An interesting article. Johnson writes: >>What was the role of slavery in American economic development? The most familiar answer to that question is: not much. By most accounts, the triumph of freedom and the birth of capitalism are seen as the same thing. The victory of the North over the South in the Civil War represents the victory of capitalism over slavery, of the future over the past, of the factory over the plantation<<
If I remember correctly, this "familiar answer" is Louis Hacker's sorta-Marxist perspective in his THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. What it ignores is the international connection, the way that US-based slavery provided fuel for England's capitalist engine. On the other hand, my understanding of US economic development indicates that in the period up to 1860, the North and the South were developing away from each other (though both were based on stealing land from the Native Americans). The South was more and more an economic colony of England (importing more and more stuff from them, too) while the North was becoming more of a self-contained economic unit (involving not just industry but also the farmers of what is now called the Midwest). (Not that they were ever totally separate.) While the English capitalists were getting the lion's share of the loot extracted from the slaves, the Northern US ones were benefiting to a lesser extent. The lack of economic connection between the North and South was one reason for the long-term conflict over tariffs that reinforced the conflict over slavery (which was won by the North when the South seceded) and the weakness of the shared culture of the ruling classes, which made it hard to avoid a Civil War. >> the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.<< Empirically, that's true when describing the political economy of global capitalism before the Civil War. But analytically, there's a clear distinction (at least for Marx): capitalism as a mode of production exploits "free" wage labor, while the slave mode of production exploits slaves. Of course, the world system of the 1850s was more than just a collection of different modes of production: slavery was dominated by capitalism, clearly promoting the latter's growth. This shaped the nature of Southern slavery. In CAPITAL, for example, Marx says: > ... as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower [sic] forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour,& c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself ... < from CAPITAL, vol. 1, ch. 10, sect. 2. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S2 Since then, I think it's pretty clear that capitalism can exist without slavery. Of course, many workers -- e.g., in Indonesia -- might live in slave-type conditions. But that's a kind of wage labor. That system can be more profitable to the capitalists than even slavery if the supplies of labor-power are abundant enough. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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