The frontier principle was more than is implied simply by its initial
content, in other words the mere domestication of a geographical space. It
was rather an ideological principle expressing the ability of the American
nation to polarize individual activity in a direction of progress. This is
why the industrial bourgeoisie was later able to get the whole of the
nation to swallow the technological transformations induced by relative
surplus-value by presenting these as the building of a new frontier. The
development of capitalism and the construction of the nation were thus
identified into one process in the popular consciousness. The ideological
* This extract is taken from Michel Aglietta, Rgulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris 1976
(English translation forthcoming NLB, 1979).
18
resources also well under way. The Civil War was to accelerate the
process as well as bringing a qualitative modification.
The Civil War
The American Civil War was the final act of the struggle against colonial
domination. This is why it is legitimate to see it as the origin of the
modern epoch in the American capitalist revolution. The slave form of
production in the South owed its existence and its prosperity to its total
integration into an English-dominated international trade. It blocked the
unification of the American nation on every level, and threatened to put
an end to the frontier expansion. The long phase of industrial expansion
in England after 1849, with its strong demand for agricultural raw
materials, including cotton, actually incited the slaveowners to expand
their domain, and slavery gained new footholds in the lands conquered in
the South-West. In this way it braked the expansion of the textile industry
and other industries using sub-tropical raw materials, as well as
preventing the exploitation of immense mining resources. The
slaveowners also exercised a preponderant influence in the Congress,
sufficient to block any protectionist policy; industrial capitalism thus
suffered as a whole, for the leading industries in the economic division of
labour were unable to withstand English competition. What was at stake
in the war was thus both the direct penetration of capitalism to the entire
Union territory, a policy of commercial protection, and the political and
ideological unification of the nation under the leadership of the industrial
and financial bourgeoisie. The reasons for the political alliance between
the capitalists and the small agricultural producers are clear enough. The
latter feared above all else the extension of the slave system to the free
lands of the West, and the blocking of the sale of public land by a
Congress dominated by the slaveowners representatives. Finally, these
fiercely individualistic petty producers were also very strongly attached
to the ideology and institutions of bourgeois democracy. Yet they were
soon to find out to their cost that this was an alliance with the devil
himself.
The Civil War gave a vigorous impetus to the development of the
productive forces. Economic exchange between North and South was cut
off, and imports from England reduced. The war effort in the North
mobilized all industrial resources and promoted accumulation in those
branches of Department 1 involved in the production of armaments,
explosives and weapons, as well as the extension of communications
routes. There was also a strong military demand for the products of the
textile industry, and for food products, while army recruitment led to a
great scarcity of labour-power. This circumstance favoured a very rapid
advance of capitalist methods of production in the department producing
consumer goods. Mechanization was undertaken in the textile and leather
industries, which enabled women and children to be employed. In
agriculture the strong demand gave a bigger stimulus than ever to
production for exchange-value. Producers became indebted to the banks,
who lent to them in paper money (greenbacks), this being issued as legal
tender so as to finance the public debt.
The immediate post-war period saw expansion continue on a rapid
21
Civil War and the First World War was formed by the assimilation of
successive strata of immigrants of quite disparate languages and cultures.
They therefore joined the American wage-earning class without any roots
in the country. Making use of the political and legal equality enshrined by
the constitutional principles and the American democratic tradition, the
chief objective of these workers was that of cultural assimilation,
according to the ethical norms of the subjective idealism that is the
common basis of ideological representation for all social groups in the
United States. This attitude was all the more marked in that these
immigrants came to a large extent from the central and southern
European countries, and were escaping the horrors of absolutism. The
norms that the immigrants had to internalize so as to succeed in their
cultural assimilation were individualism, the creation of a stable family,
and the predominance of monetary gain as a criterion of social success
and a spur to labour discipline. But they also encountered extremely
harsh conditions of economic exploitation which materially denied
the perspectives offered by political and religious liberalism. This
dual aspect is fundamental for an understanding of the specific forms
and objectives assumed by the American workers movement. This
movement took root in a country where political democracy was far
more advanced than anywhere else in the nineteenth century, and where
working-class organization was for the immigrants at the same time the
bastion of their cultural identity as American citizens. The bitter class
struggles of the 1890s were struggles against the degradation of living
conditions, and were conducted in the name of the principles of the
commodity-producing society itself. Not being waged in any great
degree in the name of a proletarian ideology, these struggles conducted on a strictly economic basis gave a powerful impetus to the
transformation of working-class living conditions in the form of
commodity relations.
Having arrived completely uprooted, the workers of the new industrial
centres had to struggle against conditions of life that had been entirely
imposed by capitalism, in places where no previous urban community
had ever existed. For the three last decades of the nineteenth century, the
accelerated accumulation in Department 1 concentrated capitalist
production around mining resources, waterways and railway junctions.
Working-class concentrations were established at a rapid pace and in the
greatest disorder. As a general rule, working-class housing was rigidly
tied to the factory. Besides being hideous, it belonged to the factory
owners. The latter rented out these dwellings at prohibitive rents, and if
dismissed, the workers lost their homes as well. In the 1890s, these special
conditions of exploitation provoked very hard-fought strikes, and
disturbances that seriously disrupted production (e.g. the Chicago
Pullman strike of 1894). The unhealthy condition of the industrial slums
also became dangerous for the industrial towns as a whole. Finally, the
immediate proximity of working-class housing to the factories began to
impede freedom of industrial location and the quest for economies of
scale that reduced losses of time by the spatial connection of production
activities that were organically linked. This need was supplemented by
that for services in the new industrial towns: sales outlets and urban
transport, improvements of communications between business offices,
and organization of business districts.
25
service, commercial and financial sectors. These social functions are the
basis for the increase in those salaried social categories who are paid in
part from the appropriation of centralized surplus-value.
To the extent that the centralization of capital progresses, so too does the
sum of surplus-value that is not accumulated, and in particular the
dispersion of this portion of surplus-value among a larger number of
individuals. It is essential, therefore, to note that the centralization of
accumulated surplus-value has as its corollary the dispersion of the surplus-value
spent as revenue. This is how a growing social demand is created for
consumer goods that were previously considered as luxuries, so that these
goods can now be produced by capital. However, the movement of these
branches from the sub-department producing for surplus-value
consumption to Department 11 as a whole does not take place
automatically. When it is realized, in other words when the working-class
consumption norm successively incorporates commodities already in
existence, then capitalist relations of production find their biggest
impetus. All technological progress can be given concrete expression in
the transformation of the social conditions of production. Advances of
productivity in Departmment 1 find their outlets in the expansion of
Department 11. The fall in unit exchange-values in this department
sufficiently increases the production of relative surplus-value to enable
real wages to rise. Accumulation can thus progress at a rapid pace in both
departments. Commodity production invades the entire life of society; all
social relations become commodity relations. The limits to this
accelerated and regular accumulation are those of the extension of
capitalist relations of production to the whole field of social production.
It is from the generalization of capitalist production relations to the entire
social division of labour that the United States draws its advanced social
relations: the rapid integration of agriculture; the absence of cultural
traditions geared to stagnation and subsistence production; the rapid
formation of industrial towns unaffected by pre-capitalist forms of urban
life; the homogenization of successive waves of immigrants, on the basis
of the living conditions of the wage-earning class in large-scale industry;
and a strong centralization of capital, inducing a very early adoption of
new methods of management and sales which give rise to intermediate
wage-earning strata (the famous American middle class into which the
whole population is supposed to melt!).
These structural conditions were further reinforced by the circumstantial
factor of the particular role played by the United States in the two world
wars. The wars considerably enlarged production capacities in
Department 1, brought new methods of production to maturity, and
distributed rapidly growing incomeswhich the war economy forced
into savings, and thus made into potential expenditure to fuel post-war
reconversion to civil production. The 1920s were years of expansion of
the sub-department producing commodities absorbed by surplus-value
in its various revenues. This expansion was the work of the automobile,
of electro-mechanical consumer durables, and the first electronic
products. The development potential of these branches was enormous;
but from 1926 onwards, threatening signs indicated that the development
was being blocked by the limits of the market created by this sub27
28