I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.

This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.

I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)

(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)

  • old_goat [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I would argue that capitalism is the system of wage labor for commodity production and thus in no meaningful Marxist sense were the southern plantation owners capitalists.

    You miss a very important aspect of Marx's critique of wage labor in that he juxtaposes wage labor vs. piecemeal wages. Under piecemeal wages, workers have no interest in creating commodities beyond subsistence levels and capitalists have no interest in increased productivity as they pay a fixed price per commodity produced and surplus value is constant. Under wage labor, the capitalist is incredibly interested in increasing productivity as they pay per hour rather than per product produced and every increase in productivity is an increase in surplus value. Labor costs and surplus value are the monetary valuations of what Marx calls the necessary product and the surplus product, or paid labor and unpaid labor.

    So lets look at slavery in relation to wage labor and piecemeal work. A slave is provided food and shelter and little else. They are paid the same regardless of the amount of commodities they produce. Slavery sure looks a lot more like wage labor than piecemeal work doesn't it? If "appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production," as per Engels, what is slavery except the purest form of Capitalism?