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 (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)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