[lbo-talk] US not a private enterprise system

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Thu Aug 27 13:06:02 PDT 2009


On Thu, August 27, 2009 7:24 am, Doug Henwood wrote:


> Slavery isn't really a capitalist form of labor domination, but the
> slave system of the South was embedded in a larger capitalist economy -
> they sold the cotton through New York merchants to English industrialists.

Exactly. The labor-surplus of North American/South American/South Asian/African slaves, plantation serfs, indentured laborers, coolies etc. was extracted by British capitalism for centuries, with near-genocidal consequences for the extractees. Liberal Brit capitalism = illiberal Brit Empire.

This is also what makes our own world-system so shockingly different from the past, though. The world population is majority urbanized, literate, and organized into independent nation-states with considerable economic reserves and autonomy, for the first time ever. This is actually a reason to be hopeful about the near future.

-- DRR



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