Capitalism, slavery

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

dms,
I assuming that all four messages say the same thing

> What Rakesh ignores in this speculative exercise is that the puts
> and calls on the  economic expansion of industrial capitalism could
> not allow slavery to remain intact,
> for the slaveholders were determined to prevent such expansion.  Had
> the slaveholders triumphed, there would have been no Northern
> industrial capitalism as we know it to finance the mechanization of
> Southern agriculture in 1940 or 1890.


how would the slaveholders have prevented such an industrial
expansion--by standing in the way of the tariff, immigration and
monetary policy that the Northern industrialists needed? by not only
failing to mechanize as a result of the objective fettering by the
slave form of exploitation to the development of the productive
forces but also spreading slavery at the expense of the more dynamic
family farm whose demand supposedly powered the American industrial
revolution?

You seem quite bothered by my use of counterfactual argument which
seems to me implicit in any kind of historical argument.

But we are left with this sequence of events:
sharecropping=>weakening of sharecropping through New Deal
policies=>evictions and consolidations=>mechanization through the
cotton harvester starting circa 1949.

Is there any evidence here that sharecropping as a disguised form of
wage labor fettered the mechanization of cotton harvesting which had
to wait until its weakening? That seems to me true, and suggests that
the simple progressivist Marxist view of history as the autonomous
development of the productive forces choosing and abandoning various
forms of exploitation is probably wrong. The development of the
productive forces did not dictate the transition from slavery to
sharecropping; the resistance of former slaves ensured this.
Sharecropping does not seem to have promoted the development of the
productive forces more than slavery would have. The form of
exploitation--sharecropping--was probably not optimal either in terms
of capitalist profitability or the development of the productive
forces. But this--the defeat of large scale capitalist agriculture on
the basis of slavery for the disguised wage labor system of
sharecropping--seems to be the price that the Northern bourgeoisie
had to pay for political defeat of the rival capitalists in the South.

Rakesh






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