Jim:
why is the idea that US slavery wasn't capitalism _prima facie_ wrong? Is it because anything (in the post-1492 world, at least) that's exploitative and immoral has to be capitalist?
I deal with all this in depth here: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins.htm
At least for Marx, slavery was _not_ a form of capitalism (and he's clear about it). One of his rhetorical points was that capitalist social relations were _like_ slavery (thus "wage slavery") and in some ways _worse than_ slavery. (Slave-owners at least tried to keep their chattel alive when they weren't needed in production, while capitalists dump their employees into the reserve army.)
Well, as I tried to point out already, Marx's comments on slavery appeared mostly in the form of oberta dictum. And if you define capitalism as requiring a free market in labor, then Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa were not capitalist countries. I find that most unlikely.
