Light of Lenin
15th March 2014, 17:32
In chapter 33 of Marx's Das Kapital, titled The Modern Theory of Colonisation, Marx makes some very interesting observations on the nature of the Labor Theory of Value and what we would now call Settlerism. Allow me to quote at length:
Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies.
Here Marx begins to lay out the distinction between how capitalism operates in countries where primitive accumulation has been completed, and the colonies of the Euro-Settlers.
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. [4] Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!
Here Marx begins to point out that the capitalist is unable to control the newly arrived Settler-labourers. The social-mechanism which allows the capitalist to dominate the world in the Old World doesn't exist in the New World.
“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” [6] So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible...
“In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.”
Here Marx quotes Wakefield as saying the dynamic that prevents the proper functioning of capitalism is the amount of cheap land available. The Europeans who came to America were seeking cheap land, because they rightfully saw cheap land as the golden-ticket to their prosperity and escape from the dominion of capitalists. When the capitalist class can't control who uses the land, they can't control anything. This is why hordes and hordes of different European ethnicities came to America in the first place.
This is also why slavery was necessary.
Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England — the Swan River Settlement — where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.”
Here we see the capitalists bemoaning the uselessness of Euro-Settlers in advancing their economic interests. Without the ability to control the use of the land, they could not extract any substantial amount of profit from the Euro-Settler masses. Hence the need for African slavery as the sole basis for Colonial wealth.
Marx drives it home:
We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.[10] This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.”
Capitalism simply can not function where land is cheap. The Euro-Settlers, even at highly inflated wage rates, would prefer to work for themselves on their cheaply acquired land than to work for a capitalist. And without a means to compel the Euro-Settler to perform labor which benefits the capitalists, the capitalist resorts to slavery instead.
As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” [12] With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?
For the newly arrived Euro-Settlers, their wages were much higher than in the Old World, and many would quickly become capitalists themselves.
The supply of wage labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is always not only small but uncertain.” [13] “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” [14] The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.” [15] Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come!
Chapter 33 goes on and on like this. Everyone interested in a Marxist understanding of the nature of Settlerism should read it over and over again. If you ever make a reading group for Capital, this chapter should definitely be stressed above all others. The secret of capitalism in the Old World is revealed by how capitalism fails in the Euro-Settler colonies.
One of the last Euro-Settler colonies to come into existence was Israel. The key colonial institution for the Zionist-Settler regime was the Israeli 'trade union' Histadrut. It is worth quoting at length the Electronic Intifada article Histadrut: Israel’s racist "trade union":
Histadrut has always been a strange creature. In most countries one joins a trade union which is affiliated to a national trade union federation. In Israel one first joins Histadrut and then one is allocated to a union. It is only outside Israel that Histadrut is seen as a normal trade union, the Israeli equivalent of the British Trade Union Congress or the American union movement AFL/CIO.
Less well known is the fact that Histadrut, an organization of the settler Jewish working class, was the key Zionist organization responsible for the formation of the Israeli state. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked: “Then [1928] I was put on the Histadrut Executive Committee at a time when this big labor union wasn’t just a trade union organization. It was a great colonizing agency.” [1] Pinhas Lavon, as secretary-general of Histadrut, went so far as to describe it in 1960 as “a general organization to its core. It is not a trade union …” [2] Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, held that without Histadrut, “I doubt whether we would have had a state.”
All the first Zionist leaders of the Israeli terrorist state were Labor Zionists who acknowledged Histadrut as the key organization responsible for allowing Israel to exist. More to the point, the entirety of the Zionist regime leadership was made up of "Left" wing Zionists. Israel was ruled by a Social-Democratic Labor Aristocracy up until 1977, when Likud took power.
Histadrut founded Haganah, the Zionist terrorist group, in 1920, later to become the Israeli armed forces, and Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party, in 1930, an anti-socialist party whose supreme value lay in the needs of the Israeli state. [11] David Ben-Gurion, Histadrut’s first secretary-general, became in 1935 chairman of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist government-in-waiting, and in 1948 prime minister of the State of Israel.
Histadrut was formed in 1920 as the General Confederation of Hebrew Labor by the two main labor Zionist parties, Hapoel Hatzair (Young Workers) and Achdut Ha’Avodah (Union of Labor). From its inception it excluded Arab labor and thus rejected worker solidarity in favor of national exclusivism.
Long before the Holocaust become an excuse for the Zionist-Settler terror regime to do whatever it wanted, the Euro-Settler 'trade union' apparatus was setting up racist terrorist organizations and excluding Arab labor from its ranks. So decades before the Holocaust, the Euro-Settlers in Israel acted the way Euro-Settlers have in all their colonial projects.
The leadership of the American Labor Aristocracy has always supported their Labor Bureaucrat Brothers in Israel. The AFL-CIO gave Histadrut $10 million dollars in 1967, and has wrote many resolutions in support of this terrorist 'trade union.' Here is a sample:
Pinhas La Von, Histadrut Leader, Arrives in U.S.; Will Address Afl-cio
September 3, 1959
NEW YORK (Sep. 2)
Pinhas Lavon, secretary general of the Histadrut, Israel’s General Federation of Labor and a former Minister of Defense, arrived here today aboard an E1 A1 Constellation for a three-week visit in the United States. He made the trip at the invitation of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, to address its bi-annual convention scheduled to open in San Francisco on September 17.
Mr. Lavon will be the luncheon guest of Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell in Washington on September 9 Other guests at the luncheon will be members of the executive board of the AFL-CIO and high officials of the State and Labor Departments.
Another:
Afl Convention Calls for Support of Israel Histadrut Campaign
September 24, 1952
NEW YORK (Sep. 23)
The American Federation of Labor convention here today adopted a resolution calling upon its affiliated bodies and membership to strengthen the Histadrut, the general federation of labor in Israel, by “participating wholeheartedly in the Israel Histadrut campaign.”
The resolution also declared that the Histadrut, with a membership of over 400,000, is the only free trade union movement in the Middle East. It congratulated the “youngest democracy” and expressed “pride in the achievements of the Histadrut,” pointing out that the AFL has for over a quarter of a century “taken the lead in mobilizing support among American trades unionists” for the Histadrut.
The AFL-KKK, a thoroughly reactionary and racist organization of White Nation Labor Aristocrats, has always supported the Zionist terrorist 'trade union' that is Histadrut.
The reality of the American Labor Aristocracy is systematically hidden from young would-be radicals. It is necessary to hide and obscure the reality of what the trade union apparatus actually is and how it functions for US imperialism, in order to turn young people into pawns of the Labor Aristocracy. Young idealistic people are exploited by the American Labor Aristocracy into doing organizing work that will never amount to revolution. Exposing the nature of the American Labor Aristocracy is absolutely essential for any genuine revolutionary activity to even begin.
Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies.
Here Marx begins to lay out the distinction between how capitalism operates in countries where primitive accumulation has been completed, and the colonies of the Euro-Settlers.
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. [4] Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!
Here Marx begins to point out that the capitalist is unable to control the newly arrived Settler-labourers. The social-mechanism which allows the capitalist to dominate the world in the Old World doesn't exist in the New World.
“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” [6] So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible...
“In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.”
Here Marx quotes Wakefield as saying the dynamic that prevents the proper functioning of capitalism is the amount of cheap land available. The Europeans who came to America were seeking cheap land, because they rightfully saw cheap land as the golden-ticket to their prosperity and escape from the dominion of capitalists. When the capitalist class can't control who uses the land, they can't control anything. This is why hordes and hordes of different European ethnicities came to America in the first place.
This is also why slavery was necessary.
Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England — the Swan River Settlement — where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.”
Here we see the capitalists bemoaning the uselessness of Euro-Settlers in advancing their economic interests. Without the ability to control the use of the land, they could not extract any substantial amount of profit from the Euro-Settler masses. Hence the need for African slavery as the sole basis for Colonial wealth.
Marx drives it home:
We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.[10] This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.”
Capitalism simply can not function where land is cheap. The Euro-Settlers, even at highly inflated wage rates, would prefer to work for themselves on their cheaply acquired land than to work for a capitalist. And without a means to compel the Euro-Settler to perform labor which benefits the capitalists, the capitalist resorts to slavery instead.
As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” [12] With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?
For the newly arrived Euro-Settlers, their wages were much higher than in the Old World, and many would quickly become capitalists themselves.
The supply of wage labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is always not only small but uncertain.” [13] “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” [14] The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.” [15] Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come!
Chapter 33 goes on and on like this. Everyone interested in a Marxist understanding of the nature of Settlerism should read it over and over again. If you ever make a reading group for Capital, this chapter should definitely be stressed above all others. The secret of capitalism in the Old World is revealed by how capitalism fails in the Euro-Settler colonies.
One of the last Euro-Settler colonies to come into existence was Israel. The key colonial institution for the Zionist-Settler regime was the Israeli 'trade union' Histadrut. It is worth quoting at length the Electronic Intifada article Histadrut: Israel’s racist "trade union":
Histadrut has always been a strange creature. In most countries one joins a trade union which is affiliated to a national trade union federation. In Israel one first joins Histadrut and then one is allocated to a union. It is only outside Israel that Histadrut is seen as a normal trade union, the Israeli equivalent of the British Trade Union Congress or the American union movement AFL/CIO.
Less well known is the fact that Histadrut, an organization of the settler Jewish working class, was the key Zionist organization responsible for the formation of the Israeli state. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked: “Then [1928] I was put on the Histadrut Executive Committee at a time when this big labor union wasn’t just a trade union organization. It was a great colonizing agency.” [1] Pinhas Lavon, as secretary-general of Histadrut, went so far as to describe it in 1960 as “a general organization to its core. It is not a trade union …” [2] Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, held that without Histadrut, “I doubt whether we would have had a state.”
All the first Zionist leaders of the Israeli terrorist state were Labor Zionists who acknowledged Histadrut as the key organization responsible for allowing Israel to exist. More to the point, the entirety of the Zionist regime leadership was made up of "Left" wing Zionists. Israel was ruled by a Social-Democratic Labor Aristocracy up until 1977, when Likud took power.
Histadrut founded Haganah, the Zionist terrorist group, in 1920, later to become the Israeli armed forces, and Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party, in 1930, an anti-socialist party whose supreme value lay in the needs of the Israeli state. [11] David Ben-Gurion, Histadrut’s first secretary-general, became in 1935 chairman of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist government-in-waiting, and in 1948 prime minister of the State of Israel.
Histadrut was formed in 1920 as the General Confederation of Hebrew Labor by the two main labor Zionist parties, Hapoel Hatzair (Young Workers) and Achdut Ha’Avodah (Union of Labor). From its inception it excluded Arab labor and thus rejected worker solidarity in favor of national exclusivism.
Long before the Holocaust become an excuse for the Zionist-Settler terror regime to do whatever it wanted, the Euro-Settler 'trade union' apparatus was setting up racist terrorist organizations and excluding Arab labor from its ranks. So decades before the Holocaust, the Euro-Settlers in Israel acted the way Euro-Settlers have in all their colonial projects.
The leadership of the American Labor Aristocracy has always supported their Labor Bureaucrat Brothers in Israel. The AFL-CIO gave Histadrut $10 million dollars in 1967, and has wrote many resolutions in support of this terrorist 'trade union.' Here is a sample:
Pinhas La Von, Histadrut Leader, Arrives in U.S.; Will Address Afl-cio
September 3, 1959
NEW YORK (Sep. 2)
Pinhas Lavon, secretary general of the Histadrut, Israel’s General Federation of Labor and a former Minister of Defense, arrived here today aboard an E1 A1 Constellation for a three-week visit in the United States. He made the trip at the invitation of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, to address its bi-annual convention scheduled to open in San Francisco on September 17.
Mr. Lavon will be the luncheon guest of Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell in Washington on September 9 Other guests at the luncheon will be members of the executive board of the AFL-CIO and high officials of the State and Labor Departments.
Another:
Afl Convention Calls for Support of Israel Histadrut Campaign
September 24, 1952
NEW YORK (Sep. 23)
The American Federation of Labor convention here today adopted a resolution calling upon its affiliated bodies and membership to strengthen the Histadrut, the general federation of labor in Israel, by “participating wholeheartedly in the Israel Histadrut campaign.”
The resolution also declared that the Histadrut, with a membership of over 400,000, is the only free trade union movement in the Middle East. It congratulated the “youngest democracy” and expressed “pride in the achievements of the Histadrut,” pointing out that the AFL has for over a quarter of a century “taken the lead in mobilizing support among American trades unionists” for the Histadrut.
The AFL-KKK, a thoroughly reactionary and racist organization of White Nation Labor Aristocrats, has always supported the Zionist terrorist 'trade union' that is Histadrut.
The reality of the American Labor Aristocracy is systematically hidden from young would-be radicals. It is necessary to hide and obscure the reality of what the trade union apparatus actually is and how it functions for US imperialism, in order to turn young people into pawns of the Labor Aristocracy. Young idealistic people are exploited by the American Labor Aristocracy into doing organizing work that will never amount to revolution. Exposing the nature of the American Labor Aristocracy is absolutely essential for any genuine revolutionary activity to even begin.