The First Capitalists

[which doctor]

I was wondering if the first capitalists living in feudal Europe were considered radicals by their contemporaries.

Were they told that Capitalism would never work?

If they were considered radicals then that would justify us being radicals in our time, sort of.

[KC]

I was wondering if the first capitalists living in feudal Europe were considered radicals by their contemporaries.

Were they told that Capitalism would never work?

If they were considered radicals then that would justify us being radicals in our time, sort of.

I would suggest reading up on the French Revolution.

[Zapatista_Revolucion]

I would suggest reading my post in this forum "A history of capitalism", they may well have been ridiculed but the truth is they had innitiative ideas and the power to implement them.

[bolshevik butcher]

The french revolution wasnt the emergence of the first capitalists, I'd argue that the beugorise first emerged in ENgland during the English Civil War.

[ComradeOm]

Originally posted by Clenched [email protected] 19 2006, 07:28 PM
The french revolution wasnt the emergence of the first capitalists, I'd argue that the beugorise first emerged in ENgland during the English Civil War.
I'd generally agree with this. However France is really the textbook example for how a bourgeoisie emerges and takes power.

[Amusing Scrotum]

I think the first "proto-bourgeois" emerged in China in around the 15th century.

[bolshevik butcher]

Originally posted by ComradeOm+Feb 19 2006, 08:06 PM--> (ComradeOm @ Feb 19 2006, 08:06 PM)
Clenched [email protected] 19 2006, 07:28 PM
The french revolution wasnt the emergence of the first capitalists, I'd argue that the beugorise first emerged in ENgland during the English Civil War.
I'd generally agree with this. However France is really the textbook example for how a bourgeoisie emerges and takes power. [/b]
Yes I'd agree that post revolutionary France was probably the first functioning beugorise state.

[Iepilei]

The War of the Colonies was probably the greatest victory for the capitalists of old. The establishment of a representation system proved to the feudal-minded individuals that the average citizen could partake in the choices which affect the nation.

[JKP]

The French revolution never happened with the intention of establishing capitalism. Its main goal was to establish private property and the state; capitalism would develop from that.

[ComradeOm]

Originally posted by [email protected] 3 2006, 02:39 AM
The French revolution never happened with the intention of establishing capitalism. Its main goal was to establish private property and the state; capitalism would develop from that.
What? Establish private property and the state? Both of those already existed in France at the time. What the bourgeoisie wanted was a different form of state governence... one that took its orders from it.

[Zeruzo]

I say the dutch geuzen-revolt was the first bourgeouisie revolution.

[Comrade-Z]

You all might want to read up on how Southern political-economists during the pre-American Civil War period opposed capitalism and argued for the continued existence of slavery and quasi-feudalism (although they didn't call it that).

In particular, if you can get your hands on anything by George Fitzhugh, you will find it most enlightening. Here are two articles of his from the pre-Civil War period in America:

George Fitzhugh: Southern Thought (http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moajrnl;cc=moajrnl;q1=fitzhugh;q2=Southern%2 0Thought;op2=and;op3=and;rgn=works;view=image;seq= 0341;idno=acg1336.1-23.004;node=acg1336.1-23.004%3A1)

George Fitzhugh: Centralization and Socialism (http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moajrnl;cc=moajrnl;q1=fitzhugh;q2=slavery;op 2=and;op3=and;rgn=works;view=image;seq=0716;idno=a cg1336.1-20.006;node=acg1336.1-20.006%3A3)

For more resources on this topic, you might want to look at the links at the bottom of this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeBow%27s_Review

I actually had to do an assignment for class where I had to read the Fitzhugh piece oon "Southern Thought" (linked to above) and reply to the following question:

"How did people like Fitzhugh in the pre-Civil War South attempt to justify slavery?"

To which I responded:


Fitzhugh first attempts to justify Southern slavery in several ways, first by drawing attention to the fact that England and France were also enslaving people in much the same way in the course of their imperialist conquests. France had subjugated Algiers, and England had subjugated India, among many other places. Likewise, England and France cloaked their ambitions behind claims that those peoples needed to be “civilized” and “Christianized.” Fitzhugh's argument was that, if England and France were allowed to do this, why couldn't the South do this as well with its own slave population? This is indeed a valid argument if you consider the imperialism of England and France to have been legitimate, which I do not, of course.

Fitzhugh then argues that economic productivity in Southern society and society in general depended on slavery, for the argument was that a cessation of slavery in the South would mean higher prices on cotton, rice, sugar, corn, wheat, and tobacco, all of which the South produced with the help of slave labor at this time. In short, it was thought that slavery had been a decisive factor in making Southern society successful. Thus, slavery was not to be abolished while the South was still finding it quite useful.

The notion of the existence of “superior” and “inferior” races (including some past white races) served to justify slavery as well. It was thought that these inferior races were thought fit only for slavery, for they were like little children and needed masters who would take care of them and discipline them correctly. This is actually quite similar to Nazi arguments regarding race and slavery. Like Fitzhugh, the Nazis did not draw the line at skin color either. (The Nazis, in retrospect, may have actually been trying to restore feudalism/slavery by force.) Many white races, such as the Slavs, were fit only for slavery according to the Nazis.

What was being suggested as replacement—the wage-slavery of a capitalist system—was thought to be worse. Fitzhugh's arguments highlight the fact that the South at the time was still operating under a form of feudalism and serfdom. Any feudal monarch would have approved of many of his arguments instantly. (And what is the insistence on “state's rights” (provincial rights), if not a desire to return to feudal territorial relations?) For instance, Fitzhugh argues that the abolition of old-fashioned slavery would only lead citizens to enter into a worse form of slavery--“slavery to capital”--in becoming wage-slaves to a capitalist system. Fitzhugh points to the misery of the nominally “liberated” men of Europe and the Northern U.S. who worked in factories and were being exploited even more thoroughly than they had been under slavery. In addition, crime and ignorance had skyrocketed with the introduction of wage-slavery in these places. After all, at least under slavery one is guaranteed some measure of food and housing, whereas working as a wage-slave exposes one's self to all of the ruinous vagaries of the market and the capitalist system. In a capitalist system a worker may indeed find him/herself thrown out of a job, starving on the sidewalk with his/her family, through no fault of his/her own. The obvious thing to do for such a person is to steal what he/she needs. Hence, there is increased crime.

Fitzhugh hits on the real reason for the disappearance of slavery in Europe and the North when he says:

“...the liberated whites work harder and cheaper as freemen, or rather as slaves to capital, than they did as serfs; and, therefore, the rich who employ them think white emancipation a successful experiment, a glorious change for the better. Because, although it starves and brings to untimely graves some half million of the laboring poor annually, it nevertheless makes labor cheaper, and increases the profits of the rich.”

That is to say that it was in the material self-interest of the ruling class of Europe and the North to relinquish old-fashioned slavery and promote wage-slavery. It became more profitable to exploit workers in this way. In any exploitative system, the workers are paid for the reproduction of their labor. That is, the workers must be paid enough so that they come back to work the next day. If a worker is dead and has left no offspring, then his/her labor is not reproduced. Thus, a worker is paid to the extent that the worker is able to survive, raise a portion of the next generation of workers, and desires to return to work the next day. Beyond that, the worker produces surplus value, which is appropriated by the owner in the form of profits.

In Europe and the Northern U.S., it became cheaper to reproduce wage-labor than slave-labor. There are several reasons for this. An employer is not stuck with feeding and housing a wage-slave at all times. When the wage-slave is not needed, he/she is fired and ceases to be paid. An ordinary slave, on the other hand, must be paid in food and housing at all times. An ordinary slave works only to avoid physical coercion, such as a whip to the back. On the other hand, wage-slaves do not need a supervisor to constantly keep a whip at the wage-slave's back (although whipping a wage-slave was not out of the question). The daily threat of unemployment and subsequent ruin is enough to motivate most wage-slaves most of the time. Unemployment was not a concern for an ordinary slave, especially in a society with huge tracts of unoccupied land such as the Southern U.S. In such a society, an unemployed person could just move west and set up a small subsistence farm, which is much preferable, with the security that it entails, to working as a wage-slave in a precarious capitalist system. The Southern plantation owners needed slavery to keep their workforce from running away. But as soon as it is assured that the workforce will not run away under any circumstances, it becomes cheaper to supervise a group of wage-slaves, for they are primarily self-motivating. Likewise, in jobs that require workers to have a sense of independent initiative for productivity's sake, wage-slaves works much better than ordinary slavery. Furthermore, if a worker gets disabled or dies, that worker can be discarded and cheaply replaced from the ranks of the massive reserve army of the unemployed that exists under the capitalist system.

Indeed, at the South's stage of technological and material development, slavery was the only method of exploitation that would work for the Southern plantation owners. A pre-requisite for the capitalist mode of production is that all properties and lands become bought up and occupied. The South could have had its own natural transition from slavery/semi-feudalism into capitalism by legislating its own “Act of Enclosures” as the English did in the late 1600s and having the large land-holders buy up, occupy, and monitor (with police, road networks, etc.) all of the unoccupied land and property. Then the Negro slaves could have been given their “freedom” and offered the chance to come right back and work for the same master, this time as nominally “free men” working for wages. And the former slaves would have had few other alternatives. They would have to work for some master, because all property and land (and thus all living space and capacity for food production) would have already been bought up and monopolized by the ruling class. In a capitalist system, there is no fear that the workforce will run away because there is nowhere to run to. All lands, all properties are already occupied. If a worker tries to trespass on a land or property, the worker is arrested by the State. In this situation, one must work for an employer so that one can rent a piece of property to live in and buy the food that one needs.

Europeans and Northerners came to view slavery as barbaric and repugnant not because they became more “noble” than their feudal predecessors, but because it came to be in their material self-interest to repudiate slavery and promote the capitalist mode of production. We today are not any more “noble” than the Southern plantation owners were in their day. We just recognize that it is in our self-interest to argue for the capitalist mode of production as opposed to slavery. A re-introduction of slavery in today's world would threaten our way of life, and thus we oppose it with our own moral arguments, which are themselves derivatives of our perceived material self-interests and not timeless principles that just float around up in the sky and occasionally land in a person's head. The South would have developed its own moral arguments against slavery (or adopted those of the Northerners) in due time as the South became more monopolized in terms of land and property, became more materially developed, and became more suited to the capitalist mode of production—in short, as soon as it came to be in the self-interests of Southerners to argue for wage-slavery instead of ordinary slavery. In time these moral arguments and the perceived self-interests of the slaves and rising capitalist class alike would have produced the South's own miniature version of the 1789 French Revolution which would have dismantled the rule of the Southern landed aristocracy and its associated serfdom/slavery and initiated the rise of the South's industrial capitalist class.

The final justification for slavery that Fitzhugh makes is that the Bible approves of slavery. This is indeed the case. Ephesians, 6:5 writes, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ...” Titus 2:9 states, “Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect...” Romans 13:1 states, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” The abolitionists of the North who argued against slavery from a Biblical basis were being theologically and intellectually dishonest. If one were to proceed from the Bible and be consistent, one would have to support slavery. Perhaps one could argue for a slavery filled with more “benevolence” and “love” from the slave-master—a more benevolent despotism--but that's as far as one could take that line of argument.