From: Andrew Brown (A.Brown@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Tue Apr 19 2005 - 17:13:53 EDT
Thanks Rakesh, I had in mind simply the overall mode of production (slave or feudal or capitalist), rather than individual relations and activities within any given mode.The world of difference between selling a labourer (slavery) and selling labour-power (capitalism) is to be considered at the level of the overall mode of production, and by no means rules out the functionality of slave production at the indiviudal level within a capitalist mode of production (it does rule out slavery becoming the prevalent and dominant form of production with capitalism). You give very important examples of the existience and functioning of slave production *within* the capitalist mode of production but this is a different matter from consideration of the slave mode of production as such (where capital has no general hold of production and no general existence). Re. allocation, then we certainly may consider how slave production *within*capitalism responds to price signals. My argument is that labour, in *all* societies, is not fixed by the external material constraints, nor internal structure of the labourers. In all societies we can distinguish between the power to labour and the actual labor done, noting the unique creative productivity of labour. However, in slave and feudal societies labour *is* pretty much fixed by the prevalent social relations. In the slave mode the labourer it is treated as a talking animal and in the feudal mode peasants are bound to their plot of land (to put it very crudely). The fluid creativity of labour remains little more than a potential in such societies. It must be painfully obvious that I'm no expert on world history, btw, and so apolgies in advance and I look forward to be being corrected! Andy -----Original Message----- From: OPE-L on behalf of Rakesh Bhandari Sent: Tue 19/04/2005 20:11 To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Cc: Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Why aren't non-labourers sources of value? > >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 : Thu Apr 21 2005 - 00:00:02 EDT