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> "If you wanted to understand the brutality of American capitalism..." Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppos

> "If you wanted to understand the brutality of American capitalism..." Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppose in the first place. And we could have capitalism without having slavery.

Avshalom 7y ago
we could have, but we didn't.
- eej71 7y ago
  Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    But surely you agree that as soon as anyone realized that slavery is wrong, their duty is to shut it down immediately? Capitalism did not do that.
    - dsr_ 7y ago
      2 hours later, there are at least three people on HN who don't agree, but aren't brave enough to make a comment so we can see who they are.
      - eej71 7y ago
        Your prior comment makes it sound like it was a light switch that people were reluctant to throw. I see the bloody and protracted nature of the Civil War as evidence for just how difficult it was to end - even in the 1860s! I'm grateful the North didn't give up. It's a miracle they kept at it.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    I don't think that's a good summary. Yes, there were always enslaved people. But the transatlantic system was something new. Why didn't the colonizers just use European serfs as slaves in America? Because the Europeans already had a norm against serious abuse of serfs. Why didn't they enslave the Native Americans? They tried, but the indigenous all were dying of European diseases. So they brought in a third party, the Africans. Sure, Africans had been enslaving each other, but it wasn't worse than what Europeans did to serfs. When the Europeans enslaved the Africans, suddenly things got a lot worse than it had ever been in the history of slavery. Just incredible cruelty, but even more than that, the new element of skin color based discrimination. That had never really been a thing before, but to justify being this cruel to Africans, you needed a powerful ideology. In some countries, this led to a color system where your proximity to power was roughly equal to your degree of darkness, but in the US, we evolved a "one drop" rule where people were either classified as white or non-white with no half-measures. (This was also bad for mixed European/Native Americans, as well as those of African heritage.) "Capitalism" is a fuzzy term that is hard to pin down, but to the degree that it means something, I think it's fair to say: after the Columbian contact, the European economic system led to transatlantic slavery, transatlantic slavery was something new in the world and led to modern racism (which is distinct from mere xenophobia), and racism has lived long beyond the end of the legal slave system and taken on a life of its own. Capitalism inherited slavery but then refashioned it and birthed new evils.
    - rdm70 7y ago
      In the early colonial period, the colonizers did use European as near slaves. Many thousands of people came from Europe as indentured servants for seven year contracts, and few survived the harsh conditions for the full seven years. For forty years (1619-1661), Black Africans came to Virginia as indentured servants rather than slaves. Then Virginia passed a slave law. Slaves were cheaper. Citation. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/ https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured...
      - earthboundkid 7y ago
        That doesn't go against what I'm saying. The point is that "slavery" had always been around but then it turned into something much eviler and worse. Those European slaves didn't have their condition inherited by their children through to 1865. The African indentured servants didn't go on to gain the freedom of European indentured servants. (Yes, there were many freeman Africans in pre-Civil War America, but the point of Dredd Scott was that their citizenship was only provisional.) European indentured servants didn't have the women raped and the children of that union enslaved. Look at the skin color of the average African American and the average West African. Virtually every African American alive today has some European ancestry. This process of raping women and then enslaving the children produced by rape was not a normal aspect of global slavery. Is it fair to blame this on "capitalism"? That question depends a lot on the semantics of what we mean by "capitalism". But at the very least, we need to explain why slavery went from being the equivalent of being alive today and working at Foxxconn (sucks but hey, that's life) to being in the Lord's Resistance Army (hell on earth).
danso 7y ago
That quote comes from the headline of this fairly in-depth essay: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav... In the context of 19th-century history, I don't think calling out American capitalism as being particularly brutal is that controversial. Considering one of our most lionized presidents – one of the 4 immortalized on Mount Rushmore – is arguably most famous for sweeping economic reforms and regulations. And this was decades after slavery. > And we could have capitalism without having slavery But we didn't, and this is ostensibly one of the themes of this project. That slavery is inextricable from America's founding economic success, so it's inaccurate to view something so foundational as simply an unfortunate misstep.
- throwaway94857 7y ago
  But it's not foundational to America's success. That's just propoganda for people who want to diminish and belittle America. America grew to its present power due to its industry not because of southern plantations.
untog 7y ago
> Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppose in the first place. Maybe if you didn't stop reading you could have read the whole essay and formed an opinion based on that, rather that on one line of text? I don't mean to sound unnecessarily mean, but stopping reading the very second you see something objectionable strikes me as very closed-minded.
istjohn 7y ago
In addition to slavery, American businesses have been behind exploitation and despotism in Latin America and Africa. American capitalism has certainly been brutal.
- throwaway94857 7y ago
  All business, regardless of home country, exploits 3rd world labor. American companies are actually some of the most humane when it comes to this. But let's just keep bashing America since it's the cool thing to do, right?
- manfredo 7y ago
  I think the issue is the erroneous claim that slavery was a product of capitalism. This is patently untrue, slavery predates capitalism by millennia. Not only that, a strong argument can be made that capitalism ended slavery. The American South was an agrarian society, with an economy based on crops. The North was a capitalist society with industry forming a much larger portion of the economy. It was the industrialist, capitalist North that voted an abolitionist President into office and defeated the South's subsequent rebellion. This pattern holds true across global history. Agrarian societies have almost always had some mechanism to lock large segments of the population into agricultural or manual labor: caste systems, serfdom, slavery all filled this role with some variation in their implementation. Abolition movements predominantly occurred in the time range from 1750 to 1900, and in the same time period many countries began to industrialize.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    I think you're confusing the difference between capitalism and industrialism.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      The two largely go hand in hand. You need capital to start new industries. Industrialism, in turn, generates lots of capital that people are going to want to invest thus leading to more capitalist activity. Industrialism without capitalism has been attempted in the USSR and PRC, both of which ended up adopting capitalism. No industrial society managed to remain non-capitalist for more than 50-60 years which is incredibly short in the context of global history.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Avshalom 7y ago

we could have, but we didn't.

eej71 7y ago
Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.
- dsr_ 7y ago
  But surely you agree that as soon as anyone realized that slavery is wrong, their duty is to shut it down immediately? Capitalism did not do that.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    2 hours later, there are at least three people on HN who don't agree, but aren't brave enough to make a comment so we can see who they are.
    - eej71 7y ago
      Your prior comment makes it sound like it was a light switch that people were reluctant to throw. I see the bloody and protracted nature of the Civil War as evidence for just how difficult it was to end - even in the 1860s! I'm grateful the North didn't give up. It's a miracle they kept at it.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  I don't think that's a good summary. Yes, there were always enslaved people. But the transatlantic system was something new. Why didn't the colonizers just use European serfs as slaves in America? Because the Europeans already had a norm against serious abuse of serfs. Why didn't they enslave the Native Americans? They tried, but the indigenous all were dying of European diseases. So they brought in a third party, the Africans. Sure, Africans had been enslaving each other, but it wasn't worse than what Europeans did to serfs. When the Europeans enslaved the Africans, suddenly things got a lot worse than it had ever been in the history of slavery. Just incredible cruelty, but even more than that, the new element of skin color based discrimination. That had never really been a thing before, but to justify being this cruel to Africans, you needed a powerful ideology. In some countries, this led to a color system where your proximity to power was roughly equal to your degree of darkness, but in the US, we evolved a "one drop" rule where people were either classified as white or non-white with no half-measures. (This was also bad for mixed European/Native Americans, as well as those of African heritage.) "Capitalism" is a fuzzy term that is hard to pin down, but to the degree that it means something, I think it's fair to say: after the Columbian contact, the European economic system led to transatlantic slavery, transatlantic slavery was something new in the world and led to modern racism (which is distinct from mere xenophobia), and racism has lived long beyond the end of the legal slave system and taken on a life of its own. Capitalism inherited slavery but then refashioned it and birthed new evils.
  - rdm70 7y ago
    In the early colonial period, the colonizers did use European as near slaves. Many thousands of people came from Europe as indentured servants for seven year contracts, and few survived the harsh conditions for the full seven years. For forty years (1619-1661), Black Africans came to Virginia as indentured servants rather than slaves. Then Virginia passed a slave law. Slaves were cheaper. Citation. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/ https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured...
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      That doesn't go against what I'm saying. The point is that "slavery" had always been around but then it turned into something much eviler and worse. Those European slaves didn't have their condition inherited by their children through to 1865. The African indentured servants didn't go on to gain the freedom of European indentured servants. (Yes, there were many freeman Africans in pre-Civil War America, but the point of Dredd Scott was that their citizenship was only provisional.) European indentured servants didn't have the women raped and the children of that union enslaved. Look at the skin color of the average African American and the average West African. Virtually every African American alive today has some European ancestry. This process of raping women and then enslaving the children produced by rape was not a normal aspect of global slavery. Is it fair to blame this on "capitalism"? That question depends a lot on the semantics of what we mean by "capitalism". But at the very least, we need to explain why slavery went from being the equivalent of being alive today and working at Foxxconn (sucks but hey, that's life) to being in the Lord's Resistance Army (hell on earth).

danso 7y ago

That quote comes from the headline of this fairly in-depth essay: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav... In the context of 19th-century history, I don't think calling out American capitalism as being particularly brutal is that controversial. Considering one of our most lionized presidents – one of the 4 immortalized on Mount Rushmore – is arguably most famous for sweeping economic reforms and regulations. And this was decades after slavery. > And we could have capitalism without having slavery But we didn't, and this is ostensibly one of the themes of this project. That slavery is inextricable from America's founding economic success, so it's inaccurate to view something so foundational as simply an unfortunate misstep.

throwaway94857 7y ago
But it's not foundational to America's success. That's just propoganda for people who want to diminish and belittle America. America grew to its present power due to its industry not because of southern plantations.

untog 7y ago

> Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppose in the first place. Maybe if you didn't stop reading you could have read the whole essay and formed an opinion based on that, rather that on one line of text? I don't mean to sound unnecessarily mean, but stopping reading the very second you see something objectionable strikes me as very closed-minded.

istjohn 7y ago

In addition to slavery, American businesses have been behind exploitation and despotism in Latin America and Africa. American capitalism has certainly been brutal.

throwaway94857 7y ago
All business, regardless of home country, exploits 3rd world labor. American companies are actually some of the most humane when it comes to this. But let's just keep bashing America since it's the cool thing to do, right?
manfredo 7y ago
I think the issue is the erroneous claim that slavery was a product of capitalism. This is patently untrue, slavery predates capitalism by millennia. Not only that, a strong argument can be made that capitalism ended slavery. The American South was an agrarian society, with an economy based on crops. The North was a capitalist society with industry forming a much larger portion of the economy. It was the industrialist, capitalist North that voted an abolitionist President into office and defeated the South's subsequent rebellion. This pattern holds true across global history. Agrarian societies have almost always had some mechanism to lock large segments of the population into agricultural or manual labor: caste systems, serfdom, slavery all filled this role with some variation in their implementation. Abolition movements predominantly occurred in the time range from 1750 to 1900, and in the same time period many countries began to industrialize.
- mcguire 7y ago
  I think you're confusing the difference between capitalism and industrialism.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    The two largely go hand in hand. You need capital to start new industries. Industrialism, in turn, generates lots of capital that people are going to want to invest thus leading to more capitalist activity. Industrialism without capitalism has been attempted in the USSR and PRC, both of which ended up adopting capitalism. No industrial society managed to remain non-capitalist for more than 50-60 years which is incredibly short in the context of global history.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]