Capitalism and Slavery

http://www.thenation.com/blog/206025/capitalism-and-slavery

by benbreen • 11 years ago

24 19 11 years ago

pnut• 11 years ago

Thank god for robots and computers, 'cuz capitalism isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

danbruc6• 11 years ago

Well, robots and computers did nothing to prevent capitalism from enslaving its workforce, they might actually have made the situation worse.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

webXL• 11 years ago

Despite all this scholarly work, each generation—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Robin Blackburn, from Eric Williams to Walter Johnson—seems condemned to have to prove the obvious anew: Slavery created the modern world, and the modern world’s divisions (both abstract and concrete) are the product of slavery. Slavery is both the thing that can’t be transcended but also what can never be remembered. That Catch-22—can’t forget, can’t remember—is the motor contradiction of public discourse, from exalted discussions of American Exceptionalism to the everyday idiocy found on cable, in its coverage, for example, of Baltimore and Ferguson.

The sins of our fathers... Just because racism and violence still exist today does not mean we're all ignorant of the sins our ancestors committed and should abolish an economic system that tangentially benefitted. And this is not a modern phenomenon, as he seems to imply. This country was one of the first to abolish slavery. What occurred in this country's brief history pales in comparison to the brutality that came before it.

Slavery is institutionalized theft, organized crime. It is the opposite of free trade and capitalism. Sure, self-proclaimed "capitalists" owned slaves, but that shouldn't impugn the whole system. Please tell me, what other economic system has lifted billions out of poverty?

AnimalMuppet• 11 years ago

While we're at it, please note that slavery existed for millenia before capitalism (at least before our western form of it).

danbruc6• 11 years ago

Capitalism is still a form of slavery were the capitalists benefit from the workforce disproportionally with regard to their investment. And what lifts people out of poverty is work, not an economic system. Capitalism is of course very effective at organizing the environment in a way to enable highly productive work but suggesting that this is a unique feature of capitalism seems hardly justified, we just didn't explore many alternatives. Finally judging capitalism by the number of people it lifted out of poverty seems also misguided to me, there are a lot of people that were negatively affected by capitalism. And a fair comparison should of course not compare the result achieved by capitalism with the situation before capitalism but with the - unfortunately mostly counterfactual - result achieved by an alternative system that started from the same initial conditions.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

brianfitz• 11 years ago

Dan, I'll chime in. I don't know your circumstances, but when I read a critique like this my first question is always "where has the person travelled?". It's very difficult to spend time in places devoid of capitalism and not notice the differences. Due to my past work, I travelled all over the globe to both established and emerging markets -- and work simply can't explain the levels of disparity. What repeatedly made a difference was ownership. For example, the poverty in Addis Ababa is overwhelming. Once you get past that, the second thing you'll likely notice is that the government has a tight grip over business there. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or any recognizable brands there. This is for the "benefit of the people", but really is just there to protect government interests (the coffee place nearly has the exact same Starbucks logo). In one area where there were nice homes, a single individual owned the entire lot of them. Unlike the US where you might be able to acquire property or make free choices about a new business, your choices are restricted there. There is much talk in the US about the top 1%, but this defines the "99%" by limiting the sample size to only those living within capitalism. On a global scale, the top 1% is anyone making over $34k a year.

nickff• 11 years ago

There is a great deal of evidence that slavery was related to cotton, sugar, and rice plantations (as well as some other crops to a lesser extent). One could also make a very convincing, if not definitive argument that imperialism enabled slavery (at the intercontinental scale), and that mercantilism supported it. Politics, as played by wealthy landowners and slave-traders also perpetuated slavery, as can most easily be seen from the (abominable) actions of the American House of Burgesses.[1]

There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery. Economics was called "the dismal science" precisely because its critics thought the proponents of free markets were not taking a (racist) vision of 'social justice' seriously.[2] Later on in the American South, the bus and streetcar companies tried to segregate busses on the basis of smoking and non-smoking sections, but politicians and racist groups forced them to segregate based on race. In South Africa during the aparteid, businesses were taken to task for not discriminating strongly enough against the Africans, and many groups such as socialists and unions held racist policies as a tentpole of their platforms. There are innumberable cases of the market acting against slavery, and even Smith described markets as notable for their lack of nationalism or discrimination.[3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

bobcostas55• 11 years ago

There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery.

Not only that; they were and are diametrically opposed. The Beckert quote implies a connection between slavery and industrialization when in fact the relationship was an inverse one.

A comparison between the confederacy and the north is illuminating. The concentration of wealth in slaves and land prevented industrialization during the 19th century, and the south fell very far behind economically. I think it's worth nothing that the vast majority of white people in the south were worse off because of slavery, because the system prevented capital from being allocated efficiently. And while the two areas have converged, differences still remain today.

danbruc6• 11 years ago

What? Having slaves pick cotton is as capitalist as it can get. You own the land, they do the work, you get the profit. That slaves are not as effective as tractors really doesn't matter for that.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

yummyfajitas2• 11 years ago

I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished and later that system evolved into capitalism.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is. The author seems to think someone forgot about slavery, though it's unclear who.

As a counterpoint to the mood affiliation, I'll just remind everyone here that the term "dismal science" was coined by Thomas Carlyle, who favored slavery rather than "find[ing] the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand,' and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished and later that system evolved into capitalism.

Capitalism was a term coined in the late 19th Century to refer to the post-feudal economic system that developed through several centuries and was in full swing by the mid-19th century, and overlapped considerably with the use of chattel slavery.

While its critics hadn't yet called it "capitalism", the system which they did get around to calling "capitalism" did not evolve only after the abolition of slavery as you claim.

yummyfajitas2• 11 years ago

I don't dispute that old-school market economies involved the use of slavery. I just don't know what the point of the article is, beyond perhaps attempting to affiliate "slavery" and "capitalist" moods in our mind.

Capitalism and Slavery

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