Why does the relation of production have to be free of extra economic coercion in order for there to be production of value and surplus value? I have not been able to follow Jerry's answer to this question which he may word differently of course. Robert Brenner however has a very good answer (I am trying to apply the analysis in his Social Bases of economic Development in Analytical Marxism, though Brenner himself does not talk about modern plantation slavery presumably because it--like the putting out system--is a difficult liminal case): Only if workers are free from extra economic coercion does the ruling class find that it can only appropriate surplus labor through commodity production carried out in terms of efficient technology. If the ruling class cannot appropriate surplus labor through compulsion of rent in kind, money rent, direct labor services, etc., it finds that it has to pay a wage to a working class which will willingly then create new money value in excess to the money value of its wage. Only if the ruling class finds that it cannot fall back on the appropriation of surplus labor through the violent compulsion of rent in kind or money rent or direct labor services--that is, only when the ruling class confronts labor power as a commodity--will it be forced to depend itself on commodity production for the market and invest in the rationalization of the costs of commodity production such that output will be market competitive while still allowing the capitalist his reasonable money profit, money profit being the form in which surplus labor is appropriated. A slave owner can always decide not to make the investments in commodity production which make output market competitive and fall back on the direct compulsion of surplus labor in the form of rent in kind or direct labor services since the plantation owner owns the person of the slave. Like the colonial settler peasantry, the slave owner can then dump excess commodities on the market below their value once his own consumption needs have been met. Slave plantations thus can never free themselves of the temptations of natural or patriarchal economy: a plantation enterprise can never become a proper capitalist enterprise since its reproduction is not dependent on the production of commodities and more specifically the production of commodities which due to ongoing technological and organizational improvements in the labor process can be sold vis a vis rival commodities on the market at prices of production. The slave owner (as well as feudal lord) always has the "easy" fall back position of extra-economic coercion to command surplus labor in direct, consumable form--that is, surplus labor which does not have the value form. There is of course the further obstacle that with huge fixed costs in the purchase of slaves--labor power is not a variable (in the business sense) cost for plantation owners--they cannot shift production to those commodities which will be tendentially realized at prices of production. Of course my position has been that modern plantation owners had no such fall back position. They had to (and very much wanted to) appropriate surplus labor in the form of money through the production of commodities because of the money debts they had incurred (after all, plantation owners did not themselves capture slaves but paid for them with borrowed money) and the ongoing money costs which they had on their books (means of production, means of subsistence, faux fraix, world market luxuries--fine clothes, fine wine, world travel, etc) and thus the threat of bankruptcy over their head; moreover, they learned that production for the market would make them wealthier than simply forcing slaves as coerced peasants to give up rent in kind or direct labor services--plantation owners did not borrow money and make huge capital investments just to live on the food and luxuries with which their own slaves could directly provide them! Fogel provides evidence that slaves were not purchased as luxuries for the purposes of conspicuous consumption but as capital investments for the purposes of profit making. It was because the plantation owners were entangled in the world market from the start that the aim of production was surplus value. Modern plantation owners did in fact have flexibility to shift their mix of crops in response to market signals, as Fogel emphasizes. There is also no evidence that if New World plantation capitalists had to rely on free wage labor--that is, if labor costs had been more variable than fixed--much of New World agriculture would have even been profitable, that it would have made any sense to go into capitalist business in the Americas. And without the capitalist business of New World plantations there would have been much diminished demand for Old World mfg goods, the sugar shipping industry and shipping industry in general would not have developed as if in a hothouse, merchants would not have had the power to make a bourgeois revolution. Modern plantation owners embedded themselves in the world capitalist market and had to appropriate surplus labor in the form of money through the production of commodities which would be competitive on the world market and profitable in terms of their costs (given that merchants commanded much of the surplus value, cost cutting forcibly imposed itself on the plantation owners; the merchants tied to the New World plantation system were of course key actors in the English bourgeois revolution). Modern plantation slavery seems to have been more innovative of the labor process (the gang system) than early capitalist agriculture and the putting out system. It was closer to the real subsumption of labor. And it seems to have been as, if not more, technologically dynamic in the assimilation of machines in the mercantilist or early capitalist phase. So it seems to me that capitalist compulsions were at work in the case of modern plantations despite workers not being free of extra economic coercion. Of course the servants in husbandry in the English countryside were not free of extra economic compulsions either. Rakesh
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