The new history of slavery and capitalism

[Recursion]

https://aeon.co/opinions/how-capitalist-was-american-slavery

Questions about the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the United States have animated historians for nearly a century, and they have never really been resolved. Where some scholars have argued that profit motives, entrepreneurialism and market relations defined American slavery, others have insisted just as emphatically that the slave society of the southern states lacked a truly free labour market and precluded the cultivation of bourgeois values and the development of large cities, which are distinguishing characteristics of capitalist society.

In the past several years, however, the former view has been clearly ascendant, with historians producing a steady stream of scholarship advancing the argument that slavery in the US was both itself deeply capitalistic and made profound contributions to the burgeoning industrial world whose guns, ships and bombs would eventually bring about slavery’s demise. Books by Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert and Walter Johnson have made the most noise. But their work, along with that of the historians Daina Ramey Berry, Seth Rockman, Caitlin Rosenthal, Calvin Schermerhorn and many others has effectively launched an entire subfield of literature dedicated to exploring the ways that human bondage gave rise to a modern Western superpower.

...

Notwithstanding skeptical critics, there are reasons so many find this new scholarship refreshing, compelling and persuasive. In part, of course, an emphasis on the darker side of capitalism’s history comports well with the world today. It is a world where, following the financial meltdown of 2008, the fragility of the economic system is apparent. It is a world in which almost anything can be commoditised and securitised for the benefit of a small minority, while those at the bottom struggle to scrape by. In this world, a past in which the most vulnerable literally belonged to forces of capital that manipulated their labour and their lives for profit makes perfect sense. Indeed, sometimes the past presents striking, specific parallels with the present. The crisis of 2008, for example, grounded in reckless speculation and foolish beliefs about the endless rise of real estate and housing prices, looks not so dissimilar from the crisis of 1837, grounded in reckless speculation and foolish beliefs about the endless rise in the prices of cotton and enslaved people.

Studies exploring the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism also resonate because the racialised nature of US capitalism continues to be patently evident. Black people can no longer be bought and sold as chattel, but they remain disproportionately subject to the predations of payday and mortgage lenders, court officials who extort them to fund local government operations, and law-enforcement officers who assume they have licence to discipline them with excessive and sometimes deadly force. Most dramatically, it is disproportionately black bodies that get funnelled into US prisons and guarantee that state contracts with corrections companies get fulfilled. The operation of the modern and often privatised prison system in the US does not amount to slavery. But slavery’s legacy can be seen plainly in the annual reports of corporate entities whose stock prices depend in part on how many black men and women are locked in their cells.

[daybranch]

1. Howard Zinn's book captures the issue of slavery in its many forms from the most beastial forms to

the wage slavery instituted for the poor both whites and blacks with the willing help and gratitude of those great industrialists of the north eager to exploit the mineral and other resources of the south. Zinn borrows heavily from Du Bois, a black democratic socialist, and best descriptor of the reformation after the civil war and its effects in the south, stated it simply in his own book " Black Reformation" where in he says -we are all slaves now. Zinn's book is a classic and the most comprehensive book on our history I have ever seen. By pointing out the reality of what has happened time and again, and again, it stirs your blood and calls you to action. The name of the book is The People's History of the United States. It is filled with voluminous detail to support its conclusions but even a skimming of its chapters can truly awaken us to what is happening today. Go Bernie!

[malthaussen]

2. Insofar as it casts light on the interdependence of slavery and capitalism...

... this trend is healthy. Insofar as it is used as some kind of justification (ie, "slavery was no worse than working for a sweatshop&quot it may be misleading. But if one does not perceive man in purely economic terms (which is the trend in both capitalist and communist interpretation), then it is insufficient of itself to explain the phenomenon, since clearly many owned slaves who derived no significant economic advantage from them (and who may well have suffered economic loss thereby: slavery is really only profitable for large plantations of a valuable cash crop, where economies of scale can have impact). I think any discussion of slavery and racism is incomplete without taking into account simple schadenfreude, and the same goes for discussions of class.

-- Mal