Charles writes: "As a further answer to David S's question, the notorious "carpetbaggers" (see below) were principles and agents of Northern "hostile takeovers" and "vulture capitalists" . One capitalist absorbed many Southern capitals. This was monopolization, centralization of capital, a process that Marx noted in the penultimate chapter of _Capital_ as a main feature of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. This contributed to the Northern takeoff without slavery , but was dependent on the leftover wealth of slave-owning capitalism."
I am trying to understand the importance of this debate. If the point is that a capitalist economy can coexist with and thrive in a relationship with a slave economy, that does not seem like a very important point. Seems obvious. If, however, the point is that the rapid economic takeoff of capitalist economies in the 19th century was "dependent" on its prior profitable relationship with a slave economy, I just don't see it. We can only speculate about counter-factuals, but the notion that a "necessary" condition to the growth in the North in the last quarter of the 19th Century was slavery in the South for the prior 200 years does not ring true to me. I don't dispute that the wealth created in the South was a contribution to the growth in the North, but it seems to me that wealth (profitable cotton, tobacco, etc.) would have been created if the South had a wage-based similar to the North. And I further believe that if the South simply never existed, the North would sti! ll have grown steadily and then taken off in the late 19th Century as industrialization took off. David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
