Jerry, I cannot follow your latest argument about exactly why it is only wage labor that can produce surplus value or as you put it: > it is the *specific >production relations* that determine whether the surplus product takes the >*particular form* of surplus value. What is the specific production relation? And if it is the exchange of labor power for a wage, why is this production relation rather than an exchange relation? Moreover, I do not understand why only wage labor can produce what you are calling big C commodities the definition of which is also opaque to me. But in a certain sense I do agree with you: there is in fact a difference between little c commodities and big C commodities. But the difference does not lie in that the latter can only be produced by wage labor. As Marx points out, some of the surplus produced by colonial settler peasants in the white colonies was in fact dumped on the market as little c commodities while the output of plantation slaves working under that discipline of the military agriculture of gang labor which would become a model for factory labor was produced from the start as big C commodities. As Marx points out, plantation slavery was regulated by value unlike colonial settler farming. You have yet to comment on the passage (you have also yet to provide me with the source of your claim that most of the subsistence requirements on plantations were internally produced, something that is explicitly disputed by economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz for example in The Great Divergence; you have also not told me on the basis of whose specific critique of Fogel and Engerman you have dismissed their work as reactionary). At any rate, you miss Marx's point when you write: >From the standpoint of the seller, >all that matters is that the potential buyer has enough money or other >commodities to trade (since your most abstract definition doesn't >*require* money for there to be commodity production) to buy >the commodity output. For Marx all that matters to the colonial settler peasant is that he gets some or any arbitrary sum of money for the surplus which after he has met his own needs he dumps on the market as small c commodities to the detriment of true capitalist agriculture; he has not produced his agricultural output such that what he attempts to sell has be realized (tendentially) at prices of production if his farming is to remain viable. So what you say about little c commodities is in fact not what Marx was getting at: > Moreover, we would have reason to believe under >most circumstances that the exchange-value of both commodities and >Commodities will tend under conditions of generalized production >and sale of Commodities to be determined by the conditions of >Commodity production. Since the colonial settler peasant only cares that his buyer has some, any money, he can be much more arbitrary about the prices that he hopes to receive and he thus undermines the growth of capitalist agriculture. This was in fact Marx's point. Moreover, the colonial settler peasant only dumps some of his agricultural surplus on the market as commodities; he has not produced goods, which are commodities from the start. i.e., he does not make capital investments in the production of specific commodities which are at no point meant for his own consumption and only produced because they are meant from the start to be sold tendentially at prices of production. For the plantation capitalist it is moreover a matter of the very viability of his capitalist enterprise whether he has organized and directed production that the "big C" Commodity output can be sold tendentially at prices of production. If not, the plantation capitalist will withdraw his own capital and/or lose access to credit and thus go under under (as many in fact did). Brought into the world market and thus dependent on it for the monetized inputs of subsistence, means of production and capital, the plantation capitalist had to ensure not only that surplus value would be produced (why else make purchases of inputs off and borrow from the market?) but that those specific commodities which are produced can be realized at their prices of production (a transformed value). Slavery was thus transformed from a patriarchal institution into a calculating and calculated system for the production of surplus value. So of course I agree with Ian when he writes: >A slave owner producing for the >market submits himself (this is not a sexist use of the term) to market >discipline: and this make a difference to the interests served by the >employment of the productive forces. The colonial settler peasant did operate under such discipline of the capital market; his viability was not threatened if he consumed most of his own output and dumped on the market his surplus as small c commodities below what were the prices of production which had been established by capitalist enterprises. That is, the production of modern plantations though not using free wage labor was regulated by value unlike the colonial settler peasantry which may in fact have used some free wage labor at say the time of harvest. Again one cannot determine whether there is production of surplus value or whether production is regulated by value simply by the presence or absence of wage labor. It's not that simple. Again here is the Marx passage on which you have yet to comment. "Two different aspects must be distinguished here. First, There are the colonies proper, such as in the US, Australia, etc.Here the mass of the farming colonists, although they bring with them a larger or smaller amount of capital from the motherland, are not *capitalists*, nor do they carry on capitalist production. They are are more or less peasants who work themselves and whose main object, in the first place, is to produce *their own livlihood, their means of subsistence. Their main product does not become a *commodity*, and is not intended for trade. They sell or exchange the excess of their product over their own consumption for imported mfg commodities, etc. The other, smaller section of the colonists who settler near the sea, navigable rivers, etc. form trading towns. There is no question of capitalist here either. Even if capitalist production gradually comes into being, so that the sale of his products and the profit he makes from this sale become decisive for the farmer who himself works and owns his land: so long, as comparedwith capital and labour, land still exists in elemental abundance providing a practically unlimited field of action, the first type of colonisation will continue as well and production will therefore *never* be regualted according to the needs of the market--at a given market value. Everything the colonists of the first type produce *over and above* their immediate consumption, they will throw on the market and sell at any price that will bring in more than their wages. They are, and continue for a long time to be, competitors of the farmers who are already producing more or less capitalistically, and thus keep the market price of the agricultural product *below* its value... "In the second type of colonies--plantations--where commercial speculations figure from the start [is this akin to ideal precommensuration in VFT terms?--rb] and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, sicne the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage labour,which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by *capitalists*. The method of production, which they introduce has not arised out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitaist and landowner. And the *elemental* [profusion] existence of the land confronting capital and labour does not offer any resistance to capital investment, hence none to the competition between capitals. Neither does a class of farmers as distinct from landlords develop here. So long as these conditions endure, nothing will stand in the way of cost price [by which we understand price of production--rb] regulating market value." TSV, part II Moscow, pp. 301-3 Rakesh
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