I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.
This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.
I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)
(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)
You're close with your assessment on technology. The Radical Republicans in the 1800s were pretty clear on it, actually. Owning slaves ends up costing you more, especially after the abolition of the slave trade. Wage labor was cheaper.
If you are a slaver who wants to own people, they are your responsibility. Yes you can treat them terribly, but you still have to feed and house them. If they get sick, you either lose an investment or you pay for their doctor. Brazil kept slavery going the longest because they were closest to Africa and thus had cheaper access to human capital. If they worked a slave to death in two weeks, they could get another one for relatively cheap. In North America, boats had to travel further so slaves were more expensive. If you paid more for a slave, you wanted more labor out of them to get return on investment. So they had better working conditions in NA compared to Brazil or the Caribbean. Once the slave trade was ended in like 1808, NA slavers had to make sure their enslaved population lived long and healthy enough lives to reproduce, since there wasn't more boats coming from Africa (at least legally). I've heard a professor say that for a slaver in the antebellum South, buying a human was an equivalent investment to buying a car today in terms of comparable cost.
Now Republicans pointed out that if you pay a man a wage, you are absolved of anything that happens to them outside of work. (I'm sorry I don't have good sources on this, but you could probably find some with googling). Do they have a home? Do they have enough to eat? Doesn't matter, they are "free" and have to take care of themselves. Do they have hungry children at home? Not your problem. Old Joe just died of malaria last night in bed? It's okay there are 3 more Joe's lining up to take his place. You pay him for the day and you get work for the day, you already made your money by the time the worker gets their wage. You can keep the cruel working conditions with capitalism and get rid of everything else that costs you overhead. So long as there's a wage and a labor market.
The labor market is the other side of this coin. In capitalism, workers race to the bottom to compete with each other. You don't work, you don't get paid, you don't eat. So workers will sell themselves to capitalists at lower and lower costs. This is the real trick of capitalism, eroding solidarity with your fellow worker. If you demand $3 a day, there's someone hungry enough to settle for $2 a day.
There's also the fact that capitalists can double grift the workers. They steal their labor by underpaying them, but since they're free workers they also have to buy stuff. Buy stuff from capitalists. That $2 goes back to some capitalist almost immediately, if not the same guy who owns the factory you work for. Profits on both end of the equation.
This also plays out at large with colonialism transitioning to neo-colonialism. Great Britain could extract all they wanted from their colonies, but they had to pay British troops to keep the locals in check. Since they were the local government, they had some bearing of responsibility if there was famine or plague or violence or whatever. That was an upfront cost.
By empowering local comprador class to run the government, the locals had to now bear the cost of social welfare and military. Locals bosses have to deal with local workers, and the British (or American or French or whatever) still to get to rake in dough from extracting natural resources and labor. And they get to call it free. On top of that, neo-colonial governments will compete with eachother for a race to the bottom. El Salvador sells cheaper sugar than Haiti? Haiti better respond by lowering their workers wages to make sure they don't get cut out of the sugar trade. And of course, these neo-colonial nations are the perfect market for cheap finished goods. Profit on both ends by getting cheap materials then selling it back to them in a new package.
Thanks for your response.
If indeed it was cheaper, why did the slave owners in the US go to war to protect their ability to own humans?
Edit: similarly why did the northern bourgeoisie go to war to prevent it? Surely it would have defeated itself?
Great question with a couple possible answers.
First off, while capitalists have class consciousness when it comes to keeping workers down, they are not a monolith. In the past (and still today) there are different factions within the capitalist class. Different factions compete with each other for investment and control of capital. Northern capitalists wanted more investment in their property, which was mostly factories. More money meant more machines, which could make individual workers more productive. They produced finished goods and needed free people to sell them too.
Southern capitalists resisted abolition because their capital was already heavily invested in slaves. When northerners invested capital, they bought more machinery or raw goods. Slavers just bought more slaves to work the land more intensely. Abolition would immediately make 99% of their investments worthless, even if they could eventually recoup the losses. It is the same short sided thinking that modern capitalists have, they prefer money now to money in the future. They were comfortable with the situation as it was, having the "free" north to sell their raw goods to at ridiculous profits.
But there's a cultural element to it. Southern life revolved around white supremacy for as long as there was an American south. Their world view revolved around the idea that black people were naturally subhuman. Anything less than that shattered their perception of self. That's why even poor southern whites fought to preserve slavery, it was the one thing they had. If they were poor and white, at least they weren't black and a slave. There's propaganda from the South that literally says as much.
There's an economic element to poor whites as well. If all the slaves were free, then poor white people had a huge new pool of workers to compete with for jobs. And for the slave owners, those free people might move north to find better jobs.
For your second question, the northern bourgeoisie largely did not want to go to war over slavery. Sure there were many genuine abolitionists, but most were comfortable with the relationship with the south. The standard Republican view was that eventually slavery would wither out because it was outdated. In the meantime Southern plantations provided raw cotton for cheap and the North could manufacture it and sell it. What the northern bourgeoisie could not live with, however, was this relationship changing. Lincoln was very clear in the early years of the Civil War, this was not a war over slavery it was a war over national unity. An independent South meant that Northern capitalists would have to pay tariffs and generally higher prices for raw material. Lincoln was clear, if the South had surrendered any time before 1863 he would have let slavery continue in the South. In fact the Emancipation Proclamation very clearly said that slavery was still legal in states that had not seceded from the Union. Northern capital would not profit without cheap southern cotton.
It was only after several years of warfare that it was clear to Northern bourgeoisie that the South would not surrender. At that point, the only way to stop the CSA was destroy their economic base. General Sherman's march to the sea liberated slaves and redistributed lands, it also tore up railroads and other infrastructure. Compromise was off the table and the North had to impose free wage capitalism onto the South at gunpoint (this also provided great investment opportunities for Northern capitalists.)
The North and the South saw the writing on the wall, free labor capitalism would eventually overtake slave plantation capitalism. The south were too high on their own white supremacist propaganda (see Social Darwinism) to see that peacefully transitioning into free labor would save them in the long run. So they tried to literally fight it. Enshrining slavery was the key feature of the CSA. Capitalists never willingly give up what they had and slavery was literally all they had.
Abolition would immediately make 99% of their investments worthless, even if they could eventually recoup the losses. It is the same short sided thinking that modern capitalists have, they prefer money now to money in the future.
This is an extremely important point. Compare lack of willingness to abandon slavery to lack of willingness to abolish fossil fuels, no matter the human cost.
I would argue that capitalism is the system of wage labor for commodity production and thus in no meaningful Marxist sense were the southern plantation owners capitalists. They were far closer to aristocrat
They were far worse than capitalists from a moral standpoint but it's not accurate to just use capitalist to describe bad rich people
Regardless the slaver aristocracy existed within a capitalism system. The north could not have developed industrial capitalism without the slave labor of the south. Just like European capitalism could not have developed without the exploitation of their colonies. You raise a good point and even if slavocrats were technically capitalists themselves, I think in this case it's a distinction without a difference. Slavocrats still acted like capitalists, in that they invested money into commodities for the sole sake of making more money. They competed for capital from the northern banks for the sake of expanding their slave economy. Now of course humans are not commodities, but within the slave system they were treated as such.
A commodity is a product created to be sold. Slaves were not a commodity in this way for the plantations even under the inhuman logic of chattel slavery as they weren't primarily being intended from birth to be sold on rather they were expected to work on the plantation they were born on.
Again it doesn't make much of a moral difference and there was capitalism involved in slavery for example the triangle trade itself was a capitalist system that relied on commodity production to exchange for slaves
they weren’t primarily being intended from birth to be sold
The “production” of slaves consisted in the fetching, not in their births. They were, in the twisted logic of slavery, “naturally occurring” resources to be exploited. It is just as immaterial how they came to be in their environment as the fact that iron ultimately was created in a supernova far before the era of capitalism. Likewise, the capitalist value of slaves corresponded to the socially necessary labor for their reproduction; not labor in general, but labor that socially counted as equal homogenous labor, ie the labor of the European slavers.
The “production” of slaves was comparable to the production of machines. They didn’t work for a wage or directly produce surplus value. Their value was preserved in the product in proportion to the average working lifespan. The logic of why slavery took over as the dominant “technology” of the Southern capitalist production methods is the same as any other technology like the cotton gin; it reduced the amount of socially necessary labor (again, labor that counted as social labor, generally white labor).
Sorry to dig up an old comment but I thought it was an interesting discussion. I think all here agree that whether the CSA were capitalists doesn’t make a big material difference. Especially since I see below you agreed chattel slavery does ultimately look capitalist.
nah it's cool
I think to the logic of capitalism the key difference is that machines cannot reproduce themselves and slavery in America lasted quite a bit longer than the trans atlantic slave trade.
But there are some pretty good arguments later in this thread if I recall that did convince me that chattel slavery is a capitalist mode of production
I would argue that capitalism is the system of wage labor for commodity production and thus in no meaningful Marxist sense were the southern plantation owners capitalists.
You miss a very important aspect of Marx's critique of wage labor in that he juxtaposes wage labor vs. piecemeal wages. Under piecemeal wages, workers have no interest in creating commodities beyond subsistence levels and capitalists have no interest in increased productivity as they pay a fixed price per commodity produced and surplus value is constant. Under wage labor, the capitalist is incredibly interested in increasing productivity as they pay per hour rather than per product produced and every increase in productivity is an increase in surplus value. Labor costs and surplus value are the monetary valuations of what Marx calls the necessary product and the surplus product, or paid labor and unpaid labor.
So lets look at slavery in relation to wage labor and piecemeal work. A slave is provided food and shelter and little else. They are paid the same regardless of the amount of commodities they produce. Slavery sure looks a lot more like wage labor than piecemeal work doesn't it? If "appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production," as per Engels, what is slavery except the purest form of Capitalism?
ok you raise a good point my mind is changed chattel slavery is a capitalist mode of production
My guess: even before abolition, the north and south had developed into economies with different structure. They were linked and dependent on each other, but slavery was largely concentrated in the south. You can't press the capitalism button more than you can press the communism button, and for various historical reasons the north had a more developed capitalist economy ready to smoothly step in and replace slavery. Slavers would lose in the short term by switching to free labor.
Then again, slavers were compensated lavishly for their lost property, and slave labor morphed into prison labor, so the picture is a bit muddy, idk.
well the south didn't have an industrial economy. The agrarian economy of the south had different material conditions and they were more aristocrat than capitalist in their economic interest
they also wanted to expand slavery to more states not just maintain it as they wanted a country ran to cater to the interests of the cotton economy not a country that was organised to benefit industrial production. This pushed the interests of slavery and capital at odds similar to how in Europe the bourgeoise had conflict with the feudal system
I always kinda chalked that up to plain cruelty and racism on the south's part.
That may be true, I guess I'm looking for a materialist argument though, not an idealist one.
I mean material conditions aren't entirely deterministic. We could read racist ideology as a residual aspect of an earlier mode of production that basically took hold. There aren't always "material" causes in a 1:1 relationship to the dominant mode of production, sometimes residual ideologies from residual material conditions can exert a powerful force. I think that's basically what happened there (and you might also look at Hell on Earth as another example, with the late feudal order fighting a doomed conflict with modern weapons and material concerns against a rising class (the bourgeoisie) whose actions and ideology were aligned with the emergent new mode of production.
Read Dominant, residual, emergent from Raymond Williams for more on this potential for actions and ideologies to be "out of step" with dominant forms of production and material conditions
I think cruel and racist people can be cruel and racist without checking their material conditions first.
I didn't say they did - I'm not saying the poster is wrong I'm just asking for the materialist argument
Without being anywhere near an expert on the topic, I would hazard a guess that southern slave states took a look at the industrialised northern states and saw that, if slavery was abolished overnight, the much more agrarian south would suddenly find itself at a huge economic disadvantage. Basically they had (literally) bet the farm on slavery and were all in on it continuing.
In addition to the other good answers, there may be a couple other explanations that work alongside those mentioned. In the time before the war, there was discussion about whether slavery would eventually be phased out. And it certainly would have eventually. However, just because something may appear to be more profitable (wage labor), it's something else entirely to convince one economic class (slavers) to completely upend their entire mode of production instantaneously. The costs to transition over to wage labor would likely have been high and very disruptive. There's a contradiction in capitalism in maximizing short versus long term profits; and I think it's generally true that given a choice, capitalists will take $1.00 now over $2.00 tomorrow.
The owning classes didn't abolish slavery, elements of the capitalist class abolished slavery in coalition with the working class and slaves!
I really encourage you to read the first couple chapters of Black Reconstruction. WEB DuBois argues that the Emancipation Proclamation sparked a black general strike as thousands of slaves drew on previous organization to walk off the fields, sabotage plantations and join the union army. After that initial strike, freedmen, including Harriet Tubman, lead raids to free their compatriots.
From a materialist perspective, the rise of industrialization created new economic opportunities and wealth, which led to changes in social and political power structures. The ownership class, made up of capitalists, merchants, and industrialists, saw slavery as a hindrance to their ability to maximize profits and expand their businesses. They began to use their political and economic power to advocate for the abolition of slavery, both in their own countries and abroad.The materialist argument also points to the role of the working class in the abolition of slavery. The growth of industrialization created a large, urban working class that was becoming increasingly organized and politically conscious. This working class saw slavery as a source of cheap labor that competed with their own wages and working conditions. They also saw slavery as a source of oppression that perpetuated social and economic inequalities. As a result, they began to demand the abolition of slavery as part of their broader struggle for social and economic justice.In summary, the materialist argument for the abolition of slavery posits that changes in the economic and social structure of society, driven by the rise of industrialization and the growth of the working class, were the main factors behind the end of slavery. The ownership class and the working class, with their own distinct economic and political interests, came to see slavery as a hindrance to their ability to maximize profits and improve their own lives, and they used their collective power to push for its abolition.I'm sorry if my previous response was not what you were looking for. Is there a specific question or topic you would like to discuss? I'd be happy to help. Please note that using inappropriate language or being disrespectful is not productive and goes against OpenAI's use case policy.not that surprising you phrased your question in a way that would likely be equated by the model as similar to marxist literature so it pulled your answer from the theory it was trained on
Huh, it's impressive that AI can generate comprehensive sentences, but it uses a lot of unnecessary political jargon to hide the fact that its output is incredibly shallow in meaning.
I mean, in typically AI fashion it didn't actually answer the question or really seemingly understand it. I kind of hate this bot outside of a bit, but I am optimistic that when this becomes prevalent enough it will destroy the apparent validity of interacting with strangers on the internet and we'll start talking to each other again.
It is more unstable to keep the slaves of your colony within your colony where they can come kill you than to keep them across an ocean where you can subject them to whatever tortures you can. See the harvesting of rubber.
The postan thesis states that labor relations in europe in the middle ages are dependent on demography. Esentially tenancy was phsed out because after the black death labor was scarce. Then worker co ditio s deteriorated as population increased. And ultimatley this rezulted in landlessnes and proletarization(wage labor).
We can extend the model further so that in an early state you lack agrarian peasents so you have to go and kidnap hunter gatherers to do yohr work for you. A sitjation similar to tjat descrived in against the grain by sc scot.
Then as your population increases you have more poor people to work the fields and it becomes less profitable to go and kidnap slaves. Eventually your poor are enough that the landlord can negotiate an extreamly one sided tenancy agreement.
So wage labor would be the other side of the coin from tenancy demografically speaking.
For sources:
The brener debate is a book arguing against the postan thesis also incluedes postans original article. I dont necesarily agree but its a good read.
Koepke has an article calculating the optimal feeding for slaves taking into acount the capital cost of buyng them. In another article he shows slaves were taller and thus better fed during childhood than free whites during antebellum south.
You can probably find them by searching gor koepke antropometry. Both scots book and tge brener debate should be free on libgen.
As for why slavers were against it. They already had huge capital invested in the system.
In order to formalize this a bit:
Mpl(l) marginal productivity of labor. Is the value aded by the ith worker. in neoliberal theology this is very close to the wage (or other labor relationships) because if one capitalist offers too litle the next one will ofer a bit more. But no one will offer more than the mpl. In reality it is less because there is coertion and social institutions that favor the ruling clases.
The mpl is always declining with respect to labor. Because the most productive tasks are filled first.
The average productivity of labor is the sum or integral of the mpl at every worker divided by the amount of workers. This is decreasing at a slower rate than mpl.
The substraction of one from the other is the profit the capitalit or landlord gets. At the begining both look very similar so there is little profit to extract. So you see the maximum amount of coertion: Slavery.
However coertion has a cost and as mpl decreases the sulprus value you can expropiate by force also decreases until it is less than the cost of the original coertion so you use other methods. Prehaphs you transiion to some form of share croping system from a slave society.
As for the argument that slaves are only viable for low complexity tasks imagine a society with both low and high complexity tasks. Training a worker to do the later is very expensive but since there are are few of this types their mpl os very high with respect to apl so you cant profit from them. So you can theoretically have a wage market for low complexity tasks and slavery for pmcs.
This is the case in medieval islamic societies. And to an extent in imperial societies from ancient assyria to china were scrives and high end beurocrats would be property of the king.
Slavery was abolished because the risk of slave rebellions, including the risk of the slave master's throat being slit and his head impaled on a stake, and cost of suppressing slave rebellions in order to prevent said slave master's head from being separated from his neck, was too great. At the end of the day, the cost/benefit was not in slavery's favor. It's like how "becoming a drug lord selling illegal drugs" isn't a career path most people would choose if the profit margin is extremely high for the commodity.
You can see this clearly with the way the British empire abolished slavery. There were various slave rebellions, including two Maroon wars where runaway slaves forming autonomous communities outside of British rule in Jamaica fought against their British oppressors. The triumph of the Haitian Revolution, where massa's collective throats were slit and massa's collective heads were impaled onto stakes, struck fear in the slaveowning class. And when Jamaica again had another slave rebellion where one fifth of Jamaica's slaves revolted against their British oppressors, the British empire saw the writing on the wall. After the rebellion was crushed in late 1832, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, almost 6 months later.
As for why the US South stuck with slavery, there's a major demographic difference between Caribbean islands like Haiti and Jamaica and the antebellum South. With this demographic advantage and the settler colony's strategy of self-deputizing settlers as a means of protecting theft of stolen Indigenous land, I believe the slaveowning class simply felt that the risk of slave rebellions was low enough that slavery should continue and with the UK's booming textile industry and their need for cotton, the status quo of slaves toiling in cotton fields can be sustained and a potential Nat Turner or John Brown wouldn't be enough to overthrow slavery.
Didn't know any of this, have got to read up more about the abolition of the international slave trade and about slave revolts. I'm decently read up on the Haitian revolution, but Jamaica is next.
The owner class is always at each others' throats, so don't discount the hypothesis that some owners saw the gain in ending slavery and became more powerful than the other owners (literal slavers).
Look to two things:
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What was the impetus to end slavery and, most importantly for ruling class issues, why was the impetus tolerated rather than outlawed and propagandized?
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After the American Civil War, which owners gained?
For (1), don't discount the aspect of moral outrage and organization by abolitionists. Marxism emphasizes material conditions, but doesn't discount human agency and our ability to also shape our own direction. The proximal effort was by abolitionists pushing to end the expansion of slave states.
But let's get to material conditions because they are so often underemphasized. So long as abolition was directly opposed to ruling class interests, it would usually get quashed, after all - and ending slavery is clearly against the material interest of slavers. Without revolution or the ability to otherwise depose the ruling class, abolitionists would not be able to accomplish this on their own.
The settler push West was a major driving factor, and also had proximal causes re: the American Civil War. Namely, whether new states - created through genocide and replacement of the Native Americans - would be slave states. This was the tipping point issue of the Civil War, and there arec liberal narratives about it, but it's important to see the aspect of it that is an intra-ruling class fight over who will own land, resources, and production in those new states. And moreover, the slave states' ruling classes saw themselves becoming politically, and then economically dominated if they ever lost the Senate. They relied on a form of regional protectionism to not get bought up and deposed by richer northern businesses, particularly the rapidly growing industrial capitalists. They, probably correctly, saw their own doom when Kansas was admitted as a free state, hence the South starting the Civil War. And the proof is in the pudding: the North did end slavery, but also absolutely did not ensure fair equitable conditions for the formerly enslaved, instead throwing people at the mercy of a racist society and agricultural work that started out pretty similar to slave conditions and slpwly morphed into segregated wage labor that was deeply exploitative and left the vast majority in extreme poverty.
So that's point (1) leading to point (2). The issue was allowed to come to a head, even pushed, aa a fight between ruling class factions. The deeper material conditions are an increasingly powerful capitalist class, including industrial capitalists, that wanted to break open the South for their own exploitation. They also wanted the new states for themselves. Their own ascension was driven by industrialization, the railroads, capitalism, etc etc.
For point 2, just look at where reconstruction went while the north had a monopoly on power. Protectionist policies disappeared, former slaves were made into sharecroppers and wage laborers, and large portions of Appalachia, Virginia, and the Carolinas were bought up by capitalists, turned into extraction efforts to feed industry, and sometimes themselves industrialised. With Lincoln's death this monopoly ended and Southern planters forced themselves back into power, though less than they had before and more regionally restricted to the Deep South, where northern capitalists had less interest. Back in power, they created Jim Crow and terrorized former slaves into apartheid conditions and incredibly exploitative wage labor.
Another common Marxist point at this juncture is that under capitalism, wage laborers' pay tends to get driven down to subsistence (or even below), at least until something gives and the ruling class chuckleheads figure out they get better profits with a minimally educated, housed, and fed workforce. Anyways, a common Marxist refrain is that wage labor of + renting to former slaves was more profitable than slavery, as now subsistence was not the owners' problem. The fact that black people could still be treated and exploited as an underclass suited them very well and there was no way an attempt to restore slavery would have any material base.
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