Re: Dumb Question on Capitalism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Jos (FÈ G. PÈrez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx> 03/08/00 11:52PM >>>
Charles,

    I'm more than a little fuzzy on how to analyze this all, but it seems to
me that slavery in the U.S. was capitalist slavery. My understanding is that
the slaves were dedicated to a couple of cash crops (especially cotton),
i.e., the production of a commodity for the market. Slave breeding was also
a big business, especially in the border states, and again this was
production for the market.

**********

CB: Yes, Jose, thanks for bringing in the "cash crop" concept.  Cash crops are
produced for a capitalist market.

Here's a brief quote from Marx comparing slaves and proletarians:

         From "The British Cotton Trade"
                   (Vol. 19 Collected Works M&E page17)

        ....English modern industry, in general,
relied upon two pivots equally monstrous. The
one was the potato as the only means of feeding
Ireland and a great part of the English working
class. This pivot was swept away by the potato
disease ad subsequent Irish catastrophe. A larger
basis for the reproduction and maintenance of the
toiling millions had then to be adopted. The second
pivot of English industry was the slave-grown cotton of
the United States.The present American crisis forces
them to enlarge their field of supply and emancipate
cotton from slave-breeding and slave-consuming oligarchies.
As long as the English cotton manufactures depended
on slave-grown cotton, it could be truthfully asserted
that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery
of the white man in England and the direct slavery
 of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic.
Sept. 21, 1861 written
New York Daily Tribune 10/14/1861


CB