Blood and Money by McNally David;

Author:McNally, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies, they entered directly into the large-scale enterprise of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system. It further required that they live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane when reaped had to be rapidly transported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported. The Negroes, from the start, lived a life that was in essence a modern life.102

Notwithstanding all of this, many scholars remain committed to the view that plantation slavery in the Americas was noncapitalist. For instance, following on the analysis of Eugene Genovese, historian Peter Kolchin has argued that plantation slavery could not be considered a capitalist formation, because “the market was conspicuously absent” in relations between masters and enslaved people, unlike in those between capitalists and wage laborers.103 The questions raised by such reasoning are manifold; however, in lieu of an extensive critique of this position, I here restrict the discussion to two points of key theoretical importance.104

First, let us consider an argument made by economic historian Jairus Banaji in the 1970s, in which he pointed out that Marx uses the term “mode of production” (Produktionweise) in two distinctive ways—one referring to the immediate labor process, and another describing epochal systems, or social forms, of production. The latter, he rightly insisted, is the more complex and developed concept, as it is meant to grasp the “laws of motion,” or the dynamic social processes, by which a specific form of production is reproduced across historical time. What is critical to capitalism is that individual units of capital reproduce themselves by appropriating surplus value through production of commodities—and essential tasks related to that production—in a context of market competition. This requires that these units match or better the average costs (and times) of production, which are expressed in market prices. While capitalism may well show a historical tendency toward wage labor as the predominant immediate relation of production, this need not be the only form of commodity production and surplus value appropriation. This is why Marx could describe cotton-producing plantation slavery in the US South as generating “surplus value,” and why creative Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, could analyze “capitalist accumulation with forms of slavery and serfdom.” Rather than a formal equation of capitalism with wage labor, capitalist production is theorized here as a complex and dynamic system in which capital reproduces itself by appropriating surplus value from a diverse set of commodity-producing workers.105

A second theoretical observation is in order. In a very different tradition from Banaji, so-called political Marxists have made market dependence the definitional feature of capitalism.106 By this they mean that in the capitalist mode of production, both producers (workers) and appropriators (capitalists) are dependent on the market for their survival. Workers rely on the market to find buyers of their labor power in exchange for a wage, which

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