Originally posted by
[email protected] 23, 2006 04:10 pm
Sorry if this comes out a bit mangled but I have been drinking.
Anyway my question is basically if somebody can explain what i see as a slight flaw in the argument. Marx presents Slavery as being the second epoch, yet it was often seen in the fourth epoch, capitalism, such as in the southern US States. What is the explanation? I consider myself to have a fairly good understanding of marx but this bit has puzzled me.
The stages shouldn't be seen as rigid, or as all societies going through the same stages in the same way. Marx basically developed a method for investigating history, more than an account of history.
And Marx's view of precapitalist development probably needs a bit of modification - many places never had slavery as the major form of labor and production. Feudalism is more general - but it comes in many forms.
The specific thing with modern capital-driven slavery has to do with uneven and combined development. (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm#law-combined-uneven-development) Bascially, the interactions between societies at very different levels of social and economic developement.
As the capitalist mode of productions was developing in western Europe, it had some paradoxical effects on other parts of the world. Eastern Europe, for example, slipped backwards, into the "second serfdom" - producing grain for export to Western Europe.
Similarly, there was a new increase of a new sort of chattel slavery in the Americas - production of commodities for trade on the world market, by slaves who were traded on the world market, under the control of slaveowners seeking money profit. (Or to pay money debts.)
Marx commented on one of the consequences of this combined development in Capital (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm)
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).
Capitalism and Slavery (http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/870) by Eric Williams is one classic examination of the particular conditions which gave rise to New World slavery.