Assuming we want to be Marxist about this, isn't part of the definition of capitalism that it uses wage labor, and so slave-based economies are noncapitalist by definition?
--- On Thu, 8/27/09, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
>
> Ah, but the South *was* capitalist, through and through.
> Not industrial
> capitalism, true, but plantation/mercantile capitalism --
> slaves were
> commodities with price tags, and their labor-power and
> production were
> sold on world markets. Plantations were the first global
> factories
> (Rediker and Linebaugh's "The Many-headed Hydra" makes this
> point
> somewhere).
>
> -- DRR
>
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