On 12/18/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>At least for Marx, slavery was _not_ a form of capitalism (and he's >clear about it). One of his rhetorical points was that capitalist >social relations were _like_ slavery (thus "wage slavery") and in some >ways _worse than_ slavery. (Slave-owners at least tried to keep their >chattel alive when they weren't needed in production, while >capitalists dump their employees into the reserve army.)
Well, as I tried to point out already, Marx's comments on slavery appeared mostly in the form of oberta dictum.
No, it's not a matter of "oberta dictum." It's more a matter of definition. Proletarians are free in the double sense, i.e., free of "extra-economic" coercion and free of direct access to (and control of) the means of production and subsistence. Slaves, on the other hand, are directly coerced. Now, anyone is free to use other definitions. But it's important to know that Marx's definition was central to his analysis of the abstract capitalist mode of production. It's important to know that he separated theoretical analysis from empirical analysis and did not equate them.
And if you define capitalism as requiring a free market in labor, then Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa were not capitalist countries. I find that most unlikely.
But both of those countries had a lot of free proletarian labor. The government of Nazi Germany, say, was extremely and horribly repressive. But most workers outside of the armed forces could quit their jobs if they wanted to. (Of course, they didn't want to: just as under "normal" capitalism, quitting has major economic consequence. During the war, things changed significantly, as discussed below.) It wasn't just slave-labor camps. As usual, NG and apartheid SA were complex societies. Each involved proletarian wage labor _and_ other types of work relations. In Althusserian patois, they represented articulated combinations of different work relations. However, capitalism was dominant. (I can never get the jargon exactly right, since I'm not an Althusserian.) To some extent NG was straining capitalism. Under the type of full employment that prevails during an intense war, it's hard to get people to work. To some extent, rhetoric about "defending the homeland" and fear can help motivate them. So slave labor was increasingly _necessary_. But slave labor is also notoriously unproductive, except for very simple tasks. I doubt that NG would have survived for very long if it had been able to extend the war... -- Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.
