This has proved to be a productive discussion. The American Revolution hasn't been a major focus of my interest for years, and I particularly found David Walters' learned discussion of the recent arguments behind the misassessment of the American Revolution an excellent update.
What has been my focus has been the nineteenth century. It is possible to see slavery as a precapitalist labor system, as were other features of production in the U.S. (say, for example, the preindustrial artisanal structure of crafts), though its racial basis and other features in the U.S. were unique. These are very different questions than the class nature of the society and its ruling class. Gentlemen of property always viewed the Mason-Dixon line as quite permeable. Sectionalism as a political and ideological force represented a cultural construct. Yes, the apologists for slavery always argued that theirs was a fundamentally different social system than that of those mean-spirited anti-family money-grubbing Yankees who used and discarded wage workers as suited them, etc. But was it really? Among the masters of the South, slaveholders ran a wide range of enterprises. They owned plantations . . . and banks . . . and mines . . . and small manufacturing companies . . . and shipyards. Put another way, were the owners of shipyards, small manufacturing companies, mines and banks not capitalist if they also owned slaves. Even sticking to the cotton production, was there a single plantation owner--not in the most rural backwaters of Dixie--that did not rely on wage labor when it was convenient or useful to them? Did they run a single plantation that was NOT part of that global marketplace that provided what the textile mills of Britain (and bits of the North) what they needed for what used to be called the Industrial Revolution? The arbitrariness of such a distinction is very evident when looking at individuals who crossed the artificial borders of slave and "free" states in the course of not just a life-time but in their daily commutes. Where I live, you had the perfectly obvious nineteenth century urban bourgeois happily scarfing up the profits of their indisputably capitalist exploitation of labor, but they own a large farm across the river in Kentucky with slaves. From their perspective--and they were ultimately the rulers--it was all different ways of exploiting labor and accumulating capital. The end of slavery also demonstrated this. Nobody can look at the range of methods the old ruling class used to try to maintain the subjugation of black workers in the South in the wake of emancipation can believe that the legal distinction between slave labor and "free labor" meant that it was not smudged continually in the application, Solidarity! Mark L. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#8418): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8418 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82563203/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
