Michael P writes in 7244: > >Many certainly used the slave-produced food to lower variable capital, even >though the South imported an enormous amount of food. One of the problems >was that theft of food -- reports of stolen hogs seem to be the most >commonly reported problem. yes, the US plantations received supplies of food produced elsewhere in the Union as well as from abroad. In Brazil the sugar provinces were fed with supplies from other parts of the country, though there were also huge self subsistent estates (fazendas) in Brazil which were feudal rather than capitalist enterprises and which developed to meet the internal needs of a world cut off by poor communication. There was however a severe problem of malnutrion on the Caribbean sugar plantations as they were densely populated and intensely concentrated on the production of one cash crop. source: M.L. Bush Servitude in Modern Times, ch 8 on New World Slavery. He relies on Schwartz and Ward for studies of Brazil and the Caribbean, respectively. Pomeranz also relies on Schwartz. An aside on stolen hogs: One of my favorite articles on the origins of Marx's thought is Heinz Lubasz's in which he emphasizes how it took Marx's analysis of the wood theft laws to make a Marxist of Marx. Lubasz also wrote on the Aristotelian dimension of Marx's thoght, but haven't tracked down that piece. >I have not been following this debate -- too close to the end of the >semester. I did agree with what Rakesh said here. > >To me, slaveowners were a mix of capitalist and precapitalist mentalities. there is an interesting criticism in Hirst and Hindess' Precapitalist Modes of Production of Genovese's attempt to determine the character of plantation slavery by the mentality of the slaveowners (pp.148ff). I did find this part of their argument persuasive as I found your model of primitive accumulation very helpful indeed. It is commonplace to read that slave owners had such a mental attachment to the ownership of chattel slaves that they were unwilling to countenance a shift to free wage labor even as it would have become more profitable. To many commentators, slave mastering had become an end itself. Others will argue that slave owners simply bought slaves for the purposes of conspicuous consumption, but historical analysis reveals that modern plantation slavery was a ruthlessly profit oriented system. That is, the aim of modern slaver owners was exploitation, not possession. And I think you agree when you write: >No single characterization would apply, outside their profiting from of the >abomination of slavery. Jairus long ago ago called attention to Preobrazhensky's characterization of transitional forms of surplus value production. It seems that you maintain something of this quite reasonable position. I also think that there was a post-slavery resort to indendentured labor and sharecropping suggests that the free wage form of exploitation could not have undergirded surplus value production in backbreaking, tropical agriculture. Note that because of its whites only policy Austrialia attempted to man sugar plantations with free wage labor only; consequently, the industry was never profitable and had to be subsidized, as Eric Williams long ago pointed out. So we see that in certain branches of capitalist production the free wage form of exploitation has proven incompatible with surplus value production. This stands against Jerry's and Nicky's shared thesis that only wage labor can produce surplus value. In fact free wage labor in some cases stood in the way of surplus value production. Speaking of the problem of pre capitalist modes of production, there is a fascinating, high standard scholarly debate between Harbans Mukhia, Ram Sharan Sharma, Hira Singh and others whether there was ever an Indian feudalism. All are profound students and very sympathetic critics of Marx. Mukhia seems to come close to a rehabilitation of Marx's view of the Asiatic mode of production (the Marxist Kathleen Gough did as well), but this view is subjected to criticism by Sharma, Singh, O'Leary and others. I wish I knew more about this debate; I would recommend to David Laibman as editor of Science and Society that an article be commissioned to introduce us to the material. I have also been thumbing through Ricard Jones who despite being an apologist for landlords and imperialism seems to me to have certainly been the father of historical materialism! Like Grossmann, I would not look for the origins of Marx's historical materialism in The German Ideology or in the Hegelian legacy but in Marx's careful study of a English pastor who ascended to Malthus' chair!! It's hard to imagine Marx's historical materialism without Jones's study of peasant rents in terms of the form of which (labor, metayer, ryot, cottier) Jones sought the secret to social formations. Thus, the idea of the form of rent which is so so decisive to Marx's social science seems to come from Jones; of course for Marx the form of rent reduces to the form of surplus labor appropriated by a ruling class from a class of direct producers. But Jones let himself remain opaque about the source of rent and profit! One question becomes whether feudalism should be reduced to a particular form for the extraction of surplus labor--say serfdom or demense production. Marx of course critiqued Kovalesky for such an overbroad definition of feudalism that he found it in Mughal India. Moreover, Marx's idea that the secret to any social formation lay in the manner in which surplus labor is pumped from the direct producers is straight from Jones though of course Jones could not penetrate beneath the forms of rent to surplus labor itself. But he did refer to all social forms of labor and appropriation--including the free wage form--as antagonistic social systems which eventually pass away. That is, he had sense of capitalism as a historical and transient social system; it was left to Marx to specify the conditions under and mechanism by which capitalism would in fact be superceded. All the best, Rakesh
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