The fact that there was a civil war over slavery doesn't solve the question at all.
I've written a lot about this and don't really feel like retyping it here. Just a few obvious points. Capitalism was, in part, a product of the slaveholding South. The cotton it produced fueled the first stages of the industrial revolution. Planters were an integral part of an emergent global system of capitalism. The owners of the textile mills were capitalists. The bankers who financed them were capitalists The shipowners who brought them the raw material they needed were capitalists. And those who owned the means of producing those materials were capitalists. A capitalist owns, buys, sells, invests capital of all sorts. Among them, almost no slaveholders were just slaveholders. They owned all sorts of capital in the form of ships, railroads, businesses, etc. Conversely, there were prominent industrialists, including in the North, who invested in land, as capitalists were wont to do and, depending on where, could have a lot of slaves on it. Recognition of their fundamentally common interests also defined the restrictions imposed on the Reconstruction, anything that the freed people attempted. On Mon, Dec 2, 2024 at 6:57 PM sartesian via groups.io <sartesian= [email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 2, 2024 at 06:38 PM, Mark Lause wrote: > > I have argued for years that slaveholders were capitalists who held > slaves. That line between them is largely artificial. And slavery itself > was a a very flexible system that often included elements of wage labor. > > > > I have to disagree with Mark. Firstly, the "line between them" was real > enough to cause a civil war- that resulted in abolishing the slaveholders' > relations of production, disposition over the condition of labor, their > *property* in human beings. That the bourgeoisie did this reluctantly, > incompletely, and sooner rather than later abandoned the overhaul of the > plantation economy is exactly what the bourgeoisie do/did when > accommodating and accommodating an archaic, but intertwined, class > formation. The development of US capitalism is an exercise in uneven and > combined development. That the slaveholders were integrated into world > markets, established commercial relations with industrial capitalists does > not make them capitalists, no more than the commercial relations > established by Russian landowners prior to 1917 made them capitalist or > Russian agriculture capitalist, Lenin to the contrary notwithstanding. > There are any number of ways to distinguish the two, capitalism and > slaveholders as classes, but they all depend on the need to accumulate > surplus labor as *value *that reproduces through expanding the means of > production themselves as commodities to be exchanged. Capitalist > reproduction is all about the reproduction of specific classes--the owners > of commodities who can command the free labor time of a class where the > ability to labor only has use as a commodity for exchange. The > slaveholders could never reproduce themselves nor their "property" in such > fashion. > > Yes, there was some industrial slavery and yes there were some slaves > supplementing their subsistence with wage-labor, but the dominant force of > the mode of production was not driven by the capitalist need to substitute > "c" for "v" and expand by reducing the overall costs of production. > Slaveholders would never have produced capitalism in the US South. > > As for Charlie--well he's a perfect example of what happens when ideology > pretends to be historical materialism. Hey Charlie, did you ever find > those studies that proved undocumented migrant laborers were taking jobs > away from black janitors, like you claimed on Michael Robert's blog? > > > quote <#m_-2129045625712628341_quoted-246049197> > > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33855): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33855 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109886990/21656 -=-=- 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/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
