[This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. The first three excerpts are here, here and here. The present excerpt is abbreviated from a longer discussion of capitalism and slavery in section II of the paper. At the end of this post there’s a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’; it contains the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts. – NG.]
So far, we have been considering economies of wage labour, predominantly in Europe, in our critique of the closed commodity economy of ‘free’ labour conceptualized in Marx’s labour theory of value. One of the main strands of this critique has been the varied ways in which such economies of labour have been politically as well as economically instituted, entailing legal constraints on exchange, different rights to the use of labour-power in production, and different political constructions of the labour force through school leaving and retirement ages. There is no general form, in other words, no capitalism-universal logic, to the economies of wage labour.
However, the assumption enshrined in Marx’s Capital is that capitalism is almost defined as being based on the emergence, and then universalization, of economies of ‘free’ wage labour, with the dissolution of forms of feudal bondage. Yet, of all the historical and geographical varieties of instituted economies of labour that developed with industrial capitalism – some would argue, indeed, as a precondition for this development – the new economies of forced labour in the plantation economies of Latin America, the Caribbean and North America diverged the most from the presumption of ‘free’ waged labour. Modern industrial-scale slavery in those regions, built on a slave trade of some 15 to 18 million African slaves, constituted one of the greatest historical movements of labour, and it was followed by an equally modernized form of indentured labour from India, with a further 2 to 3 million persons being transferred under various degrees of compulsion and bondage.
Marx was well aware of the phenomenon, from 1847 when he wrote The Poverty of Philosophy through to Capital, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value. Moreover, though not offering a developed analysis, he acknowledged three key aspects of slave plantation economies: first, they were modern and not the archaic remnants of an earlier mode of production; second, they were capitalist (not solely the outcome of ‘primitive’ accumulation), even, he wrote, producing surplus value; and, third, they were absolutely critical to European, and especially English, manufacturing capital, producing cotton for the archetypical capitalist industry in the Lancashire mills. Marx was particularly emphatic on the modernity and originality of the North American slave economy, as one written, he suggested, on a tabula rasa, rather than carrying the burden of historical institutions. He even went so far as to say that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal‘ (our emphasis).
Yet, in spite of allotting to slavery so important a role, references to it by Marx are sparse, and in contrast to the wealth of empirical detail deployed in setting out the labour theory of value, they are detached and absent from his core analysis of capitalism. Indeed, at points Marx does describe the plantation owners in America as capitalists; but they are also ‘anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’ For Marx, as we have seen, a foundational assumption is that the capitalist mode of production is based on free wage labour. Slavery, although capitalist, was not free labour, and just did not fit the assumptions of his analysis. So, this major historical phenomenon of the 19th (and the 20th) century is excluded from it.
Of course, there is much that Marx did not know, and could not know at that time, about the various economies of forced labour and their historical co-development with industrial capitalism. He relied heavily on secondary sources, since much discredited (for example, on J.E. Cairnes’s The Slave Power). It is now quite widely recognized that the plantation economies of the New World were critical in bringing about the ‘great divergence’ between the then vibrant economies of the East, and the industrial capitalisms of Europe and North America. Apart from the availability of cheap and appropriate coal in England, the colonies provided key resources in sugar (calories), raw material for clothing, timber and other materials, thereby uniquely relieving Europe of a critical pressure on land. Without the vast expansion of land resources, it simply would not have been possible to clothe and feed a level of population, especially an increasingly urban one, in the emerging industrial centres. Europe, and in particular England, escaped the land constraints faced by other world economies of the epoch. This economic growth both drove and depended on the expansion of slave plantation economies. By 1860, just before the American Civil War, over 90 per cent of cotton for the English textile mills was produced by slaves in America. Moreover, the growth of world commodity markets, in which the slave trade and products of slave plantations were key components, was intricately woven into the development of finance capital and financial services industries, a leading edge of commodity market economies.
…..
But were slavery and indentured labour just transitional forms, inevitably to be superseded by free wage labour? In one sense that is obviously the case, although, as we have argued, it applies equally to many forms of ‘free’ wage labour in industrial capitalisms; they too, for their part, no longer exist. However, it also has to be said, the disappearance of slavery and indentured labour took a very long time within the historical development of industrial capitalism – slavery lasting until 1860 in America; 1886 in Cuba and 1888 in Brazil; and indentured labour in plantation economies, British and other, until 1920. Moreover, as already emphasized, if they were transitional forms, they were modern ones, born and developed with and alongside industrial wage labour economies, in a combined and complex economic dynamic. They were definitively not relics of previous modes of production. Finally, and critically, they did not just disappear because of the competitive economic superiority of free wage labour in a global market economy. Just as they were politically instituted, so politics and civil war disestablished them. Acts of Emancipation not market forces freed slaves in British colonies. Military defeat by the North over the slave political economies of the South, economically thriving and expanding in the decades immediately preceding the war, brought an end to that particular form of slave economy of labour. Political protest, both led by Ghandi in South Africa and by political movements in India, forced the British Government finally to terminate the systematic exportation of indentured labour from that country. These forms of forced labour were not economically incompatible with capitalism, but politically and morally incompatible with certain political institutions and developing norms. But then, as we have argued, free wage labour economies are also not closed market systems, nor autonomous in their constitution. And to this day, throughout the history of the twentieth century and in many parts of the world, we need no reminders of the narrowly economic compatibility of forced labour, child and adult, with modern capitalist productive systems. Whether in China, Indonesia, India or Vietnam (to point only to a few obvious cases), some of the most advanced production units of contemporary multi-national capitalist enterprises engage labour under conditions of forced constraint, debt bondage, or child servitude. There is no implacable, purely economic logic, as suggested by Adam Smith, that formally ‘free’ wage labour will outcompete and hence eradicate the many varieties and degrees of servitude. Capitalism is far from bounded by a Benthamite ‘freedom, property, and equality’ before the law.
So, although indeed transitional in a limited sense, the epoch of slavery and indentured economies of labour presents the most powerful empirical refutation of the narrow vision of the economy of capitalism enshrined in the labour theory of value. It also, as importantly, reveals an analytic failure to incorporate known realities into an adequate theoretical framework. To say that slavery and indentured labour are anomalies within capitalism is like saying that whales do not belong in the oceans.
[I shall post one further excerpt at the end of the week. For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]