re Gil's 7433: >> production. > >Viewing the putting-out system through the lens of Marx's analytical >categories, I understand the putting-out system to be an instance of >the circuit of merchant's capital that involves the commodification >of labor power but *not* the subsumption of labor under capital, in >even the formal sense. Insofar a this system is a form of surplus >value production, then subsumption is not required for capitalist >exploitation, or at least wasn't required under the class conditions >obtaining in that era. But how is labor power commodified in the putting out system? The craftsman does not alienate labor power to the merchant. > >If this is an accurate summary, it prompts two questions: first, >what made it possible for capitalist exploitation to occur without >even the formal subsumption of labor under capital, and second, >would it be possible for surplus value to exist--if perhaps not at >the same magnitude as in the circuit of industrial capital >characterized by wage labor and capitalist production--on the basis >of putting-out production under modern class conditions? Well to the latter question I would say no because putting out production will tend not to be economically competitive vis a vis large scale, cooperative enterprise. Let me add another question. Is free wage labor necessary for the production of surplus value? In The Origins of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review, 1999): 70-71 Ellen Wood simply asserts at one point that only when workers are dispossessed and thus dependent on money wages and the market for their subsistence goods does the market begin to operate coercively by compelling competition, accumulation and profit maximization. However, Wood provides no clear reason why only with the emergence of free wage labor and the consequent dependence of direct producers on the market for their subsistence does the market cease to provide only opportunities for exchange and trade but become the kind of coercive institution which is uniquely capitalist (While Wood makes no use of Marx's value theoretic reasoning, John Weeks however does make a Marxian argument in his brilliant Capital and Exploitation, pp. 39-40; however, Weeks does not argue with Nicky and Jerry that surplus value can only be produced by free wage labor but rather that value only regulates production when free wage labor is generalized and the means of subsistence thereby monetized--Nicky and Jerry would have been on stronger grounds if they had pursued the latter argument, in my opinion, though as I tried to show Marx himself rejected it for very good reasons in the case of modern large scale plantation slavery in which the means of production and much subsistence were in fact largely monetized despite the formal unfreedom of the direct producers and [the law of] value did more or less regulate production as evidenced by the shifting of slaves to the most profitable activity and the bankruptcy of plantations which could not maintain profitability). At any rate, Wood proceeds to focus not on free workers at all (this seems to be an implicit concession to Albritton who has underlined that early agriculture workers were often servants in husbandry) but on farmers or tenants who had to produce cost effectively or capitalistically in order to ensure the renewal of their leases. That is, Wood's actual argument does not in fact demonstrate a link between free wage labor and characteristically capitalist dynamics but between competitive landlord/tenant relations and dynamic productivity growth. And indeed Wood comes to realize that this is the argument which she has presented: Šit is important to keep in mind that competitive pressures, and the new 'laws of motion' which went with them, depended in the first instance not on the existence of a mass proletariat but on the existence of market-dependent tenant-producers. Wage laborers, and especially those who depended entirely on wages for their livelihood and not just for seasonal supplements (the kind of seasonal and supplementary wage labor that has existed since ancient times in peasant societies) remained very much a minority in seventeenth century EnglandŠIn other words, the specific dynamics of capitalism were already in place in English agriculture before the proletarianization of the work force. (95) Indeed! Yet if the work force did not have to be free wage proletarians in order to labor in capitalist agriculture enterprise, then why could have slave plantations also not been capitalist enterprises? Wood thus does not present a case against the capitalist nature of that peculiar institution which depended on the unfreest of labor and thus does not justify the almost total excision of the barbaric trade and institution from her parochial history of early capitalism (save one sentence with no mention of Inikori, Solow, Blackburn and others) and the apartheid division she in effect maintains between English agriculture and plantation agriculture in theorizing the origins of capitalism. All the best, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Aug 02 2002 - 00:00:04 EDT