![]() I’d seen River Rouge and it was nothing compared to this hot, wild, and hellish labor. ![]() I’d seen men tending machines in frantic haste, but I’d never seen men working like machines. Talking to a young black clerk dressed in Western clothes, Wright learns that these men make, at best, 7 shillings a day each, and each boat earns 12 shillings a trip to a freight vessel.ģ Clearly struck by the scene he had just witnessed, this productive force of social relations in motion at such scale, Wright’s dissonant reflection is provocative: These “wet and glistening black robots,” moving from the harbor to the shore at breakneck speed, did so because the harbor was too shallow to allow for ships to dock, but the port of Takoradi, some 170 miles away, would have meant a cut into profits of shipping companies that would have had to factor in the costs of sending their freight by rail to Accra from the less labor-intensive harbor. Shortly thereafter we find Wright observing stevedores unloading freighters along the seashore of Accra, a scene where the coordinated activity of this “army of men, naked save for ragged strips of cloth about their hips,” moved “parts of machines, wooden crates, sacks of cement” with their heads put together, some four at a time, as “scores of canoes, each holding twelve men who paddled like furies against the turbulent surf” moved towards the freight vessels to eventually follow suit. Here, however, he decides to “leave this question of accounting for the ‘economic laws’ of the Gold Coast to other and more astute minds,” for, he says, “I don’t believe that there’s any such thing!” The cultural admixture of a capitalism that “here reaches surrealistic dimensions” and “tribal customs” that possess a “seeming preference for direct cash dealing,” the passion amongst the people of Accra’s marketplaces for “visible, tactile methods of exchange of goods,” produces a flurry of activity that “reveals that the whole process of buying and selling is anarchy calling for the sharpest wits imaginable.” In his speculation upon the origins of this “petty financial game of wits,” Wright briefly considers that this “innocent chicanery” could likely have been gleaned during the five centuries of trade with Europeans, the inculcation of such practices from the “pretty sharp and unsavory methods of trading cheap trinkets for gold dust, a transaction which allowed for a wide leeway of bargaining” amidst the backdrop of the so-called Triangular Trade in enslaved Africans and colonial plunder. In Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, an account of his first trip to Africa in 1953 to witness the Ghanaian independence movement in the Gold Coast, Richard Wright articulates a curious contradiction amongst his many observations of this setting of momentous historical import. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.” - Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. ![]() to force them into the limit suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to 'regulate' wages, i.e. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the 'natural laws of production', i.e. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. The mute compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital's valorization requirements. ![]() The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. “It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |