Capitalism and Slavery | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism and Slavery

thenation.com

24 pointsbenbreen19 comments

> Despite all this scholarly work, each generation—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Robin Blackburn, from Eric Williams to Walter Johnson—seems condemned to have to prove the obvious anew: Slavery created the modern world, and the modern world’s divisions (both abstract and concrete) are the product of slavery. Slavery is both the thing that can’t be transcended but also what can never be remembered. That Catch-22—can’t forget, can’t remember—is the motor contradiction of public discourse, from exalted discussions of American Exceptionalism to the everyday idiocy found on cable, in its coverage, for example, of Baltimore and Ferguson.

The sins of our fathers... Just because racism and violence still exist today does not mean we're all ignorant of the sins our ancestors committed and should abolish an economic system that tangentially benefitted. And this is not a modern phenomenon, as he seems to imply. This country was one of the first to abolish slavery. What occurred in this country's brief history pales in comparison to the brutality that came before it.

Slavery is institutionalized theft, organized crime. It is the opposite of free trade and capitalism. Sure, self-proclaimed "capitalists" owned slaves, but that shouldn't impugn the whole system. Please tell me, what other economic system has lifted billions out of poverty?

While we're at it, please note that slavery existed for millenia before capitalism (at least before our western form of it).

Capitalism is still a form of slavery were the capitalists benefit from the workforce disproportionally with regard to their investment. And what lifts people out of poverty is work, not an economic system. Capitalism is of course very effective at organizing the environment in a way to enable highly productive work but suggesting that this is a unique feature of capitalism seems hardly justified, we just didn't explore many alternatives. Finally judging capitalism by the number of people it lifted out of poverty seems also misguided to me, there are a lot of people that were negatively affected by capitalism. And a fair comparison should of course not compare the result achieved by capitalism with the situation before capitalism but with the - unfortunately mostly counterfactual - result achieved by an alternative system that started from the same initial conditions.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

Dan, I'll chime in. I don't know your circumstances, but when I read a critique like this my first question is always "where has the person travelled?". It's very difficult to spend time in places devoid of capitalism and not notice the differences. Due to my past work, I travelled all over the globe to both established and emerging markets -- and work simply can't explain the levels of disparity. What repeatedly made a difference was ownership. For example, the poverty in Addis Ababa is overwhelming. Once you get past that, the second thing you'll likely notice is that the government has a tight grip over business there. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or any recognizable brands there. This is for the "benefit of the people", but really is just there to protect government interests (the coffee place nearly has the exact same Starbucks logo). In one area where there were nice homes, a single individual owned the entire lot of them. Unlike the US where you might be able to acquire property or make free choices about a new business, your choices are restricted there. There is much talk in the US about the top 1%, but this defines the "99%" by limiting the sample size to only those living within capitalism. On a global scale, the top 1% is anyone making over $34k a year.

I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished and later that system evolved into capitalism.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is. The author seems to think someone forgot about slavery, though it's unclear who.

As a counterpoint to the mood affiliation, I'll just remind everyone here that the term "dismal science" was coined by Thomas Carlyle, who favored slavery rather than "find[ing] the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand,' and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

> I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished and later that system evolved into capitalism.

Capitalism was a term coined in the late 19th Century to refer to the post-feudal economic system that developed through several centuries and was in full swing by the mid-19th century, and overlapped considerably with the use of chattel slavery.

While its critics hadn't yet called it "capitalism", the system which they did get around to calling "capitalism" did not evolve only after the abolition of slavery as you claim.

I don't dispute that old-school market economies involved the use of slavery. I just don't know what the point of the article is, beyond perhaps attempting to affiliate "slavery" and "capitalist" moods in our mind.

There is a great deal of evidence that slavery was related to cotton, sugar, and rice plantations (as well as some other crops to a lesser extent). One could also make a very convincing, if not definitive argument that imperialism enabled slavery (at the intercontinental scale), and that mercantilism supported it. Politics, as played by wealthy landowners and slave-traders also perpetuated slavery, as can most easily be seen from the (abominable) actions of the American House of Burgesses.[1]

There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery. Economics was called "the dismal science" precisely because its critics thought the proponents of free markets were not taking a (racist) vision of 'social justice' seriously.[2] Later on in the American South, the bus and streetcar companies tried to segregate busses on the basis of smoking and non-smoking sections, but politicians and racist groups forced them to segregate based on race. In South Africa during the aparteid, businesses were taken to task for not discriminating strongly enough against the Africans, and many groups such as socialists and unions held racist policies as a tentpole of their platforms. There are innumberable cases of the market acting against slavery, and even Smith described markets as notable for their lack of nationalism or discrimination.[3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

>There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery.

Not only that; they were and are diametrically opposed. The Beckert quote implies a connection between slavery and industrialization when in fact the relationship was an inverse one.

A comparison between the confederacy and the north is illuminating. The concentration of wealth in slaves and land prevented industrialization during the 19th century, and the south fell very far behind economically. I think it's worth nothing that the vast majority of white people in the south were worse off because of slavery, because the system prevented capital from being allocated efficiently. And while the two areas have converged, differences still remain today.

What? Having slaves pick cotton is as capitalist as it can get. You own the land, they do the work, you get the profit. That slaves are not as effective as tractors really doesn't matter for that.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

I got into a long discussion with eli_gottlieb here but I don't think either of us got the answers we were looking for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9335125

I read your discussion there, let me pick one of your early comments.

It does this (in general) by giving points to people who satisfy other people's values and proportional to how much they satisfy them. These points can be used to satisfy their own values after and this creates a feedback loop of value satisfaction. IMO a very good thing.

If I understand you correctly, you think that what Adam Smith explained with the invisible hand, that all individuals pursuing their best interests will usually result in a beneficial situation for society as a whole, is true. If that is the case I have to disagree, otherwise just ignore the rest of the comment.

There is nothing that justifies this assumption, if everyone just tries to maximize its individual gain there is no force that will ensure that gains for society as a whole are simultaneously maximized. Let's just stick with the topic of the article, slavery. If a few people exploit the workforce of a large number of slaves they surly maximize their personal gains but you can hardly argue that it leads to a good overall situation.

By the way, I want to avoid the moral discussion and will just take it for granted that we agree that a world in which the slaves are not slaves but receive a fair compensation for their work is a better world.

> that all individuals pursuing their best interests will usually result in a beneficial situation for society as a whole,

The very next sentence I wrote disagrees.

> Of course there are problems, every system has winners and losers and thats why we have taxation and welfare, to smooth out some of the issues.

The choice of capitalism depends on moral subjectivity, its a necessary part of the discussion. As I said before, capitalism is a type 2 system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338441

At the end of the discussion I asked a question that eli_gottlieb didn't get around to answering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345477

This was specific to economic democracy but you can replace that with any other alternative system, the question would still apply and be interesting.

I am not sure if I don't understand your reasoning with regard to subjective or objective morality or if I disagree. I don't think it matters. We want an economic system that honours some moral objectives. To come up with such an system we have to first establish our moral values, but I don't see in which way it matters if those values are based on subjective or objective morality. Especially because there is no proof that moral objectivism is true it is at least for the moment also just a subjective position. So how could we even think about choosing an economic system based on that distinction if we don't know which is true? For the records, I am heavily on the subjective side but think that only very few values or assumptions are required to build an entire system of moral values upon them.

Let me pick an example, all humans are equal. This might be an objective truth or a society might just agree on that as a foundational value. But in both cases you can build the exactly same society or economic system that honours this value independent of its origin. But I guess I missed a crucial point of your argument, maybe our understanding of subjective and objective morality differs. Are you talking about the distinction between a society where everybody lives by his own moral values as opposed to a society where all people share more or less the same moral values?

I should define my terms better.

For this discussion, I'll initially restrict it to just "value subjectivity", i.e. a person's desires are dependent on their state of mind and that state of mind is personal and varying. For example, ranking your preference for a cool glass of water and a delicious sandwich depends on how thirsty you are.

Scale this up to millions of people and you find that there is no objective ordering of "things" that can satisfy everybody bhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

Capitalism, as a system, recognises this and is effectively a distributed consensus mechanism. Allocating "points" to people who provide the most value to the system. BUT like any system, it has winners and losers (not necessarily evil, just benefitting) and without checks and balances would lead to a state of the world that I'm unhappy with. Which is why taxation and welfare.

For any proposed alternative/update, I'm interested in the new winners and losers as well as how this distributed consensus is achieved.

I am fine with the market mechanism to establish prices and production volumes, it is a pretty efficient mechanism for this. But I also see no fundamental difference to say a planned economy. Whenever the Soviet Union created their five-year plan they still tried - at least to some extend - to align demand and production, but this is of course hugely inefficient compared to a market because of the long planning interval and because it is impossible to capture the demand in detail or predict what it will be in five years.

There are also some advantages in a planned economy, you can for example penalize environmentally unfriendly products directly in the plan while controlling a market is only possible indirectly via laws and regulations and their enforcement which might be less efficient. But all in all market and price mechanism with some added planning, i.e. regulations where market forces are not aligned with goals agreed on by the society, seems at the very least a reasonable choice for an economy.

I take issues with capitalism in other places, for example with the ownership of the means of production. Let's again take an example. You found a company, your workers produce goods or services sold for 10 millions per year. You pay 8 millions for consumed raw materials and in salaries and invest 2 millions into the growth of the company, say a new offices, a new production floors or new machines. For the moment this is all good and even necessary for the growth of the company. But when you decide to sell your company you alone get all the money your workers worked for. This is of course unfair and leads to inequality because one or a few owners are able to capture a share of the value created by a lot of workers.

> But I also see no fundamental difference to say a planned economy

Unfortunately from Arrow's impossibility theorem (linked above), there is no objectively "best" ranking for allocating resources so all plans will be sub optimal (provided values are subjective). Because of this, any system/allocation will always produce winners and losers, the only difference being who they are.

In a planned economy you can prevent those products from being made entirely or at least kept to a minimum but again, who decides the trade off. Subjective morality is always an issue. Democracy, btw, is based on a principle of subjective morality, if a majority of voters feel that their plastic toy is more important than an endangered fish then isn't that the way it should be? If not, why not? Of course, the real issue is that people have a hard time predicting the consequences of their decisions. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy for a possible fix).

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As far as the means of production go, I'd like to set aside the moral argument (for now) and just talk about incentives. A country (with any political structure you choose) has a natural gold source somewhere in an area, they don't know exactly where.

0. Who predicts a market for gold and how are they incentivised?

1. Who searches for the mine and how are they incentivised?

2. Who develops the mine and how are they incentivised?

3. Who discovers and researches new mining tech and how are they incentivised?

4. Who organises and hires miners, craftsmen, support and how are they incentivised?

5. Who pays these employees and other operating costs and how are they incentivised?

6. Who markets, ships, advertises the finished gold and how are they incentivised?

And the big question, what if the venture fails? does everyone above get paid? If any loans are taken to start this venture and can't be paid back who takes the liability?

It is not that I don't believe there isn't an alternative but capitalism, as a system, has answers to all of these questions and the list isn't exhaustive by any means. Any upgrade/fix/replacement should have answers to questions like this before it can be seriously considered.

edit: formatting

Thank god for robots and computers, 'cuz capitalism isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

Well, robots and computers did nothing to prevent capitalism from enslaving its workforce, they might actually have made the situation worse.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

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