From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Apr 19 2005 - 15:11:54 EDT
> >I reply: >I think we do need capitalism because in any other mode of production >the market 'allocation' is peripheral relative to the dominant >production relations (feudal or slave, say). Value is only 'fully >developed' in capitalism. Dear Andrew, In recognizing that some forms of slavery have been part of the capitalist mode of production, we are forced to deconstruct any a priori opposition between the slave and the free wage laborer. There is a reason why the expression wage slavery has resonance. Some formally free wage laborers and slaves may have more in common as dependents of capital than they have with others of their own presumed type. Part of the reason for the failure to understand this may come from the underlying progressivist liberal belief that capitalism can be understood as a higher stage in the unfolding drama of human freedom. I haven't read McCarney's defense of Hegel's theory of history yet, but I doubt that I shall be persuaded! At any rate, I am not quite sure what you mean here; there is good evidence of crop reallocation in response to price signals in American plantation slavery. African labor was not fixed by external constraints and internal structure, so it too as part of the social labor pool had to be organized, and it was organized in response to price signals and profit requirements in a ruthlessly "calculating and calculated system"--to use Marx's phrase about New World slavery in his chapter on absolute surplus value. To be sure, the plantation could not allocate resources as fluidly as the contemporary conglomeration (Harvey points to the conglomeration as institutional form for the mobility of capital needed to effect the averaging of the profit rate), but I don't think that this disqualifies the plantation from having been a part and an example of the capitalist mode of production. Moreover without racial slavery--racialized labor extra economically coerced intergenerationally--capital may never have been allocated to much of New World capitalist commodity agriculture--given the availability of land and the repulsive gang labor that was used to ensure profitability (though that system of gang labor was studied carefully by Frederick Winslow Taylor according to Keith Aufhauser--just another way to deconstruct said a priori opposition). Robin Blackburn contests this capitalist necessity of slavery thesis, but Barbara Solow, drawing on Domar, effectively rebuts the argument, I believe. Yours, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 20 2005 - 00:00:01 EDT