3 ms·

Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.

by eej71 7y ago

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).

Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.

by 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).