[This book, writes reviewer Wendland-Liu, shifts the geographic
focus of "origins of capitalism" debates from Europe "to the motion,
spaces, circuits and conflicts in multiple global sites and stages of
economic production relations." ]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE UNTOLD STORY OF CAPITALISM  
[[link removed]]


 

Joel Wendland-Liu
March 10, 2023
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This book, writes reviewer Wendland-Liu, shifts the geographic
focus of "origins of capitalism" debates from Europe "to the motion,
spaces, circuits and conflicts in multiple global sites and stages of
economic production relations." _

,

 

_The Untold History of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and the
Anti-Slavery Revolution_
Enrique S Rivera
International Publishers
ISBN: 9780717808663

May 10th marks Afro-Venezuelan Day and commemorates the 1795 Coro
Rebellion. The May 1795 revolutionary events are the centerpiece of
Enrique S. Rivera’s _The Untold History of Capitalism: Primitive
Accumulation and the Anti-Slavery Revolution_. Rivera’s careful use
of the colonial archive to reconstruct the events in Coro, Venezuela
is enhanced by his global mapping of the commodity and labor streams
and colonial systems that conditioned the region’s political
economy. He narrates the causes and events of a peasant-slave revolt
that targeted for destruction colonialism, key features of the
foundational stage of racial capitalism and racial slavery.

By 1795, Coro had become Venezuela’s second largest city with 150
plantations in its vicinity. Several smaller nearby indigenous towns
populated by Ajagua and Ayamane peoples were forced to pay onerous
taxes and supply labor-power to Coro’s ruling planter class.
Plantation economies centered on livestock-based international trade,
cacao production and sugar. Plantation owners and other
European-descended city dwellers tended to be the main customers for
Europe-originated consumer goods, such as expensive and fashionable
textiles, tools and weapons, and other luxury goods. Enslaved Africans
and racially mixed peasant farmers who depended on occasional wage
labor to survive comprised the laboring population of the city and its
environs.

Clothes and textiles appropriated by the insurrectionists were the key
pieces of evidence in the subsequent investigation of the failed
insurrection. Those ‘precious objects’ had been expropriated by
the insurrectionists during their raids on plantation homes and
redistributed to participants and family members. Rivera shows how
luxury clothing items had marked racial and class status through
prohibitive cost and punitive law. The ostentatious display of wealth
was intimately tied to the presentation of white supremacy and class
status (32). Thus, the insurrectionists’ appropriation and
redistribution of clothes and textiles reveals how they targeted the
plantation-slavery political economy and reimagined a political
economy more closely aligned with their communitarian values.

Textiles imported by the plantation class were almost exclusively made
in European centers such as Devon, Brittany, Flanders and the
Guizpúcoa region of Spain. ‘European fabrics,’ Rivera shows,
‘were infused with a complex of social relations that shaped the
nature of race, class, and revolution in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic’ (33). Those social relations were rooted in the European
slave trade that brought hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to
Northern Venezuela. Primarily responsible for this calamitous
incarceration of Africans were the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and
British South Seas Company (SSC) trading monopolies in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries alone. Coro’s white plantation owners
eagerly exploited enslaved African labor and willingly engaged in that
barbarous institution even as it increased the danger to their lives
and livelihood as the May 1795 events revealed.

The WIC and SSC along with the Spanish Royal Guipúzcoa Company (RCG)
were the three major trading monopolies in the region. The RCG was a
Spanish public-private partnership specializing in the slave trade and
shipments of cacao. The Dutch enterprise, which had been modeled on
its far more successful East India counterpart, controlled a dozen
slave-trading fortresses on Africa’s west coast. The WIC ‘served
as a government administrative entity,’ managing security, transport
and financial machinations for state and capitalist interests in the
colonial enterprise (72). Born out of antagonism toward Spanish rule,
the Dutch enterprise continued to operate illicitly in the Spanish
Caribbean through its colonial station at Curaçao off Venezuela’s
northern coast, smuggling enslaved people and as an entrepot for
Venezuelan or indigenous traders seeking to avoid Spanish taxes on
goods headed to Europe. Rivera attributes to the WIC the role of
delivering most of the enslaved Africans to Coro, even though by the
1790s it had begun to falter. Many of the enraged participants in the
1795 uprising were either directly the victims of Dutch international
trade or the descendants of those who had been kidnapped out of their
home territories, now parts of Ghana and Congo.

In competition with the WIC, the British SSC gained legal access to
lucrative Spanish markets. The SSC secured a Spanish 25-year asiento
in 1713 and contracted to bring 75,000 enslaved Africa via Royal
African Company-controlled Gold Coast slave forts to Spain’s
American colonies. Along with this nefarious activity, the financial
machinations of the company’s managers, through debt swaps and
fictitious capital experiments, collapsed the London stock market in
1720. In addition to ‘structuring the plantation economies of places
like Coro,’ the financial and political schemes that resolved the
London crisis freed up massive amounts of capital to finance the
private-public partnership that became the British Empire (100). As
Marx proves ‘[t]he public debt became one of the most powerful
levers of primitive accumulation.’ (Marx 1967: 607). In other words,
the international trading system, a foundational element of emergent
world capitalism, shaped the political economy of Coro and the
conditions that led to the peasant-slave rebellion of 1795, even as it
molded the still-emergent capitalist structures in the European
metropole.

Rivera’s work bears the influence of historian Eric Williams, who
had shown that plantation-based economic systems were designed as
racially-based labor systems for extracting raw resources for
production in European industrial centers. They were never intended as
catalysts for full capitalist development in the Americas, Asia or
Africa, even as the formation of planter classes generated competing,
divergent interests from the metropole (Williams 2021: 42). Rivera
frames his project with a comparable endeavor of mapping the
development of capitalism as a world system and the localized American
social relations of production. But he takes it one step further by
exploring the circuits of production and accumulation on all three
ends of the ‘triangular trade.’ He examines and elucidates the
regional demographics of racial, class and gender hierarchies around
Coro, and the productive relations managed by force, coercive taxation
schemes and legal prohibitions. The plantation system continued in a
transitional stage of feudal and capitalist relations of production as
taxation schemes that forced peasant and indigenous people into labor
service for church and private landlords could not fully monetize the
economy. Spanish officials were forced to accept cocuiza plants (used
for making rope) as exchange values for taxes and fees (165).

Rivera also attends to European production relations. At the time of
the 1795 uprising, the sectors that drove the consumer markets in Coro
lingered in a pre-industrial stage. Textiles sold to Coro’s planters
primarily originated in Devon, England, the Brittany region of France
and Flanders (one of the united provinces of the Dutch Republic).
Rivera shows that while merchant capital had increasingly owned
industrialized finishing operations for textiles, petty producers
controlled most of the processing of raw wool or flax into cloth.
These producers owned their looms and spinning machines but continued
to render labor service or tribute to local landlords. In other words,
Rivera contends, the industrial system remained primarily a
semi-feudal operation not fully appropriated by capitalists. Over the
eighteenth century, productive growth was tied to population growth.
Petty producers earned a substantial real wage because, in this
transitional mode, they controlled labor, tools and knowledge about
the production process (54-55).

Rivera also explores the cultures and social relations of the
societies from which enslaved Africans were kidnapped. Many of the
enslaved Africans in Coro, forced into slavery via Dutch or British
slave-trading enterprises, came from the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Loango
(Congo). In contrast to private property relations dominant in Western
societies, the several polities that existed in Ghana and Congo were
kinship-based social formations organized as communal societies in
which shared well-being was the driving political-economic principle.
Rivera shows that such communal social practices remained prevalent in
the lifeways of Coro’s enslaved and free African populations.
Notably, large numbers of Africans, many of whom fled Dutch
enslavement in Curaçao, lived in nearby maroon societies known as
cumbés (126-135). These settlements developed social relations that
extended their African cultural habits into the Americas and
represented a dramatically different trajectory of human development
than that which was led by their European neighbors.

_The Untold Story of Capitalism_’s subtitle draws attention to a
longstanding theoretical concern within Marxism. Rivera argues ‘that
it was primitive accumulation that gave rise to Coro’s plantation
economy and the revolutionary movement that aimed to destroy it’
(p21). In other words, capitalist accumulation had yet to predominate
in either European centers and or the plantation colonies, with
primitive, non-capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of accumulation
(and non-accumulation) remaining very much at play as types of
potential generalized development. The peasant-slave revolt, which
emanated from the cumbés, offered a development model that would be
suppressed through mass killing, re-enslavement campaigns and final
capitalistic development. Rivera’s research shifts the geographical
locus implicit in many ‘origins of capitalism’ debates from
localities in Western Europe to the motion, spaces, circuits and
conflicts in multiple global sites and stages of economic production
relations. Such a research paradigm most closely aligns Rivera’s
research with Marx’s thinking.

References

* Karl Marx 1967 Capital, Vol. I New York, International Publishers.
* Eric Williams 2021 Capitalism and Slavery Chapel Hill, University
of North Carolina Press.

Joel Wendland-Liu is the author of _Mythologies: A Political Economy
of U.S. Literature in the Long Nineteenth-Century_ and_ The
Collectivity of Life: Spaces of Social Mobility and the Individualism
Myth_. His ongoing research includes a study of the Marxist concept of
primary accumulation, the historical development of Marxist-Leninist
thought in the US, and a study of radical U.S. literature in the
twentieth century.

* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* slavery
[[link removed]]
* Accumulation
[[link removed]]
* resistance
[[link removed]]
* Slave Rebellion
[[link removed]]
* revolution
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]