Nicky writes in 6900 >Interesting... I see two clarifications are required: > >1) when I say 'capital-labour' relation I emphatically **DO NOT** mean a >relation of production. The capital-labour relation describes a >relationship constituted in circulation (i.e. by the whole capital circuit >of production and exchange, within which the moment of production lies). No, I disagree. The capital-labor relation and exploitation are exactly not constituted in circulation! This is the superficial relationship, a deceptive appearance which is not the true essence of the relationship. To focus on circulation is precisely to gloss over the essential nature of the capital-labor relationship, extinguishing its differentia specifica. Which is the production of surplus value and capital. >This is so because the exchange of labour-power for wages (prior to >production) is the key part of it key part of what? the reference here is unclear. Moreover, why must wages take the form that you specify? In the Journal of Peasant Studies you will find scholars who argue that there are many hidden wage forms. Perhaps more importantly, this exchange for wages is at best a necessary but not sufficient condition for the capital-labor relation. What are the other conditions? And why can't those other conditions be sufficient? >(see also, Marx's volume 2, ch.1 argument >for the *necessity* of wage labour as the initiating moment of the >transformation of money-capital into productive capital). what is this argument? Marx also refers to the proletarian male as a slave dealer who sells his wife and child to the capitalists. > From this >perspective, the *owners* of slaves and serfs are not faced by the same >Value Form 'requirements' as the *employers* of wage labour. Why not? I am just trying to get a clear answer here. What are value form requirements? And why cannot they appy to the owner of slaves or serfs? Slave owners in the modern plantation system were in fact faced with task of the valorization of capital yesterday and today in the forests of Brazil. As slaves become widely available on the market, slave owners amortized them in a period between 3mos to 1 year; the rate of return averaged that on industrial enterprise. With the easy and cheap availability of new slaves, the overwork of slaves ensured the expansion of capital though it killed them off sometimes in no more than seven years (Marx emphasized this; so did JE Cairnes in the Slave Power in his attempt to differentiate modern plantation slavery from the slavery of the ancients and Aristotle; even John Hicks notes how with the full development in the market for slaves, slaves were subjected to a lethal work regiment). Iron, tools and clothes (for the masters and the slaves) were purchased on the market by planation owners--these were capital investments made by capitalists in what Marx characterizes as a calculated and calculating system. That market purchases by slave owners were often debt financed only intensified the pressure to amortize their investments as quickly as possible. Land was very quickly destroyed--which suggests how continuous and intense slave production in fact was; the rapid destruction of fertile land forced the geographical expansion of the slave system and brought on the American Civil War in which Marx had a great interest. My reading of Marx's articles and correspondence on the American Civil War do not turn up references to the Southern slave system as non-capitalist. In fact I read Marx as agreeing with the slaveowners' defensive propaganda (see for example George Fitzhugh) that they were no different than Northern industrialists in exploiting the working class. Keith Afhauser would later show in "Slavery and Scientific Management" Journal of Economic History, 33 (1973) that Taylor in particular would study the slave system in detail in order to understand how to control the movement and maximize the exploitation of the factory proletariat. It's been a long while since I read the piece and can't find my copy , but it's quite revealing. > For me, only >the latter relation - as constituted by Marx's circulation of capital, is a >capital-labour relation. I just don't follow the argument. Do you think the plantations and mines of colonial Southern Africa and Zimbabwe--I mean Rhodesia--were not capitalist enterprises just because they were often based on formally unfree (or rather formally the unfreest) labor relations? How do you make sense of the history of your own homeland? > >2) I emphasis that 'exploitation' is concept specific to the capital-labour >relation (as I have defined it). > This is because exploitation has to do >not only with the split between labour power and means of production (which >would indeed give rise to a variety of 'forms of exploitation'), It seems to me that you are reducing exploitation by definition to the relation between capital and free wage labor. I don't follow the argument. > but with a >prior payment of wages and as a result of that, the subsumption of living >labour under the aspect of time why does the subsumption "under the aspect of time"--I am not clear as to what you mean here; please define--only obtain as a result of the prior payment of wages? There were debt pressures to quicken amortization in the modern plantation slave system; amortization and valorization were accomplished as quickly as possible without due consideration for the lives of slaves. This was true as well in the mines and the plantations of colonial Africa in which labour was by no means formally free. >(by which I mean that the measure of labour >by time and intensity is a 'formula' peculiar to the capital-labour >relation; also, Marx, vol.1, ch.1). Slaves and surfs are not 'exploited' >in this sense. This is not true as a matter of fact. On what studies are you relying to reach the conclusion that intensity or squeezing out as much effort per unit of time were not root concerns of slave owners or employers of formally unfree laborers (which let's not forget includes millions of Asian indentured servants or "coolies" after slavery was abolished in the Caribbean and many former slaves attempted to become peasants)? Intensity is what all too often defined modern plantation slavery and exploitation in the mines and planations of colonial Africa and elsewhere! There was life denying obsession on the greatest appropriation of the surplus value produced by slaves in the shortest period; hence, the expression from sun up to sun down. > > >3. I don't want to deny that Banaji's different definition and use of >exploitation (which implies that exploitation can take 'forms' other than >the one defined by the wage and the clock) is wrong or irrelevant or not >useful. Banaji does not deny that the clock or pressures to quicken turnover are absent if there is not free wage labor as you are defining it (he also has a broader definition of what wage payments can be). > Also, I don't want to say that your call for a distinction between >'forms of exploitation' and the 'relation of production' is unviable. IMO, >the only test of this is whether these concepts are applicable and valid >for the *specific* inquiry and the *particular* problem you have in mind. >My object of inquiry is the fully developed capitalist economy where >wage-labour is purchased as an input to the production of commodities >intended for markets. It is fine and quite important to study a pure capitalism--a capitalism in which all products take the form of commodities and are all produced by the formally freest wage labor. But real capitalism is not, has not been and never will be Marx's pure capitalism the theoretical nature of which is most interestingly discussed by Robert Albritton and other Unoists. I think the mistake made here by both you and Jerry is the mistaking of Marx's model of reality for the reality of the model. The consequence of such overformalist Marxism is the cutting out of huge swaths of capitalist history in the periphery and millions of the human victims of capitalism in the past and even the present (though vagrancy laws were used to provide capital with a formally unfree European labor force in early capitalism as well). This overformalism thus feeds the racism and Eurocentrism of Marxism. It removes the common history of the exploited proletariat as an exploited proletariat and leads to divisiveness. It feeds the European and white workers' reactionary calls for immigration controls against people whose common history they do not recognize in face of the arbitrary differences that are instead fetishized; it leads black workers away from class politics into the reactionary utopias of defensive and bourgeois nationalisms. Rakesh
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