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 (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)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)
In order to formalize this a bit:
Mpl(l) marginal productivity of labor. Is the value aded by the ith worker. in neoliberal theology this is very close to the wage (or other labor relationships) because if one capitalist offers too litle the next one will ofer a bit more. But no one will offer more than the mpl. In reality it is less because there is coertion and social institutions that favor the ruling clases.
The mpl is always declining with respect to labor. Because the most productive tasks are filled first.
The average productivity of labor is the sum or integral of the mpl at every worker divided by the amount of workers. This is decreasing at a slower rate than mpl.
The substraction of one from the other is the profit the capitalit or landlord gets. At the begining both look very similar so there is little profit to extract. So you see the maximum amount of coertion: Slavery.
However coertion has a cost and as mpl decreases the sulprus value you can expropiate by force also decreases until it is less than the cost of the original coertion so you use other methods. Prehaphs you transiion to some form of share croping system from a slave society.
As for the argument that slaves are only viable for low complexity tasks imagine a society with both low and high complexity tasks. Training a worker to do the later is very expensive but since there are are few of this types their mpl os very high with respect to apl so you cant profit from them. So you can theoretically have a wage market for low complexity tasks and slavery for pmcs.
This is the case in medieval islamic societies. And to an extent in imperial societies from ancient assyria to china were scrives and high end beurocrats would be property of the king.