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 (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)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)
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
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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.