>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.
Ricardo Duchesne represents a residual discourse (at least among leftists), about to be consigned to the dustbin of history (at least among us), I hope.
>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.
A ghost of Hegel speaking through a medium, I think.
>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 dialectic of forces of production & relations of production, however, does not have to be reduced to economistic terms of calculus of profitability, and I don't think Eric Williams intended his work to be read in a vulgar reductionist fashion. Have you read Russell R. Menard, "Reckoning with Williams: Capitalism and Slavery and the Reconstruction of Early American History," _Callaloo_ 20.4 (1997) 791-799, at <http://calliope.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v020/20.4menard.html>?
>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.)
Yes, in the USA, freedmen & their families got coerced into share-cropping & convict labor & Jim Crow, a result of reaction against Black Reconstruction.
Nevertheless, one can't conflate share-cropping with chattel slavery.
>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).
Right, but Williams' point is that _metropolitan_ British capitalists, by the time of abolition, had come to neither need nor want the West Indian monopoly of sugar production; they wanted laissez faire, buying any sugar from anywhere, with no special treatment for West Indian sugar producers. See Chapter 10 "'The Commercial Part of the Nation' and Slavery" of _Capitalism and Slavery_. After the abolition of West Indian slavery, British capitalists, generally speaking, said, "Leave the slave trade alone, it would commit suicide," while the former slave owners of the West Indies held "the humanitarian torch" & protested against "a system of man-stealing against a poor and inoffensive people," pleading for an adoption of "more decisive measures than any that have hitherto been employed to stop the foreign slave trade; on the effectual suppression of which the prosperity of the British West Indian colonies...ultimately depend(s)" (Williams, _Capitalism and Slavery_, pp. 172-6).
In short, the abolition of West Indian slavery helped Britain break out of its own mercantilism; and laissez faire helped the British to gain supremacy over Latin America, benefiting from the breaking down of Spanish mercantilism.
>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...)
No question about it -- hence the necessity of anti-colonial and then anti-neo-colonial struggles, continuing to this day.
>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.
No disagreement here: "it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production...and the...ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out" (Marx, _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, NY: International Publishers, 1970, p. 21).
Yoshie