On Capitalism and Agrestic Unfreedom

Abstract

The proposition is not new that the freedom of labour is not a necessary accompaniment of the growth of capitalist production; and that conditions of non-market duress upon labour ranging from outright slavery to indenture and restrictions on mobility have been a typical feature of the world-wide growth of capitalism. Indeed the very title of Eric Williams' seminal book Capitalism and Slavery, which explored the interlinkages between the rise of capitalist manufacturing industry in Britain and the exploitation of the slave labour-based plantation system of the West Indies, exemplified this understanding. Ernest Mandel in his Marxist Economic Theory, which in fact dealt as much with historical description as with theory, also analysed the role of duress in the operation of the colonial system, as did P. A. Baran in his Political Economy of Growth. To the present author who shares Williams's perception, in particular that the colonial system and the later working of imperialism were crucially dependent on the imposition of unfree conditions upon Third World labour (particularly wherever labour migration was induced), Tom Brass's general emphasis on the lack of correspondence between capitalism and freedom of labour seems quite unexceptionable.