The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)

[Cookiegod]

I see those names Berger, Luckmann, Guess, etc., and all this bloated blabla, and the image that gets forced on my imagination is of a shoddy castle in the sky. I propose we TWC's make up our own race theory. As long as we stay internally consistent we can claim anything we want. Sociology is not a falsifiable science.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Christianity and capitalist industry destroyed the classical/feudal institution of slavery in America. That truth won’t die no matter how hard pseudo-intellectual revisionism tries to change it.

[Cookiegod]

Kinda weird to see a "feudal institution of slavery" when feudalism and slavery are juxtopposed and incompatible, legio.

[sumskilz]

Don't say...so, it seems that you read The Social Construction of Reality? accidently, I have the book here, tell me the right page, if you don't mind.

Bottom of page 79, she quotes "These legitimations are learned by the new generation during the same process that socializes them into the institutional order."

[Ludicus]

Christianity and capitalist industry destroyed the classical/feudal institution of slavery in America.

Isn't America an exceptional nation? in America and everywhere, christian slaveholders used the bible to justify slavery. As late as 1800, Protestants began to invoke a Christian hierarchy in which slaves were bound to obey their masters.And let's not forget the racist ideology of the KKK, along with their particular brand of Protestantism and nationalism,


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It all begun in 1452. The Papal Bull Dum Diversas issued by Pope Nicholas V, authorized the Portuguese King Afonso V to...

We grant you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude

--

Kinda weird to see a "feudal institution of slavery" when feudalism and slavery are juxtopposed and incompatible, legio.

Exactly

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Bottom of page 79

Indeed.Also here- "Social Theory Re-Wired: New Connections to Classical and Contemporary Perspectives, chapter 8, page 188

[Lord Thesaurian]

The pro-slavery argument tying slavery to capitalism has been debunked ad infinitum, most recently in this post. The fact there would be no abolition movement without America’s churches is self evident.

This essay reviews the "New History of Capitalism" (NHC) literature with specific attention to its claims about the relationship between capitalism and slavery. While others have critiqued severe deficiencies in the empirical dimensions of this literature, I focus upon the shortcomings in its conceptualization of "capitalism." In addition to being plagued by definitional imprecision surrounding its use of the term that causes NHC scholars to conflate the slave system with laissez-faire economic doctrines, this literature generally neglects the close historical association between classical economists and abolitionism. The ensuing confusion over the intellectual history of capitalism and its relationship to the emergence of economics as a social science leads several practitioners in the NHC literature to unwittingly adopt a modern iteration of the "King Cotton" economic thesis that was advanced by radical pro-slavery "fire eaters" on the eve of the American Civil War. While the two service opposite objectives with regards to slavery itself, they are shown to adopt eerily similar diagnoses of slavery's economic position in the world. As with its Confederate-era precursor, the NHC variant of this thesis errs in its attempt to reduce the complexities of an economy to a simplistic causal relationship based upon a single slave-produced crop.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3438828

[Love Mountain]

Slavery pre-dates capitalism. Capitalism exists now without slavery. Think on that.

[Cookiegod]

If you mean capitalism as opposed and counterreaction to mercantilism then yes. If you mean free market then no.

[Ludicus]

The pro-slavery argument tying slavery to capitalism has been debunked ad infinitum,

You forgot to add: "...in my opinion". Ad infinitum is a dogmatic hyperbole.There are different opinions.
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No, I don't think so. Racism is still today an essential tool for maintaining the capitalist order. How Capitalism solved its instability problem by using racism
"U.S. capitalism used, absorbed, and built on slavery’s legacy by inserting large portions of the African American community into the shock-absorber role that the system required. The racism developed by U.S. slavery thereby both facilitated U.S. capitalism and was reinforced by it".

Capitalism did not merely produce one historical rationale for racism but continuously reproduces new rationales for racism as the development of process of capital accumulation assigns news but subordinate roles to black labor. (Source, Capitalism without racism.Science or fantasy?)

I encourage you all to see the movie "Birth of a Nation". The Library of Congress and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The movie portrays the Afro-Americans as sexually aggressive and unintelligent, and presents the KKK as the force necessary to preserve "American values". "Birth of a Nation" revived the KKK.

Griffith's film is regarded as a landmark in cinema history, technically brilliant-and the most racist movie ever made.
Not surprisingly, it's an accurate representation of the birth of a racist nation, in parallel with the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of Will. Here, with an amazing three-hour-long musical score,


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More on Christianism, racism, capitalism. Capitalism in all its glory,
Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, added £10bn to his fortune in just one day.
Fiscal paradises represent a known and used process of fraud and tax evasion, but who cares? they are legal, aren't they great?
The top 15 tax havens for millionaires around the world
Listing of tax havens by the EU - European Parliament
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Interview with a well-known capitalist,



"I'm basically there to make money, I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do . As a competitor I've got to compete to win".

The reincarnated Dr. Jekyll/ mr. Hyde coexists well with the duality of human nature,
"I am.. it's one person who at one time engages in immoral activities and the rest of the time tries to be moral"
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Q. you went out with this protector of yours that swore that you were his adopted godson...in fact you helped in confiscation of property from the Jews.
A. Yes, that's right.
Q. Was it difficult?
A. Not at all. Not at all. It's just like in markets, if I weren't there of course I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow whether I was there or not, so I have no sense of guilt.

Indeed, it's just like in markets. They are all hypocrites, The millionaires and billionaires who want to pay more tax,

"George Soros...in 2011 was quoted in The Star saying that the rich are “hurting their own long-term interests by their opposition to paying more taxes." Still, the investor has been accused of hypocrisy by pouring billions into charity to sidestep tax and for moving the domicile of his Soros Fund to low-tax Ireland – the deferrals added up to an enormous $13.3 billion (£10.5bn) by the end of 2013"
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Republicans and Democrats, you shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God MLK in vain.

Here, Republicans/Pence pays homage to MLK,



Here, Democrats pay homage to MLK,



Hypocrites, Sanders is the honorable exception. Which bring us to MLK's revolutionary political thought. Christians are not supposed to be communists, says the leftist Luther King.
"Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible"
But he adds,
"Indeed, it may be that Communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all to inert. It should challenge us first to be more concerned about social justice.

We must admit that we as Christians have often lagged behind at this point. Slavery could not have existed in America for more than two hundred and fifty years if the Church had not sanctioned it.
Segregation and discrimination could not exist in America today without the sanction of the Church. The Church has to often been an institution serving to crystalize the patterns of the status quo.
Who can blame Karl Marx for calling such a religion an opiati"

Communism's Challenge to Christianity, 1953.
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Obviously, liberals detested MLK. In fact, MLK focused on the racial dishonesty of the North,
In 1963, he stated that the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice", was more of an impediment than the White Citizens Councils or the KKK.

"As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated and usually denied"

1967, in an address to the American Psychological Association", MLK says that white people’s illegal behavior helped produced Northern ghettos :" “flagrantly violates building codes and regulations, his police make a mockery of law, and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services"

In the same year, he wrote :"most whites in America, including many of good will proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement"

[Lord Thesaurian]

You forgot to add: "...in my opinion". Ad infinitum is a dogmatic hyperbole.There are different opinions.

Nothing was omitted, I’m afraid. I didn’t cite my opinion. I cited facts. I’m aware there are narratives seeking to counter these facts. The former are debunked.

[Ludicus]

I cited facts.

Interpretations.
This, I think it makes more sense,
Walter Johnson - Harvard University
W.J. is an American historian who teaches history and directs the Charles Warren center at Harvard University. W.J. the author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market, and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom.

This brilliant essay is an accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism. To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice -In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)
Doesn't take too much time to read it all,for a better comprehension. An excerpt,

"The tension between the specific actions and idioms of enslaved life and the broadly comparative categories of “independent will and volition,” “agency,” and “humanity” seem analogically—and, indeed, historically and ethically—related to the tension that Karl Marx noted between the historical and material inequalities of nineteenth-century society and the abstract equality of rights-based human emancipation, of which he was critical.

...Paraphrasing Marx, I think it is fair to say that the emergence of a global movement in support of human rights is the summary accomplishment of “the hitherto existing world order.” It is not, however—nor in my view should it be—“the final form of human emancipation” or of what a just world should look like.
In Moyn’s view, in fact, human-rights thinking has provided the intellectual architecture for a sort of liberal neo-imperialism, the justifying terms of continuing European and American intervention in the affairs of former colonies.
There is a quite different genealogy for discussions of human freedom—this one rooted in the experience of slavery rather than the question of the humanity of slaves. The Movement for Black Lives proposal, “A Vision for Black Lives,” insists on a relationship between the history of slavery and contemporary struggles for social justice. At the heart of the proposal is a call for “reparations for the historic and continuing harms of colonialism and slavery.” Indeed, the ambient as well as the activist discussion of justice in the United States today is inseparable from the history of slavery, ...
...nor in the historical “simplications” of black nationalism, which threatens to replicate white-dominated institutions but with black people in charge. Instead the path to justice is located in the black radical tradition: in the democratic practices and revolutionary thought of black people living under conditions of racial capitalism.
For Robinson, W. E. B. Du Bois was the preeminent historian of the ways that racism had defined the history of capitalism...In a 1920 essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois suggests that both economic exploitation and domination justified by imagined difference have histories “as old as mankind.”

But their combination in European imperialism—the “discovery of personal whiteness” by those who claimed title to the world and the concomitant designation of the world’s dark peoples as “beasts of burden”—is recent, a product of the slave trade.
Gone in Du Bois are the orthodox markers that serve to keep the history of slavery separate from the history of capitalism. In their place Du Bois proposes a new milestone, the emergence of a sort of capitalism that relies upon the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference. a global capitalism concomitant with the invention of what Robinson termed “the universal Negro.”

In short: racial capitalism. With this in mind, we might return to the question of “human emancipation”—this time with the purpose of essaying a notion of justice that is rooted in the history of slavery and goes beyond liberal notions of human rights.
Through this route, we can arrive at a history of the global political economy that is attentive to what, following Cedric Robinson, I term racial capitalism.
In Black Marxism (1983), Robinson argues that the historical developments of capitalism and racism were inseparable...

In Black Reconstruction in America, published fifteen years later, Du Bois roots his account of racial capitalism in the history of slavery in the United States. “The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire,” he writes in the book’s first pages,

Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.
In a few sentences, Du Bois scuttles the orthodox separation of slavery and capitalism. He names his history of American slavery “The Black Worker”—a subject, at once, of capital and of white supremacy. This, Robinson writes, was “the beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American Civilization—the naming of things.”
Rather than following Adam Smith or Karl Marx, each of whom viewed slavery as a residual form in the world of emergent capitalism, Du Bois treats the plantations of Mississippi, the counting houses of Manhattan, and the mills of Manchester as differentiated but concomitant components of a single system.

Many scholars have expressed a fear that terming both what happened in Mississippi and what happened in Manchester “capitalism” will make it impossible to see the trees for the forest—“obscuring,” in the words of James Oakes, “fundamental differences between economies based on enslaved [and] free labor.” But there is no obvious reason that should be the case.
The history of white working-class struggle, for example, cannot be understood separate from the privileges of whiteness, to which the white working classes of Britain and the United States laid claim in their demands for equal political rights. And it was the ever-expanding frontier of imperialism and racial capitalism that pacified the white working class with the threat of replacement and promise of a share of the spoils.

The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as well as blackness, of “freedom” as well as slavery.
Du Bois does not argue that all whites benefit from capitalism while all blacks do not.

But nor does he argue that blacks and whites are “workers” in the same way.
He suggests instead a subtle and dynamic relationship between capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.
Du Bois’s famous invocation of the “wages of whiteness” can best be understood in the context of a global economy that entwined Mississippi, Manhattan, and Manchester together in a white-supremacist system of differential rights and entitlements.
The abolition of American slavery,” Du Bois writes, “started the transportation of capital from white to black countries where slavery prevailed . . . and precipitated the modern economic degradation of the white farmer, while it put into the hands of the owners of the machine such a monopoly of raw material that their dominion of white labor was more and more complete.”

The end of slavery in the United States, according to Du Bois, marked not the liberation of the independent forces of capitalism and freedom from their archaic interconnection with slavery, but the generalization on a global scale of the racial and imperial vision of the “empire of cotton.”
Perhaps the fullest expression of Du Bois’s account of global racial capitalism is in his 1946 book The World and Africa. There he describes the process by which “slavery and the slave trade became transformed into anti-slavery and colonialism, and all with the same determination and demand to increase profit an investment.”

It all became a characteristic drama of capitalist exploitation, where the right hand knew nothing of what the left hand did, yet rhymed its grip with uncanny timeliness; where the investor neither knew, nor inquired, nor greatly cared about the sources of his profits; where the enslaved or dead or half-paid worker never saw nor dreamed of the value of his work (now owned by others); where neither the society darling nor the great artist saw the blood on the piano keys; where the clubman, boasting of great game hunting, heard above the click of his smooth, lovely, resilient billiard balls no echo of the wild shrieks of pain from kindly, half-human beasts as fifty to seventy-five thousand each year were slaughtered in cold, cruel, lingering horror of living death; sending their teeth to adorn civilization on the bowed heads and chained feet of thirty thousand black slaves, leaving behind more than a hundred thousand corpses in broken, flaming homes.
As much as anything, this is an account of the spatial aspect of racial capitalism. It emphasizes both the intimate, violent proximities and the material and cognitive distances of region, race, and scale (global and imperial, intimate and proximate)
...The history of American slavery...seems a more apt starting point for the analysis of a world characterized by the global division of labor, the resurgence of slavery as mode of production, the emergence of personal services (and pornography) as leading sectors of the economy, and the effulgence of nativism and white nationalism as fundamental features of white working-class ideology. History has moved on, and in so doing it has reshuffled its own past.

Indeed, the history of capitalism makes no sense separate from the history of the slave trade and its aftermath. There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.

Would Great Britain have industrialized without slavery, though perhaps at a different pace or in a different way?” James Oakes has recently written. What is being proposed is an adventitious, ahistorical definition of capitalism—a thing which might have happened even though it actually did not—that serves no purpose except to preserve, at whatever cost, the analytical precedence of Europe over Africa, the factory over the field, and the white working class over black slaves. Capitalism counterfactually emancipated from slavery. That is not social science; it is science fiction.
The entire “pyramid” of the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century (the economy that has been treated as the paradigmatic example of capitalism) was founded upon the capacity of enslaved women’s bodies: upon their ability to reproduce capital.

...given that enslaved people were the collateral upon which the entire system depended, it seems absurd to persist in asking whether the political economy of slavery was or was not “capitalist.” Enslaved people were the capital. Their value in 1860 was equal to all of the capital invested in American railroads, manufacturing, and agricultural land combined.

It is important to add that the land tells a different part of the story, one that resounds with Du Bois’s emphasis on empire alongside enslavement as the primary categories of capitalist accumulation. The land that enslaved people planted in cotton and which their owners posted as collateral was Native American land: it had been expropriated from the Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole. Indeed, if one traces the legal history of private property in the United States back, trying to find a legal foundation for determining why (legally rather than morally speaking) we own what we think we own, at the bottom lies the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823). At stake in the case was the question of whether white settlers could purchase land directly from native inhabitants, and the answer of the Supreme Court was “no.”

Native American lands, the court ruled, must be passed through the public domain of the United States before being converted into the private property of white inhabitants. In other words, the foundation of the law of property in the United States combines, at once, the imperial assertion of U.S. sovereignty and the identification of that project with continental racial governance.
... Let me return to the relationship between the history of slavery and contemporary notions of justice. Tragically, the history of slavery is increasingly being written without enslaved people.

There are six principal virtues of an account of justice rooted in the history of slavery and racial capitalism:
First, it mounts its critique of modern injustice from the standpoint of Africa and what has come to be called “the Global South,” rather than from Europe and “the Global North.
...Sixth, it suggests the possibility of relating a critique of the instrumentalization of human beings through slavery to the instrumentalization of nature in capitalist forms of extraction.

Over and against many recent efforts which assert that a forthright treatment of global environmental history requires the elevation of the categories of the “human” and the “Anthropocene” over and against other historical categories—principally those of race, class, gender, and colonialism—it insists upon the intimate and dialectical relationship between domination and dominion".

[Lord Thesaurian]

Yes, there are Marxist and other revisionist interpretations. Meanwhile there are facts, several of which fundamentally contravene these narratives, as cited. Thank you for the reading list.

[Common Soldier]

Isn't America an exceptional nation? in America and everywhere, christian slaveholders used the bible to justify slavery. As late as 1800, Protestants began to invoke a Christian hierarchy in which slaves were bound to obey their masters.And let's not forget the racist ideology of the KKK, along with their particular brand of Protestantism and nationalism,

Slavery existed thousands of years before Chrisrianity, but Christians led the campaign to abolish slavery, not just in their own countries but worldwide, in Europe, Americas and Africa. Many of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement were motivated by their Christian religuous beliefs. If there was an anti-slavery movement to abolisubslavety worldwide in Biddhist, Confucious or Hidu countries I havsn't heard of it. Can you providr mewith an example?

In the American Civil War, by the end of the war ending slavery was a major driving factor, even if thr initial motivation was merely to preserve the Union. Lincoln said the nation could not continue to exist half free and half slave, ending slavery became essential to achieve the primary goal of preserging the Union. Exactly how many Buddhist died to end slavery? How many Buddhist and Daoist risked their libery helping slaves to escape?

[Common Soldier]

Interpretations.]
This, I think it makes more sense,
Walter Johnson - Harvard University
W.J. is an American historian who teaches history and directs the Charles Warren center at Harvard University. W.J. the author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market, and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom.

This brilliant essay is an accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism. To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice -In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)
Doesn't take too much time to read it all,for a better comprehension. An excerpt,

"The tension between the specific actions and idioms of enslaved life and the broadly comparative categories of “independent will and volition,” “agency,” and “humanity” seem analogically—and, indeed, historically and ethically—related to the tension that Karl Marx noted between the historical and material inequalities of nineteenth-century society and the abstract equality of rights-based human emancipation, of which he was critical.

Seems typicsl marxist historical nonsense writing.

...Paraphrasing Marx, I think it is fair to say that the emergence of a global movement in support of human rights is the summary accomplishment of “the hitherto existing world order.” It is not, however—nor in my view should it be—“the final form of human emancipation” or of what a just world should look like.
In Moyn’s view, in fact, human-rights thinking has provided the intellectual architecture for a sort of liberal neo-imperialism, the justifying terms of continuing European and American intervention in the affairs of former colonies.
There is a quite different genealogy for discussions of human freedom—this one rooted in the experience of slavery rather than the question of the humanity of slaves. The Movement for Black Lives proposal, “A Vision for Black Lives,” insists on a relationship between the history of slavery and contemporary struggles for social justice. At the heart of the proposal is a call for “reparations for the historic and continuing harms of colonialism and slavery.” Indeed, the ambient as well as the activist discussion of justice in the United States today is inseparable from the history of slavery, ...
...nor in the historical “simplications” of black nationalism, which threatens to replicate white-dominated institutions but with black people in charge. Instead the path to justice is located in the black radical tradition: in the democratic practices and revolutionary thought of black people living under conditions of racial capitalism.
For Robinson, W. E. B. Du Bois was the preeminent historian of the ways that racism had defined the history of capitalism...In a 1920 essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois suggests that both economic exploitation and domination justified by imagined difference have histories “as old as mankind.”

Successful people take responsibility for their own success or failure, even if they got bad breaks in life. Unsuccessful people tend to blame their failures on others. The Jews have been thr most discriminated people in history, so.by BLM logic they shod be thr lokrest but that is not the case. If you want to blame present day failures on events of the past, they why stop at slavery? Black societies in general less literate than Europe before the first black slave was brought to the New World. The printing prrss was established invention before Columbus set foot in thr New World, and for centuries the Africans expressed no desire for printing presses - Europeans were willing to supply guns, I am sure they would have traded presses if Africans wanted them. But they did not.

If there should be reparations for slavery, then why shouldn't blacks owe whites for all.the things the blacks did not invent - like.printing presses, microscopes, compasses, modern university, sailing charts, reading glasses, pulleys, mechanical winches, modern anatomy. It works both ways. Contrary to thd reparation movement, inventions are not the product of accident, they are not the product of of nature, youndon't find a reading glass like you would aump of gold.

During the middle ages, an African was the wealthiest man in world. What did Mansa Musa do with his vast wealth? Did he go abroad and bring back technological knowledge like building windmills watermills to power labor.saving machinery, as was thr case in contrmpkrary Eurole? Nope. Did he bulding enduring bridges and and roads and othrt infrastructure peojects lime.ancient aromans and contemporary medieval.Europe? No again. Mechanical.foot powerd apinning wheels? No. Build.a network of universities to advancd buman knowledge, like medical univeristies wherr human dissection was performed? Advance.the art of navigation, lime He ry thr Navigator? No. Double Entry book keeping? No once again. Metal wire production using draw plates? No. Mariner's compasses? No. Cast iron production? No.

By Musa's time Europe had made a number of technical advances which Africa had not. Since Musa had vast wealth, this failure by Africans can't be blamed on poverty, or exploitation by Europeans. Rathet it was thr other around - Africans were.enalaving Europeans for centuries before Europeans startrd to enslave Africans, and Africans continued to enslave Europeans right up until thr 19th century when Europeans themselves put a stop to it. Africans colonized Spain until they were driven out.aaaa@

But their combination in European imperialism—the “discovery of personal whiteness” by those who claimed title to the world and the concomitant designation of the world’s dark peoples as “beasts of burden”—is recent, a product of the slave trade.
Gone in Du Bois are the orthodox markers that serve to keep the history of slavery separate from the history of capitalism. In their place Du Bois proposes a new milestone, the emergence of a sort of capitalism that relies upon the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference. a global capitalism concomitant with the invention of what Robinson termed “the universal Negro.”

European capitalism began before the Atlantic slave trade. Italian merchant banks existed from the middle ages and laid the stages for European capitalism. The money eas not gemerated by African slave trade. You have only to look at bulidings like Notre Dame and Chartes cathedrals to see that Euorope had a cettain amount of wealth long before the African slave trade. St. Marks church in Venice was not built with thr peofits of African slavery, and the BLM claim that Europeans went in around rags and loin cloths before the African slave trade or.that money from the African slave trade centuriez in ts future to allow Europeans to build things like St.Marks is false and absurd. Yet if it is, then the entire claim of the BLM and Dubois fails, since Europe clearly had wealth to build magnicant structures like St. Mark which also means Europe had wealth to form.capitalism as well.

In short: racial capitalism. With this in mind, we might return to the question of “human emancipation”—this time with the purpose of essaying a notion of justice that is rooted in the history of slavery and goes beyond liberal notions of human rights.
Through this route, we can arrive at a history of the global political economy that is attentive to what, following Cedric Robinson, I term racial capitalism.
In Black Marxism (1983), Robinson argues that the historical developments of capitalism and racism were inseparable...

Slavery and capitalism are quite separable, despite what is asserted. The origins of capitalism began centuries before the African slave trade. The rise of Venice as a major center of wealth began centuries before the African slave trade, and the wealth that allowed Europe to bud ships to sail to African and the New World in thr first place came from internal European industries, not African trade. African slave trade may have added to European wealth, but it did not create it. Silver, essential for trade with the East, originally came from European mines, before the Americans, mined wirh European labor, fed with food from European farms that used European labor. The wealth and technology to make a suit of medieval plate armor did not come the African slave trade.


Slavery existed before capitalism and capitalism after slavery was gone. No amount of marxist gobbledygook will make the Roman empire a capitalist society. Slavery no longet existed in the late 19th century when capitalism thrived.

[Qu
In Black Reconstruction in America, published fifteen years later, Du Bois roots his account of racial capitalism in the history of slavery in the United States. “The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire,” he writes in the book’s first pages, [/quote]

No facts but opinions. Nothing so disproves Du Bois view that in a test of strength, the slave based society of the Confederscy was totally defeated by the non slave based society of the Union. The South was poorer and weaker precisely becauae it was slave based.

Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.

Nonsense. The corner stone of industrialization was iron and coal, and neither was indebted to slavery. The technology did not come from slavery, and there were other sources of wealth to fund the building of factors. The cotton could come from other sources and it wasn't until the later 19th century that America became a major source for cotton, by which time the industrialization was well under way. At the time of the revolution, tobacco, not cotton, was America's main cash crop. Cotton was later.

In a few sentences, Du Bois scuttles the orthodox separation of slavery and capitalism. He names his history of American slavery “The Black Worker”—a subject, at once, of capital and of white supremacy. This, Robinson writes, was “the beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American Civilization—the naming of things.”
Rather than following Adam Smith or Karl Marx, each of whom viewed slavery as a residual form in the world of emergent capitalism, Du Bois treats the plantations of Mississippi, the counting houses of Manhattan, and the mills of Manchester as differentiated but concomitant components of a single system.

I can think of a few examples of the top of my end that completely scuttles Du Bois arguments. Du Bois seems to just assert things without actual facts to prove them. He may make claims but that does not make them true. The spinning jenny was invented before America became a major source of cotton, not after. James Watt improved thr steam engine before the US was a major cotton exporter. If Cotton did not come from the South, it would have come from somehwere else. American cotton was just superior, not essential.

Du Bois ignores the fact that there was a textile industry in England before cotton, based on wool and linen.

But nor does he argue that blacks and whites are “workers” in the same way.
He suggests instead a subtle and dynamic relationship between capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.
Du Bois’s famous invocation of the “wages of whiteness” can best be understood in the context of a global economy that entwined Mississippi, Manhattan, and Manchester together in a white-supremacist system of differential rights and entitlements.
The abolition of American slavery,” Du Bois writes, “started the transportation of capital from white to black countries where slavery prevailed . . . and precipitated the modern economic degradation of the white farmer, while it put into the hands of the owners of the machine such a monopoly of raw material that their dominion of white labor was more and more complete.”

The end of slavery in the United States, according to Du Bois, marked not the liberation of the independent forces of capitalism and freedom from their archaic interconnection with slavery, but the generalization on a global scale of the racial and imperial vision of the “empire of cotton.”
Perhaps the fullest expression of Du Bois’s account of global racial capitalism is in his 1946 book The World and Africa. There he describes the process by which “slavery and the slave trade became transformed into anti-slavery and colonialism, and all with the same determination and demand to increase profit an investment.”

Next time, could you provide the evidence Du Bois used to back up his claims? I could say the moon was made cheese but it wouldn't make it so.

Indeed, the history of capitalism makes no sense separate from the history of the slave trade and its aftermath. There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.

A lot of claims but no facts. Manchester, if it could not get cotton from Missippi, would have just gotten it from Egypt and Indiw or elsewhwere. Amerixanncotton was merely preferred, but not essential.

Africa slavery in Americas existed because of the availibility to obtain relatively cheap African slaves, made only possible by the willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade. Without African support of the slave trade, within a few decades slaves near the coast wouls have been exhausted and collecting slaves further from the interior would have become unprofitable if the Europeans had to do the enslaving and collecting themselves.

The technology to make Manchester a major center of textile manufafturing was created before not after America became the leading cotton producer. The spinning jenney was created arou d 1765, while Eli Whitney wasn't born until then and it was his cotton gin that allowed Amerixan cotton to take off.

The texhnical advances of the 19th century had their roots in the middle ages where African slavery did not play any kind of significant role. The first practical stram engines innthr early 18th century were funded by the profit of the coal industry, not the slave trade. Already in ths middle ages Britain had active coal industry, and Britain was major iron produce in Tudor times. The English in Tudor times were leaders in making cast iron cannons and cast iron cannon balls were one of the first major uses of cast iron itself in Europe. England made major profits in the wool trade, and those profits were generated not by African slavery.

Would Great Britain have industrialized without slavery, though perhaps at a different pace or in a different way?” James Oakes has recently written. What is being proposed is an adventitious, ahistorical definition of capitalism—a thing which might have happened even though it actually did not—that serves no purpose except to preserve, at whatever cost, the analytical precedence of Europe over Africa, the factory over the field, and the white working class over black slaves. Capitalism counterfactually emancipated from slavery. That is not social science; it is science fiction.
The entire “pyramid” of the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century (the economy that has been treated as the paradigmatic example of capitalism) was founded upon the capacity of enslaved women’s bodies: upon their ability to reproduce capital.

The technology needed for industrialization did not come from Africa, and the basis, the coal and iron industey, had developments going baxk to late medieval times predating significant involvement of Britain in the slave trade. While the slave rrade did generate profit, Britain engaged in other activities that generated peofit and capital too not related to slavery. You can see many a fine gothic medieval church built with the profits od the wool trade. The peofits of he East India Fompany were not generates by slavery. And when slavery ended, the US still rrmwined the world leading cotton producer for another 3/4 of a century, proving slavery was not as essential to cotton production as claimed.


Capitalism was founded on the creation and accumulation of money, not on enslaved women's bodies. There were many waya to make money, slavery was one. The only thing depending on enslaved women bodies was thr continuation of slavery itself after slave importstion was banned innthr early 1800's. Nonsense personified.

...given that enslaved people were the collateral upon which the entire system depended, it seems absurd to persist in asking whether the political economy of slavery was or was not “capitalist.” Enslaved people were the capital. Their value in 1860 was equal to all of the capital invested in American railroads, manufacturing, and agricultural land combined.

Nonsense. Nothing disproves this more than the Union, which was not dependent on slavery, completrly and totally defeating the Confederacy, which was based on slavery. If you every read Alexis de Tocqeville Demacracy in America, he notes the greater industry of the free states compared to the slave states. While a small numher of elite slave owning whites greatly benefited from slavery, the southern white was less well off than his counterpart in the north - lower level of literacy, lower levels of education, lower average income. The typical Confederate soldier was less well off than his Union counterpart. The Republican party formed because ordinary whites zid not want to have to compete avainst slavery, which would lower their income.

States where slavery was most prevalent, typically had the poorest white populations as well as blacks population.

It is important to add that the land tells a different part of the story, one that resounds with Du Bois’s emphasis on empire alongside enslavement as the primary categories of capitalist accumulation. The land that enslaved people planted in cotton and which their owners posted as collateral was Native American land: it had been expropriated from the Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole. Indeed, if one traces the legal history of private property in the United States back, trying to find a legal foundation for determining why (legally rather than morally speaking) we own what we think we own, at the bottom lies the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823). At stake in the case was the question of whether white settlers could purchase land directly from native inhabitants, and the answer of the Supreme Court was “no.”

Just as China took land from non Chinese - the southern half of China was originally not Chinese, and most of the land the Chinese took in southern China, Manchuria, innner Mongolia was just taken. The US at least tried to take the land legally, by bribing chiefs and getting the tribes to sign treaties. The Chinese just tool land, and even today the western half China is heavily populatez by non Chinese eth ic groups which China is working to exterminate. But since China is Marxists, that is ok, just as its taking over of Tibet. Indeed, the major colonial power is China.

Native American lands, the court ruled, must be passed through the public domain of the United States before being converted into the private property of white inhabitants. In other words, the foundation of the law of property in the United States combines, at once, the imperial assertion of U.S. sovereignty and the identification of that project with continental racial governance.

It is simular ro the way land in eastern Germany was transferred to Poland. Millions of German inhabitants were diaplaced at the end of WW1 and WW2 from lands they had lived in for centuries.

... Let me return to the relationship between the history of slavery and contemporary notions of justice. Tragically, the history of slavery is increasingly being written without enslaved people.

There are six principal virtues of an account of justice rooted in the history of slavery and racial capitalism:
First, it mounts its critique of modern injustice from the standpoint of Africa and what has come to be called “the Global South,” rather than from Europe and “the Global North.
...Sixth, it suggests the possibility of relating a critique of the instrumentalization of human beings through slavery to the instrumentalization of nature in capitalist forms of extraction.

Over and against many recent efforts which assert that a forthright treatment of global environmental history requires the elevation of the categories of the “human” and the “Anthropocene” over and against other historical categories—principally those of race, class, gender, and colonialism—it insists upon the intimate and dialectical relationship between domination and dominion".

I don't see a lot of facts being presented. The problems of most.of Africa predated the Atlantic Slave trade, and while.slavery may have contributed to the problems, as.did colonialism, it did not create the problems.

1. Literacy - most of Sub Sahara Africa was largely illiterate, and while many African societies had some form of writing, it was more of the stage Viking runic writing - unlike high snd late medieval Europe, writing played no major role in most Africsn societies. If you look at the Great Zimbawe structure, you won't find evixencr of writing, unlike contrmlorary medieval cathedrals where you can find all kinds of of examples of writing in stain glass window and on door ways, crosses and grave markers. Timbuktu was the rare exeption, not the rule.

2. Advance mechanicsl mechanisms like clocks, windmills, watermills, mechanically winched crossbows are simply absent for most of Sub Sahara Africa. Younwon't find harbor cranes, wheelbarrels or similar mechanical devices in most of Africa as far as I can tell.

3. While in some fields, such as iron and steel making Africa seemed as advancrd as Europe until the late middle ages early modrrn times, other fields lie glassworking, paper production Dub Sahara Africa seemed far behind. I don't sed evidene of multi-mast sailing boats, sternpost rudded, frame first construction or other advance.ship building technology - native African boats were fine craftd but really primarily for.local use. Madagascar was settled first by people from much further away Indian island before much closer Africa. The Dhows of of east Africs were really more Arabic ships, and Arabs helped found many of the cities along Africa's eastern shore. Even by 19th century most of Africa seemed to had not quite.reached the technogical level of medieval Chona or India from what I csn see. More like the level of early to mid medieval.Europe.

4. Much of Africa had yet to fall under nation states and was still more tribal in nature. This made it vulnerable to foreign conquest, and less capable of engaging in modernization projects. I doubt even without conialism Africa could have modernized any where near as quickly as say Japan. It was a few centuries laghig in many areea before Columbus even discoverd America.


Africa was as much exploited because it was poor and backwards as it is poor poor abd backward because it was exploited. Ethiopia was able to resist colonaization for the part, but it was still not as advanced as late medieval Europe


Capitalism before and after slavery in the Americas. Du Bois claims, which essential boils down to all wealth of the industrial revolution was ultimately due to slavery, is simply not true. Du Bois claims essential asserts that Europeans had no sources of wealth other than that provided by slavery, and that the industrial revolution did not begin until African slavery, are both inaccurate. Capitalism certainly existed in Europe before African slave trade, and the argument that without thr additional wealth provided by slavery the capitalism the industrial revolution would not occur is a highly debatable and ultimately impossible to prove question. It is a fact that Europe had made a number of advances in a number of industries that rhe Atlantic slave played no role. Certainly Europe made a number of texhnogical advances starting in the middle ages that African slavery waa not repaonsible for. When it comes to UD slavery, the answer is even more clear. Until the late 18th century, slavery was primary was producing luxury items like tobacco and sugar, not essential to the European economy. What food the slavery did produce was not the primary or essential source of food to feed Britain, and could have been dispensed with if needed. Only in the late 18th century, after thr inventions like steam engines and spinny jenny had been created did slavery produce essential material for industry.


Slavery wasn't not the only source generating weqlth for capitalism as Du Bois assumes nor has it even been demonstrated that it was the primary souce of wealth. Europe clearly had other sources of wealth creation that Du Bois ignores. In short, his work seems very poor.


To figure out slavery's contribution to wealth creations as compared with other sources would be difficult, getting reliable complete data is well nigh impossible. The fact when you see the typical income level of the ordinary nothern farmer exceeding his southern counter part seems to clearly show slavery's contribution is overstated. Only in the case of the plantation owner, represnting a tiny fraction of the white population, might be said to exceed those of the north and even that is debatable. There certainly plenty of wealthy northern merchants and manufactures in the non slave statss, places like.Boston were quite prosperous.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Warning: have your Kleenex ready

[alhoon]

https://news.yahoo.com/ignorance-tur...033703106.html

A lot of progressive idiots confuse the NORWEGIAN flag with the Confederacy flag, and have bullied a Norwegian business to take down their flag.

[Mithradates]

Maybe Norway should just change its flag, they shouldnt carelessly trigger unsmart people.
Doubleplus-sad

[Lord Thesaurian]

Hail to the Chief! A nice doc if you have 20 minutes to kill.

[Common Soldier]

https://news.yahoo.com/ignorance-tur...033703106.html

A lot of progressive idiots confuse the NORWEGIAN flag with the Confederacy flag, and have bullied a Norwegian business to take down their flag.

If they could think, they would not be progressives. The same ignorance of facts is why they are progressives.

[Ludicus]

Meanwhile there are facts.

Please don't use the term "facts" (your facts) as an ultimate,definitive and universal truth.
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Three different perspectives. What they all have in common is the the inexorable link between slavery and capitalism in the USA. I hope this helps you to understand better the clear connection between capitalism and slavery in the USA, where capitalism need not emerge along the same lines as the agrarian transitions identified by Brenner and Wood in the European cases.

(1) The New Your Magazine, American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the
A little, little, very small excerpt. Read it all.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation
Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.
“American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman.

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(2) The Jacobin has a more incisive perspective How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism - Jacobin
Excerpts...read the full article.

The New York Times is right that slavery made a major contribution to capitalist development in the United States — just not in the way they imagine.

(...) Why Slavery Mattered

The fact that the American economy appears to have prospered from the abolition of slavery should not lead us to conclude that slavery had no lasting consequences for US economic development.

(...) For there are straightforward ways that slavery clearly influenced the development of American capitalism.

(...)There is also a lesser-known but equally clear and durable influence of slavery evidenced in the work of legal and institutional historians that Desmond neglects, such as David Waldstreicher and Robin Einhorn. These historians point out that a major effect of slavery on US economic development came through its foundational influence on America’s legal and political institutions.
One of the central problems faced by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was how to create a common legal and political framework that would unite the slave states of the South with Northern states that were then in the process of abolishing slavery. The slave states were concerned that a strong federal government dominated by Northerners might tax their slaves or even abolish slavery.

The solution the delegates found was two-fold. On the one hand they ensured that the South was disproportionately represented at the federal level through the three-fifths clause. On the other hand, they reserved the bulk of fiscal and economic policymaking to the states themselves.

Thus the constitution effectively restricted federal taxing and regulatory power to international and interstate commerce.
But even here slavery shaped the way that power would be used. Slave states were concerned about federal power to tax slave imports and slave-produced exports, but they also wanted the federal government to enforce their property claims when it came to fugitive slaves who might flee to the free states.

The result was a restriction on the federal government’s taxing power (banning export taxes and limiting taxes on slave imports) and a strengthening of its power (vis a vis the states) to enforce property claims in the “fugitive slave clause.”
This division of federal and state power over slave property is not just manifest in now-dormant articles of the constitution dealing with slavery. It imbues all parts of the constitution and arguably lent to the American state system its distinctive form, which combines strong property protections with weak regulatory and fiscal powers (the introduction of a federal income tax in 1913 required a constitutional amendment).

Apologists for this system call it “competitive federalism.” The fugitive slave act and the commerce clause restricted the domestic power of the federal government — the most powerful entity in the state system — to protecting large merchants and enforcing property claims across state lines, i.e., ensuring the mobility of capital. Its powers to tax, spend, and interfere with the interests of the wealthy (e.g., through regulating banks or providing debt relief) were explicitly curtailed. Even the legal scholar Richard Epstein, a libertarian champion of competitive federalism, acknowledges that “it’s quite clear that the cause of limited government was advanced by the institution of slavery.”

In principle the states were left to regulate and tax as they liked, but their practical ability to do so was constrained by federally mandated capital mobility. This created a fiscal and regulatory race to the bottom, as the wealthy could force relatively weak state legislatures to compete for their investments — just as city and state governments prostrate themselves before Amazon and Boeing today. The infamous Dred Scott case was itself a matter of the federal judiciary protecting capital mobility (in that case the right of slave-owners to move through the territories with their slaves) and Robin Einhorn points out that the same principle was at work in later judicial interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed federal courts to strike down state-level labor regulations.

Einhorn’s point is not that the framers were all proslavery (they were not) nor that they intended to produce a capitalist paradise of unfettered accumulation. Her point is that in making certain concessions to the slave-owners the framers unintentionally generated those conditions. Slave-owners were particularly afraid of allowing democratic control over property because they were literally afraid of their property. They were haunted by the threat of slave insurrections, as well as foreign armies turning their slaves into enemy soldiers through offers of freedom (as the British had recently done). Einhorn concludes that “if property rights have enjoyed unusual sanctity in the United States, it may be because this nation was founded in a political situation in which the owners of one very significant form of property thought their holdings were insecure.”

The resulting balance of strong property protections and weak regulatory and taxing power may or may not have been conducive to economic growth (that’s for economic historians to figure out). But there is no doubt that it helped shift American capitalism onto the low road.
In addition to the profound effect of slavery on America’s enduring racial inequality, slavery’s legacy for American capitalism may thus be found more in the structural constraints on US politics than in its direct contributions to the nineteenth-century American economy.

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(3) First published: 25 March 2020- Journal of Historical Sociology A Theory of Capitalist Slavery - Clegg - 2020 - Journal of Historical Sociology
A very small excerpt, I don't want to bother you, feel free to read the full paper.

(...) What are the stakes of recognizing this distinctively capitalist dynamic of American slavery?

(...)The point is rather, firstly, to identify and understand the differentia specifica of American slavery. Secondly, to correct the misconception that capitalist accumulation can only be based on free wage labor....We can now add that capitalism need not emerge along the same lines as the agrarian transitions identified by Brenner and Wood in the European cases.
Rather, the main preconditions for capitalist patterns of accumulation are simply the spread of viable, liquid markets in capital and labor, and the elimination of subsistence alternatives to production for the market... In the American case I have argued this was achieved through a combination of violent expropriation and a creditor‐friendly legal system.
The violent enslavement of millions of Africans and their progeny proved an effective means of commodifying labor in a context in which the violent expropriation of native lands gave European settlers a ready alternative to selling their labor.
In that context debt and foreclosure became an important mechanism for enforcing capitalist patterns of behavior, for it both ensured the liquidity of capital and slave labor markets, and closed off alternative pathways of (non‐) development.

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Slavery and capitalism are quite separable

Not in the history of the USA.
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slavery .. colonialism.. did not create problems.

Sure. The retarded Africans always enjoyed to see foreigners stealing their lands and resources, killing and imprisoning them, they absolutely loved the socio-political engineering known as apartheid, framing non-whites and creating second class citizens. Colonialism was a win for the humanity.

I doubt even without conialism Africa could have modernized

Now, if that's the case, why not a case for re-colonization, and long‐​term nation‐​building projects in Africa? if profitable, off course. Bruce Gill, in the "Case for Colonialism", calls for a return of colonialism, citing the benefits of a "colonial governance" agenda over the "good governance" agenda, which would involve overtaking state bureaucracies, recolonizing some areas, and creating new colonies "from scratch".
There is no end to colonial nostalgia...
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. There is no place in the world- Africa, Middle East, Asia and Americas - where colonists/settlers gently landed, built homes and lived their lives. No, they were always part of a movement consisting of subjugation and disempowerment of the native inhabitants.
Even today, neocolonialists tend to think that enslaving, killing and theft is an insignificant collateral damage, and in order to justify the oppression of the conquered peoples, they cynically, systematically argue that there is no oppression without permission.