For some reason I did not receive Paul B's message; here is my reply: Paul B wrote >It is one of those common steps backward in social progress in the period >before a relative surplus population can actually be established. > >Now the puzzle that seems to be worrying everyone is if a product is >produced under conditions which are not fully capitalistic, I consider production essentially capitalistic if it is undertaken in the circuit of capital, i.e, money investments are only made in constant and variable capital for the production not of use values for immediate consumption but of commodities the latent value and surplus value of which has to be realized in money. I do not define the free wage labor or wage labor form (at least as Jerry and Nicky have defined wage labor; Jairus has a broader definition) as part of the essence of capital as such though indeed fully developed capitalism depends on it; in other words, the generalization of this form is the cause and effect of capitalist development on the basis of relative surplus value. The boundless search for surplus value however is the essence, if there is a singular essence, of capitalist production. Plantation slavery was thus in my estimation essentially capitalistic but in the long term an inefficient method for the production of surplus value. Raw materials pilfered from pre capitalist formations may not have been capitalistically produced as commodities; however the commodity output of plantations--indigo, sugar, tobacco, cotton, etc--was capitalistically produced. Slave labor was also part of the social labor of early bourgeois society. > or not at all >so, but these products are purchased by capitalism, can we say that these >products are, or have become, 'commodities'...'commodities' meaning the >fully matured commodity made with free labour and in which surplus value >resides. The same sort of problem arises when we talk of the earliest raw >materials purchased from feudal states in the 18th century...they exchange >for money... so is the labour that has provided these materials somehow >'become' abstract social labour? For fun I can call this the problem of >retrospective legislation, or 'surplus value by annointment'. No these materials need not have produced only because they would allow a so called reasonable return on capital. They could have been dumped on the market well below their prices of production as Marx suggested some of the surplus output of peasants in the white settler colonies was. On the other hand, plantation owners tended to make only those investments that allowed for the prospect of a reasonable return on capital and thus the valorization of capital. > >The point is that once a 'real' capitalist, the developed sort, buys any >item, exchanges it for money, then it certainly is, from then on, a >commodity with a price, but at that stage the social character of the labour >power that has been involved is only accidentally and hesitatingly coming >into existence as a commodity. My goodness, the output of slaves did not accidentally take the commodity form; the whole point of command of slave labor and the massive concommitant in the modern plantation was the production of commodities whose sale would allow for the valorization of capital as Marx himself underlined. >In the case of US slavery labour power was >not a commodity. Yes but the general form of the product of labor was the commodity. > Society was not bourgeoise. James Oakes in the Ruling Race provides good evidence of how deeply commercial values were embedded in the antebellum US South. Rakesh
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