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Re: [ox-en] Labor contradictions



Hi Michel,

Michael Bauwens a écrit :
I have 2 extra questions:
- can you recommend any literature about the slavery to feudalism transition, as I think this change is particularly relevant to the coming one
Well I don't know any specifically devoted to that subject, but one may find information in history books dealing with the end of the roman empire, which are many. In "Deep History", the last David Laibman's book (that I bought because you talked about it in one of your contributions in this list) he explicitly tackle the question and says that the "coloni" were "the earliest serfs". An old book by Shepard B. Clough, "The rise and fall of civilization" can also be interesting...

- I would like to copy your excerpt in our wiki, see below for the selection,

It is, of course, OK for me.

Merry fiestas of winter solstice ;-)
Raoul
Michel

PROPOSED EXCERPT:

(...)A lesson what we can learn from several historical trials is,
that we
cannot start from the question of ownership: first conquer the ownership, then build a new society -- no, this does not work. We can
learn, that ownership is a result of the development of the way to produces our lives and of the productive forces, it was always in history in this sequence.
I don't think this is totally correct. It is true that, at least in the
French case, it is during the period of political revolution (1790s), long after the bourgeoisie had begun to establish its mode of production, that the question of ownership was broadly posed: possessions of the Church and the emigrated nobles were confiscated by the State and sold to the "people"... (in fact to the new bourgeoisie, the rich merchants, bankers and manufacturers who had previously developed and were the only ones who could buy them). But if the bourgeoisie had had the capacity to develop the new production relations before that moment, it was because it had since the beginning the ownership of crucial means of production, merchant ships and commodities, banks and manufactures, for example. If you consider the transition between slavery and the first forms of feudalism, at the end of the Roman Empire (III-V century), the basic change consisted since the beginning in a question of ownership, that of the slaves (who were also the main "mean of production"). The "coloni", the first form of "serves" were emancipated slaves. They ceased to be the property of their old owners. They remained attached to the land (which was sold with its coloni) but a part of their production became their own property. That is for the past. But it is the same if you consider the present transition. Free Software was also confronted a question of ownership (copyright/copyleft) since the beginning. "Peer production", and more generally "peer X" has developed using means of production (software like Linux or Apache, for example) which were "non-proprietary" software, the results of fights to prevent any private appropriation of them.
Production needs to have the "possession" (not in the sense of "private
ownership" but in the sense of having the control of something, as for example a primitive man needed to "posses" a "non-proprietary" stone to drive a stake into the land). How could new relations of *production* develop without dealing since the beginning with the question of possession of the means of *production*, even if it is only in an incipient form?

That being said, it is true that the question can be posed in a more global and definitive form when the new relations of production have developed. This is so because it is only *social practice* which can "convince" the majority of society to accept and develop the new forms of ownership/possession. For example, the bourgeoisie could obtain the support of small peasants, artisans and new wage-earners workers when expropriating the Church and the nobles, because the new production relations appeared to bring in practice more liberty and wealth.




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