Latin America, Africa and Asia: just a rehearsal, just a tentative
When comparing the situation in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East with that of South or Southeast Asia, the following conclusions can be drawn:
- There is a kind of progression of unequal degrees ranging from the colonization of Latin America and South and Southeast Asia, to the later colonization of the Middle East and Africa. In Latin America, the Asian mode of production was crushed in a genocidal manner, and the infrastructure was built that would allow the centralization and concentration of both taxes and the elimination of the problem of increasing the commercial margin between intermediaries (as I hope it is clear below). In South and Southeast Asia, the same thing happened, but without the physical elimination of the indigenous population: both in India and in the French and English colonies of the Southeast, colonial power replaced tribal chiefs and traditional villages in the collection of taxes, creating a state and colonial infrastructure that maintains the communal and traditional (but not static) relations of the native populations. Lastly, in the Middle East and Africa, the State's infrastructure for tax collection is not even replaced, and tribal chiefs continue to receive taxes and commercial profits. These degrees show the progressive reduction of costs in the administration of the colonies by the European powers (the reason that also explains the contradictory support of the colonial 'metropolises' towards decolonization and independence), and the gradual step from direct command to indirect control as a method of colonization. Moreover, this has the importance of helping to explain the problem of the Nation-State in regions such as Africa and the Middle East: if the traditional relations of the villages and tribes are maintained in South and Southeast Asia, and regions such as India or Vietnam already had a relative stability of state centralization that precedes even colonization, then the fragmentation of the Middle East and Africa is not due to 'archaisms' or 'primitivism', nor the capacity of Indian or Vietnamese centralization before the colony has anything to do with Western influence : neither India nor Vietnam had to eliminate their tribes or villas to consolidate nation-states and allow the development of capitalism. This opens the theory of the State beyond European absolutism, and certainly, brings the conception or originis of the State itself to something much more archaic and primitive than modernity.
- We must separate the commercial margin from commercial integration, or the dispersions based on commercial margin and space / regions. India or the Philippines have much lower trade margins than Africa or the Middle East, but retail trade predominates over wholesale, and is concentrated among the land owners themselves in the villas ('traditional retail merchants'). In contrast, regions such as Indonesia or Malaysia (which also have much lower trade margins than the Middle East and Africa), very few of the villagers themselves are engaged in trade, although retail trade has a much larger share within the totality of trade (especially in Indonesia). This coincides with the predominance of lease tenancy over sharecropping in the first countries compared to the second: the need to pay fixed income in money requires the marketing of surplus, as opposed to the simple delivery of variable or fixed income equivalent in produce , but this also implies that the communal agriculture of the villas can be perfectly integrated into capitalism without raising the commercial margin; in the Philippines or Thailand it does so through a predominance of the parcel-plot over the latifundio, but that allows the monetization of the agricultural economy, and in Malaysia or Indonesia with the predominance of the great property based on sharecropping and wage labor. The traditional commune operates the two forms of subsumption of capital: the commercialization of surplus of the simple mercantile mode and the absolute surplus value, in addition to the relative surplus value, only with a predominance of the small property. This helps us clarify and fine-tune the broad and general statements we make here or here: it is not that in Africa or the Middle East there is no change in the productive process that allows changing the relationship between constant and variable capital and raising their productivity, etc. (relative surplus value and real subsumption), nor is it that the leasing and marketing of surpluses is absolutely and completely non-existent, but 1) there is a divergence between the fragmentation of land tenure and the division of agricultural labor through the tribal commune, and 2) there is a divergence in the margin that allows the real subsumption to be promoted to a greater degree even through the framework of the tribal commune. This would mean (if accepted) that 1) there is a difference between the Latin American landowner regime (or at least the non-indigenous!) and a kind of asian or african communal parcel regime, and that 2) there is an unusual real capitalist subsumption within the framework of tribal communal agriculture . As is already known: the theory of the parcel regime of Volume III of Capital is based precisely on the societies that do not develop the primitive or originary capitalist accumulation. And this is precisely the characteristic of the neocolonies of the world: a penetration of capitalism without the dispossession of peasant land, without predominance of latifundia over small property, without the creation of an internal market, or as Tony Cliff puts it: a capitalism 'without Third State. ' The great paradox of what we are proposing here is that Marx speaks only of a smallholding model of the dominance of the smallholder over the latifundia in the framework of the ownership and individual possession of the land, the nuclear family, or Chayanov’s "family unit". We would be pointing out the extension of its concept towards tenure and production regimes based on extended families and diverse types of filial and kinship relationships.
- Before continuing, we need to clarify one detail: how is the trade margin of South and Southeast Asia reduced compared to the Middle East and Africa, if in all these regions there is an overwhelming majority of retail trade and intermediaries within the framework of a fragmentation of land that is based on the subsistence of communal relations? We can then advance an hypothesis: the substitution of the colonial tax collection in the South and Southeast Asia allowed a much stronger State, and with greater capacity of investment in infrastructure, which allowed to reduce the commercial margin and that the communes and villages received a higher proportion of the final sale price, raising its productivity. The tribal chiefs of the "Indian Subcontinent" or Southeast Asia were stripped of their ability to concentrate state taxes, remembering that within the Asian mode of production the tribute is indistinguishable from land rent: while the European serf pays rent in kind or money, etc, the direct agricultural producer of the Asian way pays a tax or tribute (this in the same way that the feudal European property is based on the ownership of the land, and through this, the possession or property of the servant, while the property of the Asian mode is based on taxing population and through this, the extraction of rent/taxes). On the other hand, and anticipating the characteristics of this communal land tenure system: the fragmentation of tenure and the division of labor (which are not the same types of fragmentation) is radically different in an Asian or African communal village, compared with the rural Latin American (or in what has been made to be seen as the Latin American countryside: forgetting the indigenous peasant of Latin America! As we will see below, this is another of the paths of research that are opened with this discussion) or more exactly, compared to a classic parcel-plot regime like that of Marx. The difference between property and possession is diffuse (customary), and tenure is fragmented throughout the family that previously functioned as a single productive unit; not only alienation is limited, but the modification of the productive process itself is limited by that same customary law (and formal law as well: this diffuse character is what allows tribal leaders to collect taxes and rents as farm-taxers and owners, that is, as true landlords - but not in the European sense-). At the same time, the division of labor extends way beyond the nuclear family as a unit, and even beyond the extended family. This has two contradictory consequences: 1) the fragmentation of tenure slows down or decreases agricultural productivity, 2) but the division of labor allows for greater productivity than the Western division of labor. This may explain the failure of the Pan-Arab and Pan-African agrarian reforms due to the superiority of the productivity of the tribal communal lands; or it may explain the fact that although Africa has much higher trade margins than the South or Southeast Asia, it has a much larger marketable surplus; or it can explain the high productivity that African agriculture is having on the world market in recent years.
- We remember Ellen Meiksins Wood with affection: her controversy with Brenner and the Dobb and Sweezy debate about transition undoubtedly opened a breath of fresh air. If the development of capitalism is not teleological but historical (in the sense of Vico, and through this, in Hegel), then it could have developed in a different way. It seems incredible that even decolonial theorists like Dussel dedicate themselves to insisting on stalinist readings of Marx obviating the Asiatic mode of production, and imposing a stageist development scheme, etc (certainly an omission that validates the Stalinist reading itself), and is someone like Kevin B. Anderson who engaged in rescuing the multiplicity of historical development that appears in Grundrisse. It is Marx himself who is concerned with British primitive accumulation not being generalized, and elaborates not only the theory of formal and real subsumption, but chapter XX of Volume III on a completely different path of development of capitalism even different from revolution, and then the chapter on the plot-parcel regime and the income theory that allow us to understand precisely a real subsumption without primitive accumulation: because if it sounds scandalous to speak of a real subsumption in the tribal community of Africa or Asia, we must remember that the whole kernel of the plot-parcel regime of Volume III is precisely the modifications to the productive process (as in the real subsumption) within the framework of an economy of surplus marketing (as in formal subsumption). It is precisely Marx's ambivalence with respect to formal subsumption: it is capitalist and it is not capitalist. That's why the concept of simple merchantile mode of production has its usefulness: simple marketing of surpluses from the old or medieval market does not allow a commercial modification of the productive process; for that reason, the production and exchange of merchandise must be generalized. This can be done through primitive accumulation (having as prototype England), but it can also differ: the plot-parcel regime of Volume III raises precisely the possibility of an economy that instead of generalizing the latifundio and the agricultural industry, consists of small farmers who modify the productive processes of their own lands through commercial liberalization, and are responsible for marketing their surplus. The capitalist draws a profit from them not for an absolute rent, but for commercial gain. That is why it appears next to chapter XX: it is a capitalism where production is subordinated to trade. Not only is the 'Prussian way' opened, but also the way to Chayanov's theory: the petty-bourgeois peasant who is exploited but not by a property relationship.
- The absence of absolute surplus value and rent and property relations as the basis of a capitalist production regime sound radically adequate in a discussion about customary property and possession. Moreover, if the tribal or communal chief receives income as tribute and rent at the same time, since it is precisely the relation of property / possession and absolute rent that is in doubt in Asian or African agriculture, then the communal landowner regime or agricultural fragmentation based on communal tenure and division of labor, have a characteristic closer to absolute rent and surplus value than the Western classical regimental regime itself : the kinship and filial relationship, and the relationship with the State, makes of the collector of taxes and rent an owner with the power to modify or limit alienation and the productive process of the land, at the same time that shares this faculty with the direct producer who uses it. Not only that: in the western or classic landowner regime, the only one that modifies the productive process and has the right to alienate its land, is the producer and owner of the land. In the customary and formal African and Asian law the tribal or communal leader of the village can get to participate in these functions, so it is even closer not only to absolute rent, but to relative surplus value. And at the same time it is not: it is not a capitalist property in the strict sense of the term, precisely because of the limitations in alienation and others. In the same way that Lenin speaks of sharecropping or the serf’s rent in kind as capable of going directly to a capitalist relationship without going through rent in money (this in The development of capitalism in Russia, based precisely on the same claims of Marx in his theory of rent of Volume III, and that we related to García Nossa, etc), and in the same way that Marx speaks of the communal regime as 'primitive' (in his letters to Vera Zasulich and the Ethnological notebooks ) as capable of skipping capitalism and to move towards another type of socialization of the means of production, it seems at least possible that the communal and tribal regimes that survived in Asia and Africa did go directly to develop capitalist relations (anomalous, if you like, but valid). It is an intermediate and ambiguous degree between absolute rent and relative surplus value, just as in the Asian mode of production rent and taxes are indistinct and merge into a single profit, rent and tribute/tax. And this is how tribal communities and villages operate in their relation to capitalism in Malaysia or Sub-Saharan Africa: from paying rent to a fixed income in kind, the tribal chief acts in effect as a 'capitalist' landowner of his tribe. In other regions this tribal chief is your merchant and your money lender. Tribes and communities are sub-contracted by multinational wholesale trade companies, or bosses are themselves retail merchants linked to a commercial enterprise, as well as traditional informal markets that connect direct producers or merchants with consumers or majority traders, etc.
- What happens is that the modification of the productive process carried out by this tribal chief (this supposed real subsumption and relative surplus value with which we are dealing) is based predominantly on the organization of the division of labor of the village or the contribution of raw materials and fixed capital for direct farmers, who continue to work on land separated by the tenure of diverse extended families, or coordinate the division of labor beyond extended families but always within the pattern of land tenure (which is not possible in the plot-parcel regime developed by Marx), or break with this pattern and insert more productive methods and division of labor, etc. Just as it has similar characteristics with absolute rent and relative surplus value (because it is a relative owner), it has similar characteristics with the trader's putting-out system, which is defined because it still does not develop neither capitalist, nor agro-industrial, nor bourgeois production. In this contradictory sense, there is no absolute or relative surplus value: everything we have said so far falls apart. The head of a tribal village simply exploits the peasant to the same extent that a merchant is in charge of making a commercial profit from surpluses in the classic peasant regime of the West. The only thing that differentiates this subsumption from a simple mercantile regime is the fact that generalized commodification allows the peasant to modify his productive process (a difference that resolves the ambiguity of the so called Capital volume I Chapter 6 on formal subsumption). Just as this relationship seems to be more advanced even than the classic landowner regime due to limited property (giving it apparent characteristics of absolute rent and relative surplus value), it can also be seen as more backward since the communal and tribal regime multiplies intermediaries that by definition cannot exit the putting-out system: while a series of parcels can relate directly to a smaller number of merchants who, in addition, are in charge of selling wholesale, the communal plots have to be related necessarily with limited trade to even access wholesale trade (hence the African or Asian trade margin is, on the whole, much greater than that of the 'metropolis' of Europe et al). This promotes, precisely, the gradations in the predominance of sharecropping in Africa and Asia compared to Latin America and the 'metropolitan' countries, which reduces the monetarization of the economy, etc. Although sharecropping can pass directly to capitalism as wage labor, payment in kind is also mostly a marketing of surpluses in Latin America (and therefore ceases to be rent and becomes an appropriation of commercial gain between peasant and merchant), while in Africa and Asia it is mostly perceived as rent. While there is income in money, income in kind and surplus trade in Latin America, in Asia and Africa the surplus trade that represents a gain is subsumed into a rent (all this in relative terms). But as this African and Asian income is based on a commercial mediation in kind, and that Latin American payment in kind is based on a commercial mediation paid with money, and the first is limited in terms of the control of the productive process, while the second is based on general trade, the character of relative surplus value is confused (as we proposed in our first text on colonialism and peripheries). In effect, innovation and the modification of the productive process in the Middle East and Africa is very limited, because the landowner appropriates "from outside" the production without any incentive for productive development. This, and not the Koran, is what explains the lack of productive investment and the predominance of trade in agriculture in the Middle East and Africa.
- But if we say that Latin America is characterized mainly by a production dominated by commercial capital based precisely on its intermediation with respect to the agricultural producer, and at the same time, we say that Africa and the Middle East have that same subordination of production to commercial capital. How are these three major regions of Latin America, Africa / Middle East and South Asia different? We wrote before: "This helps us to be more precise about why we talk about divergent degrees of transition between formal subsumption and real subsumption: in Latin America the landowner is the direct owner of the land (absolute rent and relative surplus value of real subsumption), but the small and medium agricultural plot predominates (marketing surpluses as in the formal subsumption), while in Africa and the Middle East the landowner receives his rent but without transforming the communal productive process (an absolute rent without relative surpluses), and is also in charge of marketing surpluses (as in the formal subsumption). " With the inclusion of Southeast and South Asia, we see that we have to refine some things: the definition of Latin America can be maintained as it is (always remembering that we are talking about a very general plane, and that there are internal degrees and exceptions to all of this), but is altered by the fact that Asian and African rent approaches or relates the landowner relatively to the modification of the production process, which in addition to being an ambiguous approach to absolute rent (as a partial owner), it also brings it closer to relative surplus value (as organizer of the division of labor or supplier of raw materials and fixed capital). For this same ambiguity and relative approach, that same income by which we can compare it with an absolute and relative surplus value, becomes precisely the reason why it is the opposite: that supply of raw materials and fixed capital is not relative surplus value. The answer to all this conundrum is the difference between commercial margin and integration , or the difference that we made between the fragmentation of tenure of the land in a tribal communal land tenure regime, and one based on individual property or the nuclear 'family unit': the divergence between the commercial margin that goes from the producer price to the final sale price, and the statistical dispersion based on the regional space: the landowner of East and South Asia has greater integration between merchant landowners in retail and wholesale trade despite the multiplication of the intermediation of the landowner himself as a trader. The fragmentation of African or Asian tenure in comparison with Latin America produces an increase in the commercial margin, and the greater integration of East and South Asia through the network of retailers and wholesalers produces the difference in their favor with respect to their counterparts in the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, the African and Asian landowner-trader still has the position of an intermediary of production in a similar way to the putting-out system , only that in India or the Philippines the reduction of the commercial margin allows a greater appropriation and concentration of commercial capital, encouraging income in money, etc. The fragmentation of communal and tribal tenure multiplies land ownership relations (and therefore that appearance of absolute and relative surplus value): between a series of lands cultivated by direct Latin American producers and their marketing, there are fewer intermediaries, and this concentrates more commercial capital. The percentage of retailers is likely to be much smaller, or there may be a similar proportion to the Asian but with retailers belonging to common capitals , instead of being the individual property of minority owners, etc (something that becomes necessary to investigate). Meanwhile, in communal and tribal tenure regardless of the greater or lesser integration between retailers and wholesalers, the commercialization of the surplus is perceived as an income mostly in kind. It is the excess of property relations that produces the increase of the commercial margin, and the possibility of comparing the African and Asian rents with absolute and relative capital gains: instead of the villa communicating directly with the next point of sale, it has to mediate with a non-existent intermediary in a western location. And at the same time, this produces the deterioration of integration itself: neither commercial capital nor the State can invest in reducing the commercial margin. This is the tendency contrary to any form of absolute rent or relative surplus value (even knowing that it is simply the formal appearance of such surplus value): in addition to representing a much more limited marketing to use values and much less formal or general, it is the character of rent precisely that which limits the merchant to mediate in a manner other than putting-out. The subordination of production to commercial capital in Latin America at least implies the possibility of the direct producer producing and buying in general, and of commercial capital buying and selling in general. In Asia and Africa there is a general production and purchase, but the commercial capital specifically buys from the communal village, is in charge of selling specifically that communal production, and of buying and selling raw material / fixed capital specifically for its communal village (not in general). East or South Asia achieved an intermediate level of this relationship: the direct producer and the commercial capital sell and buy in general, but they still remain an intermediate link between the raw material / fixed capital and the output of their communal village and trade (especially wholesale). What a direct producer could buy directly in a central formal market, has to do it through the local formal market: this allows a saving for the direct producer, but an increase in costs for commerce.
- We return to Meiksins Wood and Brenner: what we are proposing here (which is still only one of many hypothesis) implies not only that underdevelopment is created by development, or that capitalism prevents capitalism itself, or that neocolonies live an 'impure' or 'atrophied' capitalism: the 'metropolis' of the world developed capitalism, the powers which arrived belatedly (Germany or the United States) managed to industrialize, develop their own internal market and a kind of diverse “primitive accumulation”, but the 'peripheries' seemed never to reach capitalism . Now we see that it is rather a perfectly capitalist development: it is not a capitalism that stops or prevents capitalism in its neocolonies, but a capitalism that spreads and progresses insatiably for the underdeveloped countries. They do not suffer from 'underdevelopment', but from development . They're not backwards, and they never stop to advance. For this same reason the tribal chiefs of Sudan or Somalia, or of Iraq or Syria, do not question their Nation-States from an 'archaic' or 'pre-capitalist' point of view, but precisely for seeking to increase their accumulation and deploy with all their forces the power of modern capital. And I am afraid (or at least I think so) that the theory of dependency or world-systems (or decolonialism or post-colonialism ) do not manage to unravel this type of hypothesis, precisely to the same extent that they remain in smithianism and Ricardianism , as Brenner aptly points out . Neither the mercantile exchange around the world market, nor the production process or production factors seen as market supply and demand, can solve in the least any of these issues, or at least raise them. Chris Harman is right about Brenner : he focuses only on agriculture, and not on the multiple variety of elements treated by Dobb's magnificent work . We must say that if we focus on agriculture, we do so not to give it any weight or priority: it is neither a center nor an axis of determination, nor even a key to reading. What allows us to interpret the historical development of the "Third World", understanding that the characteristic of these regions is the lack of development of primitive accumulation in the transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism, and therefore, the absence of a internal market and a self-sufficient industry; that is: the exit of the natural or subsistence agricultural economy (the exit from the Asian mode of production) and how it more or less shaped the way in which it was decided to develop capitalism in our regions. Oppositions between the bourgeoisie and feudal landlords / aristocrats, or between the industrial / peasant proletariat and the industrial bourgeoisie, do not have the slightest sense to understand the capitalist experiences here in our continent or the rest of the neo - colonies of the world .
- Latin America: this approach opens the possibility of studying indigenous Latin American communities in their own way. For example, compare the relationship between the encomienda and mercedes reales in Costa Rica, and its comparison with countries such as Guatemala (à la Sol Tax ), where there is also a radically different small-latifundio: how is it possible to dominate the latifundio and a greater presence of communal farming regimes? Could it be that as sharecropping in kind can pass directly to the capitalist wage or salary (and its different modalities), then the tribute of the pre-Columbian Asian mode of production in Central America went directly to wage labor?
