Capitalism and its Distinction from Other Forms of Exploitation
Capitalism is fundamentally a mode of production through which money begets more money. The cycle of production as such starts with money or capital, which is exchanged for some commodity, which is then exchange for more money. In an abstract sense, exchange value is privileged over use value in capitalist production. In other words, the capitalist does not ultimately seek to acquire goods with a specific utilitarian function, but seeks rather to acquire more money qua capital. This quality of capitalism engenders exploitation that is qualitatively different from exploitation in modes of production in which commodities (as use values) are produced primarily to be exchanged for other commodities (to obtain other use values).
As Marx observes, when commodities are primarily produced to be exchange for other commodities, the following obtains: in any economic formation of society where the use-value rather than the exchange-value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and that no boundless thirst for surplus labor will arise from the character of production itself (345). This is emphatically not to say that there no extraction of surplus labor or that such extraction is not brutal; this is simply to say that there is a natural limit to such production that is tied to the needs of consumption. In capitalist production, there is no such limit:
Hence the Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. (Marx 345)
Without any natural limit to the extraction of surplus value,
By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus labour, not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself” (Marx 376).
Regardless of whether the economy is based on slave labor or wage labor, the nature of surplus labor itself is fundamentally the same “What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the distinction between for example a society based on slave- labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker” (325). The difference, as we have seen, lies in the mode of extraction. The intensification of extraction and the fungibility of surplus labor between the two systems explains the following passage from Bridge’s text:
“The sure cure for the slave-trade,” says Mr. Laird, “is in our hands, it lies in producing cheaper commodities by free labour, in our own colonies.” And, to accomplish this desirable end, England will seize upon the liberated Africans and land them in her West India islands, with the alternative of adding their toil to the amount of her colonial labour, or of perishing by starvation. How much better will their condition be, as apprentices in Trinidad or Jamaica, than as slaves in Cuba? Infinitely more wretched! (Bridge Journal Ch. VII)
The slaves are liberated only to be re-enslaved through a the yoke of capital, and are thus free only nominally. It is not clear, therefore, that so-called free or wage labor is more benign that slave labor. We may cautiously note that:
In one respect, slaves were more fortunate than wage earners. Some slave owners felt an obligation to care for their sick and aged chattel. Employers of wage labor were generally unburdened by such thoughts. In the words of one forthright American manager: ‘‘I regard my work-people just as I regard my machinery. . . . They must look out for themselves as I do for myself. When my machines get old and useless, I reject them and get new, and these people are part of my machinery’’ (Perelman 78)
The Difficulty Faced by Early Capitalists in Getting Workers to Accept Wage Labor
Ignorance of the most appropriate soil, and of the most productive kind of cane, and the best methods of planting and grinding it, have likewise contributed to retard the cultivation of sugar. The grand difficulty is the want of a ready capital, and the high price of labour. The present wages of labour are from sixty to seventy- five cents per day. The natives refuse to work among the canes, on account of the prickly nature of the leaves, and the irritating property of a gum that exudes from them. Yet it may be doubted whether the colony will ever make sugar to any important extent, unless some method be found to apply native labour to that purpose. (Bridge Journal Ch. VI)
It may be difficult to imagine otherwise, but Michael Perelman notes that “even today, observers who presume that wage labor is the ‘natural’ state of humanity are perplexed by the apparently irrational rejection of wage labor” (Perelman Classical Political Economy 44). One of the problems faced by early capitalists is precisely the tenacious resistance of traditional modes of production. Perelman cites several examples: “during the Industrial Revolution, Irish women were reported to have been willing to accept half the salary they could earn in a factory if they could do the same work at home” (93); handloom weavers were “unwilling to surrender their imaginary in- dependence, and prefer being enslaved by poverty, to the confinement and unvarying routine of factory employment” (93); and in colonial Virginia, “people often preferred a more leisurely subsistence economy despite frequent bouts of hunger and malnutrition” (93). Indeed, if we examine the numbers compiled by the Commissioner of Labor Statistics and the United States Department of Agriculture, we may conclude that in Bridge’s account, the wages offered are roughly double the average paid to farm laborers, and should be enticing by “rational” calculation.
Imbrication of the Slave-Trade with Industries Ostensibly Dependent on Free Labor
“A large number of the vessels engaged in the African trade, whether English or American, do a considerable part of their business either with the slavers, or with natives settled at the slave-marts, and who, from their connection with the trade, have plenty of money” (Bridge Journal ch. XIV)
The British abolition of slavery does not imply that all British subject thus form an ideologically consistent whole that is unequivocally opposed to any association with slavery. As such, one finds that:
Some of the large English houses give orders to their captains and supercargoes not to traffic with men reputed to be slave-dealers; but if a purchaser come with money in his hand, and offer liberal prices, it requires a tendered conscience and sterner integrity than are usually met with, on the coast of Africa, to resist the temptation (Bridge Journal ch. XIV)
The capital accumulation enjoyed by industries dependent on free labor were often enabled precisely by the slave trade. For example, we may consider shipbuilding and its attendant industries:
The needs of shipbuilding gave a further stimulus to heavy industry. The iron chain and anchor foundries, of which there were many in Liverpool, lived off the building of ships. Copper sheathing for the vessels gave rise to local industries in the town and adjacent districts to supply the demand. Between thirty and forty vessels were employed in transporting the copper, smelted in Lancashire and Cheshire, from the works at Holywell to the warehouses in Liverpool.
The ironmaster’s interest in the slave trade continued throughout the [eighteenth century]. When the question of abolition came before Parliament, the manufacturers of and dealers in iron, copper, brass and lead in Liverpool petitioned against the project, which would affect employment in the town and send forth thousands as “solitary wanderers into the world, to seek employment in foreign climes.” (Williams 84)
Objectively, such anxieties may have been hyperbolic, but they underscore the interconnection of slave trade with other industries through its economic dimension. Eventually, the provincial concerns of individual industries would be outweighed by the national—but no less economic—concerns of rivalry with the French. As CLR James observes:
The British bourgeoisie investigated the new situation in the West Indies, and on the basis of what it saw, prepared a bombshell for its rivals. Without slaves San Domingo was doomed. The British colonies had enough slaves for all the trade they were ever likely to do. With the tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks, those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave-trade. (James 51)
In this view, the abolition of the slave trade is thus fundamentally a means to effect the economic devastation of a slave colony belonging to a rival power.
It is clear that the official ideological position does not reflect the reality of the situation, and Bridge’s account uses this fact to downplay American complicity in the slave trade: “The English have no right to taunt the Americans, nor to claim higher integrity on their own part. They lend precisely the same indirect aid to the traffic that the Americans do [. . .]” (Bridge Journal ch.VII)
Journal of An African Cruiser 