[lbo-talk] Question on efficiency of slave labor in US South

[andie nachgeborenen]

There was a  big debate around this about 25 years
ago. Some Chicago Nobel Memorial Prize winning
economist, , I forget his name, North, something like
that? he won the prize later, and a collaborate
published a book called Time On The Cross and a
followup book in which he argued that slave labor was
pretty efficient, more than people had thought.  He
ran into a firestorm from people like Herbert Gutman
and Eugene Genovese (then on the left).  I am really
bot qualified to judge the outcome, as a lot of it
depended on economic issues combined with historical
research that are a little beyond my depth, besides it
was a long time ago, and I have forgotten the details
I once knew. Probably there has been more recent
research. I think that part of the problem the TotC
people ran into was also due to the fact that they
made the claim that most slaves were tolerably
decently treated as valuable property and that not all
slaveowners were sadistic brutes.  (Genovese ran into
similar problems arguing in a Gramscian vein in Roll
Jordon Roll that slavery rested on a combination of
consent or at least acquiescence and coercion).
Anyway, it is at least possible that slave labor was
highly efficient --s some smart and respectable people
who did a reputable if controversial study thought so.
But  was certainly controversial.

--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> 
> 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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