Whats the historical materialist reason behind the abolitionment of slavery by capitalists?
Whats the historical materialist reason behind the abolitionment of slavery by capitalists?
Austin Howard
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Jack Green
a load of free labour puts serious downwards pressure on wages
Adrian Jackson
Take a look at the third world. Child slavery is the main supplier of trousers jeans.
Gabriel Jenkins
It's easier to pay someone than to take care of them.
Brandon Nguyen
Capitalism is rental slavery.
A slave master has access to their slave 24/7 and is their property, but with that comes the responsibility of managing, at minimum, their shelter and food, for their entire life.
Under capitalism, you just lord over the employee and pay for them when you need them, then they fuck off and have to find their own food and sheltdf: And here is the key, since you can charge rent on your land, extracting profit out of something that was previously a cost.
Essentially, it became more profitable to 'proletarianise' slaves and turn them into sharecroppers or wage labourers, aided by improvements in agricultural efficiency made possible by the explosion in engineering creativity brought on by industrialisation.
Dominic Cruz
Long story short is just like things such as Enclosure whereby land was seized for private interests and the proprietors handed exclusive property rights, Slavery is an incredibly good way to kickstart Capitalist development. The problem is however, you're actually not generating Surplus Value in the same way as you are in actual Capitalism, you're not paying wages to Slave and you're responsible for their reproduction, they don't have any money to buy goods so unless you're never developing beyond a certain point within a national framework and just exporting everything Capitalism literally becomes unsustainable because value can't be realised on markets domestically. There are a lot more historical specifics that explain the particular development in the US.
Henry Flores
Unironically cristianity , the same that happened in the roman empire once cristianity spread all over the empire banning slavery while the rest of the world enforzed it more hardly than ever in usa once the conquer period happened and the territory was centralized slavery was never an coherent options with the values of cristianity
Grayson Perez
One of the central contradictions in America at the time is that the slave economies in the South needed to expand geographically. Slave owners (billionaires in their day) certainly wouldn't teach them how to read so they could operate machinery – you need to be able to understand instruction manuals for that. So as the old slave economies developed, they began to stagnate and needed to shift into exports. Obviously cotton was an export but also slaves heading westward to new slave colonies. Basically, it was necessary to convert old slave territory into slave-breeding factories. This also served as a mechanism to direct idle low-class whites outwards in the form of filibustering expeditions.
Also a reason why the initial stage of the U.S. Civil War saw white men on horseback overrun the border states – the Union was a more complicated society and took awhile to get its gears spinning. And of course, halting the expansion of slavery was one of Lincoln's key priorities and a central topic during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The slave-owning elites in the South understood, correctly, that their system would be doomed if its geographic expansion halted.
Alexander Carter
It became cheaper to pay someone a wage than feed clothe and house them.
It has nothing to do with people becoming nicer or WOKE it was economic viability
Charles Phillips
lol no the slave trade was created by Christians
see
Connor Rivera
Part of it is working-class solidarity from organized (yet not fully class conscious) proletarians in the north.
Eli Powell
slavery is comically inefficient in industrial society
workers rebel much less than slaves, work harder with less oversight, are far less likely to damage expensive capital equipment, and are generally easier to replace outside conditions of full employment. they also consume more goods and services.
Isaac Long
no it was propaganda from northern capitalists trying to expand markets
Slaves are not good consumers
Carson Sullivan
slaves were actually used as ammunition against the south to enact the federal yankee union. slaves were simply used by the north, why do you think nothing got better for so many years after they were "freed"? Black Americans are a beautiful displaced mutant of the western world. Not connected to their history, continent, country, they are unique animals.
Thomas Watson
Slavery can provide big growth in the short-term but it gradually becomes an economic drag after a while. It is a barrier to technological invention. Why bother investing in machines when you don't have to pay your workers anything?
Brayden Jackson
To expand on :
Slavery costs more money because slaves still require upkeep costs even when not working; winter massively reduced yields of, say, crops, and so slaveowners had to pay for their food, shelter, and other such necessities while their slaves were waiting around. Additionally, markets will usually demand different products during different seasons; nobody wants to buy thick coats during summer and certain foods are seasonal; embrace the Dialectics of Nature!
Capitalism switched and replaced regular slavery with wage slavery, now the capitalists just pay the workers to work when they need them and so cut the extra costs off when workers are unneeded. Additionally, competition for employment keeps a downward pressure on wages; nobody had to compete to become a slave.
Many Americans, because of the propaganda "education" system, still honestly believe the civil war was fought over slavery. Northern schools portray themselves as the selfless heroes, while in the Southern states, the civil war is referred to as "The War of Northern Aggression." This is the reason Southfags still fly Confederate flags, which lead to an entirely new bullshit narrative like this happening: en.wikipedia.org
Leo Barnes
Marx literally wrote an article on why slavery was the core issue of the conflict.
Joseph Price
Because it WAS.
Carson Williams
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear enough: what I meant was that the way it was presented was "The good guys vs. the bad guys" rather than "One mode of production vs. another" which is what it really was. I'm not saying slavery wasn't involved, what I mean is that the civil war didn't happen because everyone in the North suddenly grew a heart and decided slavery was immoral and so they went to war to put a stop to it based on that entire premise alone.
Brody Gutierrez
In the U.S, struggle for power between the north and the south, more or less, the north winning because they had developed industry where the south just used human bodies.
The other posters explained that last part better, but what the shit they're saying means is that the north was able to curbstomp the south when they got uppity about their right to use humans as farm equipment.
Ethan Lewis
...
Samuel Martin
Lol peak idealism
Luke James
Oh no I certainly believe that, but the government and capitalists of the North couldn't care less about moral issues.
Again I agree, just saying the OP asked for a HisMat analysis, and, all things considered, I think that the whole narrative of "going to war over morality/states' rights/secession" wasn't the main cause. They certainly played a role, but if it hadn't been for competing modes of production, the war wouldn't have happened.
Xavier Miller
this. working for pennies a day isn't much functionally different from slavery especially if you're in prison
Carson Butler
abolition of slavery is simply a political gesture, whilst the institutions (private property, racism, violence .etc) still exist in society. Foucault said that power is not distributed to the public, but rather, it takes different forms in existing institutions, but the essence remains. Today, we are mentally enslaved, our chains are invisible.
Jayden Cook
why isn't admin banning pseudoleftists who write things like this?
Gabriel Carter
triggered
Bentley Thomas
nice only took four posts to say
"reduces liability and input costs"
remember lords were responsible for the well-being of their serfs and had to provide services by decree, like community ovens
Charles Garcia
One of these is a much better option than the other, and urbanization (the concentration of workers where they're easy to find) made it more practical to abandon slavery. It hung on for a long time in the US which was more rural than the rest of the west (esp the South) because it had only recently been settled by Europeans. Burger cities hadn't had the time to develop that European cities had.
Industrialization is starting to lead us back toward the plantation slave model. This is why the prison population is exploding in the US. Because of industrial production of food, clothing, and buildings, it's cheaper to keep people as prison laborers than to let them be "free" wage slaves. That's because when you have everyone on one system like in prison, economy of scale kicks in. It's the extension of the factory organizational model to the whole structure of a person's life.