Colonial unfree labor can sustain effective capitalism, not just free labor

Evidence

Significantly, there is one point where Rex challenges both Marx and Weber—a point where, incidentally, they both appear to agree. This is the contention that “free labour was the only form of labour compatible in the long run with the logic of rational capitalism” (Rex 1973: 273). This argument—founded, in Weber, by his particular ideal-type definition of “capitalist rationality,” and in Marx, by his historical analysis of the “typical” path of capitalist development, based on the English case—is contested by Rex on both fronts. Instead, Rex argues that historical deviations from this “modal” type can often be found in social formations of a “specifically colonial type.” Here, in contrast, conquest, and a variety of forms of “unfree labour” (based on apparently irrational forms of ascriptive relations, such as those founded on racial differences) can be possible conditions of existence for the emergence and development of an “effective” capitalist mode of production. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 597

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Marx’s Capital analysis resting on the English case, and to later postcolonial/racial-capitalism critiques (Cedric Robinson, racial capitalism). — connects to: Capitalism must preserve labor as profit source despite its potential abolition — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 240
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this 1970s ‘left Weberianism’ debate prefigure contemporary work on racial capitalism and unfree labor?