From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2005 - 21:41:01 EDT
At 11:06 PM +0100 4/13/05, Christopher Arthur wrote: > >For me and you who stres time as the crucial quantitative form >determinaton, and for debates with Greens, the interesting question is the >dofference between labour labouring and nature naturing (e.g. maturing wine >etc). To conflate these time is precisely to miss the ontological >difference between natural/techical time and social time. >The slave case has always bothered me in its shape as plantation slaver >where it is clearly embedded in an M-M circuit. I guess I have to agree >with you that slaves are like donkeys, i.e. stubborn and coerced >physically, and of course bought outright not hired. However to some extent >this intermediate case may be open to definition. >best >Chris Chris, I must admit to being confused by your post here. Are you saying that slaves slaving are possibly somewhere between donkeys donkeying/ nature naturing and wage laborers laboring? What keeps slaves from being cleanly on the social time side and being instead liminal or on the the natural/nature time side? How did commodity producing slaves (often up to 80% of the working time of modern plantation slaves was devoted to commodity production) come to be excluded from or not included in the pool of social labor time which is divided and allocated? Also note that I have never said all slaves are enslaved to produce surplus value. I don't think it's a social relations view that keeps many Marxists from understanding that the 400 hundred year old institution of modern plantation slavery and other formally unfree labor arrangements were through and through capitalist. The people on whom I am drawing all emphasize social relations. The problem is a dogmatic Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history, close to Stalin's stagist viewppoint, that has mankind marching through clean historical stages of personal dependence/personal independence based on objective dependence/free social individuality and of internal relations that are concretely particular/external relations that are abstractly universal/internal relations that are concretely universal and of relations of inequality/relations of formal equality/relations of concrete equality. We might want to call such a stagist history, spun out of an Hegelian logic, a social relations viewpoint but it's an eschatology, a dogmatism, an epistemological barrier to a scientific history. Marx is certainly not blameless. Rakesh
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