In this post, I want to argue against Robert Albritton's stimulating thesis that the putting out system of woolen mfg was the typical form of mercantilist or early capitalist accumulation that plantation slavery actually played this role. First to repeat: Variable capital is the investment that capitalists make on the control and reproduction of labor power which alone has the potential to create new value in excess of its own costs--s/v. Modern plantation owners had to pay for the control and reproduction of slave labor power even if on some plantations slaves produced much, if not all, of their own food (which was less true in North America after the explosion in demand for cotton while housing materials, shoes, clothes, fish and other subsistence goods had always been purchased off the market by the planation owner, often with credit); the cash crop commodities which slaves produced through the coerced expenditure of their labor power broke down into, say, that sugar which reproduced the value of their own subsistence and that sugar which represented surplus value (not all of which was directly appropriated by the plantation owner). And slaves spent--according to Fogel--80% of their working time on the production of cash crop commodities which seems to have been a much higher proportion than the putatively true Anglo rural, 15th-17th century proletariat which was often composed (as Robert Albritton underlines) of servants-in-husbandry who as only seasonal commodity producers often relied on payment in kind and were tied down by extra economic coercion. Also, the resort to the gang labor system on the New World slave plantations (and I do think this needs to be considered a techno-organizational innovation) allowed these New World capitalists to so increase the productivity and intensity of cash crop production that they were able to outcompete the plantations off the coast of Africa and in the Mediterranean even as they fiercely competed with each other first for luxury markets and then mass markets. So even if slavery is ultimately a system of absolute surplus value production, it may have had (from the capitalist point of view) the most advanced technology and the most industrial technology in terms of the organization of the labor process at its time. This is close to the argument of Keith Aufhauser (sp?) in his Harvard dissertation; he emphasizes how closely Taylor studied the organization of the plantation slave process in planning the organization of factory labor (Fogel very much picks up on this). At any rate, the plantation owner appropriated surplus human labor through the production and sale of commodities or, in short, through value relations, not through the command of rent in kind or direct labor services. Any attempt to return to a natural or patriarchal economy was blocked (as underlined by Blackburn) by the debts which the plantation owners had incurred and the capital investments which they needed to amortize. After the cotton revolution, American plantation owners were often criticized for excessive focus on cash crop production to the detriment of subsistence farming (see Fogel; Blackburn's anecdotal evidence on the food self sufficiency of the North American plantations seems to predate the cotton revolution). Slavery had been transformed from a patriarchal institution into a system of commercial exploitation. Slaves' direct subsistence labor time was minimized. Robert Albritton has argued that the putting out system of manufacture especially in the case of woolen goods was the most important form of surplus value production in the mercantilist or early capitalism. While I agree with Albritton (and Marx) that not only pure wage laborers can produce surplus value (these independent mfgs after all were not directly paid a wage), I think plantation slavery was just as, if not more, central to the mercantilist phase of capitalism--so I disagree with the Uno school which puts the center of capital accumulation (to repeat) in the putting out system of woolen manufacture instead of in English agrarian capitalism. Yet, slave gang labor approximated--in fact anticipated as Keith Aufhauser has shown--the cooperative, piecemeal and large scale nature of capitalist factory discipline: it was much closer to real subsumption and much more productive than the putting out system which just is the formal subsumption of labor; and capitalist slavery was free of any trace of precapitalist patriarchal relations as slavery became enmeshed in the capitalist world market (despite what Genovese has claimed). Albritton argues the putting out system was more important to the development of capitalism than slavery because the profits of slavery were often not used for accumulation but the purchase of country estates. But he cites no data here (there is only a citation to Crouzet); moreover, he agrees that those who purchased country estates often acted in terms of capitalist rationality in how they tried to improve them--was this case of the new plantation capitalist owners? Finally, many industries other than the plantations themselves made profits from the the slave system and as Blackburn and William Darity (following Eric Williams) show, the profits from slavery as a system were crucial in creating a sufficient supply of capital so that working capital requirements could be met and infrastructure projects financed in early capitalist England. Racial slavery was the veritable pivot for the development of the world capitalist system not only in terms of the surplus value which it generated but also in terms of the organizational changes in the labor process which it introduced. And it also made a mightly contribution to the revolution in ethics that was needed to kick all gods but Profit off the altar! I think Albritton should have made slavery the key example of the mercantilist phase as Grossmann had. Rakesh
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