As Marx says, in Capital III, what distinguishes each mode of production is the means by which surplus labour is pumped from the labourer. In all of these precapitalist modes of production, the surplus labour is immediately pumped from the producer and appropriated directly by the landed proprietor.
“Rent (as the Physiocrats conceive it by reminiscence [of feudal conditions]) appears historically (and still on the largest scale among the Asiatic peoples) as the general form of surplus labour, of labour performed without payment in return. The appropriation of this surplus labour is here not mediated by exchange, as is the case in capitalist society, but its basis is the forcible domination of one section of society over the other. (There is, accordingly, direct slavery, serfdom or political dependence.)” (p 400)
With slave or serf labour, the surplus labour is directly appropriated by the master. Nothing is given in exchange. The slave or serf performs labour under the direction of the master. Part of the labour undertaken simply produces the products required for their own reproduction. Everything produced in excess of that is a surplus product, at the disposal of the master.
As Marx and Engels set out, in Anti-Duhring, however, in the chapters on The Force Theory, to see the surplus, here, as being merely a consequence of this forcible domination of the slave/serf, by the master, is wrong. Firstly, slavery/serfdom does not arise simply on the back of such forcible domination. If A dominates B, A cannot obtain a surplus product unless B is able to first produce a surplus product, i.e. to produce more than is required for their own reproduction. Secondly, slavery does not initially arise solely on the basis of such forcible domination. It arises because individual families become impoverished and unable to produce enough for their own subsistence. They are then led to sell off some of their cattle etc., then their land, which further undermines their ability to sustain themselves. They then sell off their daughters as domestic servants, into the households of the rich. Eventually, having sold off their land, cattle, and children they have to resort to selling off themselves, and become slaves.
Once such systems of slavery come into existence, the slave owners can expand their wealth by expanding the number of slaves, which can now be achieved simply on the basis of forcible domination, as the slave owners acquire their own means of subjugating others. But, once established, other bases for the continuation of slavery and serfdom persist. Leo Tolstoy attempted to emancipate the serfs on his estates, but they declined his offer. When, in 1861, the Russian serfs were emancipated, it brought terrible misery, because it meant they were also emancipated from the land on which they lived, and which was their only means of subsistence. To survive, they either had to buy that land, which meant borrowing money to do so, which turned them into debt slaves, or else they had to hope that they could find paid employment, thereby becoming a wage slave. Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, sets out a similar story in relation to the experience of French peasants, following the revolution.
In the Asiatic Mode of Production, the producers, organised in village communes, are heavily dependent on large-scale public works. In Egypt, as Marx says, they developed the science of mathematics and astronomy, in order to predict the rise and fall of the Nile, on which they depended for their agriculture. Elsewhere, large-scale public works for irrigation, etc. was required. The communes, therefore, had to create administrative, technocratic and bureaucratic bodies to undertake and coordinate such activity, and to collect taxes and rents to cover both the cost of the public works and of those administrative bodies.
These administrative bodies, therefore, occupy the same kind of status as that of the semi-state envisioned by Marx and Engels under communism. However, under the Asiatic Mode of Production, these administrative bodies are the foundation for the establishment of a bureaucratic collectivist state. Unlike a class state, which arises as the means by which a ruling class, resting upon the ownership of the means of production, defends and extends its position, this bureaucratic collectivist state acts as a means by which a ruling caste maintains control over the means of production, and thereby extracts surplus product.
A ruling-class is reproduced at the same time as the mode of production reproduces the exploited classes, and the existing social relations are reproduced as a direct consequence of the ownership of the means of production by the ruling-class, and their non-ownership by the exploited classes. A set of ruling ideas, of morals, and culture, along with political institutions arise on the back of these productive and social relations, which cement the dominant position of the ruling-class class. However, under the Asiatic Mode of Production, the ruling caste does not own the means of production. It merely exercises control of the state apparatus, and thereby the ability to levy rents and taxes. Its position is not naturally reproduced along with the productive-and social relations as with a ruling class. In order to consolidate its position, as a ruling caste, therefore, it had to first establish a series of taboos, rituals, laws, inhibitions on entrance to the ruling-caste, etc., which develop over centuries, before it can consolidate its position. This is why the idea that what existed in the USSR was such a form of bureaucratic collectivism, and such a ruling caste is preposterous, because there was no possible means for such a formation to have established itself in a matter of just a few years.
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