[PEN-L:7229] Re: Re: Liquidated damages for slavery

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The physical location of capital , especially fictional capital , is an interesting question. The surpluses from the South also went to England, so maybe the payback should be international in this global economy.

The big bourgeoisie who were and are resident in the South, the former slaveowners and the rich people since the Civil War , may have had material means of production destroyed, but it is not clear to me that they were expropriated of all of their wealth in the other forms of capital, other than the labor/means of production they owned as slaves. Not all of their land was taken from them. Slaves did not get the forty acres and a mule, as promised.

Charles Brown



>>> Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 05/25/99 06:05PM >>>
Jim Devine's analysis would be correct if the surplus in the South would have
been confined to that region.  Much of the wealth generated by the slave
economy migrated to the north.

Jim Devine wrote:

> My reading is that the slaves did a hell of a lot of work (and in hell) but
> that a lot of went wasted, because the Civil War destroyed the South. With
> Northern occupation preventing the normal process of rebuilding that takes
> place after wars (fixing the railways), with Southern white insistence on
> the most reactionary politics after Reconstruction, with an economy overly
> concentrated on cotton agriculture in an era with low cotton prices, the
> South became a backwater, so that most of the slave's contributions were
> for nought, allowing the slaveowners to live high on the hog for a few
> decades before the Civil War. The slaveowners mostly invested in owning
> more land and more slaves; they didn't do much in the way of capital
> investment, while they avoided educating the slaves. After the Civil War,
> they ended up with landholdings, a lot of desperate freedmen who became
> debt peons, and a stagnant economy.
>

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901