Devine, James wrote:
The thing about labor in Potosi was that it was either slavery or very
close to slavery. (It was very non-feudal. I don't see why feudalism is
relevant here at all.) It was a lot like the slavery in antiquity that
Marx writes about.
This is not the case at all. Slavery in antiquity was tied up with the
natural economy. Slaves could become free. In the Ottoman Empire, for
example, slaves commanded armies. In Ethiopia they bore arms. In such
precapitalist societies, commodity production was not generalized. In
the 16th century, Latin America was a source of silver, gold, sugar,
etc. that became transformed into commodities for sale on the world
market. Stocks in mining companies were bought and sold like any other
stocks, even if the workforce was unfree.
It wasn't free proletarian labor (of the sort that
Marx argued distinguished capitalism from other modes of production). So
this "primitive accumulation" didn't create a proletariat _per se_. It
created a system that later evolved into the latifundium/minifundia
system, a sort of "semi-feudal/semi-capitalist" system.
But a proletariat was created. How else would you describe somebody who
digs silver 11 hours a day for a wage? Btw, most silver miners were wage
earners, even though they were subject to all sorts of nonmarket
constraints.
right. But this "second serfdom" persisted in a modified form until the
time that Engels wrote.
Not really. The Junkers estates of the 1800s were typical large-scale
capitalist farms operating on a strictly for-profit basis. The only
thing not typical about them is that the work force was constrained by
nonmarket judicial codes that tied them to the land. If you want to
understand this better, I'd recommend Lenin's early work on the
development of capitalism in Russia. He says that there were 2 roads
that Russia could take. It could follow the Junkers capitalism model or
that of the USA, where small proprietorship and wage labor prevailed
with a minimum of extra-market coercion. He favored the second path.
_Of course_. Of course European rubber companies used slavery & other
forms of forced labor whenever they could! Who said otherwise? This is
another case of "people [being] drawn into the whirlpool of an
international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production
[and] the sale of their products for export becoming their principal
interest, [so that] the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on
the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom..."
So you are saying that there was no capitalism in the Congo in the
1880s? Interesting.
The fact is that "capitalism" isn't a single company or even several
companies. It's a type of _society_. It's the type of society that has
dominated the world market and subordinated other modes of production,
_eventually_ (and not immediately) converting them into capitalism --
or simply destroying them.
But that's what happened in the Congo exactly. The rubber companies
separated the small farmers and hunter-gatherers from their means of
production and converted them into a proletariat. It didn't matter that
this was done through extra-market coercion including taking family
members as hostage. In terms of class relations, you had a bourgeoisie
based in Belgium--about this there should be no doubt. And in the Congo
you had a proletariat. From a Marxist standpoint, there is *no*
difference between somebody climbing a tree to harvest rubber and
somebody back in Brussels turning the raw material into tires.
--
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