I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.
This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.
I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)
(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)
You're close with your assessment on technology. The Radical Republicans in the 1800s were pretty clear on it, actually. Owning slaves ends up costing you more, especially after the abolition of the slave trade. Wage labor was cheaper.
If you are a slaver who wants to own people, they are your responsibility. Yes you can treat them terribly, but you still have to feed and house them. If they get sick, you either lose an investment or you pay for their doctor. Brazil kept slavery going the longest because they were closest to Africa and thus had cheaper access to human capital. If they worked a slave to death in two weeks, they could get another one for relatively cheap. In North America, boats had to travel further so slaves were more expensive. If you paid more for a slave, you wanted more labor out of them to get return on investment. So they had better working conditions in NA compared to Brazil or the Caribbean. Once the slave trade was ended in like 1808, NA slavers had to make sure their enslaved population lived long and healthy enough lives to reproduce, since there wasn't more boats coming from Africa (at least legally). I've heard a professor say that for a slaver in the antebellum South, buying a human was an equivalent investment to buying a car today in terms of comparable cost.
Now Republicans pointed out that if you pay a man a wage, you are absolved of anything that happens to them outside of work. (I'm sorry I don't have good sources on this, but you could probably find some with googling). Do they have a home? Do they have enough to eat? Doesn't matter, they are "free" and have to take care of themselves. Do they have hungry children at home? Not your problem. Old Joe just died of malaria last night in bed? It's okay there are 3 more Joe's lining up to take his place. You pay him for the day and you get work for the day, you already made your money by the time the worker gets their wage. You can keep the cruel working conditions with capitalism and get rid of everything else that costs you overhead. So long as there's a wage and a labor market.
The labor market is the other side of this coin. In capitalism, workers race to the bottom to compete with each other. You don't work, you don't get paid, you don't eat. So workers will sell themselves to capitalists at lower and lower costs. This is the real trick of capitalism, eroding solidarity with your fellow worker. If you demand $3 a day, there's someone hungry enough to settle for $2 a day.
There's also the fact that capitalists can double grift the workers. They steal their labor by underpaying them, but since they're free workers they also have to buy stuff. Buy stuff from capitalists. That $2 goes back to some capitalist almost immediately, if not the same guy who owns the factory you work for. Profits on both end of the equation.
This also plays out at large with colonialism transitioning to neo-colonialism. Great Britain could extract all they wanted from their colonies, but they had to pay British troops to keep the locals in check. Since they were the local government, they had some bearing of responsibility if there was famine or plague or violence or whatever. That was an upfront cost.
By empowering local comprador class to run the government, the locals had to now bear the cost of social welfare and military. Locals bosses have to deal with local workers, and the British (or American or French or whatever) still to get to rake in dough from extracting natural resources and labor. And they get to call it free. On top of that, neo-colonial governments will compete with eachother for a race to the bottom. El Salvador sells cheaper sugar than Haiti? Haiti better respond by lowering their workers wages to make sure they don't get cut out of the sugar trade. And of course, these neo-colonial nations are the perfect market for cheap finished goods. Profit on both ends by getting cheap materials then selling it back to them in a new package.
Thanks for your response.
If indeed it was cheaper, why did the slave owners in the US go to war to protect their ability to own humans?
Edit: similarly why did the northern bourgeoisie go to war to prevent it? Surely it would have defeated itself?
Great question with a couple possible answers.
First off, while capitalists have class consciousness when it comes to keeping workers down, they are not a monolith. In the past (and still today) there are different factions within the capitalist class. Different factions compete with each other for investment and control of capital. Northern capitalists wanted more investment in their property, which was mostly factories. More money meant more machines, which could make individual workers more productive. They produced finished goods and needed free people to sell them too.
Southern capitalists resisted abolition because their capital was already heavily invested in slaves. When northerners invested capital, they bought more machinery or raw goods. Slavers just bought more slaves to work the land more intensely. Abolition would immediately make 99% of their investments worthless, even if they could eventually recoup the losses. It is the same short sided thinking that modern capitalists have, they prefer money now to money in the future. They were comfortable with the situation as it was, having the "free" north to sell their raw goods to at ridiculous profits.
But there's a cultural element to it. Southern life revolved around white supremacy for as long as there was an American south. Their world view revolved around the idea that black people were naturally subhuman. Anything less than that shattered their perception of self. That's why even poor southern whites fought to preserve slavery, it was the one thing they had. If they were poor and white, at least they weren't black and a slave. There's propaganda from the South that literally says as much.
There's an economic element to poor whites as well. If all the slaves were free, then poor white people had a huge new pool of workers to compete with for jobs. And for the slave owners, those free people might move north to find better jobs.
For your second question, the northern bourgeoisie largely did not want to go to war over slavery. Sure there were many genuine abolitionists, but most were comfortable with the relationship with the south. The standard Republican view was that eventually slavery would wither out because it was outdated. In the meantime Southern plantations provided raw cotton for cheap and the North could manufacture it and sell it. What the northern bourgeoisie could not live with, however, was this relationship changing. Lincoln was very clear in the early years of the Civil War, this was not a war over slavery it was a war over national unity. An independent South meant that Northern capitalists would have to pay tariffs and generally higher prices for raw material. Lincoln was clear, if the South had surrendered any time before 1863 he would have let slavery continue in the South. In fact the Emancipation Proclamation very clearly said that slavery was still legal in states that had not seceded from the Union. Northern capital would not profit without cheap southern cotton.
It was only after several years of warfare that it was clear to Northern bourgeoisie that the South would not surrender. At that point, the only way to stop the CSA was destroy their economic base. General Sherman's march to the sea liberated slaves and redistributed lands, it also tore up railroads and other infrastructure. Compromise was off the table and the North had to impose free wage capitalism onto the South at gunpoint (this also provided great investment opportunities for Northern capitalists.)
The North and the South saw the writing on the wall, free labor capitalism would eventually overtake slave plantation capitalism. The south were too high on their own white supremacist propaganda (see Social Darwinism) to see that peacefully transitioning into free labor would save them in the long run. So they tried to literally fight it. Enshrining slavery was the key feature of the CSA. Capitalists never willingly give up what they had and slavery was literally all they had.
This is an extremely important point. Compare lack of willingness to abandon slavery to lack of willingness to abolish fossil fuels, no matter the human cost.
I would argue that capitalism is the system of wage labor for commodity production and thus in no meaningful Marxist sense were the southern plantation owners capitalists. They were far closer to aristocrat
They were far worse than capitalists from a moral standpoint but it's not accurate to just use capitalist to describe bad rich people
Regardless the slaver aristocracy existed within a capitalism system. The north could not have developed industrial capitalism without the slave labor of the south. Just like European capitalism could not have developed without the exploitation of their colonies. You raise a good point and even if slavocrats were technically capitalists themselves, I think in this case it's a distinction without a difference. Slavocrats still acted like capitalists, in that they invested money into commodities for the sole sake of making more money. They competed for capital from the northern banks for the sake of expanding their slave economy. Now of course humans are not commodities, but within the slave system they were treated as such.
A commodity is a product created to be sold. Slaves were not a commodity in this way for the plantations even under the inhuman logic of chattel slavery as they weren't primarily being intended from birth to be sold on rather they were expected to work on the plantation they were born on.
Again it doesn't make much of a moral difference and there was capitalism involved in slavery for example the triangle trade itself was a capitalist system that relied on commodity production to exchange for slaves
The “production” of slaves consisted in the fetching, not in their births. They were, in the twisted logic of slavery, “naturally occurring” resources to be exploited. It is just as immaterial how they came to be in their environment as the fact that iron ultimately was created in a supernova far before the era of capitalism. Likewise, the capitalist value of slaves corresponded to the socially necessary labor for their reproduction; not labor in general, but labor that socially counted as equal homogenous labor, ie the labor of the European slavers.
The “production” of slaves was comparable to the production of machines. They didn’t work for a wage or directly produce surplus value. Their value was preserved in the product in proportion to the average working lifespan. The logic of why slavery took over as the dominant “technology” of the Southern capitalist production methods is the same as any other technology like the cotton gin; it reduced the amount of socially necessary labor (again, labor that counted as social labor, generally white labor).
Sorry to dig up an old comment but I thought it was an interesting discussion. I think all here agree that whether the CSA were capitalists doesn’t make a big material difference. Especially since I see below you agreed chattel slavery does ultimately look capitalist.
nah it's cool
I think to the logic of capitalism the key difference is that machines cannot reproduce themselves and slavery in America lasted quite a bit longer than the trans atlantic slave trade.
But there are some pretty good arguments later in this thread if I recall that did convince me that chattel slavery is a capitalist mode of production
You miss a very important aspect of Marx's critique of wage labor in that he juxtaposes wage labor vs. piecemeal wages. Under piecemeal wages, workers have no interest in creating commodities beyond subsistence levels and capitalists have no interest in increased productivity as they pay a fixed price per commodity produced and surplus value is constant. Under wage labor, the capitalist is incredibly interested in increasing productivity as they pay per hour rather than per product produced and every increase in productivity is an increase in surplus value. Labor costs and surplus value are the monetary valuations of what Marx calls the necessary product and the surplus product, or paid labor and unpaid labor.
So lets look at slavery in relation to wage labor and piecemeal work. A slave is provided food and shelter and little else. They are paid the same regardless of the amount of commodities they produce. Slavery sure looks a lot more like wage labor than piecemeal work doesn't it? If "appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production," as per Engels, what is slavery except the purest form of Capitalism?
ok you raise a good point my mind is changed chattel slavery is a capitalist mode of production
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My guess: even before abolition, the north and south had developed into economies with different structure. They were linked and dependent on each other, but slavery was largely concentrated in the south. You can't press the capitalism button more than you can press the communism button, and for various historical reasons the north had a more developed capitalist economy ready to smoothly step in and replace slavery. Slavers would lose in the short term by switching to free labor.
Then again, slavers were compensated lavishly for their lost property, and slave labor morphed into prison labor, so the picture is a bit muddy, idk.
well the south didn't have an industrial economy. The agrarian economy of the south had different material conditions and they were more aristocrat than capitalist in their economic interest
they also wanted to expand slavery to more states not just maintain it as they wanted a country ran to cater to the interests of the cotton economy not a country that was organised to benefit industrial production. This pushed the interests of slavery and capital at odds similar to how in Europe the bourgeoise had conflict with the feudal system
I always kinda chalked that up to plain cruelty and racism on the south's part.
That may be true, I guess I'm looking for a materialist argument though, not an idealist one.
I mean material conditions aren't entirely deterministic. We could read racist ideology as a residual aspect of an earlier mode of production that basically took hold. There aren't always "material" causes in a 1:1 relationship to the dominant mode of production, sometimes residual ideologies from residual material conditions can exert a powerful force. I think that's basically what happened there (and you might also look at Hell on Earth as another example, with the late feudal order fighting a doomed conflict with modern weapons and material concerns against a rising class (the bourgeoisie) whose actions and ideology were aligned with the emergent new mode of production.
Read Dominant, residual, emergent from Raymond Williams for more on this potential for actions and ideologies to be "out of step" with dominant forms of production and material conditions
I think cruel and racist people can be cruel and racist without checking their material conditions first.
I didn't say they did - I'm not saying the poster is wrong I'm just asking for the materialist argument
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Without being anywhere near an expert on the topic, I would hazard a guess that southern slave states took a look at the industrialised northern states and saw that, if slavery was abolished overnight, the much more agrarian south would suddenly find itself at a huge economic disadvantage. Basically they had (literally) bet the farm on slavery and were all in on it continuing.
In addition to the other good answers, there may be a couple other explanations that work alongside those mentioned. In the time before the war, there was discussion about whether slavery would eventually be phased out. And it certainly would have eventually. However, just because something may appear to be more profitable (wage labor), it's something else entirely to convince one economic class (slavers) to completely upend their entire mode of production instantaneously. The costs to transition over to wage labor would likely have been high and very disruptive. There's a contradiction in capitalism in maximizing short versus long term profits; and I think it's generally true that given a choice, capitalists will take $1.00 now over $2.00 tomorrow.