Cockburn on slavery

[Charles Brown]

Actually I was involved in a couple
of extended discussions on this
issue on another list a while ago.
I agree with your suggestion
that U.S. slavery _was_ capitalism.
It was sort of a mixed system, such
that the slave owners were capitalists
and made profits on  the world
capitalist market, although they didn't
pay wages. (This superexploitation
was the basis for the U,S. slavocracy
becoming the ruling class in the
U.S. in the period before the 
Civil War; Herbert Aptheker
has termed the Civil War a
counterrevolutionary attempted
coup d'etat by the overthrown
slaveowning ruling class)

  The capitalist system
of the time included the U.S.
slavery. Marx analyzes slavery as
part of the socalled primitive 
accumulation of capitalism.

The whole world capitalist system
of the period could not have 
had this structure, for the reason
in my post you quote - capitalists need
the spending of the wage workers
to realize their profits out of the
surplus value they exploit. So my point
in the post was that there was a
fundamental contradiction between
slave capitalism and free capitalism,
in that slave capitalism had 
the above contradiction in it.

By the way, this is an example
of dialectics, because first slavery
as part of the socalled primitive 
accumulation of world capitalism
was a necessary element of 
capitalism. But then this 
form which was necessary at
first came into necessary contradicton
with "pure" capitalism with 
"free" labor.  Thus, an internal
contradiction in capitalism 
caused the historical
change  which was the Civil
War and other abolitions
of capitalist slavery.
See "Hegel on Logical
and Dialectical Contradictions"
by James Lawler ( in Dialectical
Contradictions : Contemporary
Marxist Discussions:Marxist
Educational Press 1982) on
the paradoxical character of
dialectical contradictions.

By the way, don't you think the
slave masters may have forced
some slaves to produce food
and other subsistence goods not
only for the slaves,but for the
master and family ? You know that
slaves provided much of the
child and house care subsistence
work for the master and family.

Charles Brown

Detroit


>>> Tom Waters <twaters at usit.net> 11/10 8:08 PM >>>

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Charles Brown wrote:


> I think one of the main problems
> for slavery in capitalism is that
> slaves are not paid, so they don't
> have any money to buy the
> commodities produced in a
> capitalist system. 

Still, plantation slaves subsisted largely on commodities--meal and salt
pork bought on the market, albeit by the planter. This has always struck
me as a point in favor of those who would argue that new world slavery was
a disguised form of capitalism.

Tom

Thomas Waters
twaters at usit.net 
1021 East Oak Hill Avenue, Knoxville TN 37917
But this wall is not real. How can it be real? 
It's only made of concrete and barbed wire.