Paul C writes in 6947 > >The slave owning class can carry out the circuit m-c-m' under these >circumstances, buying slaves from the state and food and industrial >raw materials from each other. The profit is used to employ >personal slaves in sector 3. The profit made by the state is used to >employ public slaves to build monuments etc. (Let me assume that all profit is accumulated in the expansion of the slave acquistion industry and the commodity producing sector which is based on slave labor. So no mention of sector 3.) Is surplus value produced in sector I which is the violent state acquisition of slaves? However, profit may be made by the state without the state organizing the actual production of surplus value. It seems to me that new slaves are paid for out of revenue deducted from the surplus value embodied in the products from sector 2--your commodity producing sector based on slave labor. The costs of slaves are thus more like the faux fraix of plantation slavery. I say this because I do not think slaves are means of production (they are not in fact speaking instruments, as the friendly Romans had it) the value of which can then be transferred to the commodity output. In order to recover the costs of new slaves the slave owners of sector 2 have to super-exploit slaves. The costs of new slaves seem to have been recoverd on average in well less than a year. In this way whether a slave is used in the production of commodities or for personal use the price paid for her is akin to a luxury expenditure by slave owning class. Most slaves were not however used in order to meet the personal whims of the master but subjected to alienated, value positing proletarian labor, yielding value in excess of their own costs, including the price paid to the slave trader and the costs of their daily reproduction (these latter costs would be variable capital). I do not see why it is not possible for the slave owner to pay a so called "fair" price to the slave catcher for additional slaves such that the slave catcher enjoys a "reasonable" return on his capital investment (the minimum capital requirements for slave trading seem to have been horrifically low, thus encouraging massive migration of capital into the slave trading business for hundreds of years) and then to whip the slave into producing value so in excess of his total costs to the slave owner that the latter enjoys a reasonable return as well. But it seems to me that the production of new value happened entirely on the plantations and in the mines. Of that new value both slave traders and slave owners partook (as well as insurance agents, financial capitalists, the state and myriad other actors). The profit in your sector 1 is thus redistributed surplus value produced in sector 2. That is, I would give sector 2 the same place that the Physiocrats gave agriculture--the sole source of the produit net. Rakesh
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