Nicky wrote in 7227 >Hi Riccardo, >Thank you for the following comment on the nature of 'flames', which I >interpreted in the exactly the same manner as you did: > >> (ii) may be it is a problem of language and culture, but translated >>in Italian, a parenthetical like "even Nicky who seems to be Jerry's >>good friend etc.", implying that an argument by Nicky in favour of >>Jerry should be due to the fact that she must be "a good friend" of >>him, would be judged as a flame. Nicky and Riccardo, I don't see how pointing to my putative bad behavior in any way answers the question of whether the moderator has offended. That I may have flamed someone does not mean that someone else hasn't also flamed someone. Sharing the blame with someone does not obviate his own blameworthiness. At any rate, I meant to say that disagreement between Jerry and Nicky over x (moderation) cannot be plausibly attributed to their not being good friends while disagreement between Jerry and me over x could be understood to have been motivated by strong (if not nasty) disagreements over y (the capitalist character of plantation slavery). In other words, I was attempting to free myself of a charge of hidden motives, not to flame my good friend Nicky. [By the way, one of the interesting things about that previous debate over y was the non intervention by Michael P who after all argues that in some cases where capitalists can extra economically coerce proletarians to engage in commodity production even after they have already produced much of their own subsistence, capitalists can enjoy a higher rate of surplus value than if it had to make money payments which are in themselves sufficient for the reproduction of labor power--in other words, Michael argues that the self production of subsistence may not only not make the production of value impossible, it may in certain cases work to raise the rate of surplus value by decreasing the money that capitalists have to pay for the reproduction of labor power (the Cuban historian Fraginales and Robin Blackburn both made the same point). Of course plantation capitalists still had to spend sums of money for the reproduction of slave power (on cotton clothes, shoes, housing and church materials, fish, etc). The value of that expended money was of course less than the new value which slaves objectified in what were commodities from the start: there was less labor time in the former than the latter. Which is why Marx thought it was meaningful to speak of the rate of exploitation of modern slaves and compare that rate to free wage workers. Of course a plantation capitalist must have reached the conclusion that the commodities (sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, etc.) which could have been produced in that time slaves were allowed to produce their own subsistence would have yielded less money value than the money it would have required to have purchased on the market those subsistence goods that slaves themselves produced. Of course if those subsistence goods were not even available on the market, then the capitalist had no choice than to have slaves produce their own subsistence. And in a calculating and calculated system it often made sense to allow slaves to produce much of their own food subsistence even if that meant condemning them to a bland, uniform diet while higher quality food stuffs could be bought on the market. Capitalists also figured that those slaves who could be used to produce food for immediate consumption were too infirm to engage in say the backbreaking work of sugar production. So for plantation capitalists the decision to use some slaves to produce food may have entailed little opportunity cost in the form of foregone commodities. It did however allow them to reduce (but not eliminate!) variable capital (the money that they had to lay out for the reproduction of slave labor power) and thus raise the rate of exploitation. While condemning slaves to a miserable diet. Capitalism did not approach the pure form in these historical instances which their "impurity" should not make them any less historically relevant to Marxists (has anyone read Hamza Alavi's Capitalism and Colonialism?). And what was the pure case in the 15 to early 18th centuries anyway? Servants in husbandry in the English countryside seem to have produced much of their own food needs as well. And which example better approximated the cooperative, large scale, intense, gang like nature of the labor process that is usually a mark of real subsumption? At any rate, let it be noted that Michael P's historical research and theoretical model are very much in my favor: slaves (not all slaves, Nicky, though this would include those Scottish mining slaves of Adam Smith's time) can produce surplus value despite being slaves and even if they produce their own food subsistence. Or in other words: despite owning slaves slave owners can at times primarily appropriate surplus labor not through the command of a product in kind or a product meant for immediate consumption or direct labor services but through the production of those capitalistic Commodities which are tendentially realized at prices of production. Not only that: modern plantation slavery was such a system that commodities had to be tendentially realized at prices of production if plantations were to remain viable enterprises. Marx thus compared slave plantations as capitalist enterprises to settler colony peasantries which were under no pressure to realize prices of production for those commodities that they dumped on the market after their consumption requirements had been met. Maybe Michael P will say a word about his excavation of the history of primitive accumulation and hiw own views as to whether extra economic coercion has been incompatible with capitalist exploitation? In referencing Grossmann, Eric Williams, William Darity, Fraginales, Blackburn, Dobb, Sweezy, Brenner, Wood, Albritton and others, I have tried to underline that my interest here is not an idiosyncratic one.] Rakesh
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