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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

If you had told me 25 years ago that in my home country (Bangladesh) people were going to be demanding removal of a statue of lady justice from in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court would oblige, and that veiling women would go from being nearly non-existent to commonplace, and that secular journalists would be getting murdered, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Islamists got control of education, and all of those things happened.

So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry.

But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.

View on HN

> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist.

Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?

It may be "capitalist" in the sense that things are being bought/sold/owned sure. But it's being portrayed as a concept/occurrence that is mostly if not entirely a product of capitalism. Which is plain wrong because we've had slavery and various forms of it in a multitude of situations and political systems throughout history, a lot of which were in no way capitalist. It's white-washing a lot of our collective history and suffering just as like claiming that slavery was purely done by "western", "white" or "imperialist" nations.

The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.

It doesn't matter if there's a historical precedent. Each system is defined by the incentives it sets up. The incentives set up by capitalism are clearly instrumental to the vast expansion of slavery.

Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. The means of production is usually defined as tools, machinery or technology, not people.

> Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.

No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.”

Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.

People are gaslighting me by telling me resurgent Marxism isn’t a real thing, and yet here I am having people quote Marx at me to define capitalism.

No one is gaslighting [1] you. People are arguing that your interpretation of current events is in error. By calling that "gaslighting", you implicitly claim that disagreement with you is in itself an abusive act.

Calling anyone who disagrees with you abusive seems like a pretty wild flex.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Well I guess it depends on what you mean that my stated concern is a “problem that doesn’t exist?”

Do you mean that Marxist ideas aren’t finding renewed currency? Nobody seems to deny that efforts to equate slavery with capitalism are critiques pioneered by Marx. Instead they seem to be arguing that Marx was correct. So the ideas do seem to be having renewed currency, in which case denying that fact is gaslighting.

If you’re arguing that it’s not a problem that Marxist ideas are being incorporated into schoolbooks, then in that case we just disagree.

What I mean is, where you seem to see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as evidence of some sort of vast generational conspiracy to subvert the US and replace its current government with some kind of Stalinist totalitarianism, I see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as a totally unsurprising and if anything long delayed response to the mounting evidence that four straight decades of untrammeled capitalism on the Reaganite model has had catastrophic results for almost everyone in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

What I don't see is any need to assume that, because Marx's critique of capital is serving as a source for those developing a modern critique of capital, Stalinism must necessarily follow. I think that's really where we disagree, and I'll admit, I feel no nearer understanding the wellspring of your fear now than I did when I started this conversation.

Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.

Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale. The kids just aren't listening any more, and I see no reason why they should be.

> What I mean is, where you seem to see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as evidence of some sort of vast generational conspiracy to subvert the US and replace its current government with some kind of Stalinist totalitarianism, I see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as a totally unsurprising and if anything long delayed response to the mounting evidence that four straight decades of untrammeled capitalism on the Reaganite model has had catastrophic results for almost everyone in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)

> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.

The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.

> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale

I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic structure of our economy, we perceive them as a threat to our prosperity. We view their attempts to submarine Marxist ideas into schools as a bid to make our children ignorant about what created the prosperity they see around them. Most importantly, we by nature view civilization as fragile. We are grateful that we stumbled across a formula that basically seems to work—because there are few ideas that work and many more that don’t—and view attempts to rethink that formula from first principles with deep skepticism. I agree that conservatives can go too far with this (calling Obama a socialist, etc.) And they can fail to perceive important distinctions, such as the difference between BLM as a corporate entity, versus what most people who are completely unaware of the Marxist connection believe they are supporting: https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an.... But the Reagan/Thatcher-ite opposition to Marxism was basically a good thing, and destroyed it as a going concern for a good 25 years between 1990-2015. And now, as I think you even agree, it's back.

> Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone.

Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.

> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.

Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.

I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.

I suppose I don't understand what you're saying about the situation you saw in Bangladesh. Were the fundamentalist Islamists you described having taken over the country, via the educational system, also ideological Marxists? Is there a history of some sort that I can read, to understand better what you're describing? Just based on what you've said today, it sounds like you're adjusting the goalposts to suit the argument of the moment, but I'm sure that can't be the case. So I'd definitely appreciate the ability to develop a better understanding of the events that seem to form the basis of your argument.

With regard to the whole Marxism-and-BLM thing - I have to say, at this point, I honestly don't know. On reflection, I decided it might be better, instead of just taking your word (and Newsmax's, and it turned out also Breitbart's!) for what's in that video, if I saw and heard for myself what it contained. So I did that [1], and found that your representation of what it contains (and Newsmax's, and Breitbart's) is, and I say this with all possible charity, extremely tendentious in a way that leads me to suspect it's been deliberately stripped of context in order to sound maximally frightening to people already predisposed to be suspicious of BLM activists' motives.

In particular, when I investigated the quote of which you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) make so much, I found that it was said in the context of answering a question raised by among others Jalil Muntaqim (born Anthony Bottom) [2], a former Black Panther imprisoned since 1974 for the murder of two police officers, over whether the Black Lives Matter movement has a coherent enough ideological direction to avoid simply "fizzling out" as Occupy Wall Street did.

Cullors' answer is, as you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) imagine, a political one. But it's not political in the way that you think it is. Here's a transcription I made just now from the video, covering the entirety of Patrisse Cullors' answer, rather than just the part that has been so frequently taken out of context with what appears to me very strongly to be deliberately deceptive intent.

"I think that the criticism is helpful; I think a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame; myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on sort of ideological theories, and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk. We don't necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement; I think we've tried to put out a political frame that's about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the Black community, to really fight for all of our lives, and I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don't believe it's going to fizzle out; it just gets stronger, and we see it, right? We've seen that after Sandra Bland, we're seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum. What I do think, though, is [that] folks, especially folks who've been trained in a particular way, want to hear certain things from us, [and] we're not framing it in the ways that maybe another generation has. But I think it's important that people know the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just live online, although there's many people who utilize it online. We're in a different set of circumstances, a different generation, [and while] social media may feel like it's diluting the larger ideological frame, I argue that it's not."

The reason I say that that's a political answer is, again, in the context of it being a response to critique by someone who is widely regarded as a political prisoner and, as the show host notes, an "elder of the struggle". It really comes across as kind of a "gotcha" question, and Cullors' answer is consequently phrased with care. She opens by declaring credentials of a sort that should resonate with "elders of the struggle", as it's put, and afterward quickly redirects into what she wants to talk about, which essentially is to say that, yes, Black Lives Matter is a coherent movement with a specific purpose, and as such is not liable to the same problems that hampered and eventually undermined the Occupy movement.

It's an answer in which Cullors has to triangulate between the outdated perspective of a past generation who, while still meriting respect for their own efforts toward a more equitable US society for black people, no longer have a firm grasp on the issues of the present moment, and the need to demonstrate that her own work very much is rooted in the issues of the present moment. It's political, yes, but in the office-politics sense rather than that of some sort of conspiratorial Marxism that you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) apparently choose to see here.

And it's an answer I can respect, both because I agree that black people in the United States have literally never had a fair shot and they deserve better, and because I'm not too proud to admit that she's a hell of a lot better at that kind of interpersonal and intergenerational politics than I've ever managed to be, a lack I've often regarded with a measure of regret. I mean, I usually just say "ok, boomer". Cullors is positively gentle about it, and maybe I should learn something from that.

I have to say, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage on this subject today. Absent that, I don't know that I'd ever have had the motivation to go and find original statements of this sort from BLM organizers. I have to say, my respect for that movement, and the work that's gone and continues to go into making it a force for good in American politics, has really increased as a result of this conversation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCghDx5qN4s

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bottom

> People are gaslighting me by telling me resurgent Marxism isn’t a real thing

Resurgent Marxism in the developed world is a real thing, largely due to the geberal collapse of state-backed Leninism.

Chattel slavery adds certain people, namely those owned as slaves, to the "means of production" column. It's not incompatible in any way with capitalism.

It's literally incompatible with the standard definition of the word capitalism.

The fact that slaves are not free means that exchanges couldn't possibly be voluntary.

Why would that be an impediment? As far as I understand it, the principle of voluntary exchange relates to buyers and sellers in a market, not to the commodity in which the market is made. The moral enormity inherent in chattel slavery, namely that it reduces human beings to a commodity in which a market is then made, has nothing that I can see to do with whether such a market can operate in an economy run on capitalistic principles.

After reconsidering my statement, I think you may be correct. Slavery can be capitalistic if you only include the buyers and sellers as members of the market.

"Slavery is capitalism" is most certainly wrong though.

"Capitalism encourages slavery in plantation economies" would be a better argument, but might also be refuted given the gradual abolishing of slavery despite the continuance of capitalism.

The term “capitalist” was not coined by critics of capitalism. For example, David Ricardo used the term decades before Marx. Criticizing capitalism by linking it to slavery was pioneered by Marx, and accepting that point of view is Marxist rhetoric.

It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist. By that logic, slavery is Christian and Islamic too—even more so. I’m not interested in debating Marx’s criticisms of capitalism: the fact that we’re even having this conversation proves my original concern—the resurgence of Marxism in America. I will point out that, in contemporary usage “capitalism” assumes a free market, which is incompatible with slavery both in theory and in practice. (America got richer after it abandoned slavery, which is what free market theories of economics would predict.) Trying to link what people understand capitalism to be today, to the proto-capitalism practiced in the American south, is layering specious argument upon specious argument.

> The term “capitalist” was not coined by critics of capitalism

The term “capitalist” for people who control capital was not, the term “capitalism” for a politicoeconomic system (from which comes “capitalist” in its other sense of an advocate/defender of that system, or, as an adjective, pertaining to that systemas, opposed to labelling a particular economic class) was.

> It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist.

It would.be, but that's not the argument. Early modern chattel slavery evolved alongside capitalism, was imposed exclusively by capitalist powers, and reflects the apotheosis of the capitalist commodification of labor from the mutualism of feudal relations, even beyond wage-labor, and the evolution beyond capitalism in the direction, if not by the means, advocated by critics like Marx that led to the modern mixed economy displacing the system for which “capitalism” was coined began with abolition of slavery.

Early modern chattel slavery (not slavery more generally, such as feudal or ancient patriarchal slavery, including serfdom) was a distinctly and exclusively capitalist institution.

A massive and obvious flaw in the "capitalism is slavery" argument is the fact that American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished.

After the Civil War ended, as soon as the labor costs had to be factored in, it became increasingly clear that cotton is a dumb crop to plant at the scale it was being planted. Planters moved to other crops that could be profitable. Slavery essentially held capitalism (the efficient allocation of capital) back. This is why the Great Plains are the most productive agricultural land today, not the South. Syria or Libya, with actual, present day slaves are noticeably unable to produce much agriculture

The abolition of slavery exposed the essential government subsidization of a misallocation of capital, which is inherently un-capitalistic.

> A massive and obvious flaw in the "capitalism is slavery" argument is the fact that American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished.

“Capitalism” and “maximizing systemic, aggregate profitability” aren't even related concepts, much less so intimately linked that not doing the latter proves that something is not an element of the former.

And "slavery" and "private ownership of the means of production" are similarly orthogonal.

If the means of production were owned by the government, and the government forced its citizens to work uncompensated against their will, with no option to leave, could one then contend that socialism/communism is inextricably linked to slavery? No, that's absurd. Involuntary servitude can exist in any economic system, whether the means of production are owned by the people or by the government.

Slavery can only exist if the government actively enforces the ability for one to own another human being against their will. While it's absolutely correct that capitalism is rooted in private ownership of property, it by no means presupposes that humans MUST be considered property. On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary, which is anathema to slavery.

> On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary

That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.

In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.

Of course, nobody is credibly arguing that we are anywhere close to the platonic ideal of a capitalist system — in the same way that at no point in the history of humanity have we had a truly communist or socialist system.

If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal.

As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society.

But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.

As I've said in another comment in this thread; each system is defined by the incentive structure it sets up.

The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for.

The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars.

> As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason

It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.

> That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise.

But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to:

1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up

2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers

Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.

That's outrageously ahistorical. The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.

If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".

Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.

You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?

> That's outrageously ahistorical

First of all, there's nothing "ahistorical" about the simple fact that the South's economy was decimated after the abolition of slavery, and to this day the industry that utilized slavery the most continues to be weaker than elsewhere in the Union. That is your original allegation here: that slavery necessarily flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure. That's plainly untrue, because at the same time you had no slavery in the North, and its industrial economy outpaced that of the South (read: accumulation of capital, in your words).

You see this happening today as well: in countries where slavery is unfortunately still legal (Syria & Libya), they don't have any greater accumulation of capital or output than capitalist nations that do not have slavery (nearly every first world industrialized nation). On the other hand, nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They are also notably devoid of indentured/involuntary servitude while also enjoying some of the greatest accumulation of wealth and capital in recorded human history.

> The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.

Sure, nobody is arguing that people in the South were suddenly "free" after the abolition of slavery. You're absolutely correct that sharecropping and other practices essentially continued to ensnare black people in the South. The point is that this DID NOT translate to greater rewards in the capitalist incentive system. During Reconstruction, planters that exploited former "free" slaves LOST the agriculture race to the Great Plains, and the industrial race to the North.

> Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.

There is nothing unacceptable about "low labor costs" in a society with robust social safety nets. Countries like Switzerland that have close to 0 poverty, the highest median wealth, and among the highest standards of living in the world also see variation in labor costs between a janitor and a doctor, or a fast food cashier and a civil engineer. Not all labor is equal in value, and the capitalist incentive structure prices labor as a function of the value that it creates for others. If your argument is that this is somehow tantamount to chattel slavery, then it's you who is regurgitating propaganda.

What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves. In fact, it's important to establish how much the cost of labour even went up after all the manipulative methods to ensnare former slaves into a new servitude were applied?

Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.

There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.

> What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves

Yes, and what I am saying is that it has nothing to do with the central argument: that "slavery is capitalism" or "capitalism encourages slavery" or "slavery flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure" (there are N iterations of your argument, pick one and commit to it).

The fact that, after the abolition of slavery, the former slaves still continued to be exploited doesn't tell us much about the presence of a causal relationship between capitalism and slavery, because of course if the state sanctions slavery, you can't expect things to go back to normal by themselves without some state intervention in the opposite direction.

Further, your argument loses teeth for the following reasons:

1. We have the counterfactual in the North (successful wealth/capital accumulation + no slavery) that refute your central argument that you are yet to address. The North's capitalist economy grew more than the South even while having abolished slavery.

2. The fact that in the modern world, among the top 30 most capitalist countries in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...), only one has some form of slavery, the UAE. This refutes your central argument, and you are yet to address it.

3. The fact that in the modern world, the bottom 3 least capitalist countries in the world (same list), there are forced labor camps (North Korea) or decrees (Venezuela, Cuba). This doesn't directly refute your central argument, rather it shows that capitalism isn't a strict prerequisite for slavery. You are yet to address this.

4. The fact that agriculture became more profitable after the abolition of slavery is a direct refutation to your central argument that you are yet to address.

> Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.

This is borderline word salad, but we are applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that slavery and capitalism are two orthogonal systems that are unrelated. Slavery has existed in socialist systems (gulags, labor camps) as well as capitalist systems (international slave trade). If using historical facts to make a point is considered "using the benefit of hindsight", then using the benefit of hindsight is a valid strategy...

> There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.

You need to specify where the cherry picking is happening, because by and large the trend is universal. You also can't just hand-wave a correlation/causation argument just because you're unable to refute it.

His point is well established and and not controversial, except in Marxist and “new history of capitalism” circles: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html

The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.

Almost all of the “slavery was economically efficient” notions come from a handful of scholars, who are historians and not economists: https://economicsdetective.com/2019/09/cotton-slavery-and-th...

The work is not only methodologically flawed, but depends on shifting definitions of “capitalism”: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=3191210060650810...

A leading NHC scholar has refused to define what he means by “capitalism” preferring to let the term “float as a placeholder.”

I have zero idea what the point of your post is except calling my reply "Marxist" then linking to right-wing blog posts to prove something?

It's still controversial even if you label the other side as Marxist.

> On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary

That depends on whether by “capitalism” you mean “the real-world economic system which emerged through the relentless pursuit of class advantage by the mercantile class as they displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class and which was named ‘capitalism’ by it's critics” or “the aspirational ideal that defenders of that real world system rationalized it as striving imperfectly toward to distract from the characteristics of the real world system itself in a perpetual game of ‘No True Scotsman’”.

For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.

For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.

> For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.

Nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They also happen to have robust safety nets where the exact sort of economic coercion is difficult to carry out. To argue that slavery is somehow inextricably linked to the dominant economic system of these countries is plainly absurd, in the same way that it's plainly absurd to claim that slavery is inextricably linked to communism/Marxism just by virtue of the practical manifestation of it we've seen in the 20th century, and not the theoretical ideal as posed by Marx. The whole point here is that slavery is orthogonal to the economic system, not an underlying prerequisite for it.

> in a perpetual game of "No True Scotsman"

> For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.

You either need to compare the platonic ideal of communism to the platonic ideal of capitalism, or stick with comparing the empirical outcomes of capitalism as it has been tried all over the developed world today with communism as it has been tried in the real world. You appear to be trying to compare the platonic ideal of communism with the empirical manifestation of capitalism, and then balk when I counter with my own platonic ideal. Compare apples to apples.

> A third of college students embrace communism

This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads.

I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie.

Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid.

Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage.

> slavery was capitalist

Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop.

In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all.

You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?

I appear to arguing on HN with people who are repeating Marxist critiques of capitalism back at me, so I don’t think my fears are at all irrational.

Also, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w...

> McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names.

(Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)

It's hardly Marxist to note that slavery and capitalism are compatible, although he may have been the first to explicitly do so. Capitalism isn't special in that regard; slavery can exist, and in various forms has existed, under every economic system known to man. Chattel slavery appears to work especially well with capitalism, as indeed has been amply demonstrated in US history, so that was what I talked about.

Granted, any such discussion omits the moral enormity inherent in any form of slavery. Economic discussions are like that. I'll grant you that the moral and economic dimensions of the slavery-and-capitalism question tend not to be too clearly separated in the public discourse of the moment, but that neither surprises nor concerns me. As I mentioned earlier, what you misidentify as "resurgent Marxism" is in fact a reaction to the totally untrammeled capitalism I called by the name "Reaganism". Considering the myriad and grievous harms that system has produced in four short decades, and considering also that that system's own proponents happily describe it just as "capitalism" without the courtesy of such qualifiers as I use, whatever misidentification or misblame it may receive seems to me well earned. Besides, it's not as if counting slavery among the crimes of Reaganism is in any way erroneous. Have you seen the US prison system?

To the rest, it should be hardly a surprise to anyone that there were Soviet agents in the US government at any point from about the early 1930s through the late 80s. Just like there were US agents in the Soviet government. And Chinese agents in both, and vice versa, and so on. The existence of espionage, and the existence of a vast Red conspiracy of subversion on a national and generational scale, are in no way the same thing, and to argue from one to the other requires a good deal more substantiation than either you or Tailgunner Joe appear inclined or indeed able to provide.

Granted, one can sometimes use the former to frighten uninformed people into believing in the latter, despite a total inability to demonstrate that the latter actually exists. You seem to want to talk about gaslighting. Has it occurred to you that, unlike merely having people argue that you're wrong about something, this sort of specious, fear-based deception may in fact qualify as such?

Btw, I just spent a little while poking around Newsmax, something I hadn't previously done since the Bush administration. I don't know whether you really do read a lot of that stuff, but if you do, maybe seriously consider cutting back, and replacing at least some of it with something from outside the filter bubble it appears strongly designed to create and enforce. Or, I don't know, use an ad blocker at least? If you're going to let that stuff monopolize your brain and your political philosophy, I'd at least like to think you're doing it for its own sake, rather than so that somebody can make money off of you.

Multiple time you omitted or avoided to respond to the obvious fact that what you call "Marxist" (which you use to evoke a negative red-scare emotion) is in fact Democratic Socialism - the attempt to extend democracy - not a Stalinist dictatorship.

The issue is that extended democracy implies an extension to the economic sphere, and thus an overhaul of private property relations. This is the actual threat that is attacked by capitalists, and the Stalinist regime is used to paint all threats to these undemocratic institutions in a totalitarian light.

I'm using Marxism in exactly the same sense you are: people advocating for "an overhaul of private property relations." That is, as a I understand it, what "democratic socialism" really means. I don't use the term "democratic socialism" because its proponents in America have co-opted that term to mean Nordic-style "capitalism with a robust welfare state" (which I think would be fine). As far as I can tell, though, those economies do not embody the "overhaul of private property relations" you're talking about. After all, Article 73 of the Danish Constitution declares: "The right of property shall be inviolable." (Heritage Foundation ranks Denmark one of the 10 freest economies in the world, ahead of the U.S.) The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.

I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all. It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.

What do you expect to find in constitutions written by free market economies?

> The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights

False, it was left intentionally vague to not explicitly endorse private property in the capitalist sense.

> The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.

That's also on point for Propertarianism. Where private property has been sacralized and to argue against it is against the law of nature, even if it's wrong and unjust. "The King declared that absolute monarchy is a divine right and any resistance is thus blasphemy and shall be dealt with accordingly".

> I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all.

I never said it was about democracy!

> It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.

I would characterize it as a fervent defense of British constitutionalism, tracing back to the Magna Carta, but yes, the current system of property relations is a part of that.

But it seems like we're not in any disagreement about my original post: I expressed worry that Marxist ideas were resurgent. We seem to be on the same page about what I mean by "Marxism." And you don't appear to disagree that those ideas are resurgent--and therefore my originally stated worry was not baseless after all.

Well, I certainly hope they are, but I doubt that they are as institutionalized as you seem to suggest.

I also think that using "Marxism" for a democratic movement and ideas is done to intentionally associate them with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century.

> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist.

It was, though, at least if you're talking about early modern slavery. Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different model, but the early modern African slave trade was fundamentally driven by rich, increasingly centralized farm owners with a business model dependent on unpaid workers.

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