Yoshie,
A while ago you forwarded from another list:
>the point remains that Europeans enslaved a people who were not yet
>conscious of their freedom.
and:
>history in which what counts as a world-historical event consists in
>its contribution to the rise of freedom, then we can say that, at
>some point in world history, it was Europe that cultivated the kinds
>of reflective institutions necessary for the progressive realization of
>freedom. Insofar as other societies ceased to cultivate this self-
>understanding, they ceased to have history.
Yeeeeow. My impression's that even most right-leaning EuroAmericans don't entertain 19th century views like these. So it's pretty astounding that stuff like this would show up on a left-list.
Which leads me to wonder if there's some strand in left thought that actually incorporates these views. I know there are many salvage-the-Enlightenment projects, but this is so out there it's got to be coming from a different place than the usual ones. If this view is part of a left-current I'm not aware of, could you situate it a bit more? I guess I'm interested in a beetle-in-jar way.
Also, after pointing out to the poster that the "freedom" that motivated abolition was a particular, bourgeois notion of freedom, related to wage labor, you went on:
>When production based on chattel slavery & mercantilism ceased to be more
>profitable than production based upon free labor & Laissez Faire for
>British capitalism, as Eric Williams argues
>[...]
>Capitalism came to outgrow chattel slavery & mercantilism which had
>helped it develop in its infancy. The development of forces of
>production broke the fetters of now antiquated relations of
>production.
While William's larger point (that the end of slavery was related to transformations in capitalism) is roundly accepted, I don't think most historians interpret slavery's demise in his reductively economistic terms (calculus of profitability, etc.)
The abolition movement wasn't particularly in the class interest of its founders, and more tellingly, emancipation for the most part wasn't followed by free labor. Instead various systems of coerced labor developed -- systems tjat capitalists and statesmen spent a lot of anxious energy trying to convince everyone, including themselves, were really "free" "contractual" relations of "choice." (This utterly ritualistic effort shows up in their labels for the new arrangements: former slaves in the Carribean became "apprentices" (like Jamaicans needed to learn how to cut cane); France's indentured and forced laborers were "libres engagés," Portuguese libertos, etc.)
Moreover there doesn't seem to have been particular confidence among capitalists that emancipation would be profitable. The whole question was actually a source of unease to both capitalists and parliamentary committees at the time of Britain's abolition act. Granted the worries were expressed in bourgeois ideological terms: whether it could possibly be hoped that freed blacks, with their African proclivities to irrationality and sloth, would acquire European industriousness, discipline, and self-possession and hence become universal humans. But the profitability worry was a real one.
And for good reason. If I'm remembering right, production dropped off and the cost of sugar in Great Britain rose by half in the first years of free labor sugar production. This because former slaves populations often had recourse to land, not to mention ideas of their own about economic and communal life, thus often could afford to be strategically selective in their relationship to the labor market. In other words, and in contrast to Britain's great unwashed, capitalists couldn't as effectively subject many postemancipation societies to "the rational predicament" (= work, on capital's terms, or utter starvation).
But since it wasn't capitalism's humanity and rationality that was on trial but the slave's, freed blacks by and large "failed" the European test of self-possessed rationality. Which reinscribed ideas about African difference, which justified various forms of coerced labor.
(The pattern repeated itself in much of colonial Africa, btw, where the very rationale for colonial conquest had been to free Africans ("not yet conscious of their freedom"). But since Africans by and large didn't cooperate with European aspirations to turn them into disciplined wage laborers (most colonized Africans, too, had material options that stopped short of "the rational predicament"), their "liberators" were frequently compelled to turn to forced labor. This too was accompanied by ritual reassurances that the labor wasn't _really_ forced; it was just that these benighted Africans didn't yet know how to work reliably. but once European values and discipline were properly instilled in them, the unfortunate practice would be stopped...)
The larger point: though abolitionism may well have been shot through with opportunism, its existence as a larger social phenomenon transcended narrow class interest or calculations of profitability. Its emotive power was linked to the larger reconstitution of society and subjectivity taking place with the rise of industrial capitalism. These transformations involved profound deliberations about the nature of value, property, society, interest, humanity, nature, and so on. A whole ontology, whose hegemonic liberal categories both both gave meaning to and reflected concrete experiences and activities under capitalism. To the very extent that liberalism's particular ideas of freedom, self-possession, self-determination were becoming deeply meaningful ways of understanding the world, they also became difficult to reconcile with the co-existence of slavery.
Of course, capitalist ontology defined unfreedom in teh most sharply bounded of ways, allowing all labor-arrangements that weren't "slavery" to fall under "freedom." And granted abolitionism, tied to this understanding, had the larger effect of lending moral legitimacy to capitalism. But this just reinforces the point that abolitionism ultimately wasn't so much a vehicle for conscious class or material interests as it was one terrain on which capitalism's deeper ontology became naturalized, for capitalists and workers alike.
So naturalized in fact that in Anno Domini 2000 one can still find enslaved Africans described on left-listservs as peoples who were "not yet conscious of their freedom."
Maureen