By placing human motivation at the centre of their discussion of labour-productivity, Fogel, Engerman and Genovese ignore the structural determinations of labour-productivity given by the specific and antagonistic relations of production in different forms of production. Those who conceive of slavery as a form of capitalism ignore the specificity of the relations of surplus appropriation that define slavery and capitalism; while Genovese fails to present a rigorous concept of the necessary relations that constitute slavery as a form of production.
The conceptual differentia specifica of slavery and capital as forms of social labour can be understood along the following lines: Under capitalist social relations of production, the direct producers are excluded from the effective possession of both the means of production and subsistence.
The direct producer enters the capitalist production process as a variable element of production, capable of being fired or replaced by machinery. This relation gives capital the powers of real possession and the ability to introduce new techniques into the labour process, increasing the productivity of labour and the appropriation of relative surplus-labour. Under the relations of production that characterize slavery, the direct producers enter the plantation slavery production process as constant elements of production, entitling them to access to the means of subsistence in order to reproduce their value as means of production.
The character of slaves as both direct producers and means of production, severely limits the ability of the masters to regulate the size of their labour force, burdening the non-producers with inflexible costs of reproducing their direct producers.
The masters are forced to organize the production process along the lines of closely supervised gang-labour, making the only possible methods of increasing labour productivity the intensification of labour and the migration of production to more fertile soils.
Foust and Dale S. The advocates of this thesis pointed to several factors that posed obstacles to the industrial capitalist development of the antebellum South: the political hostility of the planters to the emergence of a wage-earning class, the small-scale of immigration to the South created by fears of slave competition on the labour market, and the shallow markets provided by the plantations for the products of industrial enterprises.
Fogel and Engerman have challenged the notion that the plantations provided a small market for industrial goods.
Fogel and Engerman found that per capita income in the South was reasonably high compared with the antebellum North and was growing at a faster rate. On the basis of these calculations, Fogel and Engerman concluded that the plantations could have provided a large and growing market for industrially produced commodities.
Such an attempt obscures the fact that the size of the home market for commodities, the depth of the social division of labour, is determined by the extent to which the means of production and means of subsistence are reproduced through commodity circulation. As we have seen, slave relations of production block the process of technical innovation, thus limiting the demand generated by the cotton plantation for objects and instruments of production. This places definite limits to the development of industries producing means of production.
In addition, slaves have direct access to means of subsistence provided by their masters. This reinforced the tendency for non-cotton, non-slaveowning agricultural producers in the South to remain outside of the sphere of commodity production and circulation.
While industrial production did develop on the basis of both free wage-labour and slave-rentals, the general diversification of industrial production was blocked by the shallow home market created by plantation slavery.
As William Parker points out, the South lagged behind the North in all categories of industry, particularly the medium and large-scale production of iron, textile machinery and agricultural implements. In sum, the shallow home market dictated by plantation slavery left the South the least industrialized area in the antebellum us.
Douglas North, following upon the work of Louis Schmidt, claimed that in the antebellum period the Southern plantations consti- tuted a major market for Western foodstuffs.
Wright, pp. On the use of slaves in industrial production see R. Andreano ed. In disaggregating this data, Fishlow made two interesting discoveries. First, New Orleans was a major trans-shipping centre for Western foodstuffs from at least the s through o. Approximately one-half of the Western commodities shipped to New Orleans were re-shipped to the Northeast.
On the basis of these findings, Fishlow claimed that the plantation South was not a major market for Western agricultural commodities, and that the major pattern of internal commodity circulation prior to the Civil War was between the West and Northeast.
Thus, the expansion of plantation slavery, at least in terms of its direct effects on the development of agrarian petty-commodity production, cannot be seen as a spur to the process of capitalist development in antebellum America. The expansion of cotton commodity production on the basis of plantation slavery was a spur, that was transformed into an obstacle, to the development of capitalism in the antebellum American social formation. Moreover the transition of commercial plantation slavery from a spur to an obstacle was determined by the process by which merchant capital created the conditions for its subordination to industrial capital.
Northeastern merchants, who facilitated the trade of cotton with the capitalist world market, accumulated mercantile wealth from the circulation of cotton. Cotton, as the major export of the antebellum us, also created a favourable balance of trade and sound international credit for American merchants and bankers. The expansion of commercial slavery provided the basis for both the geographic expansion of merchant capitalist operations land speculation and the importation of money- capital from Europe for merchant-sponsored transportation projects in the s.
As we shall see, the increase of commodity production and circulation engendered through the agencies of merchant capital brought agrarian petty-production under the dominance of the law of value. This deepening of the social division of labour in the North transformed the agrarian West into the home market for industrial capital, creating the conditions for the subordination of merchants to industrial capital in the s and s.
The emergence and rise to dominance of specifically capitalist produc- tion, on the basis of the expansion of agrarian petty-commodity production, transformed the geographic expansion of slavery into an obstacle to the development of capitalism. The expansion of plantation slavery into the territories conquered from Mexico in would have posed economic and political obstacles to the dominance of industrial capital. Economically, the expansion of slavery would have stifled the development of agrarian petty-commodity production and the social division of labour, strangling the home market for industrial capital.
In sum, the commodity producing character of plantation slavery was a catalyst to capitalist development as long as merchant capital was the major agency for the expansion of commodity production and the deepening of the social division of labor.
Agrarian Petty-Commodity Production In contrast with the debates about plantation slavery, where the crucial theoretical and conceptual issues remain embedded within historio- graphic controversy, analyses of agrarian petty-commodity production have found a much firmer conceptual basis.
In other words, independent commodity production blocked the formation of a class of propertyless wage-earners forced to sell their labour-power to capital in order to obtain means of consumption. Marketing only their surplus product, the family farms were not dependent on commodity circulation for the reproduction of their means of production and subsistence. This implies that the family farm was a real historical alternative to wage-labour before the Civil War. Politically the emergent industrialists needed the support of the Western subsistence farmers in their struggle against the planters.
Sherry begins by making a basic reassessment of the concrete dynamics governing the family farm of the antebellum North. For Sherry, the free farmers of the West and Northeast marketed not merely their surplus product, but nearly their entire product. As a result, the free farmers of the antebellum North were dependent on commodity production and exchange for their economic reproduction, and were not governed by the circuit of subsistence c-m-c , but by the circuit of competition and accumulation.
The competitive and accumulationist dynamic forced the family farmers to undertake the continual technical reorganization of their labour processes in order to survive. The dependence of the family farms on commodity circulation for economic reproduction, and their continual improvement of their objects and instruments of production, made Northern agriculture into a massive home market for capitalist produced means of production and consumption.
The expansion of agricultural commodity production stimulated the emergence of capita- list processing of agricultural produce.
Nor did the Western frontier constitute an escape from wage-labour. As concentration and centraliza- tion of farming raised the costs of establishing a viable farm, increasing numbers of ex-farmers and their children were forced into wage-labour.
This interpretation transforms the petty-bourgeois farmers from a passive and foolish group, manipulated by the industrialists, into a class struggling to advance its position, by promoting the development of commodity production and circulation. The relation that characterizes capital defines two antagonistic social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which engage in a specific form of class struggle.
Self-organized commodity production subordinated to the law of value defines only one class, the petty-bour- geoisie. Such a conflation of these two classes could lead to ignoring the possible and specific antagonisms between the petty-bour- geoisie and industrial capital. In the case of the political struggles in the antebellum us, this conflation could lead to obscuring the changing class alliances that produced the political crisis that led to the Civil War.
However, as Robert Brenner31 has pointed out, it is possible to conceive of situations where direct producers are not compelled to specialize and market increasingly large portions of their production.
In such situations, the direct producers maintain non-market access to their means of production and consumption. One form is governed by a logic of subsistence, the result of the independence from commodity production. Petty-commodity production does not pose any obstacle to capitalist development and can in fact be a spur to it along the lines discussed by Sherry. The question of which of these two forms of self-organized commodity production characterized free farming in the antebellum North can only be answered by reference to the historiographic material.
This stands in sharp contrast to the capitalist organization of the labour-process, where labour productivity is increased by the continual introduction of new instruments of production which reduce the amount of necessary labour performed in relation to surplus labour. Second, the capital outlay is much greater and riskier for slave labor than for free. Third, the domination of society by a planter class increases the risk of political influence in the market. Email required.
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