Slave economy and value relations

my last video focused on some of the technical conditions for the creation of markets which in turn were necessary for the development of slave economy and now it's going to focus on the slave economy and value itself by looking at the forms of circulation and monetary forms that were induced by the slave mode of production again I have to emphasize that the slave mode of production was a form of commodity production in addition to having a well-developed transport system it had well-developed money and indeed in gold and silver coinage with a specific invention of the slave mode of production and were supported were invented to support the relation social relations of the same mode of production the first coins around 700 BC come from Lydia which is a Greek city-state in Asia Minor and they they were stata with the coins were called State olds the unit of gold and gold static lines continued to be issued by Greek kingdoms after that some dispute about the nature of these static coins because it turned out that they're made of gold silver alloy so it undermines the theory that the origins of coins were precise and reliably weighed quantities of gold because they were that the case the king of Lydia was cheating people by giving them a gold silver alloy which at that point no one knew how to to determine whether it was an alloy of pure gold you've all heard the story of Archimedes in his bath well why was he thinking about this when he was in his bath he was thinking about it because he's been asked by the king of Syracuse to determine whether his supposedly gold crown actually was gold and what Archimedes had hit on was a technique by which you could test whether an object or an ingot was pure gold or gold and silver because you weigh it and you see what volume of water it displaces then you compare it with something you know that it's gold and see what the ratio of weight to water displaced is and then apply the same principle to a piece of silver and by detecting that variation and density you can detect whether it's pure silver or pure gold now that wasn't available 700 BC so it's pretty clear even from the start states were issuing coins and raising revenue by the fact that the coins were not of monetary value of metallic value equivalent to their notional face value another thing to note is that these are very high denomination coins and wouldn't be usable for small-scale commerce they could be useful for paying taxes by landlords and they could be used perhaps for major purchases but not for day-to-day trade for that to happen you require a silver coinage to come in to use for smaller scale of transactions and both Athens and Rome issued large quantities of silver coin those are for sort of moderate scale transactions to get an idea of what you can buy it with silver clients go and have a look at the current selling price of silver dollars now for petty Commerce though you actually need copper token money and copper token money was issued both in the Chinese Empire and in the Roman Empire Chinese Empire never used or never issued precious metal coinage only issued token copper coinage and in in Rome the effect of long-term inflation meant that by the fourth cent 3rd century a large part of the Denarius in circulation was a copper coin not a silver coin now the same thing happened in more recent times the British penny was originally a silver coin and it's now not even a copper coin it's a copper and debased coin so there's a general tendency for States there is young coinage to debase it over time not only do we see the same tendencies existing with state coinage we also see things which we tend to think are purely capitalist phenomena like financial crises there's a major financial crisis of 33 AD which is reported in Tacitus and a number of other historians so is a we extract from Tacitus hence followed a scarcity of money a great shot been given to all credit the current coin - in consequence of the conviction of so many persons and the sale of their property being locked up in the Imperial Treasury or the public exact to meet this the senator directed that every creditor should have 2/3 of this capital secured on estates in Italy creditors however we're not were suing in for payment in full and it was not respectable for persons when suit to break faith the destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation till at last the emperor and to post his aid by distributing through the banks a hundred million sister she's allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years provided the borrow gave security to the state in man to double the amount now that's an account of a financial crisis in AD 33 but many of the same features could have been observed in the 2008 financial crisis a crisis of the private credit system spreading and then this leading to a intervention by the state to prop up the banks in return for which the state acquires securities well that's the same process that capitalist states carry out now you also got profiteering in response to inflation and you got many of the same state responses I'm quoting now from the Roman Emperor Diocletian who is about 301 a DSO greed raves and burns with it and sets no limit on itself with Roe without regard to the human race it rushes to increase and augment itself not by years or months or else by days but almost by hours and very moments some people are always eager to turn a profit even on the blessings of the gods they cease the abundance of the general prosperity and strangled although they each wallow in the greatest riches with which nations could have been satisfied they chase after personal allowances and hunt down lectures linked percentages on their greed provincial citizens the logic of our shared humanity urges us to set a limit now that's the part of the introduction to directly shion's decree on prices and wages where in 301 ad having reformed the currency he now attempts to fix a fair set of prices and wages again very reminiscent of the responses for example of British governments to inflation in the 1970s why am i mentioning all this I'm wanting to counter the ignorant modern modern impression spread by value form theorists that money credit banking and financial crises are specific features of capitalism they're not I also want to counter the idea that because value money credit etc existed in the USA before the Civil War in the early 1800s that that country was the catalyst and not a slave Society no that is not evidence that it's a capitalist society because we're you to take that as evidence it's a capitalist society you'd have to conclude that the very paradigm of slave Society the Roman Empire was also capitalist so we have to look at what the distinctive features are that distinguish the structure of commodity circulation in a slave economy from that in a capitalist economy and it's the structure of circulation the form of surplus extraction and the form of social reproduction now if you've read volume 2 of capital you know something about the structure of the circulation process in a capitalist economy I'm going to present this information diagrammatically yeah this is a picture of what happens in a slave economy you have a population of slaves working on the land and as a result of that they produces an agricultural product I'm showing this in the form of amphora which are the classical containers per things like olive oil and wine now some of this is consumed by the slaves in order to feed themselves give themselves the energy to work some is given to them by the slave owners and the surplus product is then marketed marketed to the town's an in return the latter defund iya on which the slave owners live receives luxury products made in the towns and takes back some of the money that they got from selling the crops and that share of the money then feeds out from the latter frontiers to the slave trade in order to purchase in new slaves now the important point is that quantity circulation here is driven by the sell the surplus alone the latter fund dia attempt to be self-sufficient in necessities and tools and by in the absolute minimum if you read the books which were written as guides to estate managers these are the points they emphasize but the purchase of slaves means that some money is necessarily involved so they can't isolate themselves entirely and also they want to purchase luxuries and the third point is the surplus is primary agrarian with an agrarian ruling class having landed estates and if we contrast that with capitalism the diagram doesn't apply to catalyst enough in capitalism not only the surplus product but the subsistence goods take the form of commodities and the direct producers are paid in wages wrong in kind and this constitutes a big market the larger part of the market capitalist payment of wages constitute a much bigger money flow than the purchase of slaves and the countless surplus is primary urban and now the next most important point is that the means of production are commodities in a capitalist economy they're not produced within the firm or very exceptionally produced within the firm they're bought in commodities in slave economies the main means of production is the land and the land is developed and cleared by slave labor it's not bought in and typically they don't buy in much in the way of machinery they use very primitive machinery and such machineries they do use can be built by slave craftsmen on the estate now that set of characteristics which I put forward in the case of Roman latifolia also apply to the plantation of the Confederacy or the the southern states all the essential features are there again slaves are often fed from crops grown on the plantation the main means of production was the cleared land produce free by slave labor no market was formed by the direct producers so they didn't constitute an internal market which is unlike the market for necessities that exists in a capitalist economy and even the bloody architecture directly copied Roman architecture they were stating quite explicitly they were the same civilization and when you look at the form of surpluses traction it is again different from under capitalism and the cattle ISM the primary form of surplused extraction is what Marx calls relative surplus labor and relative surplus labor is produced by the improvements in productivity that machinery bring about in the slave economy the surplus is produced by quitting people literally if you look at the united states slave economy slaves are given a target number of pounds of cotton to harvest each day for each pound that they fell short they received one lash and over the years the slave owners inched up the number of pounds each slave was having to do and screwed up the level of exploit physical exploitation so there's no use of machinery there is just more and more intensive use of force to extract the surplus same applies to any slave economy the Roman the Latin language even had special words for different types of whips that were going to be used to whip their slaves to make them produce more and all slave economies have shackled their their workers very limited power use of powered machinery in general since the labor of slaves seems free to their masters the masters are unwilling to invest in machinery unless it's absolutely no alternative open to them this doesn't just depend on agricultural production but other areas as well it's not that they didn't have the basic technical skills to do some sort of steam engine for example pumps Roman pumps made at a bronze have been excavated which show many of the essential features that you would need to build a steam engine look these valves here poppet valves of that sort were used in some kinds of steam engines Pistons a reciprocating mechanism it could be said that they only had bronze to do this they couldn't cast iron they couldn't cast steel so they would only have been able to operate these at relatively low pressures so it might be an issue to do with pressure but there are certainly little evidence that they were interested in developing Machinery if you think of the early period of capitalism pumping out mines was a key motivation for the development of the steam engine so there's what's engine pumping out of mine with steam in this cylinder here here is a computerized reconstruction of a Roman mine pumping engine that has been found reconstructed from the parts which have survived and you can see reciprocating motion similar operation except slaves operated operated by muscle power they did have some knowledge of natural power sources the earliest windmills of the Afghan or Persian Mills which were known to the Babel where they called Afghan or Persian will mills now because that's the only place they survived but the Babylonians knew these and basically these are buildings with a slot in the upper floor in the direction of the prevailing wind and then a vertical axis wind turbine placed in there and then on the ground floor they have a mill powered by this it only works in an area was steady prevailing winds so Persia and Afghanistan have relatively steady wind patterns from one direction was never very practical around the Mediterranean or with us were much more varying the Romans did have water wheels and they had the most effective type which is an overshoot wheel and these tend to be late and there is evidence that by the late Roman Empire slaves were becoming scarce and therefore labor costs were rising so it may be that there was some incentive in the late Roman Empire to start using labor selling machinery late Roman Gaul shows the first signs of labor-saving harvesting machines known in history large farms in in gold where machinery that that sort could be used it's unclear to me whether the predominant form of labour on these farms was wage labor or slave labor certainly a lot of the historians say that by the fourth century there were major problems in maintaining slavery in Gaul the viability of the slave economy therefore dependent consol new supplies of slave labor and since slaves were worked to an early death and weren't about to marry the slave population didn't tend to reproduce itself and the slave economy tended to wipe out its workforce and these had to be topped up by wars of conquest and the drive to conquer new territory and capture slaves was a major motive behind Roman imperialism when he conquered Gaul Caesar made a huge fortune by depopulating large areas and hauling them off as slaves so you have to realize in a real slave economy there's a combination of forms of Agriculture taking place at any one time you have the slave estates proper you have a certain number of what I'm called urban farms or pet independent peasant farms you have some estates who may be using a portion of wage labour as well so certainly wage labor was well known as an institution and in addition you have some tenant farming now you get transition between these forms as a consequence of different events occurring the independent peasantry were often been converted into slaves by getting into debt and they were either became debt slaves or they lost their land and became part of the Roman urban proletariat or they might be forced to become effectively tenant farmers consists in perpetuity paying off the original debt on the other hand when there was a shortage of slaves and the slaves couldn't be represent the old system there was a tendency for the landlord class or the slave holding class to allow the slaves to marry and settle set up family farms from which they had to pay rent and these were the this was known as the colonnade the colony and most historians see this as a transitional form into feudalism and the percentage of wage labor first of slave labor will itself depend on where the wages were high whether it was easy to enforce the subordination of people as slaves was that more people were being captured as slaves with a the the kidnap trade in children was kidnapping children and to slavery was going well etc so what you have in a real social formation is several different sets of relationship reduction at once and you have a balance between them set by technology by political struggles by wars of conquest etc and these cause shifts some of them cyclicals shifts some random shifts between the different modes of production but there's an exit path here if this is what I'm drawing here is what's known as a Markov diagram or mock Markov process and with the set of probabilistic transitions like this with a sync state there the end result is that the system ends up in feudalism unless the expansion of territory and the capture new slaves can go on indefinitely which which it can't it's essentially the capture of new territory and slaves ended with Trajan's conquest of Dacia in in the same century after that the system would stagnant again we know that the slave trade was cut off to the USA in the nineteen in the 1830s the long term effects of that didn't really work through because the Civil War occurred before the real long term effects could could be established but a precipitating factor of the Civil War the United States was the tendency of territorial expansion of slavery calmness the expansion of the Confederacy to the west which walked into conflict with the yeoman farmers and this diagram also relates partly to the class contradictions in a slave economy you have three main contradictions between slaves and masters between slave owners and free farmers and between slaves and free farmers or free artisans and that you have to understand the political struggles that existed in these societies has been driven by that three-cornered relationship with the major political struggles occurring between the free farmers and the slave owners those dominated the politics of Rome in the Republican period slave struggles only could break out in the form of actual slave revolts and slave wars which are very rarely successful the only long-term success was in Haiti so that the dominant axis of struggle tends to be between the yeoman farmers and the slave estates and that was certainly the case in in the United States as well this is like the previous video our background covering some portions relatively small portions of a chapter in my forthcoming book

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 3,418

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: slavery, money, financial crisis, Ancient Rome

Id: UoSe66oOKsw

Length: 27min 8sec (1628 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019