Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > Mat wrote: > >There are lots of debates about whether the Enslavement of African peoples in > >the U.S. south, for example, was capitalist or not. Two points: > > > >1) Enslaved Africans were producing *commodities.* > > > >2) This production was responsible for capital accumulation > > > >This is strong evidence supporting the position that this was capitalist > >slavery. > > > >Very important differences between things called the same name, "slavery." > >Slavery in Greek Antiquity was not the same, for example, as Enslavement of > >Africans on plantations in the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Other important > >differences, too. This is why some use the term Enslavement with a capital E > >to indicate this experience. > > To add to the above points, capitalist techniques of organization of > production (be it on fields, in mines, or at sugar-refining factories) can > be said to have been elaborated under conditions of modern slavery and > other forms of forced labor, even before the labor of white artisans became > subsumed and transformed under capitalism. I've been swinging back and forth on this for 30 years. There is no doubt that the use of slavery for commodity production has a profound impact on the treatment of slaves. (The worst slavery of the ancient mediterannean world was in the gold and silver mines.) And does anyone want seriously to argue that slavery in the u.s. south would have been so important had it not been for manchester's need for cotton? On the other hand, the organization of daily life in the South was profoundly different from that in the north -- and one way at least to explain that difference is the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist social relations. Barbara Fields, *Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland in the 19th C.*, explores in some depth this contrast as it showed up in just one state. Carrol
