A Materialist Analysis of Slavery and Sharecropping in the Southern United States DANIEL GAIDO The historical nature of Southern slavery and of the social relations established after its abolition have for a long time been a source of heated debate among American historians. During the last decades, historians have tended to divide into two camps: neoclassical economic historians, who identify slavery and sharecropping with capitalism, and social historians, more or less influenced by Marxism, who define them correctly as pre-capitalist social relations. Yet the contributions of the social historians have been marred by their empiricist approach and by their reluctance to avail themselves of the theoretical tools provided by classical and Marxist political economy, This work examines Southern slavery and sharecropping in the light of the studies of the European Marxists on ancient slavery and of the works of the classical political economists and Marx on French métayage. This comparison reveals the pre-capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after ihe abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans’ plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place ‘from above’ (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre-capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the Gaido is a Lecturer jn American History at Haifa University, Israel. e-mail: dgnido@stndy. haifa.ac.il, The author would like to thank the Fulbright Foundation and the Department of Advanced Studies at Haifa University for helping to fund the sesearch upon which this article is based. ‘The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.28, No.1, October 2000, pp.55-94 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON56 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES racist prejudices born of slavery among whites ~ thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life. Southern slavery and its many poisoned legacies in the shape of pre-capitalist relations of production, racism, division of the oppressed along ethnic lines, ¢tc., has been one of the central themes of American history. The debate on these subjects offers a not uncommon sight in American intellectual history: one’side has a theory which, because of its apologetic origins, leads them astray in their inquiries; while the other, instinctively feeling that something is wrong with the theory, criticizes it on an empirical basis, and is therefore unable to offer an alternative explanation of the phenomena under consideration. More specifically, one of the most important ‘developments’ in this field during the last decades has been the identification of plantation slavery and sharecropping with capitalism by the ‘new’ neoclassical economic historians (so-called ‘Cliometricians’), who claim to have reached this indisputable conclusion, not by empirically gathering bits and pieces of information like the traditional historians, but through the application of the latest models of economic science. The social historians, on the other hand, reject this view, correctly arguing the pre-capitalist character of these forms of labour organization, but their efforts have remained at an empiricist level because they have not been guided by a monist philosophy of history and an articulate body of econoinic theory. This articlé will examine how thé tools provided by. historical. materialism. and the labour. theory of. value. can be applied to the study of Southern history. SOME THEORETICAL PREMISES One of the many fetishes worshipped by the members of this employers’ civilization is the belief in universal gradual evolution. From the fact that technology and the natural sciences are obviously advancing quickly, uncritical minds rush to the conclusion that the same must happen in philosophy, the social sciences, art, music, and even politics. Unfortunately, the history of economic thought, no less than the history of the American presidency, fails to support the claims of the believers in that particular faith. Though most of the neoclassical economic historians which nowadays dominate American economic history almost to the exclusion of any other school are perhaps not aware of it, the theories and models which they attempt to apply to the study of American history had their origin in the rejection by official social science of the labour theory of value (whichSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 57 formed the basis of classical political economy) because of the anti- capitalist conclusions which the early British socialist and Marx reached through it. Classical political economy, whose foremost representatives were Adam Smith and David Ricardo, came to be based on the idea that the value of commodities is, in the last instance, determined by the socially necessary Jabour time employed in its production, and that therefore all the economic processes of bourgeois society must be explained with reference to this law of value ~ a theory usually known as the labour theory of value. Since profits are a deduction from the value produced by the labour of the workers, and rent is a deduction from profits, it followed from Ricardo’s elabouration of the labour theory of value that there is an inevitable antagonism between the three basic classes of capitalist society — hence the socialist deductions drawn from Ricardo’s analysis by a whole series of thinkers, of which Marx is only the most prominent.’ Yet once the class antagonisms whose economic basis classical political economy described with such disarming candor became acute, once a large class of wage earners appeared and started to press their demands on the political and intellectual arena, political economy was subjected to a radical revision. The theory of labour value was replaced by the subjective or utility theory of value on which modern marginalist (or, as it is known in the United States, neo-classical) economics rests - a theory based on a confusion between use and exchange value. A famous neoclassical historian of economic thought has succinctly described the historical background against which these doctrines arose in the following words: ‘It was the rise of Marxism and Fabianism in the 1880s and 1890s that finally made subjective value theory socially and politically relevant’ [Blaug, 1997: 292], Another student of the history of political economy described this process in more detail as follows: It is not difficult to see in this change a reflection of the altered position of industrial capitalism. The main factor was now, not hostility from the landowners, although that had not disappeared; but the challenge of the working class. The theoretical necessity was to remove the antithesis between the two classes of income, profits and wages; that is, to remove the labour theory of vaiue. Capital had to be made as legitimate a source of income as labour [Roll, 1952: 383]. Lest our readers should think that these views are the exclusive property of European students of the history of political economy, we will also quote the testimony of one of the contributors to a well-known American encyclopedia of the social sciences:58 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES The marginal theories of distribution were developed after Marx; their bearing on the doctrines of Marxian socialism is so striking as to suggest that the challenge of Marxism acted as a stimulus to the search for more satisfactory [for whom?] explanations. They undermine the basis of Marxian surplus value doctrine by basing value on utility instead of on labour cost and furnish a substitute for all forms of exploitation doctrine, Marxian or other, in the theory that all factors of production are not only productive but receive rewards based on their assignable contributions to the joint product (Clark, 1953). In other words, capital was made as legitimate a source of income by developing theories of value destined to show that profits are not a deduction from the surplus labour of the workers, not the product of exploitation, but have their origin in capital itself. This is not the place to offer a detailed criticism of contemporary ‘economics’ from the point of view of the labour theory of value — especially since other authors have already done this competently. The common denominator of all the different school of official economic ‘science’ is that they reject the labour theory of value on which classical and Marxist political economy are based. Marx’s remarks on the attempts to build an economic science without a materialist basis are therefore relevant for all of them: Every child knows that a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses: of -the- total labour of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with, What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself, in a state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products, Science [i.e., the science of political economy] consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself (Marx to L. Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, in Marx and Engels (1953: 251~2]). The fact that human society is, first and foremost, a form of labour organization, and that therefore the science dealing with the dynamics ofSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 59. capitalist society, political economy, cannot but be based on a labour theory of value, is so obvious that it seems incredible that the vast majority of economists could reject it. Yet as long as there are social classes interested in arresting the process of historical development, theoretical thinking will be condemned to return to its most primitive and aberrant forms. As Balzac once said, the labour theory of value may be correct from the point of view of the critique of pure reason, but from the point of view of the critique of impure reason ... . THE MATERIALIST INTERPRETATION OF PLANTATION SLAVERY Neoclassical economic historians approach the study of Southern slavery from a metaphysical point of view. They do not analyse the question of the relationship between slavery and capitalism in its historical development, linking it, for instance, with the degree of technological and demographic evolution, but assume it to be fixed and unchanging. Already Nobel laureate Douglass North, in his book The Econontic Growth of the United States, written in 1961, argued that the Civil War had been ‘a costly and bitter interruption’ of American economic growth because slavery had not been an obstacle to the development of industrial capitalism [North, 1961: V}. Modern “Cliometricians’ go even further, totally identifying plantation slavery with capitalism. The second section of the third chapter of the latest ‘Cliometric’ masterpiece on southern slavery, Robert Fogel’s Without Consent er Contract, for instance, carries the title ‘A Flexible, Highly Developed Form of Capitalism’. According to Fogel, ‘evidence of the responsiveness of slaveowners to prices and other economic signals is quite evident throughout the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. Production in all of the major southem staples waxed and waned in response to prices.’ Not surprisingly, ‘the most dramatic evidence of the responsiveness of slaveholders to market signals was the way in which they adjusted to the booming demand for cotton’ [Fogel, 1989; 64]. His line of reasoning runs something like this: since plantation slavery was oriented towards commodity production, and since the slaveowners were as obsessed about money-making (that is to say, about extracting surplus value out of their human property) as any good bourgeois, slavery must have been no less advanced than the social formations which predominated outside the South: capitalism and simple commodity production, ‘Though it is true that commodity production, which was a common feature of both plantation slavery and capitalism, mightily increases the possibilities of surphus-value-extraction and therefore the greed of the possessing classes, that is not a sufficient reason for identifying both modes of production. ‘It is a familiar story that mankind, when confronted in America with a vast and trackless wilderness awaiting exploitation, threw off its ancient60 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES shackles of caste and privilege an set forth upon the road of freedom’, Abbot Emerson Smith remarked: ‘Among the social institutions found most useful in the course of this march were those of African slavery and white servitude’ [Smith, 1947: 226]. Bound labour was established in the colonies as the only way to extract surplus labour under conditions of ‘labour scarcity’ (unlike today, when, thanks God, we have decent rates of unemployment), and crystallized as black slavery in the tropical and semi- tropical colonies because they had the physical and climatic conditions necessary to develop an extensive division of labour with temperate Europe.’ But when, as a result of demographic growth made possible by technological development, a pool of propertyless wage earners appeared in the East large enough to propel the so-called ‘industrial revolution’ and to forge solid economic links with the Northwestern farmers, slavery was doomed: in the United States as in the rest of the American continent, capitalist industrial development brought about the abolition of slavery during the nineteenth century. The rise and fall of American slavery was therefore a dialectical process, by which bound labour, originally a stimulus to the development of commodity production and therefore of Northern and European capitalism, turned into its opposite and had to be removed to enable the further development of capitalist social relations. The task of the Cliometricians has been made easier by the inadequate view of slavery held by the opposite school of students of southern slavery, led by Eugene Genovese. These historians, influenced by Marxism, correctly maintained that slavery was a pre-bourgeois society which had to give way to new social relations at a certain stage of development of the productive forces, but they deviated from historical materialism by arguing that the slaveowners’ motivations were different from those of the bourgeoisie since they were not capitalists but ‘paternalist’ aristocrats. These historians have yet to prove that this strange pater familias, who sold his ‘children’ (often literally) without remorse, was less interested in his rate of profit than his Northern confrere. Marx, on the other contrary, believed that ‘on the American plantations, the capitalist conception [of profit} prevails’ (Marx, 1991: 940}. He described the character of Southern slavery, its metamorphosis from the colonial period to the cotton plantation regime, and the reasons for it, in the following words: In any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange value but the use value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and here no boundless thirst for surplus value arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity overwork becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange value in itsSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 61 specific independent money-form, in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognized form of over work. (See Diodorus Siculus, Bibi. Hist., Lib. 3, c. 12), Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave labour, corvée labour, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over- work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc. Hence the Negro labour in the Southern states of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in seven years’ of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus labour itself (Marx, 1956: 260}. We see that Marx (who was, among many other things, a classical scholar) distinguishes between the slavery of antiquity, which arose out of the primitive communism of the Greek and Roman gentes, and modern slavery based on the labour of blacks as it developed in America, especially after industrial revolution in England brought about a growing demand for cotton. In the case of the American plantations, he argued where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitalist and landowner [Marx, 1971: 301-3, emphasis in the original]. And in the Grundrisse he remarked: Negro slavery, a purely industrial slavery (which is, besides, incompatible with the development of bourgeois society and disappears with it), presupposes wage-labour, and if other, free states with wage labour did not exist alongside it, if instead, the Negro states were isolated, then all the social conditions there would immediately turn into pre-civilized forms {Marx, 1981: 224].62 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Plantation slavery had therefore a combined character. Since modern slavery arose out of the first stages of capitalist development, the motives for the colonial slaveowners to erect their plantations were the same of the bourgeoisie of the metropolis: to obtain at least the average rate of profit, and if possible more (to the extent that an average rate of profit existed in those primitive conditions). Given the ‘labour shortage’ from which poor entrepreneurs suffered in those black colonial days, the planters found no voluntaries to work in their estates, so that the planters had to recur to bound labour, first white and temporary, then black and permanent — which both fitted and reinforced the racist notions of the bearers of European ‘civilization’ to the American ‘wilderness’. Nevertheless, precisely because they employed bound labour, the mode of production they implanted in the South was nor capitalist, although it shared many common traits with it, nor was the transition to a truly capitalist system to be as smooth as the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist commodity production in the North (in relative terms, that is, comparing the Grange, Populism, and Progressivism with the Civil War). The Cliometricians’ identification of capitalism and slavery has its source in the original sin of marginalist economics, which attempts to analyse the process of capitalist production by means of categories derived from an ahistorical individualist view of the sphere of commodity circulation. This, as Marx remarked long ago, is the preferred terrain of bourgeois political economy, because in exchange the dramatis personae of the capitalist tragedy appear as buyers and sellers of commodities in possession Of equal rights and constrained only by their own free will - whereas. in the sphere.of production they are clearly divided into wage workers and owners of the means of production, into exploited and exploiting classes [Marx, 1956: 195-6]. These views provided the theoretical basis for the contributions of European Marxists (Ciccotti, Salvioli, Bloch, etc.) to the study of classical slavery and its relation to the capitalist mode of production, which went strangely unmentioned in the debate on the nature of American slavery. In his preface to the German tanslation of Giuseppe Salvioli's Le capitalisme dans le monde antique, Kautsky criticized the periodization of economic history of Karl Bucher (who divided it into three periods, characterized by the production of use values, production for exchange and general commodity production), arguing that commodity production is not the defining trait of capitalism, because commodities can be produced also by means of bound labour, such as slaves [Kautsky, 1912: VII-XX].- It is impermissible to emphasize one of the aspects of capitalist production (general commodity production), Kautsky argued, while abstracting from its distinguishing character: the fact that wage labourers employed by capitalists owning the means ofSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 63 production produced these commodities. ‘It is characteristic’, he concluded, “that the contemporary bourgeois theory of economic development, like the bourgeois theory of value, the marginal utility theory (Grenznuizentheorie), avoids dealing with the process of production and by “economy” understands only the circulation of finished goods’ fibid.: XIV].° He attributed this omission of fundamental productive relations to the inoffensiveness of the circulation process compared to such potentially explosive facts as the private ownership of the means of production by a tiny minority of the population, and the propertytess character of the wage earners composing the overwhelming majority of the population. We see that the emphasis of the Cliometricians on exchange relations as the fundamental taxonomie criterion for the study of social formations has a long history, rooted in the social origin of the theories they attempt to apply to the analysis of American history. In the case of American plantation slavery, foreign trade statistics can give a hint as to the degree of commodity production in a given country, but by themselves they cannot show the degree of development of capitalism (of capitalist commodity production based on wage labour), as shown by the fact that the West Indies during America’s colonial period had much higher levels of per capita exports than the mainland British colonies, and that southern cotton alone made up 57.5 per cent of the total American exports during the antebellum period.’ The historically progressive or regressive character of a social system at a given historical period is determined by the social relations established in the sphere of production, not by exchange relations. American historical experience amply demonstrates that simple commodity production is both the logical and the historical precondition for the development of capitalist commodity production (Marx’s Capital begins with an analysis of simple commodity production and only then passes to the analysis of capitalist commodity production based on wage labour), and that the transition to wage iabour - the only way to ensure a rapid development of the productive forces in nineteenth-century America ~ was much more quick and less painful in those regions where petty bourgeois farming predominated.! American slavery has been defined as ‘a bastard child of merchant capital’ [Genovese and Fox-Genovese, 1983]. The definition is problematic because American slavery, which was decaying at the time of the American Revolution, experienced a renaissance and assumed its most vicious form precisely as a result of the transformation of British merchant capitalism into industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, We can say therefore that cotton slavery was a quite legitimate child of early English industrial capitalism; what remains true is that capitalist industrial development in the nineteenth century, as already64 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES indicated, brought about the abolition of siavery all over the world. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude described succinctly the dialectical character of this process, by which the main reason for the development of slavery became the main cause for its abolition, in the following words: Forced rural labour proved necessary to early capitalist development yet ultimately had to be swept away to permit further advances. A. number of economic historians and econometricians have argued that slavery presented no real impediment to economic growth and industrialization. Still, they have yet to provide an example of a slave society that moved along that route [Hahn and Prude, 1985: 12)? All the claims to the contrary of the Cliometricians notwithstanding, the historical actors themselves grasped the essential cause of the conflict which led to the Civil War correctly when they argued that, economically and demographically, the slaveowners were fighting a losing battle against the census returns. The immediate cause of this itrepressible conflict between Northern capitalist and Southern slaveowners was the clash between the expansion of petty-bourgeois small farming, providing the widest possible home market for industry under the given technological conditions, and pre-capitalist slave agriculture, as witnessed by the decisive role the Midwest played in bringing about the conflict ~ for example, the adoption by the Republican party of the Western demand to forbid the extension of slavery in the territories. From an international point of view, the Civil War was also the result of the struggle between the Northern eapitalists-and. the British -bourgeoisie- over-the- American. market: ‘If national unity was the principal battle cry of the North it was because capitalism needed assurance of a united home market for its industry’ - James Allen remarked in his excellent book, The Negro Question in the United States, Through its tremendous cotton exports the South offered the principal base for the dominance of foreign, especially English, manufacture in the American market. The struggie of the native industrial capitalists against the European for dominance of the home market was therefore indissolubly bound up with the struggle against the slave system. The support of the English ruling classes for the Confederacy was a reflection of this; the interpreted the war against the South as a war against themselves [Allen, 1936: 35]. The historical role of the Civil War was to accelerate the transition from bound to wage labour in the South, and its outcome decided the path of capitalist development to be followed by the South after emancipation.SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 65 What distinguished the US experience from that of most other American countries is that this process was carried out in a revolutionary way ~ even if it was, as Eric Foner argues, an ‘unfinished’ bourgeois-democratic revolution [Foner, 1989: 214]. The Civil War, like all social revolutions, throws a revealing light on the way class society works. “The career of aggression pursued by the Slave Power in North America for the iast fifty years’, JE. Cairnes wrote in 1863 in what is still the best study of the economy and politics of the antebellum South, ‘furnishes a remarkable example of what a small body of men may effect against the most vital interests of human society, when, thoroughly understanding their position and its requirements, they devote themselves deliberately, resolutely, and unscrupulously to the accomplishment of their ends’ [Cairnes, 1968: 255}. The number of casualties in the conflict, leaving aside the financial costs of the war, was three times higher than the number of exploiters for the sake of whose human property the war was fought: 622,511 men were killed and 381,881 wounded in a conflict involving no more than 300,000 slaveowners. Adam Smith described the economic character of this narrow oligarchy as follows: A gentleman who farms a part of his own estate, after paying the expense of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates, and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation, but frequently of its profit [Swuith, 1951: 22-3]. Marx commented on this passage: Adam Smith emphasized how in his time (and this is stil ue for our own, as far as the plantation economy in tropical and sub-tropical countries is concerned) rent and profit are still not always separate, since the landowner is also the capitalist, as Cato for instance was on his estates, This separation, however, is precisely the precondition for the capitalist mode of production, the basis of slavery similarly standing in invariable contradiction with the concept of this mode [Marx, 1991: 923] The Civil War clearly revealed the double character of the planters as both a slaveowning and a landowning class, and after depriving them of their human property raised the issue of the future landed property regime of the South.66 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES At first sight, it would seem that emancipation without agrarian reform created the ideal conditions for capitalist development in this section, since the black population was transformed into a propertyless mass of potential wage earners — yet we know that the South remained backward for a long time after the Civil War when compared with the other sections of the country. The main cause of this backwardness was the absence in the South of those social relations that made of the US as a whole the most dynamic capitalist economy in the world at that time. As Lenin remarked in a similar historical context: Only caricature Marxists could have believed that the divorcement of the peasants from the land in 1861 {the date of the abolition of serfdom in Russia] guaranteed the development of capitalism. On the contrary, it would have been a guarantee — and so in fact it turned out to be -~- of bondage, i.e., of semi-serf tenant farming and labour rent, ie., corvée economy, which exceedingly retarded the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive forces in Russian agriculture. The more land the peasants received when they were emancipated, and the lower the price they paid for it, the faster, wider, and freer would have been the development of capitalism in Russia, the higher would have been the home market, the faster would have been the introduction of machinery into production; the more, in a word, would the economic development of Russia have resembled that of America [Lenin, {964a: 240]. The minimum task of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, the accomplishment of which guaranteed the national dominance. of the bourgeoisie, was the destruction of chattel slavery. But once this objective was reached, the revolutionary forces split. While most of its leaders, including Lincoln himself, declared themselves satisfied with the formai emancipation of the slaves, and hoped for the rapid restoration of white rule in the latifundia-ridden South to the union, the goal of the consistently revolutionary wing of the Northern bourgeoisie, the Radical Republicans, was to re-create as far as possible in the South the rural social relations that had been so favorable to capital accumulation in the North by confiscating the land of the ex-slaveowners. They were defeated in this struggle not so much by the resistance of the former slaveowners (they were after all militarily powerless at the end of the war) as by that of the Northern bourgeoisie, which was opposed to land reform in the South out of fear for the security of private property in general. The underlying fear of the capitalist class was the danger that was involved in the rising movement of the lower classes throughout the country: the freedmen in the South, the Granger movement in the West, andSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 67 the workers in the industrial cities. Peter Kolchin found that ‘the great majority of basiness papers that had anything at all to say on the subject of Reconstruction were decidedly hostile to the Radicals’ [Kolchin, 1967: 196). The 9 July 1867 issue of the New York Times explained the nature of the conflict over Reconstruction in the following words: If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labour against capital ... there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slaveholder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North ... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southem land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi (quoted in Foner [1980: 144]). On 21 June 1871, the New York Tribune noticed that there were six thousand native adult whites in Georgia who cannot read or write, and if to them were added the whole bulk of the negro population, so vast a mass of ignorance would be found that, if combined for any political purpose, it would sweep away all the opposition the intelligent class might make. Many thoughtful men are apprehensive that the ignorant voters will, in the future, form a party by themselves as dangerous to the interests of society as the communists of France (quoted in Hesseltine [1935: 206}). ‘The failure of Radical Republicans’ plans meant that the break-up of the plantations took place gradually and painfully in the retrograde form of sharecropping. In the decades after the Civil War there was an enormous decrease in the average acreage per farm in the South. Census officials counted (correctly from an economic point of view) as separate farms not only the new farms created in the Midwest and West, but also the small plots resulting from the division of the old plantations and farmed by sharecroppers and tenants. The data they collected show that the average size of farms dropped dramatically after 1870. Between 1860 and 1900 the average farm throughout the eleven states of the Deep South declined from 390 to [22 acres. In the main cotton states the drop was much greater. In Alabama, for example, the average farm contained 346 acres in 1860 and only 93 in 1900. The story was the same in Mississippi, the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas. By 1900 farms averaged less than 100 acres in several southern states. In South Carolina the figure was only 91 acres [Fite, 1984: 15].68 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Yet because of the triumph of reaction after the Civil War, this historically progressive break-up of pre-capitalist latifundia did not led the renovation of small farming ander capitalism (a necessary process in most of the South given the state of agricultural technology) but to the predominance of sharecropping arrangements between landlords and tenants. The much-vaunted ‘success’ of slavery in developing the productivity of labour (the only categorical imperative known by history) can be gauged by the agrarian social relations that resulted from its abolition. The new small farms could have been cultivated by independent small farmers as in the North, but, due to the failure of agrarian reform, this was not to be. Instead, in most of the Southern countryside slavery was replaced by sharecropping. Statistics show that in 1880, the proportion of southern farms worked by tenants was 36.2%, in 1920, 49.6%. These percentages are significantly higher than in the states of the North (19.2% and 28.1% respectively) and much higher than in the western states (14% and 17.7%). Moreover, in the Cotton South in 1880 51% of all farms were tenanted, of which 72% were sharecropped, the rest being rented for a fixed cash rent. This burden feel overwhelmingly on the black population: only 16% of total white land was tenanted, compared to 60% for blacks; 9% of white land was sharecropped and 40% for blacks [Byres, 1996: 297-9]. Sharecropping as a system of agsarian relations was virtually identical with the métayer system which prevailed in France before the Revolution and, generally speaking, in the most backward-regions of South-Western Europe (in Italy under the name of mezzadria, in Spain under the name of aparceria, etc.)."" In order to understand the character of the social relations established in the Southern countryside after the abolition of slavery it is necessary to recall briefly the place which sharecropping occupied in the systems of the classical political economists and Marx. THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF SHARECROPPING ‘Though capitalist relations of production alteady appeared in the cities of Northern Italy the fifteenth century, capitalism first became the dominant form of labour organization in England in the sixteenth century. English capitalism, moreover, was characterized from the beginning by its agrarian character, by an early process of class differentiation in the countryside resulting in the tripartite division of the agrarian class structure into landowners, capitalist tenants and agricultural proletarians - what Marx called the ‘Trinity Formula’. Kautsky described this system as follows:SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 69 Under the system of capitalist tenant farming — the lease system — the three great categories of income in capitalist society appear sharply demarcated. The owner of the land and the owner of the other means of production, the capitalist, are two separate individuals, both of whom confront the wage labourers exploited by the capitalists. The worker receives a wage, the capitalist the profit of enterprise, and the landowner ground rent [Kautsky, 1988: 88]. We can trace this division in the writings of all the major English political economists. Adam Smith, for instance, wrote in the Wealth of Nations: The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself into three parts: the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived [Sinith, 1951: 109]. David Ricardo began his major book, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, with the same description: The produce of the earth ~ all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community, namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated. But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the names of rent, profit, and wages, will be essentially different; depending mainly on the actual fertility of the soil, on the accumulation of capital and population, and on the skill, ingenuity, and instruments employed in agriculture (Ricardo, 1917: 1]. Yet this class structure was not characteristic of the countries of continental Europe. In France, notably, agriculture was enormously backward compared to Engiand because of the much greater strength of feudal survivals and the ruinous taxation policy of the absolutist state. Describing the condition of eighteenth-century French agriculture, Isaac Rubin pointed out that unlike in England, the extensive spread of tenant farming in the 18th century, which went hand in hand with the improvement and70 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES rationalization of agriculture, was rarely to be found in France. In the French countryside of the 18th century the role played by the bourgeois forms of landed property and rent was still insignificant compared to ownership where a cens was paid or to sharecropping by métayers, both of which were enmeshed in a vast number of survivals from the feudal system. Most landless peasants rented a piece of land from the seigneur or from another owner, paying for it in Kind with half of their harvest. Having no resources for equipment, these sharecroppers or métayers (so called because they gave up half of their harvest to the landowner) often received seed, livestock, or simple agricu/tural implements from the landlord. If lack of means meant that the cens-paying peasant worked the land by primitive methods, cultivation was even worse on lands worked by the métayers (Rubin, 1979: 94-5, emaphasis in the original]."" The analysis of agrarian social selations and their influence on the development of capitalism therefore played a central role in the theories of the most outstanding representatives of French classical political economists, the Physiocrats; who, as the theoretical representatives of the French rural bourgeoisie in the second half of the eighteenth century, set themselves the task of replacing the seigneurial system with capitalist tenant farming along English lines. The Physiocratic plans for rationalizing French agriculture-with the help of an-enlightened-monarchy-came-to-nothing as a result of the outbreak of the French Revolution, but their writings, besides playing an important part in the development of the science of political economy, offer a wealth of material regarding French sharecropping practices and their influence on economic development, as we will immediately see. The famous Swiss economist and petty-bourgeois critic of capitalism Sismondi retained the Physiocratic emphasis on the analysis of different system of land tenure besides the capitalist system of lease-holding typical of England, Among the critics of classical political economy, special mention should be made of the outstanding English economist Richard Jones. This Anglican priest, who was moreover a politically conservative lecturer at Cambridge, was called by Hilferding ‘the most important forerunner of the materialist conception of history’, because ‘of all the economists before Marx, he was the one who most clearly recognized and exposed the historical character of capitalism’ [{Hilferding, 1911-12: 346-7]. Jones complained that ‘the general principles of political economy have hitherto been laid down by English writers with an especial and exclusive view to the peculiar form andSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 7] structure of society existing in Great Britain’ — a society characterized by the fact that the bulk of the labourers in both industry and agriculture were wage workers employed by a class of capitalists owning the means of production and different from the possessors of the soi! [Jones, 1964: E]. Such a disposition of classes, Jones argued in 1833, can be seen only in England and the Low Countries, and in certain places in Western Europe and America; it did not describe the social structure of humanity during most of its history, not even that of most of the globe at that time. He showed that the English system of land tenure on which the Ricardian ~ system was based (which he called ‘farmers’ rents’ to distinguish them from the traditional ‘peasant rents’) presupposed the separation between the capitalist farmer and the agricultural wage labourer — or, in other words, the extension of the capitalist mode of production from the cities to the countryside. It is only when this condition is fulfilled, and when there is a free transfer of capital between industry and agriculture, so that the capitalist farmer wil] not rent a land if he does obtain less than the average rate of profit, that rent consist ‘merely of surplus profits’ (Jones, 1956: 188}. This mode of production, Jones asserted in 1831, does not exist in more than ‘one-hundredth part of the cultivated surface of the habitable globe’ [ibid.: 14]. In order to explain its apparition he drew a sketch of the history of the systems of land tenure highly reminiscent of Marx’s latter evolutionary classification into labour rent, produce rent and money rent. [Jones, 1964b: 198-211; 1964c: 430-39]. The historical significance of his studies was summarized by Marx in the following way: “The real science of political economy ends by regarding the bourgeois production relations as merely historical ones, leading to higher relations in which the antagonism on which they are based is resolved’ [Marx, 197i: 429]. Jones, like the classical bourgeois political economists and Marx after them, regarded sharecropping as an archaic form of land tenure marking the transition from the feudal property regime on land to the system of capitalist tenant farming. Marx’s reference to sharecropping can be found in the third volume of Capital, where he, following Jones, offered an evolutionary classification of the different forms of ground rent which included: labour rent, rent in kind, money rent, sharecropping and small-scale peasant ownership, and finally capitalist ground rent. He had this to say about sharecropping: As a transitional form from the original form of rent to capitalist rent, we can take the system of share-cropping, where the tenant farmer provides, besides his labour (his own or others’), a part of the operating capital, the landowner providing not only the land but also a further portion of capital (c.g. livestock), and the product being72 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES divided between share-cropper and landowner in definite proportions, which vary between different countries. The farmer, here, has insufficient capital for full capitalist cultivation. The share that the landowner draws, on the other hand, does not have the pure form of rent. It may include interest on the capital he advances, and a surplus rent on top of this. It may absorb the entire surplus labour of the farmer, or leave him a greater or smaller share of this. The essential thing, however, is that rent here no longer appears as the normal form of surplus value. On the one hand, the sharecropper. whether he applies his own labour or that of others, has a claim to a share of the product not in his capacity as worker but as owner of a part of his tools, as his own capitalist. On the other hand the landowner claims his share not exclusively on the basis of his ownership of the land but also as the lender of capital [Marx, 1991: 939].” Two characteristics of sharecropping according to Marx (and, as we have seen, according to classical political economy as well) should be emphasized: first, the fact that sharecropping is a pre-capitalist form of rent, due to the scarcity of capital accumulation and the consequent underdevelopment of a class of capitalist farmers employing wage labour, secondly, the mixture of revenue forms, both in the case of the landowner (profit mixed with ground rent) and in the case of the cropper if he advanced any portion of the capital (wages plus a portion of profit), already remarked by the Physiocrat Turgot and Richard Jones [Turgot, 1914a: VoLIL, 450; Jones, 1914: 73]. SHARECROPPERS AND METAYERS The best way to assess the influence of sharecropping on Southern economic and social development is to show the way in which it developed in Europe during the period of transition between feudalism and capitalism. In his section on the genesis of the capitalist farmer in England, Marx remarked that it first appeared in the form of the bailiff, himself a serf. This, in turn, was replaced during the second haif of the fourteenth century by a farmer, whom the landlord provides with seed, cattle and implements. His condition is not very different from that of the peasant. Only he exploits more wage-labour. Soon he becomes a métayer, a half-farmer. He advances one part if the agricultural stock, the landlord the other. The two divide the total product in proportions determined by contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to give place to the farmer proper, who makes his own capital breed by employing wage-labourers, and pays a part of the surplus product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as rent {Marx, 1956: 814-15].SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 73 This process took place in England during the last third of the fifteenth century and the whole of the sixteenth century; in France it developed much later, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘The leader of the Physiocratic school, Frangois Quesnay, one of the most important figures of classical French political economy and author of the famous Tableau économique, which for the first time depicted the entire process of capitalist reproduction, published in 1756 an article called Fermiers in the Encyclopédie, which was a long celebration of the rich capitalist farmers (fermiers) and a critique of sharecropping (métayer) agricufture, which according to his studies prevailed in seven-eighths of the territory of France (Jes sept-huitiémes du royaume) [Quesnay, 1969a: 184]. ‘The only way to increase the productivity of agriculture, and of providing workers for industrial development, Quesnay argued, is to follow the model of English agriculture and replace inefficient sharecropping — which in another opportunity he called ‘the last resort of a ruined agriculture’ Va petite culture ... qui s'exécute par des métayers ... est la derniére ressource de l'agriculture ruinée) - for the English system of leasing the land to capitalist farmers, who will cultivate it along capitalist lines by using wage labourers [Quesnay, 1969b; 340]. The problem is, he continued, that capital accumulation has not developed sufficiently to produce a large class of fermiers with the funds necessary to advance wages and pay beforehand the expenses of cultivation; that is why a system as poorly calculated to develop the productivity of agricultural labour as sharecropping continues to dominate the French countryside. His proposal was to accelerate capital accumulation and the development of this class - whose wealth, he argued, anticipating Adam Smith, ‘makes the prosperity of the nation’ (ce sont les richesses des fermiers qui fertilisent les terres, qui multiplient les bestiaux, qui attirent, qui fixent les habitants des campagnes et qui font la force et la prospérité de la nation) ~ by lightening the tax burden on them through the imposition of an impét unique on ground rent (un simple impét réel, établi uniquement et sans frais sur le produit net des biens-fonds); the first in a long series of bourgeois programmes to accelerate capitalist development by shifting the burden of taxation on the shoulders of the pre-capitalist classes [Quesnay, 1969a: 188-9; 1969b: 337-9], Quesnay’s analysis was further developed by his disciple Anne-Robert- Jacques Turgot, Louis XIV’s renowned Minister of Finance, many of whose measures, later reversed, anticipated the reforms adopted during the French Revolution, and author of the well-known book Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, where, besides offering a general statement of Physiocratic doctrine, he showed a much greater insight into the nature of wage labour and industrial profit than Quesnay. In this work, Turgot enumerated the disadvantages of sharecropping (métayerie ou colonage74 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES partiaire), a system of cultivation in which ‘as practiced in most of the territory of France, the landowner makes all the advances of money necessaries for the cultivation of the soil’ [Turgot, 1914a: 549]. Under this system of land tenure, he argued, the landowners can advance only small sums of money, which produce a very mediocre revenue (le propri¢taire fait lui-méme des avances médiocres qui lui produisent un tres médiocre revenu) [ibid.: 571-2]. Then he praised the English method of land leasing to capitalist farmers employing wage labour (/e fermage) in the following words: This method of leasing the land is the most advantageous both the landowners and to the cultivators; it is practiced in all places where rich farmers are able to make the advances of money necessary for cultivation; and, as they are able to invest much more labour and manure on the land, it results in a prodigious growth of production and rent. In Picardie, Normandie, the outskirts of Paris, and most of the provinces of the North of France, fermiers cultivate ands. In the provinces of the South, they are cultivated by sharecroppers (métayers), thus, the provinces of the North are incomparably richer and better cultivated than those of the South [ibid.: 550}. The superiority of capitalist land-leasing over sharecropping — which in another work he termed ‘the distinction between big and small cultivation’ (cette distinction entre la grande et la petite culture) [Turgot, 1914b: 467] - could be seen by its effect on the productivity of agricultural labour: in the places where capitalist farming was common, cultivation was carried out by means of horses, whereas where. sharecropping predominated, oxen were used [ibid.: 450]. Unfortunately, he concluded, sharecropping dominates four-sevenths of the territory of France (le pays de petite culture, c’est-d- dire au moins les quatre septiomes de l’étendue du Royaume) {ibid.: 449). The Physiocrats’ views on sharecropping were endorsed by Adam Smith, the economist of the manufactory period of capitalist economy, who, also holding an evolutionary view of the systems of land tenancy, attributed its appearance to the dissolution of serfdom in Burope. Smith’s analysis of sharecropping (contained in The Wealth of Nations, Book Three, Chapter If: ‘On the Discouragement of Agriculture in the ancient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire’) runs as follows: A villain enfranchised, and at the same time allowed to continue in possession of the land, having no stock of his own, could cultivate it only by means of what the landlord advanced to him, and must, therefore, have been what the French called a métayer. It could never, however, be the interest even of this last species of cultivators to laySLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 75 out, in the further improvement of the land, any part of the little stock which they might save from their own share of the produce, because the lord, who laid out nothing, was to get one-half of whatever it produced. The tithe, which is but a tenth of the produce, is found to be a very great hindrance to improvement. A tax, therefore, which amounted to one half must have been an effectual bar to it. It might be the interest of the métayer to make the land produce as much as could be brought out of it by means of the stock furnished by the proprietor; but it could never be his interest to mix any part of his own with it. In France ... five parts out of six of the whole kingdom are said to be still occupied by this species of cultivators [Smish, 1951: 168]. Arthur Young, who had the opportunity to observe in detail the workings of the sharecropping system in pre-Revolutionary France, reported: Métayers [métayage] is the tenure under which perhaps seven-eighths of the lands in France are held, It pervades almost every part of Sologne, Berry, La Marche, Limousin, Anjou, Burgundy, Bourbonnais, Nivernais, Auvergne, etc. and is found in Bretagne, Maine, Provence, and all the southern counties. In Champagne, there are many at fiers franc, which is the third of the produce, but in general is it half. The landlord commonly furnishes half the cattle and half the seed, and the métayer labour, implements, and taxes; but in some districts the landlord bears a share of these [ Young, 1929: 296]. He noted a number a evils accompanying sharecropping, such as the smallness of farms, the poverty of the cultivators, their lack of education, their state of perpetual indebtedness to the landiord, etc., which reads like a description of the evils of the postbellum South, and concluded: ‘In this most miserable of all the modes of letting land, after running the hazard of such losses, fatal in many instances, the defrauded landlord receives a contemptible rent; the farmer is in the lowest state of poverty; the land is miserably cultivated; and the nation suffers as severely as the parties themselves’ [ibid.: 298}. Modern French historians confirmed the classical political economists’ assessment of the influence of sharecropping in the France of the ancien régime. Marc Bloch, for instance, asserted that métayage ‘is found throughout the West between Maine and Perche from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and appears at much the same time in Artois’. From the sixteenth century it ‘showed a sudden increase, which was maintained at lest until the eighteenth century: formerly restricted to a few regions, and even a rarity, it came to cover the whole of France’. Yet significantly, ‘although found nearly everywhere, geographically speaking métayage was76 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES associated above all with impoverished regions, where the peasantry was totally without reserves of capital’ [Bloch, 1966: 146-8]. Georges Lefebvre attributed the early development of capitalist farming in the North of France to the influence of Flanders and the proximity of Paris (Lefebvre, 1963: 363}. Even in the département of the North, however, the proportion of land occupied by the capitalist farmers (fermiers) before the French Revolution was very small: no more than 12 per cent, according to A. Ado [Ado, 1977: 136], In 1819 Sismondi remarked that the French Revolution had ‘prodigiously multiplied the class of proprietary peasants’ through the confiscation of and sale of the lands of the biens nationaux. He believed that in his time more than three million families, representing more than fifteen million individuals, owned the soil on which they worked [Sismondi, 1819: Vol.I, 174~5]. Nevertheless, sharecropping continued to exist ‘in the provinces south of the Loire, where there are few cities, few intellectual centers, few communications, where the peasants are profoundly ignorant, bound to their habits, to their agricultural routines, and incapable of following the march of civilization of the rest of France’. Whereas sharecroppers in the Toscane, for instance, had to some extent participated in the progress of civilization because they composed but half of the population and cities where numerous, in the most backward and reactionary provinces of France, such as the Vendée, the class of sharecroppers formed nine-tenths of the population, which had remained stagnant during four or five centuries. ‘In France’, Sismondi concluded, ‘a liberal and constitutional government will only be. solidiy established in the counter-revolutionary provinces south of the Loire when a part of the lands shall be the property of the cultivators, and a different class of peasants, more forward-looking and educated, shall be interspersed with the shareeroppers’ [ibid.: 192-3]. Writing 12 years later than Sismondi, Richard Jones, in his study of the historical evolution of the different forms of land tenure, placed sharecropping in an intermediary stage between serfdom and capitalist agriculture. The existence of such a race of tenantry [the sharecroppers} indicates some improvement in the body of the people, compared with the state of things in which serf rents originate. They are entrusted with the task of providing the food and annual revenue of the proprietor, without his superintending, or interfering with, their exertions. The métayer, then must be somewhat superior in skill and character to the serfs, whose industry can be safely depended on by the proprietor, only while exercised under his direct control, and whose rents are therefore paid,SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 77 not in produce, but in labour. But still the advance of stock by the proprietor, and the abandonment of the management of cultivation to the actual labourers, indicate the continued absence of an intermediate class of capitalists, of men able to advance from their own accumulations the food of the labourer and the stock by which he is assisted; and thus to take upon themselves the direction of agriculture. The métayer system indicates, therefore, a state of society, advanced, when compared with that in which serf rents prevail; backward, when compared with that in which rents paid by capitalists make their appearance. Jones found sharecropping in various part of the world but believed that ‘it is in the western division of continental Europe, in Italy, Savoy, Piedmont, the Valteline, France, and Spain, that the pure métayer tenantry is the most common’ [Jones, 1914: 74-5]. In the classical tradition, he argued that ‘no very marked change in the efficiency of agriculture, and in the relative numbers of agriculteral and non-agricultural population will take place in any nation, while the métayer system remains in full force [ibid.: 107-8]. This he proved, among other ways, by showing how the French Revolution ‘destroyed the relations between Jandlord and tenant, and converted a large proportion of the métayers into small proprietors’ {ibid.: 157]. Unfortunately, he lamented, ‘in spite of the multiplication of small proprietors since the revolution, métayers are supposed still to cultivate one- half of France’ [ibid.: 96]. John Stuart Mill, the last of the classical economists, adopted Jones’ evolutionary classification, with certain modifications, in his Principles of Political Economy [Mill, 1965: 197-8}. Alfred Marshall, though one of the Founding Fathers of neoclassical economics, was sufficiently well acquainted with the history of political economy to point out this identity of social relations between European métairie and postbellum Southem sharecropping. Emphasizing the ‘fundamental distinction between the “English” system of rental and that of holding land on “shares”, as it is called in the New World, or the “Métayer” system as it is called in the Old’, he asserted: In a great part of Latin Europe the land is divided into holdings, which the tenant cultivates by the labour of himself and his family, and sometimes, though rarely, that of a few hired labourers, and for which the landlord supplies buildings, cattle and, sometimes even, farm implements. In America there are few agricultural tenancies of any kind, but two-thirds of those few are small holdings, let out to white men of the poorer class, or to freed Negroes, on some plan by which labour and capital share the produce [Marshall, 1964: 535].78 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Marshall offered the following statistics on the Southern regime of land tenure: ‘In 1880, 74 per cent of the farms of the United States were cultivated by their owners, 18 per cent, or more than two-thirds of the remainder, were rented for a share of the produce, and only 8 per cent were held on the English system. The largest proportion of farms that were cultivated by persons other than their owners were in the Southern States’ [ibid., 535, note]. The tenant’s share varied from one-third to four-fifths, depending on the amount of capital he supplied and the nature of the crop, and his situation was more precarious than in France, since he had no fixity of tenure. We can see from our review of the history of political economy that, all the arguments to the contrary of the Cliometricians notwithstanding," the productive relations established in the post-bellum South do not differ much from those established in the Western European countries as a result of the abolition of serfdom. The same is true of Eastern Europe. Lenin, who was an expert on the agrarian question in Russia (where serfdom was abolished as late as 1861) distinguished in his 1915 siudy of US agriculture between three main sections, which he called ‘the industrial North, the former slave- owning South and the homestead West’ [Lenin, 1964b: 20]. In the South there had been an enormous decrease in the average acreage per farm (from 199.2 acres in 1860 to 153.3 in 1870 and 138.1 in 1910), marking the transition from the slave-holding latifundia, nine-tenths of whose lands remained unimproved, to small commercial agriculture. Yet capital had ‘defeated slavery half a century ago, merely to restore it now in a new form ag share tenancy” [#bid.: 87). Lenin found a striking resemblance between social relations in-the South-and-those prevailing in the-regions of-Russia were the survivals of serfdom were most powerful. Criticizing the views of the bourgeois economist Himmer, who had asserted that the United States had never known feudalism and was free from its economic survivals, Lenin wrote: ‘This is the very opposite of the truth, for the economic survivals of slavery ave not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning south of the USA these survivals are still very powerful’ [ibid.: 24, emphasis in the original]. The proportion of illiterates among blacks in 1910 was seven times as high as among the white population (44 per cent as compared to 6.2 per cent). ‘What is the economic basis that has produced and continues to support this fine “superstructure’”?° Lenin asked. It is the typically Russian labour-service system, which is known as sharecropping. Among the whites 39.2 per cent were tenant farmers, and among the Negroes, 75.3 per cent! The typical white farmer in America is an owner; the typical Negro farmer is a tenant. TheSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 79 proportion of tenants in the West was only 14 per cent, in the North it was 26.5 per cent, and in the South, 49.6%! Half of the Southern farmers were tenants. But this is not all. These are not even tenants in the Buropean, civilized, modern-capitalist sense of the word. They are chiefly semi-feudal or — which is the same thing, in economic terms ~ semi-slave sharecroppers, In 1910, free, republican-democratic America had 1,500,000 sbarecroppers, of whom more than 1,000,000 were Negroes |ibid.: 25-6, emphasis in the original]. Both in America and in Russia, the sharecropping area was the most stagnant, the one with the lowest value of implements and machinery per acre as well as the lowest rates of geographical mobility. Since the Southern masses were subjected to the greatest degradation and oppression, immigrants avoided the South and the local black population tried to migrate. either to homesteading areas or to the cities. ‘Thus’, Lenin concluded, ‘it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who were formerly landowners’ serfs’ libid.: 26~7, emphasis in the original]. ‘The same social relations developed over and over again in all the cases in which slavery was abolished without agrarian reform. Sismondi commented in 1837 on the experience of emancipation in the British West Indies: ‘It is necessary lo make of the Negroes, either capitalist farmers (fermiers) or sharecroppers (métayers), if one wants to have peasants in the colonies’ {Sismnondi, 1837, Vol.1, 431]. A landowner and something of an admirer Tuscan métairie, Sismondi recommended the second way since capital accumulation was not sufficiently developed to carry out capitalist farming along English lines. ‘It is necessary to remember’, he remarked “that men come out of slavery completely devoid of all property’ [ibic 433). Then he added: The emancipation attempted in the English colonies, transforming the negroes not into peasants, but into agricultural proletarians, into Journaliers, assumes that they will work under the direction of a white man, which will be the fermier of the whole plantation, or under the authority of the planter himself, farming his own land; because this system of exploitation, which is completely unusual in continental Europe, is assumed to be normal in the Antilles. But it is impossible to find a fermier in the colonies. He is not to be found among the Negroes, and it even more unlikely to find one among whites. Everything is lacking among those adventurers which go to the islands to make their fortune: they have neither capital, nor credit, nor agricultural knowledge, nor even, in the majority of cases, integrity [ibid.: 436}.80 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES He therefore proposed that plantations should be divided into sharecropping lots (métairies), subjected to a uniform contract, by which the croppers would receive half of the produce and the landowners the other half [ibid.: 443-4]. We need not share Sismondi’s enthusiasm for sharecropping to see that the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was giving way, according to this analysis, to the same social relations which later came to dominate the Southern countryside — not surprisingly, since slavery left a legacy of low level of development of the productive forces wherever it was abolished, requiring its replacement by rural petty commodity production, either in the form of free peasant proprietorship or under the retrograde form of sharecropping. SHARECROPPING AND SOUTHERN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. Sharecropping was not identical with capitalist agriculture because there was no intermediate class of capitalist farmers between landowners to advance cash wages, nor was the landowner in a financial condition to run his estate along capitalist lines and paid cash wages himself. ‘Sharecropping’, Gilbert Fite remarked, ‘grew so rapidly because it was the form of farm organization that took the least amount of capital ~ practically none at all’ [Fite, 1986: 38-50].* This aspect of the question, already remarked by James Allen, was best dealt with by a neoclassical economist, Gerald D. Jaynes, who, in his book, Branches Without Roots, showed that there was no intermediate period between the end of the Civil War and the tise of sharecropping*when the~freedmen were offered, ‘but refused to accept, cash wages. According to this ‘black power’ interpretation of the rise of sharecropping, planters were forced to abandon both gang labour and the money wage because freed people abhorred the work gang, which was reminiscent of slavery. Jaynes has shown that, on the contrary, ‘the labourers’ most preferred contract of all [was] the day wage’ [Jaynes, 1986: 220). What they rejected was the planters’ attempts to pay them annual wages: A labour market based on money wage contracts failed to evolve not because the field hands provided an inherently unstable Jabour supply, but because the financial position of too many planters was too weak for them to make a reasonably periodic payroll, and because free labour, after a disastrous experience, wisely declined to extend credit to planters on such risky terms as a pseudo-guaranteed wage to be paid with a lump sum at the end of the season. Sharecropping, Jaynes concluded, ‘was generally adopted because of the planters’ inability to pay “prompt wages” — that is to say, because capitalSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 8] accumulation in the South was not advanced enough to organize agriculture along capitalist lines on the basis of wage labour [ibid.: 157]. Most planters were unable to overcome their lack of capital because of the underdevelopment of the South’s financial market: ‘In 1880, per capita bank deposits in the South represented only one-fifth the figure for the entire nation, and, as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, interest rates were systematically higher than in any other region’ [Hahn, 1990a: 96]. Only in certain places, such as the sugar and rice regions, where crops were grown which required large-scale agriculture and planters had access to outside sources of capital, sharecropping failed to replace the plantation system and cash wages were paid to the agricultural labourers - which, incidentally, shows how unsubstantiated is the assertion that shares were preferred to wages [Nieman, 1994: IX]. Sharecropping was thus a pre-capitalist form of agriculture, whose effect was, in the postbellum South as well as in Europe, to retard technological development. Jay Mandle has shown that between 1840 and 1920, the percentage decrease in man-hours required to produce 500-pound bales of cotton (36.0 per cent) was much lower that the decrease in man- hours required to produce 100 bushels of wheat (62.7 per cent) and corn (59.1 per cent) [Mandle, 1978: 72}. Labour productivity in southern agriculture grew very slowly vis-é-vis the North and the West because Southern farmers, due to the regressive character of their social relations, were unable to adopt the new agricultural technology which was being used in the other regions of America: Improved machinery such as cotton-seed planters, fertilizer spreaders, stalk cutters, and better plows and harrows did become available, but most farmers lacked money to buy the new equipment. Except for plowing, which was done with mule and horse power, cotton growing was mainly a hand operation ... while Midwestern farmers were turning to the latest horse-drawn machines to prepare the soil, plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops of corn and small grains, southemers plodded along trying to produce a living by methods little advanced over those used in the eighteenth century [Fite, 1984: 25-6]. Not surprisingly, Benjamin Hibbard reported in 1913, ‘in implements and machinery the North has an invesiment per acre two and one-half times as great as has the South; in live stock an investment about twice as great. All told a northern farm with its equipment is valued at $9,500; 2 southern farm at $2,900’ [Hibbard, 1913: 483]. In 1920, as Jonathan Wiener pointed out, ‘the North Central states had almost six times as many tractors per acre of cropland as the cotton states of the Deep South,82 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES because the South’s labour-repressive system provided no incentive to mechanize’ (Wiener, 1979: 987]. Ten years later, ‘the value of machinery and implements, for example, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi averaged only $134 per farm’, whereas ‘in Kansas and lowa it was $1,010 and $1,259 respectively’ [Fite, 1984: 114]. As late as 1955, ‘67 percent of the cotton crop was mechanicaily harvested in California, 24 percent in Texas, 2 percent in Alabama and Georgia’ [Wiener, 1979: 988]. In regions were a different kind of productive relations predominated, the adoption of the new agricultural technology was much more rapid. As Susan Archer Mann has shown, ‘although cotton production was only introduced in California, New Mexico, and Arizona after 1914, in a short fifteen years all of these states showed extraordinarily high average expenditures on wage labour and machinery per farm, surpassing both the Southeast and the Southwest’ (Mann, 1984: 423; also Whatley, 1987}. The consequences of this retard in the development of the productive forces caused by Southern social relations can be seen most clearly if we compare the rate of growth of those states where sharecropping was dominant with those of the Northern states; Plantation agriculture was concentrated in the six states of Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. Not unexpectedly these states also tended to exhibit records in achieving economic growth which were even poorer than those of other Southern states, not.to mention the.industrializing states.of the North. Thus, the fastest growing plantation state between 1880 and 1900, Arkansas, experienced just about the same rate of increase in per capita income as the slowest growing states among the remaining eight Southern states, North Carolina and Kentucky. In all other cases the plantation economy states grew more slowly that the non- plantation Southern states [Mandle, 1974: 35]. SHARECROPPING AND THE ‘NEGRO QUESTION* The evils of sharecropping, whose negative effects on economic development vis-a-vis petty or capitalist commodity production classical political economy, as we have seen, had already remarked, were aggravated in the postbelium South by the system of racial discrimination, originally consisting of a number of barriers to labour mobility aimed at assuring that as many features as possible of the bound labour of yore should be retained ~ the second poisoned legacy of this region’s ‘peculiar institution’. Restrictions to labour mobility are a common feature of societiesSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 83 undergoing a transition from feudalism or siavery to capitalism: the long fight of French absolutism and later of the French Revolution. and Napoleon against these survivals of serfdom are well known; while in Russia, for instance, the peasant commune was made collectively responsible for the paying of taxes after the abolition of serfdom, thus restricting the mobility of the liberated peasants, etc. What distinguishes the European experiences from those of America, and especially from the US experience, is that, as in the case of slavery, the victims belonged to a definite ethnic group, and that a racist ideology developed to justify their oppression on ‘Christian’ and ‘civilizatory’ grounds ~ thus creating an ‘intellectual’ tradition which many historians propagated with gusto, until the rebellion of the urban blacks at least. Besides the naked violence of the KKK and other bands of murderers, ‘planters’ had recourse to a series of legal devices, the most famous of which were of course the Black Codes. Edward Royce has described the aim and character of these laws in the following words: The aim of the Black Codes, according to legislation passed in Louisiana, where the state assembly did not mince words, was to make the labour of freed blacks ‘available to the agricultural interests of the State’. The Black Codes were intended as the legal centerpiece of the system of labour control that planters sought to establish as a substitute for slavery. Specifically, the Black Codes were designed to limit the mobility of labour, drive blacks out of towns and back onto the plantations, reduce competition among planters, restrict the employment opportunities of freedpeople, enforce contractual obligations, and ensure the continued subordination of black people in the South [Royce, 1993: 63-4]. The Black Codes were repealed in 1867 due to Northern pressure, but a number of laws of virtually identical content remained in force in the South into the 1930s. ‘For example, in a number of states it was a crime for persons of color to remain unemployed for any period of time. South Carolina went so far as to require an expensive license for persons of color to engage in any work other than agricultural labour’ [Mann, 1990: 78-9]. We can see that Southern racism ~ that of its upper classes at least — did not have an irrational character, but was, on the contrary, of a deliberate and calculated nature, and its aim was to ensure the ‘planters* their traditional supply of surplus value. Other examples of Southern measures destined to assure that the blacks would remain ‘attached to the land’ were vagrancy laws, anti-enticement and anti-recruitment84 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES legislation, convict labour laws, emigrant agent laws, breach-of contract laws, apprenticeship laws, the crop-lien system, usury and debt peonage, discriminatory hiring practices in the manufacturing sector, refusal to sell lands to Negroes, etc. [Daniel, 1979: 88-99]. Finally: The compensation system associated with sharecropping and share tenantry immobilized plantation workers for most of the crop year, because the cropper could leave an employer only by forfeiting the compensation to which he or she was entitled, which was received only at the time of the harvest. Thus except for the period at the end of the crop year, sharecropper mobility came at the cost of foregone income for which the cropper had already performed work [Mandle, 1992; 22}, Not surprisingly, the net effect of these measures was to keep the black population concentrated in the South, working at artificially low wages and mostly in the agricultural sector. Thus, for example, ‘between 1870 and 1910 the proportion of the African American population resident in the South remained virtually stationary, standing at 91 percent in the earlier year and 89 percent in the latter’. As late as 1910, 87.8 per cent of the African American labour force in five cotton-growing states worked in agriculture and domestic and personal services [ibid.: 23-4]. It was not until the First World War that the percentage of the black population resident in the South started to decline at a substantial pace, due to the disruption of European immigration. _. : Other avenues of escape being totally or partially closed by the system of racial discrimination, blacks tried to escape sharecropping by attempting, as far as possible, to accumulate capital and buy land or ran the leasing along capitalist lines."> Most of these attempts ended in failure, given the impossible conditions in which they were carried out, but they nevertheless led, on the one hand, to a temporary rise in black landownership, and, on the other hand, to the appearance of a whole gamut of tenant-landlord agreements, from sharecropping to (rarely) capitalist land-leasing: sharecroppers, providing only their own labour and sometimes one-half of the fertilizers and receiving half of the crop; share renters, furnishing part of the stock and receiving from one-fourth to one-third of the crop; ‘cash renters’ furnishing their own stock and tools and paying a fixed rent per acre in cotton; genuine cash renters (the system most common in the North), some of them employing wage labour, etc. {Ferleger, 1993], Benjamin Hibbard found in 1913 a well-defined caste system among tenants. The lowest class is represented by those who furnish little equipment and receive half,SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 85 or less, of the crop; above this comes the group whose independence is measured by the possession of a mule and a plow and the means of subsistence till harvest time; the highest class consists of those who can be trusted to deliver a certain quantity of crop or possibly a sum of money, and who are by that fact emancipated in the main from the directing authority of the landlord (Hibbard, 1913: 485-6).'° Hibbard also reported that in the South, and especially in the lower South, ‘the greatest factor in the tenancy problem is the Negro, and in proportion to the number of Negroes the rate of tenancy rises or falls’ [i 484). With time, an increasing number of white people also fell into this quagmire of pre-capitalist social relations, so that ‘when black migrated and whites entered this area in numbers during the 1920s and 1930s, many of them became sharecroppers, too’ [Kirby, 1987: 140-41]. SHARECROPPING AND WAGE LABOUR Harold Woodman’s argument that sharecropping was a special southern form of wage labour is not utterly wrong: to the extent that the cropper advanced no capital whatsoever (which was not always the case) and that there was complete mobility in the labour market (which first the Black Codes and then the Jim Crow laws, as well as naked violence, took care it should not happen) his revenue must have been equal to the amount of his wages, Yet this view of sharecropping must be qualified in the light of the preceding analysis, otherwise it would give the impression that capitalist agriculture was established in the postbellum South almost immediately after the end of the Civil War, and that all the modifications that took place Jater (most notably, the Southern ‘clearing of estates’ after the Great Depression) were merely a matter of detail (Woodman, 1979, 1995], Woodman’s thesis has its origin in the Southern legal codes, which classified croppers as ‘wage workers working for a share of the crop as wages’, a juridical fiction introduced in order to legally deprive them of any title to the crop, upon which landlords had a first call. A second source of confusion was the work of American mainstream economists, as James Allen explained in 1936: American bourgeois economists are practically unanimous in defining sharecropping as wage-labour, even of a higher form than labour paid in cash wages and differing from the latter only in that it is paid in kind. The stages in development from @ lower to a higher plane of farm labour are envisaged by them somewhat as follows: first comes86 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES. wage-labour, then sharecropping, which is the first rung in the tenant ladder. Then, via the other forms of tenancy, the worker may graduate into the class of landowners, In reality, sharecropping was neither a higher form of labour than free wage- labour, nor did it hold a position between the latter and higher forms of tenancy. The significance of sharecropping lies in the fact that it represents an intermediary stage between chattel slavery on the one hand, and either wage-labour or capitalist tenancy on the other. A capitalist course of development in the South after the Civil War ~ the break-up of the estates and the establishment of petty-proprietorship side by side with large-scale capitalist farms, necessarily accompanied by the creation of a large army of wage-workers — would have precluded the carrying. over of slave forms of labour as the dominant forms. Sharecropping, therefore, is an integral aspect of the incompletion of the bourgeois- democratic revolution. The sharecropper is neither a free wage- worker nor a chattel slave; he represents the transition between the two [Allen, 1936: 59-62]. Sharecropping was the socio-economic basis of the system of segregation and discrimination in the South, which the blacks succeeded in destroying only when they became real wage workers. The political and economic compromise between the industrial bourgeoisie and the ex- slaveowners after Reconstruction had_as.one of-its-main aims-to-retard the formation of a genuine Negro proletariat in the South in order to avoid disturbing the labour supply of the pre-capitalist latifundia — as witnessed by the lily-white character of Southern textile industry. During the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century the immigrants manned the rapidly growing industry of the North. Industrial capitalism after the Civil War could therefore get along without the for a time free labour supply which had been created by the overthrow of chattel slavery, and content itself with a regional division of labour within American economy. The Negro’s place in industry had already been preempted; his absorption into the army of workers after the overthrow of chattel slavery would have been a powerful factor militating against the perpetuation of the slave survivals in the South. Instead, on the backs of the millions of immigrant workers the industrialists could enter into peaceful collabouration with the overlords of the plantation [ibid.: 120-21].SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 87 This situation remained virtually unchanged until immigration stopped during the First World War, when a substantial black proletariat began to develop. In this sense, it can be said that real black proletarianization, as different from the legal status of sharecroppers as wage labourers, was the basis for the Civil Rights’ Movement. THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY The sufferings occasioned by these perverse social relations were enormous, for both blacks and poor whites: ‘Inadequate housing, unbalanced diets, impure water, and unsanitary living conditions ail contributed to poor health among many southem farmers. Both children and adults were subject to dysentery, various kinds of stomach trouble, malaria, typhoid, hookworms, and pellagra’ [Fite, 1984: 38]. The low living standards of southern farmers, the poor conditions of the means of transport and communication in the region, and the effects of the system of racial discrimination held down the wage scales throughout the South: Gavin Wright, a neoclassical economist, as documented the existence of a continuing gap between the Southern and the Northern labour markets until the post-Second World War period [Wright, 1986]. In addition, Southem levels of illiteracy were extremely high for American standards: ‘In 1870 the illiterate white population over ten years of age varied from 17 percent in Mississippi to 37 percent in North Carolina; for the newly freed blacks it was more than 80 percent in most southern states’. By 1890 the figure for whites had dropped to below 20 per cent, but it remained between 50 and 60 per cent for blacks. Twenty years later, the proportion of illiterates among blacks was still seven times as high as among the white population ~ not surprisingly, since the racist prejudices inherited from slavery and fuelled by the planters gave rise to the appearance of a separate and miserably funded system of black schools [Fite, 1984: 39}. To crown it all, the segregation policy, in the words of Bric Foner, ‘shifted the center of gravity of American politics to the right, complicating the tasks of reformers for generations to come’ — as the example of the American labour movement clearly shows [Foner, 1989: 604]. The subsequent history of the South is a textbook case of the so-called ‘Prussian path of capitalist development’ ~ that is, of the implantation of capitalist social relations from above through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre-capitalist class of landowners in the most painful possible way for the working masses.” The emigration of the black population from the rural regions of the South coincides with the demise of sharecropping. A first wave left the south due to the boll weevil and the88 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES drastic reduction of immigration during and after the First World War. Then, with the increasing availability of capital due to the injection of federal money as a result of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and subsequent crop-reduction programmes,'* the prosperity of the Second World War period, the growing access to credit from commercial banks, etc.; and, on the other hand. developments such as the technological revolution in agriculture sponsored by the Northern corporations and the improvement of the transportation and communication systems, a large proportion of the Southern agricultural labour force became redundant (that is, less profitable than the employment of wage labourers using tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, chemical weed killers, etc.) and those sbarecroppers which did not voluntarily ‘seize the opportunity’ to find a job in the cities or migrate to the North were unceremoniously expelled from their land. Jack Temple Kirby put the number of people displaced between 1910 and 1960 as a result of what Gunnar Myrdal called the ‘American enclosure movement’ at no less than nine million [Kirby, 1983; 585]. Both blacks and poor whites suffered from this forced migration, as anyone who as read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath knows, but the heaviest blows fell, as usual, on the weaker of these two groups - so much so, indeed, that the racists could be said to have achieved their long-cherished dream of having a lily-white southern agriculture* The ordeal that the displaced black population had to endure, the discrimination (and sometimes outright pogroms) it had to suffer in the cities, its concentration in urban ghettoes and slums, its rebellion to enjoy minimal political and legal rights, are familiar features of American history. No less familiar are the high levels’ of unemployment, ‘crime, drug addiction, single-parent families, and the low levels of education, income, health care, and integration into American society they continue to suffer from. As for the ways in which this oppressive reality can be changed, George M. Fredrickson commented: ‘The growing black middle class has been the main beneficiary of the civil rights movement and the affirmative action programs that came to be viewed as an essential means for achieving its goals. But the emergence of black judges, congressmen, presidential candidates, elite professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs should not obscure the fact that the impoverished black lower class — about a third of the black population ~ is in a worse shape than ever before. Trapped in inner-city ghettoes from which the black middle class has now largely fled, these blacks remain poor, unemployed or underemployed, beset by problems of teenage pregnancy, crime, and drug abuse, and essentially cut off from the aspirations andSLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 89 opportunities that are available to most white Americans. But this is not so much a problem involving civil rights in the traditional sense or even attitudinal racism as a challenge to the political economy of late twentieth century American capitalism. Only reforms directed at changing the American economic system in a fundamental way are likely to emancipate the black poor from misery and desperation’ (Fredrickson, 1990: 135-6]. CONCLUSION A comparison between, on the one hand, plantation slavery and ancient slavery as analysed by the classical European Marxists, and, on the other hand, Southern sharecropping and the works of the classical political economists on French meétayage, reveals the pre-capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after the abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans’ plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long period of time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place ‘from above’ (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre-capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the racist prejudices born of slavery among whites — thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life. NOTES 1. See, for instance, Hodsgkin {1964}, Other English writers who drew socialist conclusions from Ricardo’s theory are William Thompson (1783-1833), Joha Gray (1799-1850) and John Francis Bray (1809-95). See especially Rubin [1979, 1972]; Hilferding [1973]; and Bukharin [1970]. See the review of this book in Kolehin (1991: 491-502}. ‘The best overview of the history of Southern slavery is Kolehin, 1993, Salvioli’s book contains an excellent refutation of the views of those historians and economists (Mommsen, Rodbertus, ete.) who, under the influence of modern conditions, found full-fledged capitalism in ancient society. Students of the slave South should consult it in order to see how the Cliometicians are making the same mistakes more than a hundred years later wees90 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 6. See also Kautsky's review of Ettore Ciccotti’s If eramonto della schiavitu nel mondo antico, in Kautsky {19 1). In 1768~72 the vatue of exports per capita in the West Indies was ten times higher in the West Indies than in New England {Galensor, 1996: 198; North, 1961; 233} “Just as at a given stage in its development, commodity production necessarily passes into capitalistic commodity production (in fact, it is only on the basis of capitalistic production that products take the general and predominant form of commodities), so the laws of property that are based on commodity production, necessarily turn into the laws of capitalist appropriation’ (Marx, 1956: 639]. 9, Ina footnote on p, 20 they refer to Fogel and Engerman [1974}. 10. On this issue see Byres [1983}, IL. This book is the best Marxist introduction to the history of political economy. 12. The section of Das Kapital dealing with sharecropping carries the title Metariewirtschaft oder Teibwirsschajt-System. I as transtated in the first American edition of the third volume of Capital, published by Charles H. Kerr in 1909, a8 Shave Farming (Metairie System). 1a the 1981 Penguin edition it reads simply Shareeropping. 13, Neoclassical economic historians identify both plantation slavery and sharecropping with fully-developed capitalist relations of production. For two surveys of the neoclassical theories of sharectopping (whose ‘common theme is that sharecropping is a response t© uncertainty and asymmetries in information’, whatever it means) see Quibria and Rashid (1984), and Nirvikar Singh [1989], from which the above-quoted passage is taken (p.68). ‘The last study comes to the Kantian conclusion that neoclassical theories of sharecropping. have nothing concrete 1o say about this most mysterious Ding an sich: ‘Sharecropping has existed in various times and places in various forms. It has disappeared over time and reappeared, Sometimes the tenart’s share is one-half, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the ‘output share equals the cost share; sometimes it does not, Sometimes productivity is higher ‘on shavectopped land than on other types of tenaney or with self-cultivation; sometimes itis, not, Sometimes sharecroppers are poor; sometimes they are prosperous. Sometimes sharecroppers produce risky caste crops; sometimes they produce for subsistence, I do not think a single theory can capture all of these aspects of sharecropping!” (ibid.: 34] 14, In his book on the history of southern agriculture, Fite quoted @ 1867 report from Charleston, S.C., according to which planters who could. afford it were. paying monthly wages, bat ‘the greater number were compelled by poverty to adhere to the former plan of allowing negroes half the crop’ New York Times, June 19, 1867 (Fite, 1984: 239, note 7). 15, “The rent paid by the tenant farmer was inversely related to the extent to which he supplied his owa means of procluction’ (Boston, 1982: 451} “Empirical studies confirm that tenants’ wealth was strongly correlated with tixed-rent tenancy as opposed to shares? {Wright, 1986: 100}. 17, Lenin first distinguished between the ‘American’ and the ‘Prussian’ paths of bourgeois development in his already-quoted work, The Agrarian Program of the Social Democracy in the Pirst Russian Revolution, 1905-1907 (Lenin, 19648], 18, The federal programmes to eliminate agricuftural ‘surpluses’ where started during the Great Depression, that is, ata time when large sections of the American, not to speak of the world, population went hungry. As Secretary Henry A. Wallace wrote in 1934, ‘to have to destroy a growing crop is a shocking commentary on our civilization’ (quoted in Fite (1984: 129-30). 19. This number includes people displaced as a result of developments outside agriculture, such, as the mechanization of coal mining, 20. ‘As the farmers left the land, the effects on minorities were devastating. From a high of l4 percent of all U.S, farms being owned by blacks in the 1930s, today less than 1 percent are black-owned’ {Magdoff et al, 1998: 7). 4. 8 16.SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 91 REFERENCES Ado, A., 1977, ‘Le mouvement paysan et le problime de I'égalité (1789-1794)’, in Soboul (ed), Contributions a Mhistoire paysanne de la Révotution francaise, Patis: Editions sociales, pp.119-38, Allen, James S., 1936, The Negra Question in the United States, New York: International Publishers. Blaug, Mark, 1997, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Fifth Edition, Carnbridge: Cambridge University Press, Bloch, Marc, 1966, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Boston, Thomas D., 1982, “Capitalist Development and Afro-American Land Tenancy’, Sefence and Society, Vol.A6, Nod, pp.445-60, Bukharin, Nikolai, 1970, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Augustis M. Kelley Publishers, Byres, Terence, 1983, ‘Historical Perspectives on Shatecropping’ , Special Issue on “Sharecroppings and Sharecroppers’ of The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.10, Nos.2 and 3, pp.7-40. Byres, Terence, 1996, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essery in Comparative Political Economy, London: MacMillan. Cairnes, 1E., 1968, The Slave Power: lis Character, Career, and Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to Explain the Real issues Involved in the American Comest, New York: Augustus, M, Kelley, [1863] Clark, John M,, 1953, ‘Distibution’, in Edwin RA. Seligman and Alvin Johnson (eds.), Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan. Daniel, Pete, 1979, “The Metamorphoses of Slavery, 1865-1900", Journal of American History, ‘Vol.66, pp.88-99. Ferleger, Louis, 1993, ‘Sharecropping Contracts in the Late Nineteenth-Century South’, Agricultural History, Vol.67, No.3, pp.31-46. Fite, Gilbert C., 1984, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1863-1980, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Fite, Gilbert C., 1986, “The Agricatiural Trap in the South’, Agricultural History, Vol.60, No.4, pp.38-50, Fogel, Robert and Stanley Engerman, 1974, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols,, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, Fogel, Robert, 1989, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Stavery, New ‘York: WW. Norton, Fones, Bric, 1980, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction’, in Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Foner, Eric, 1989, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, New York: Harper & Row. Fredrickson, George M., 1990, ‘Black-White Relations Since Emancipation: The Search for a Comparative Perspective", in Kees Gispen (ed.), What Made the South Different? Jackson, ML: University Press of Mississippi. Galenson, David W., 1996, “The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies: Population, Labor, and Eeonomic Development’, in Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol.1: “The Colonial Era’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Genovese, Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, 1983, Fruits of Merchaat Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Haba, Steven and Jonathan Prude (eds.), 1985, The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Hahn, Steven, 19902, ‘Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Plantations in Comparative Perspective’, American Historical Review, Vol.93, No.1, pp. 75-98.92 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Hahn, Steven, 1990b, ‘Emsncipation and the Development of Capitalist Agriculture: The South in Comparative Perspective’, in Gispes Kees (ed.), What Made the South Different? Jackson, ME: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 75-88. Hesseltine, William B., 1935, ‘Economic Factors in the Abandonment of Reconstruction’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol.22, No.1, pp.191~210, Hibbard, Benjamin H., 1913, “Tenaney in the Southern States’, Quarterly Journal of Economies, Vol.27, pp.482-9% Hilferding, Rudoif, 1911-12, ‘Aus der Vorgeschichte der Marxschen Okonomie’, Die Neue Zeit, WoL.29, No.2, pp.572-81, 620-8, 885-94, and Vol.30, No.1, pp.343-54. Hilferding, Rudolf, 1973, ‘Bohm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx’, in Paul Sweezy (ed.), Karl Marx and the Close of his System, Clifton, NJ: AM. Kelley. Hodsgkin, Thomas, 1964, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; Or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen, Hammersmith, London: The Haremessmith Bookshop, (1825). Jaynes, Gerald D., 1986, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882, New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Richard, 1956, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation, Part I: Rent, New York: Kelly & Millman, [1831] Jones, Richard, 1964a, Lectures on Labor and Capital, in Literary Remains, Consisting of Lectures & Tracts on Political Economy, New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Jones, Richard, 1964b, ‘A Short Tract on Pofitical Economy, Including Some Account of the Anglo-Indian Revenue Systems’, in Literary Remains, Consisting of Lectures & Tracts on Political Economy, New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Jones, Richard, 1964c, “Text-Book of Lectures on the Political Beonomy of Nations, Delivered at the East India College, Haleibury’, in Literury Remains, Consisting of Lectures & Tracts on Political Economy, New York: Augustus M. Kelley [1852] Kautsky, Karl, 1911, ‘Skiaverei und Kapitalismus (Ettore Ciccotti, Der Uniergang der Sklaverei im Alertum, Deutsch von Oda Otberg, Berlin, 1910)", Die Neue Zeit, Vol.29, No.2, pp.713-25. Kautsky, Karl, 1942, ‘Vorrede’, to Joseph Salvioli, Der Kapitalismus im Altertum: Studien uber die romische Wintschafisgeschichte, Statigart: ILH.W. Dietz, pp.vii-xx. Kautsky, Karl, 1988, The Agrarian Question, London: Zwan Publications [1899}. Kirby, Jack Temple, 1983, “The Southern Exodus, 1910-1960: A Primer for Historians’, Journal of Southern History, Vol.49, pp.585-600.. Kirby, Jack Temple, 1987, Rural Worlds Lo: Louisiana University Press. Kolchin, Peter, 1967, “The Business Pies and Reconstruction’, Journal of Souther History, Vol.33, pp. 183-96. Koichin, Peter, 1991, “More Time on the Cross? An Evaluation of Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract’, Journat of Southern History, Yol.S8, pp.49 1-502. Kolchin, Peter, 1993, American Slavery, 1619-1877, New York: Hill & Wang. Lefebvre, Georges, 1963, "La Révolution frangaise et les paysans’, in Lefebvre, Etudes sur la Révoiution francaise, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp.338-67 Lenin, VI, 1964a, “The Agrarian Program of the Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907", in Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, Vol.X1II. Lenin, Vi, 1964, ‘New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalisea in Agriculture’, in Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publistiers, Vol.XXI. ‘Magdoff, Pred, Prederick H. Buttel and John Bellamy Foster, 1998, ‘Introduction’ to Magdott, ‘Buttel, and Foster (eds.}, ‘Hungry for Profit: Agriculture, Food, and Ecology’, special issue ‘of Monthly Review, Vol.50, No.3, pp.(-13. Mande, Jay R., 1974, "The Plantation Economy and Its Aftermath’, Review of Radical Political Economies, Vol’, pp.32-88. Mandie, Jay R., 1978, ‘The Economic Underdevetopment of the Postbeflum South’, Marxist Perspectives, Voll, No.4, pp.68~79. Mandle, Jay R., 1992, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience Since ‘The American South, 1920-60, Baton Rouge, LA’SLAVERY & SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES 93 the Civil War, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Mann, Susan Archer, 1984, “Sharecropping in the Cotion South: A Case of Uneven Development in Agriculture’, Rural Sociology, Vol.49, No.3, pp-412-29. Mann, Susan Ascher, 1990, Agrarian Capitalism in Theory and Practice, Chapel Hill, NC: Universigy of North Carolina Press. Marshall, Alfred, 1964, Principles of Economics, Bighth Edition, London; Macinifian {1920}. Marx, Katl, 1971, Theories of Surplus-Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl, 1972, On America and the Civil War (edited by Saul K. Padover), New York: MeGraw-Hill. Marx, Kast, 1956, Capital: A Critique of Potiticat Economy, Voll, New York Modern Library. Marx, Karl, 1991, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, VoLall, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Mars, Karl, 1981, Grinadrisses Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, 1953, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mill, John Stuart, 1965, Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications 10 Social Philosophy, Seventh Edition, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press {1874}. Nieman, Donald G. (ed.), 1994, From Slavery to Sharecropping: White Land and Black Labor i the Rural South, 1865-1900, New York: Garland Publishing. North, Douglass C., 1961, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Halt Quesnay, Frangois, 19698, ‘Fermiers’, in Oeuvres éeonontiques et philosophiques, edited by ‘Auguste Oncken, New York: Bust Franklin, pp.159-92, Quesnay, Frangois, 1969b, “Maximes générales da gouvernement économigue d'un royauine agricole’, in Oeuvres économiques et philosophiques, edited by Auguste Oncken, New York: Bust Franklin, pp.330-58. Quibria, M.G. and S. Rasbid, 1984, ‘Tho Puzzle of Sharecropping: A Survey of Theories’, World Development Report, Vol.12, pp. 103~ Ricardo, David, 1917, Tke Principles of Political Econansy and Taxation, Third Edition, London: JM, Dent [1821]. Roll, Bric, 1952, A History of Economic Thought, Second Edition, New York: Prentice Hall. Roll, Bric, 1992, A History of Economic Thought, Fifth Edition, London: Faber & Faber. Royce, Edward, 1993, The Origins of Southern Sharecrapping, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rubin, Isaac J., 1972, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Detroit, MI: Black & Red. Rubin, Isaac 1., 1979, A History of Economic Thought, London: Ink Links, Singh, Nivvikar, 989, ‘Theories of Sharecropping’, in Pranab Bardhan (ed.), The Economic Theory of Agrarian Institutions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.31-12, Sismondi, J.C.L. Simonde de, 1819, Noweaux principes d’économie politique, 2 vols., Paris: ‘Treutiel et Wortz, Sismondi, LCL. Sinonde de, 1837, Btudes sur économie politique, 2 vols., Pavis: Treuttel et Wort, Smith, Abbot Emerson, 1947, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Adam, 1951, An Inguiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, [1776] Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 1914s, ‘Mémoire sur la surcharge des impositions qu’éprouvait la ‘généralité de Limoges’, in Gustave Schelle (ed.), Octwres de Turgor et documents le concernant, Paris: Libyairie Felix Alcan, {1766}, Vol.2, pp.445~68. Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 19146, ‘Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des; richesses’, in Gustave Schelle (ed.), Oeuvres de Turgot et documents te concernant, Paris: Librairie Felix Atean, (1766), Vol.2, pp.534-601 Whailey, Warren C., 1987, ‘Southem Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechanization’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol.A7, No.1, pp-45~10.94, THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Wiener, Jonathan, 1979, ‘Class Structare and Economic Development ia the American South, 1865-1955", American Historical Review, Vol.84, No.4, pp.970-92. Woodman, Harold, 1979, ‘Southern Agriculture and the Law’, Agricultural History, Vol.53, pp.319-7. Woodman, Harold, 1995, New South-New Law: The Legal Foundation of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbelium Agriculterai South, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Wright, Gavin, 1986, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the ‘Civil War, New York: Basie Books, Young, Arthur, 1929, Travels in France, during the Years 1787, 1788 & 1789, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.