sociology midterm

I The only kind of exchange workers participate in is trading a commodity for money and, in turn, trading that money for another commodity. In general, they exchange one type of quality (a coat) for another (a computer). We can imagine a chain: C-M-C-M-C and so forth, where the worker gets different qualities of commodities, but not greater quantities. I Capitalists participate in an additional type of exchange. They trade money for a special type of commodity that enables them to extract more money. This special type of commodity is labor. We can imagine another chain: M-C-M0-C0-M00 and so forth, where the capitalist buys labor, extracts surplus value from that labor, gets more money (M0), then buys more labor (C0), then extracts even more surplus, gets even more money (M00) and so forth.

I This is Marx’s model for growing inequality.

I How does the capitalist extract surplus?

I (1) By lengthening the working day and paying the worker for only a portion of the value of their labor — the minimal amount needed to “reproduce” their labor.

I (2) By introducing technology to make labor more productive, but still paying the worker only what they need to be able to make it to work the next day.

I Not paying workers the full value of their labor is called exploitation.

I If workers can produce more with less labor, then each commodity contains less labor in it. According to the labor theory of value, this means that commodities will become cheaper. If so, then the money it takes workers to buy the commodities necessary to reproduce their labor goes down. So the capitalist can pay the worker even less and extract even more surplus.

I Capitalism develops discontinuously. Factories don’t grow one machine by one. Suppose a capitalist introduces new machinery, but the size of their consumer base stays constant. This capitalist can profit by firing workers and using machines instead to make the same number of commodities they previously made with lower labor costs.

I But if the capitalist then expands their consumer base, they might open another factory and soon need workers to employ in this new factory.

I Marx argues that because capitalists need the ability to hire and fire workers as their need for labor expands and contracts, capitalism generates a “surplus population” or “reserve army” of labor that can be hired and fired at will.

I “Primitive accumulation” is Marx’s name for the pre-history of capitalism. Marx asks: how, in the first place, did some people end up owning the means of production and some people end up owning only their labor? Marx argues that this is a historical process that takes place when people are kicked off their land and forced to move to cities to sell their labor in factories. Capitalism is born, in other words, through the use of force.

Review

Review

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W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Great Barrington, MA

Biography

I 1868 Born in Great Barrington, MA

I 1885 Attends Fisk University in Nashville, TN

I 1890 Earns a second bachelor’s degree from Harvard University

I 1895 Earns a Ph.D. from Harvard University

I 1903 Publishes The Souls of Black Folk

I 1910 Co-founds the NAACP

I 1920 Publishes Darkwater

I 1935 Publishes Black Reconstruction in America

Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied

Scholarship and activism

I “The investigative tools of the Du Bois–Atlanta school encompassed surveys, interviews, participant observation, organizational documents, and census data...Through such means, they believed, crucial data for overthrowing racial ignorance and stereotypes would be gathered” — Aldon

Morris, The Scholar Denied, P. 62

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Source: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death I “It might be more profitable in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap Africans” (4)

I “In the British and French West Indies, in Dutch Guiana, and in Brazil, the death rate of slaves was so high, and the birthrate so low, that these territories could not sustain their population levels without large and continuous importations of Africans” – Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the

Cross, p. 25

Slavery

Slavery

Slavery

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Marx acknowledged this factI “Considerations of economy, moreover, which, under a natural

system, afford some security for human treatment by identifying the master’s interest with the slave’s preservation, when once trading in slaves is practised, become reasons for racking to the uttermost the toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race” (374)

Slavery

I “It might be more profitable in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap Africans; but in America without a slave trade, it paid to conserve the slave and let him multiply” (4)

Marx vs. Du Bois

I “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of blackskins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation” (435–436) I Marx focused on slavery as an earlier mode of production than capitalism.

I Du Bois focused on the fact that capitalism and slavery coexisted and reinforced each other.

Slavery supported capitalism

I “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and

America” (5)

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I “What did it mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights; or on the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by his physical necessities to do this and not to do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities; and we say, here, too, is a slave called a ‘free worker,’ and slavery is merely a matter of name” (8–9)

I “But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these vital respects than that which exists today in Europe or America” (9)

I It was not just the brutal conditions of work and lack of compensation that defined slavery.

I Enslaved people could be forcibly separated from their families. This is sometimes called natal alienation. I They were subjected to the arbitrary will of another person.

This is often called domination.

What is the difference between slavery and wage labor?

What is the difference between slavery and wage labor?

What is the difference between slavery and wage labor?

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Social reproduction and literal reproduction

I “the deliberate commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit” (11)

Slavery creates race

I “in order to maintain its income without sacrifice or exertion, the South fell back on a doctrine of racial differences which it asserted made higher intelligence and increased efficiency impossible for Negro labor” (39)

I “The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry” (39)

I “his pseudo-scientists gathered and supplemented all available doctrines of race inferiority” (39)

Racial capitalism

I “the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over” (30)

Was Marx right about the South?

I “From all that has been written and said about the ante-bellum South, one almost loses sight of about 5,000,000 white people in 1860 who lived in the South and held no slaves. Even among the two million slaveholders an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the South” (26)

I “In the South...the great planters formed proportionately quite as small a class but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves. Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves” (12)

Was Marx right about the South?

I “The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions” (700)

Planters offer poor whites status

I “But two considerations led him the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters....To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system” (12)

The promise of mobility

I “there was always a chance that they themselves might also become planters by saving money, by investment, by the power of good luck” (27)

Was Marx right about the North?

I “For the immediate available jobs, the Irish particularly competed and the employers because of race antipathy and sympathy with the South did not wish to increase the number of Negro workers, so long as the foreigners worked just as cheaply. The foreigners in turn blamed blacks for the cheap price of labor” (18)

Capitalists use racial ideology to divide labor

I “The race element was emphasized in order that property-holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But the race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible” (680)

I “There was but one way to break up this threatened coalition, and that was to unite poor and rich whites by the shibboleth of race, and despite divergent economic interests” (680)

Capitalists use racial ideology to divide labor

I “the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interest who hate and fear each other so deeply and peristently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest” (700)

Labor goes along

I “It was a war to determine how far industry in the United States should be carried on under a system where the capitalist owns not only the nation’s raw material, not only the land, but also the laborer himself: or whether the laborer was going to maintain his personal freedom, and enforce it by growing political and economic independence based on widespread ownership of land. This bring us down to the period of the Civil War. Up to the time that the war actually broke out, American labor simply refused, in the main, to envisage black labor as a part of its problem.

Labor goes along

I “Right up to the edge of the war, it was talking about the emancipation of white labor and the organization of stronger unions without saying a word, or apparently giving a thought, to four million black slaves. During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife between capitalists in which they had no interest and they showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of New York and other Northern cities; while in the South, five million non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers sent their manhood by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded them equally with the black slave. Could one imagine anything more paradoxical than this whole situation?” (29)

Psychological wage

I “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown to them” (700–701)

Psychological wage

I “The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor” (701)

Threat

I “White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives, so that in many districts Negroes were afraid to build decent homes or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles or automobiles, because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites” (701)

Fear

I “Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these beings at heart are desperately afraid of something” (678)

The criminal justice system

I “Negroes have been arrested on the slightest provocation and given long sentences or fines which they were compelled to work out” (698)

I “Southern papers specialized Negro crime with ridicule and coarse caricature” (700)

The criminal justice system

Record of Tunis Campbell in the Georgia Convict Lease System,

1876

The tragedy of Reconstruction’s defeat

I “If the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world” (708) I “The plantation land should have gone to those who worked it” (673)

This is not inevitable

Manchester Guardian, December 1862

This is not inevitable

The Knights of Labor Organized white industrial workers—men and women—as well as black agricultural workers in the South

How does Du Bois change Marx’s model?

Superstructure Culture, Ideology (Philosophy, Religion)

⇑ Legal System, State

Base Relations of Production (classes)

Forces of Production (technology, nature)

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