Did the free market free the slaves?

[Questionable]

A while back, I was reading a libertarian blog post where he described how the slaves were liberated by the free market during the American Civil War. He described how African slaves were better workers than most whites, and so the Northern business leaders coveted them, while the Southern slave owners wanted to keep a monopoly on them. This conflict of interests is what lead to the Civil War, with the free market northerners winning out. He also said it illustrated the superior of free markets vs. controlled markets because the North was able to provide better pay and higher quality of life to the freed slaves.

This analysis sounds like bunk, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on the Civil War to dissect it. Can anyone help out? I don't have the link to the exact blog because it was a while ago, but this is a pretty good summary.

[Book O'Dead]

The "free market" freed the slaves to starve on their own and to be free agents in their own exploitation.

That's why socialism maintains that "free labor" under capitalism is just another form of slavery: wage slavery.

[Lobotomy]

Not really. the civil war was basically about the southern agrarian slave-owning ruling class trying to maintain their means of domination and resist the changes that the northern industrial ruling class was trying to impose on them. The issue was that slavery is economically unsustainable from a purely amoral point of view, for reasons that I'm sure other users would be more qualified to explain. Hence the real reason why the northern ruling class was trying to abolish slavery. hypothetically, even if the confederates had won the war and kept slavery intact, it wouldn't have lasted for more than fifty years or so.

Anyway, that libertarian explanation reeks of subtle racism. African slaves were better workers than whites? ugh. most modern libertarians are really not that different from the people who inspired their ideology 50-60 years ago when it comes to racism.

[Ostrinski]

Yes, but not by it's moral authority or anything like that.

The market economy needs specialization and hyper-division of labor in concentrated productive environments to sustain large industry. Slaves in agricultural regions generally did not specialize in a particular skill, but rather had to know many different skills, much like peasants.

[Blackbird123]

The white slave owners had a severe case of myopia when they started the civil war. They slave owners didn't realize that if they freed their slaves they could be hired and sustained with much less cost to themselves. The slave owners tried to sustain their way of living even though it couldn't be. The capitalist mode of production demands wage labour. In a way the free market would have freed them from slavery but put them just under a new kind of slavery, wage slavery.

[aty]

Yes it did in two ways as Marx wrote, he called the proletariat "Vogelfrei".

- In the way that the slaves was freed from being the property of the master.
- In the way that the slaves was freed/separated from the means of production.

One could argue today that this notion of freedom is no longer true because in order to live today you have too be in debt. This liberal argument is no longer valid because we today once again belongs to a master because we are indebted and with the immaterial property as the dominant force of production we have once again been directly attached with the means of production.

[A Marxist Historian]

Not really. the civil war was basically about the southern agrarian slave-owning ruling class trying to maintain their means of domination and resist the changes that the northern industrial ruling class was trying to impose on them. The issue was that slavery is economically unsustainable from a purely amoral point of view, for reasons that I'm sure other users would be more qualified to explain. Hence the real reason why the northern ruling class was trying to abolish slavery. hypothetically, even if the confederates had won the war and kept slavery intact, it wouldn't have lasted for more than fifty years or so.

Anyway, that libertarian explanation reeks of subtle racism. African slaves were better workers than whites? ugh. most modern libertarians are really not that different from the people who inspired their ideology 50-60 years ago when it comes to racism.

I'm afraid the hypothesis is wrong. If the South had won the Civil War, the worldwide moves to abolition of slavery would have gone into reverse gear. The Confederates were planning to conquer large swatches south of the border to reintroduce slavery. That's what the Walker filibuster expedition to Nicaragua was all about. Pierce and Buchanan, the pro-Southern prezzes preceding Lincoln, had been trying to get Cuba from Spain. There is no particular reason to suppose that slavery would then ever have been abolished, after all we have slavery in various corners of Africa to this day. Short of another revolution or civil war of course.

Slavery makes societies as a whole backward and drags them down hill, which is why the North won vs. the South. But from the standpoint of the southern plantation owners, that was just fine. They were getting very rich indeed, and that the South was plunging steadily further into agrarian backwardness was not their problem.

The profitability of slavery is a much argued question among historians. The opinion of many of them is that though it is bad for society and social progress as a whole, it is highly profitable for the slavemasters in basic raw material settings, agriculture mining etc. Bad for urbanization and industrialization however.

The northern capitalists, the more farsighted and less greedy ones anyway (as opposed to the "cotton whigs" who liked cheap slave southern cotton for their New England textile mills) saw slavery as bad for American social and economic development overall, and were absolutely right. The Civil War was the last of the bourgeois revolutions. Lincoln was a bourgeois revolutionary, and a pretty good one when you get right down to it. Marx and Engels's respect for him was well deserved.

This biz about slaves being better workers, obedient, efficient, disciplined and all that, reeks of the infamous Fogel/Engerman "Time on the Cross" argument, which 30 years ago all the liberal historians were denouncing as racist, but now all too many of them are quietly accepting.

-M.H.-

[Misanthrope]

A transformation from chattel slavery to wage slavery is not "freeing".

[A Marxist Historian]

A while back, I was reading a libertarian blog post where he described how the slaves were liberated by the free market during the American Civil War. He described how African slaves were better workers than most whites, and so the Northern business leaders coveted them, while the Southern slave owners wanted to keep a monopoly on them. This conflict of interests is what lead to the Civil War, with the free market northerners winning out. He also said it illustrated the superior of free markets vs. controlled markets because the North was able to provide better pay and higher quality of life to the freed slaves.

This analysis sounds like bunk, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on the Civil War to dissect it. Can anyone help out? I don't have the link to the exact blog because it was a while ago, but this is a pretty good summary.

A grossly crude and simplistic analysis with racist overtones. Northern business leaders had no interest in importing black workers northwards for their factories, there were plenty of immigrants flocking in from Europe. They would have preferred "factories in the fields" in the South to slave plantations for cotton etc., but didn't have great interest in acquiring any themselves, northern industry was growing by leaps and bounds.

The reason they wanted to break the southern plantation owners was that they controlled the US government, wanted to spread slavery to the west and conquer new territory for slavery south of the border, and wanted the US government to continue representing their interests instead of those of the rising capitalist industry of the North, as it had ever since Jefferson was elected Prez in 1800. Wouldn't even let the northerners build a transcontinental railroad to California! Which they wanted to be a slave state not a free state.

So the fundamental issue for Lincoln and the Republicans was stopping the spread of slavery. But slavery had to expand or die. So you get the civil war, and to win the war, you get a social revolution in the south, the abolition of slavery, and the modernization of the whole country. A genuine bourgeois revolution against slavery, and one of the best things that happened in the 19th Century.

As Marx put it, labor can't be free in the white skin if labor in black skin is branded.

-M.H.-

[Questionable]

As Marx put it, labor can't be free in the white skin if labor in black skin is branded.

-M.H.-

If you don't mind me asking, why is this the case? I'm having trouble comprehending. Why could chattel slavery and wage slavery not co-exist? What made the rising capitalists need the government so badly?

[A Marxist Historian]

If you don't mind me asking, why is this the case? I'm having trouble comprehending. Why could chattel slavery and wage slavery not co-exist? What made the rising capitalists need the government so badly?

Chattel slavery and wage slavery can definitely coexist. However, society cannot progress under the burden of chattel slavery, its development gets held back. One glance at the pre civil war south, with its illiteracy, extreme social backwardness, lack of industry and even lack of cities proves that.

Bourgeois revolutionaries like Lincoln weren't just concerned with making money for big business, like the railroad corporations Lincoln was a lawyer for before he got into politics, but wanted to improve society, make America a country of "free labor not slave labor" as the Republicans put it.

What cannot coexist, according to Marx, is white workers freeing themselves from wage slavery when black people are under chattel slavery.

-M.H.-