RE: Andre Gunar Frank & Marx

On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Elson E. Boles wrote:

>I think this oversimplifies Marx's views.  Certainly he noted that slavery 
>was necessary for the modern factory.  But he doesn't seem to have argued 
>that modern slavery is a form of capitalist production.  This is where 
>Marx 
>did not push the analysis of historical capitalism as far as 
>world-systemists have.

Marx makes this argument in Capital. For example, in Chapter 10 of Capital
I, where Marx is explaining the character of surplus-labor and why its
production and introduction in the capitalist world market distinguishes
capitalist production from other forms of production (or modes of
production), he writes, "...as soon as people, whose production still
moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, etc., 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, etc. 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)."

Slave-labor and corvée-labor, to the extent that either becomes determined
by the capitalist world market, become a rational calculus, just as is
wage-labor. The character of the labor-surplus changes and this is what is
fundamental to Marx. Remember, Marx argues (also in Capital I) that the
shift from slave-labor to wage-labor is only a MERE change in appearance
and is not, under a system based on the production and appropriation by
private material interests of surplus-labor, fundamentally different,
which they would be if Marx was making a modes of production argument,
wherein it is the articulation of modes that is a key feature of the
character of surplus production--Marx makes no such argument. Indeed, he
emphasizes that the surplus-labor only appears more directly as unpaid
labor under the slave mode of exploitation, as well as variable capital,
since all labor is appropriated directly, in contrast to wage-labor where
unpaid labor is distinguished through the monetary exchange of time and
wages. Again, there is no fundamental difference. Marx clearly argues that
chattel slavery in the US South was capitalist production, and, of course,
it was.

Andy Austin