Modes of production in the USA

[@Ajente02]

This explaination of the evolution in US modes of production is quite similar to the evolution in most Latin American countries, with the two very big differences being that: *1)* here in Latin America slavery was abolished way earlier, and the land dispossession of the indigenous tribes was less aggressive, so most of the population was already in semi-feudal relationships in huge landlord _"haciendas"_ already by the early 19th century; and *2)* the existence of a large indigenous populations which still practiced traditional common land ownership delayed capitalist relationships in the countryside and the migration to the citied until way after mid-20th century (in some countries like Bolivia, by 1984 -40 years ago- half of the population still lived in the countryside). There is also, of course, the issue of imperialist extraction, something the United States never had to deal with as an independent state, which greatly helped them to industrialize way ahead of us. Great content as always, professor.

[@YaBoiHakim]

Incredibly informative video, thank you

[@markode7009]

Can you get him for a episode on your podcast? Pozdrav druže

[@Ajente02]

@@YaBoiHakim Paul Cockshott on The Deprogram when?

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@Ajente02 what is the Pozdrav druze

[@Ajente02]

@@paulcockshott8733 "The Deprogram" is a popular podcast held by our guy @YaBoiHakim here (who already did an interview with you some years ago) and other two Marxist KZbinrs (SecondThought and YUGOPNIK). They've already interviewed Thomas Härdin, Richard Wolff, Torkil Lauessen, and other younger divulgators of Marxim in KZbin.

[@ime4991]

​@@paulcockshott8733it means "goodbye dude" in serbian.

[@Skeleman]

A lecture going over what constitutes the semi-feudal, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc. sectors of an economy would be much appreciated!

[@B_Estes_Undegöetz]

Thanks for another great video. Makes the morning a time both to learn something new and illuminating and enjoy it while doing so.

[@ripsirwin1]

Thanks for these invaluable lectures on the history of Capitalism in the US. Of course they don't teach this to us in school! 😅

[@uuuu-h3m]

Paul Cockshott is love, Paul Cockshott is life.

[@caulskava335]

"Shrek is love; Shrek is life."

[@Skeleman]

I know this would be a huge topic, but an analysis of fascism in Italy and Germany in the interbellum and second world wars would be a great resource. If you have any books you recommend on the topic (or if you have written about it yourself) that would also be fantastic. Thanks for another great video!

[@redoktopus3047]

Great to see my favorite novel by Le Guin get a shout-out 6:56

[@triadgaming3323]

In the future would it be possible for you to Cover the Workings, Structure and actual Applications/Functioning of the 5 Year Planning Model, in great detail, as much to my disappointment, there's not much Sources that I could find that explained the Actual Workings and Mechanisms of the Five Year Plans and Planning methods like this (My personal question Here- If we have say planned the production of shoes at 5000 over a period of 5 years, 1000 a year, 82/83 ish a Month, now let's say mid year 2, the demand has risen and stabilized at 120 shoes a month, what will be done to meet it? What will be the effects on the overall ovejctives of the Plan? If we constantly have to adjust the Production to matcg demand or even just 2 or 3 times,then it's not much of a plan is it, when goals are chnaged? I suppose we can probably meet the demand if we have Reserve capacity, but what if we are operating at full? What will we do then? We can't exactly let people stand in sorts of "Bread lines" and empty shelves right? How shall be done? What solutions are there?

[@sentientnatalie]

Thanks so much! I learned a lot from this lecture, it's very insightful.

[@fionamacdonald8363]

Thanks for making this Paul very interesting.

[@nascentcomplacence3302]

Very educational. Thank you.

[@sankarbareddy3515]

Great one. Could you cover the same analysis for China as well? From collective farms to factory workers.

[@ericgenaroflores7069]

thanks paul i'm glad i made it this far in life with enough personal power to listen to one word of your lecture and your observations to bring a total overhaul of my so called grasped on reality, otherwise in my younger years one word wouldn't of made a damn bit of difference because everything that circulated through me at the time was black thoughts and i now know the horror of the situtaion. i'm glad its not too late...self-contained:)

[@srikantdelhi]

You may have very similar physical aspects of production (including farming, extraction of raw materials, scientific establishment, machinery and technology, etc.) in both capitalist and socialist countries or societies, but they are different modes of production. I don't think that Marx regarded the physical or tangible aspect alone as the determinative aspect, rather he is constantly urging his readers to look at the whole picture, that is, both material, and non-material. As he shows, at one moment it appears to a human mind that the material determines (for example, use-value), at another it is evident that non-material or ideas (for example, value, price) become the determining factor. So, similarly about the mode of production, it is not just the physical forms or social configurations of the physical forms, but rather that these forms are accompanied by their necessary ideological representations. A popular analogy could be that no hardware can ever function without its requisite software. He gives an example that an architect before building the structure, first builds it in his mind. Another example could be the USSR which, material or hardware-wise appeared to be a socialist country, but the software or social and developmental level of the workers and officials running that show can be difficult to analyse due to the intangible nature of beliefs and ideas rooted in the heads of the citizens of a socialist or capitalist society. Despite being believed to be having the material basis of socialism, they could not sustain that mode of production.

[@atwarwithdust]

"Mechanical harvesters" immediately reminded me of Dune.

[@harkonen1000000]

Frank Herbert is very much from the era when such things got popular.

[@Praisethesunson]

I would have guessed America had gone past the inflection point to a majority renteer economy. Since ownership as a concept has basically ended for the vast majority of Americans. It's all leases, rents, and debts of one kind or another.

[@AndrewsMobs]

Techo feudalism?

[@anotherinternetperson7410]

Maybe in urban areas but not exurban and rural areas

[@Praisethesunson]

@@anotherinternetperson7410 Rural areas are more renter than urban ones. Rural areas have been pillaged and gutted by private equity.

[@longvu-x2h]

Gödel's incompleteness theorems, can you make a video on this , i see many Austrian Economists use this to attack economic planning

[@paulcockshott8733]

Prof Michaelson and I are jointly working on a video on that in response to your suggestion

[@brennanstock3896]

Excellent video Dr. Cockshott! I am currently studying American agriculture in the 1970s during the shift toward neoliberalism. The role of the state in reforming American agriculture to a capitalist mode of production I would argue, largely occurred well past the 1950s. Since the neoliberal transition, food was no longer seen as a weapon to buttress American alliances abroad through the PL 480 system that sent cheap food to allied nations. Without the various state-supported measures to protect cash-strapped farmers, the banking class largely resumed in being the sole suppliers of capital equipment, leading essentially to chronic mortgaging of land and equipment while concentration continued to consume local agricultural processing firms. In this context, state support acts as both a means of protecting agricultural commodity-producers and also as its own downfall. Extraction through debt was brought to public attention by farm protests in the late 1970s and 1980s but eventually these movements were crushed by a lack of organization coupled with large-scale farmers gaining a voice over farm policy through interest groups like the Farm Bureau. Of course, regionally this story was largely true for grain farmers in the central part of the country, the South and California experienced much different avenues of integration.

[@rsavage-r2v]

I'm curious what this means for the current class character of the US. If I understand correctly, Americans still own more property and land on average than Europeans, and "white" Americans own significantly more than "black" Americans. Without abandoning class analysis, can we point to empirical after-effects of the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans and the Atlantic Slave Trade? I'm from the US, and the dominant form of "anti-capitalist" class consciousness I encounter here is anarchism. For most people, the most "revolutionary" end-goal is to become a freeholding petty subsistence farmer, perhaps living in what amounts to faith-based small communities, unhindered by any central authority. No thought is given to the imperial apparatus that secures these property rights. I'm not sure this is so different from calling the kibbutz movement "the most successful form of communism". Is this related to the history of primitive accumulation in the USA, or is it more a result of late urbanization? I.e. there are also allegedly at least a handful of people calling themselves "Neo-Makhnovists".

[@Praisethesunson]

Americans turn anarchist because they've literally never experienced the state acting in their collective interests. They've lived under the boot so long they can't see beyond it. So their only thought about the state is to overthrow it. Also at most 40% of Americans own land.

[@brandonlee3090]

The USA is thoroughly capitalist and a majority of the population is proletarian. In terms of property ownership, I presume home ownership is what you are mainly referring to but for one, workers owning their home doesn't alter their class character and secondly, the USA has similar home ownership rates as Western Europe and isn't exceptional in that regard anyways. Racial disparities persist with blacks, Natives, and Hispanics disproportionately comprising the lower orders, but the USA is a capitalist nation with a heavily proletarianized labor force. I'm also an American and yes, anarchism is certainly a popular trend among middle-class radicals, but not among workers.

[@rsavage-r2v]

@@brandonlee3090 Yes, I'm not questioning whether the USA is capitalist. "Proletarian" is relative however. Land has remained comparatively cheap throughout American history, and many people here have benefited from this economically. We have a government that structurally favors landowners and over-represents the predominantly white petty landowning demographic in rural areas. Workers in low-paid service and retail jobs very often have a mix of liberal and anarchist views. I've spent less time around people in productive jobs, but from what I gather they trend toward the "libertarian" version of essentially the same model, when they have anti-capitalist or at least anti-establishment views. My point is that there does seem to be evidence of the US being especially "bourgeoisified", or having a significantly greater petty-bourgeois population (which is furthermore racially concentrated), which we could analyze empirically without abandoning materialism and marxism for rhetoric about "settlerism" and its liberal, racialist essentialism.

[@brandonlee3090]

@@rsavage-r2v I don't agree with your viewpoint. I don't see much evidence for that contention. The social structure of the USA is similar to other advanced capitalist economies. Manual workers in the USA do not lean toward liberalism or anarchism, they are politically unorganized and disenchanted and have been shifting Republican because of anti-immigration populism and the lack of any serious socialist opposition.

[@hitchhiker8798]

Paul can you make a video on how AI is going to change or not change all of this?

[@Praisethesunson]

Pointless. A.I is a silly scam from the tech industry. Might as well ask how blockchain™ technology is going to that. Spoiler. It won't

[@Praisethesunson]

@@hitchhiker8798 It changes nothing because A.I is a brand to trick tech investors.

[@nosleoj6006]

@@Praisethesunson Is it an analysis or a wish?

[@Praisethesunson]

@@nosleoj6006 It's what the tech companies tell each other. A.I is nothing. They all push it because that's how they get/keep access to capital markets(e.g investor money).

[@Ajente02]

@@Praisethesunson While most of the current A.I. "developments" are indeed a pure marketing scam, artificial intelligence as a whole concept is not. There are serious consequences already in the labour market (particularly in intelectual labour) due to the recent developments in AI tools.

[@toddberkely6791]

where do i start reading to understand how deindustrialisation and consumerism fit into marxist economics? arent most people in the west part of a consumer class instead of a productive/proletariat class? in that their main relationship towards capital is to soak up excess production rather than provide criticial labour. doesnt that radically change how socialism needs to be approached? sorry for the offtopic comment

[@someguy79]

Thank you even louder next time please

[@ashutoshsingh3204]

Why show the price of gold in a relative term?

[@Ajente02]

Probably because gold was in itself the standard for the value of money, so it would be pointless to show the price of gold in absolute terms (as it will always be 25.8 grams of gold = 1 USD). Also, because Cockshott's argument rests on the fact that loans acquired by farmers in silver-based dollars (pre-1878) were paid by an increasingly more expensive gold-based dollar (post-1878), so the proportion between silver and gold was important to show this value appreciation.

[@ashutoshsingh3204]

@@Ajente02 Thank you.

[@organiccomposition]

you can have agricultural capital and capitalist agriculture which is what the united states was until the gilded age

[@nosleoj6006]

He always look seen to define capitalism as the use of mechanical goods in the production.

[@organiccomposition]

@@nosleoj6006 It's chronic STEM brain

[@paulcockshott8733]

What precisely do you mean by 'capitalism'? You can have capital in the form of money lending without the capitalist mode of production. You can have the purely formal subordination of labour to capital under manufacture, but the capitalist mode of production itself comes with modern industry. I am specifically talking about modes of production.

[@organiccomposition]

​@@paulcockshott8733 All American farms are bought on credit from the bank that is already apart of a vast international system of finance and credit interlock by the stock market and Stock exchange. All transactions are done in money and not in kind or in numbers of days a year as is the case under feudalism. The American farmers are all small business men effectively, they own there farm as private property out right in the form of free simple, without manorial land tenure or guild obligations. Taxes that the farmers pays is also done in money, not in kind. These taxes are collected by a relatively centralized state with a semi professional bureaucracy not by the local feudal lord and his appointments.Production on the farms is mostly for self sufficiency yes but surplus product is sold at local town markets all in monetary quantities not for barter. and that is just the small farmers I could also mention the huge slave plantation in the south that grow cash crops for only for export and financed the industrialization of Britain.