CORRECTION CB: I guess the answer is that it wasn't though. It is a counter-factual. We'll never know whether capitalism could have got started with its initial rapid take off of accumulation withOUT "cheating" on wage-labor with slave labor, super-exploitation
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: c b <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 12:46 PM Subject: Capitalism and slavery To: pen-l <[email protected]> ..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. ^^^^ CB: I'm thinking the prior relationship was more profitable, in general , for the Southern slaveocratic bourgeosie than for the Northern bourgeoisie, who were still somewhat in the manufacturing phase before their industrial revolution really took off relative to the British. The main industry in the takeoff of the British Industrial Revolution had been textiles, clothes, thereby related to Southern cotton production. The concentration of wealth was in the South before the war, and shifted to the North afterward. The takeoff in the North was in part do to vulturizing the wealth of the defeated former ruling class in so it was not " "dependent" on its prior profitable relationship with a slave economy. So I agree with you and don't see that latter either. ^^^^^^^ 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. ^^^^^^^ CB: Only in the sense that _all_ of capitalism, including in the US derived from the primitive or original accumulation of capital which had its "chief momenta" in slavery and colonialism. Both the colonial and slaveery status of America contributed to the original accumulation of capital in both the "North" and the "South" of the US. ^^^^^ 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. ^^^^^ CB: I guess the answer is that it wasn't though. It is a counter-factual. We'll never know whether capitalism could have got started with its initial rapid take off of accumulation with "cheating" on wage-labor with slave labor, super-exploitation. ^^^^^ 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. ^^^^^^ CB: Read this ; there are many posts on PEN-L no the Brenner debate about ten years ago. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
