Silence8
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quote:
It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. [9] Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself: So was it also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now Roumania).
Any thoughtful reactions to these phenomena?
I've been considering whether, first, our current social-economic system is one predominately of freedom or of force. I am leaning toward force, where, historically and presently, the vast majority of people are driven from security and the insurance of the family, the home, sustenance, etc., into some type of market-dominated social relationship (employer and employee). While, theoretically, a market does not imply force, historically and presently this force is ubiquitous. Historically in the case of England, the process of enclosures tends to form the basis for what has been termed 'primitive accumulation,' or, more accurately, accumulation by dispossession -- stealing, theft of others' essential resources. In Africa, subsistence societies were deprived not of their land but of their people through the process of enslavement by aristocratic and merchant societies home and abroad.
In Europe, unlike Africa, the transition tends to fall along the lines of feudalism to capitalism. This transition, I think, obscures the very fundamental relationship between slavery and capitalism over and above that between feudalism and capitalism. Consider, for instance, the recent wave of foreclosures affecting mainly African Americans (i.e., in most cases, the descendants of slave populations). Does this dispossession not bear a more fundamental relationship to the sublimated force of slavery than to the force of feudalism? In feudalism, you're 'bound' to the land, and you rarely enter the market. How many foreclosed-upon homeowners would wish for such a boundary? Slavery, conversely, almost always implies passing through the market. What does it matter if the hand that forces you is visible or invisible? In fact, the danger of the invisible alternative is that you might forget that it is there.
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