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Comment by Atlas667 | Hacker News Reader

There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."

This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.

This is a fundamental problem.

It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.

The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.

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> Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.

When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).

Industrialization killed slavery not morality.

The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat.

The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery.

Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat.

Industrialization killed slavery not morality.

Where is the goodness?

You have an idealist conception of history.

How would this allow superexploitation?

When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves.

Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.

I don't understand how it's possible to read contemporary thinkers and come to those conclusions about their mindset.

What?

Englishmen who wrote about liberalism during the abolition of slavery made it very clear that it was explicitly about morality.

And industrialization enabled slavery in the US rather than killing it, thanks to the Jevons paradox; the cotton gin allowed for land previously seen as unsuitable for cotton production to be bought up by slaveowners, increasing the demand for slaves (https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent ; see section "Effects of the Cotton Gin").

I don't recognize your concept of "superexploitation" in the first place.

I wasn't using super exploitation as a specific term, just as intense exploitation.

Slavery was not profitable in the industrial north, just the agrarian south. In the North they used cheap free-labor from Irish and German proles.

If the morality argument holds why did systematic racism not end with abolition?

The fact is that wage labor is cheaper than slave labor. Slavery was no longer required in the Americas, it was a "way of life" for the south, but unnecessary for the country economically. Especially after a global system of trade had established itself, AKA imperialism, and had placed the US into competition with India with cotton and the rest of the Americas with sugar.

My reasoning is that abolitionism only became a widely accepted moral stance BECAUSE it was no longer "necessary" for the Americas' capitalists, but the weapon of racism didn't go anywhere.

> Englishmen who wrote about liberalism during the abolition of slavery made it very clear that it was explicitly about morality.

Rationalization, not cause and effect.

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