the surplus-product of the slaves was wasted or transferred out of the South, so it didn't promote the development of capitalism in the South. It didn't create a free proletariat. Instead, a system share-cropping/debt peonage developed. This was closer to the feudal system than the slavery system had been. It was only with the out-migration from the South and the end of the share-cropping/debt peonage system that a free proletariat arose.   Jim Devine