Hello all,
I've been on a Kara-Murza reading kick (he's a KPRF-oriented Russian polemicist and writer -- I translated part of one of his books and posted it here recently). The book I'm currently on is a selection of essays mostly published in the Communist press in the 1990s. A couple of them are polemics against histmat (that being Soviet shortspeak for "historical materialism."
There, he makes the suprising (to me at least) claim that slaves on plantations in the US South were actually twice as efficient as white hired workers on the same plantations. Apparently this caused a scandal among Soviet practitioners of histmat, as it was supposed to be impossible for slave productive relations to be more efficient than capitalist ones. Now, is it true?
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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