Why are capitalism and slavery said to contradict?

[Questionable]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

[Rooiakker]

It's because working poverty is cheaper than slavery, and the free workers would be jealous of the slaves quality of life.

I wish I was joking.

Slaves are seen as an investment, and were given better living conditions because they were expensive to replace. The workers were easy to replace however, and you could use them until they broke.

[ckaihatsu]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

In the case of the 19th century United States, the threat of Southern secession was *politically* untenable for the North -- with the European empires' conflicts settled in North America from the ending of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War, the North would lose too much on the threshold of its own industrialization by being recolonized by those European empires (Britain, France, and Spain).

The Seven Years' War nearly doubled Britain's national debt. The Crown, seeking sources of revenue to pay off the debt, attempted to impose new taxes on its colonies. These attempts were met with increasingly stiff resistance, until troops were called in so that representatives of the Crown could safely perform their duties. These acts ultimately led to the start of the American Revolutionary War.[61]

France attached comparatively little value to its North American possessions, especially in respect to the highly profitable sugar-producing Antilles islands, which it managed to retain. Minister Choiseul considered he had made a good deal at the Treaty of Paris, and philosopher Voltaire wrote that Louis XV had only lost "a few acres of snow".[62] For France however, the military defeat and the financial burden of the war weakened the monarchy and contributed to the advent of the French Revolution in 1789.[63]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French-...r#Consequences

Economically, though, "on its own", there's nothing to *inherently* recommend free labor over slave labor -- everything depends on (historical) context:

States across Europe in the 18th century provided a host of sinecures—well paid appointments involving no real duties—which allowed hangers-on at the courts and in governments to live in luxurious idleness. Smith’s doctrine was an onslaught on them. It was also an onslaught on landowners who lived off rents without investing in agriculture. It was a demand that the developing market system was freed from the burdens that were holding it back. It was a programme for reform in Britain and one that could easily be interpreted as for revolution in Europe.

[Adam Smith] argued for the virtues of ‘free’ labour. Slavery might seem an easy way of making profits. But because it prevented the slaves applying their own initiative to their labour, it was more costly in the long run than free labour. ‘A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and labour as little as possible,’ Smith argued.65

He was extolling the virtues of a pure market system against the feudal and absolutist institutions out of which it was emerging. As Eric Roll explains, his writings ‘represented the interests of a single class... He could have been under no illusion that his main attack was directed against the privileged position of those who were the most formidable obstacles to the further growth of industrial capitalism’.66

Smith’s account of the new system was one sided. British capitalism had not leapfrogged over the rest of Europe simply by peaceful market competition. Slavery had provided some capital. The colonies had provided markets. State expenditures had been high throughout the century and had provided encouragement without which new, profitable and competitive industries would not have emerged. The crutches of colonisation, of slavery and of mercantilism had been necessary for the rise of industrial capitalism, even if it was beginning to feel it no longer needed them.

Countries without a state able to provide such crutches suffered. This was certainly the case with Ireland, whose native capitalists suffered as Westminster parliaments placed restrictions on their trade. It was increasingly true of India, as the officials of the British East India Company pillaged Bengal without providing anything in return. Once British capitalism had established a dominant position, capitalist classes elsewhere would need state support if infant industries were not to be strangled at birth.

Writing when industrial capitalism was in its infancy, Adam Smith could not see that pure market systems display an irrationality of their own. The drive of producers to compete with one another leads, not to an automatic adjustment of output to demand, but to massive upsurges in production (‘booms’) followed by massive drops (‘slumps’) as producers fear they cannot sell products profitably.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 259-260

[RedMaterialist]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

Slavery is now everywhere a crime, it does not co-exist peacefully. I suppose the last official slave state was the Confederate States of America, which only lasted 4 years.

[ckaihatsu]

Slavery is now everywhere a crime, it does not co-exist peacefully. I suppose the last official slave state was the Confederate States of America, which only lasted 4 years.

I'll add that, in terms of the *mode of production*, the two are incompatible because -- opportunistic rhetoric of 'humanitarianism' aside -- free labor allows the employer to "outsource" the costs of workers' upkeep to the laborers themselves, through paid wages, instead of having to bear those costs directly, "in-house", with slave quarters, etc., attached to the place of production.

This is why -- perversely -- some argue that slavery was actually more humanitarian than the wage labor system, since slaveholders had to take direct responsibility for the upkeep of their workers (slaves). (I think life expectancy comparisons could readily cut against this argument.)

Because of this paradigm shift of difference in the commodification of labor between the slavery / feudal system, and that of the wage labor system, the two modes of production are inherently at-odds with each other. A plantation owner would invest in (slave) labor more as a 'fixed-capital' investment -- over the long-term -- while an industrial capitalist would invest that way for *machinery*, leaving *wage*-based labor to be more short-term and fluctuating in value with the labor market, and/or varying conditions of class warfare.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision




[22] History, Macro Micro




[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

[Blake's Baby]

'Capitalism' (at least as behaviour) existed in antique slave societies. There were workshops where people were paid to make commodities that were then sold at market (also happened in feudalism). Likewise, in capitalism, some people are de facto or even de jure indentured or bonded or just flat in servitude to others.

All the economies of historical class systems have included elements of other systems. What defines an epoch is the generalisation of the system. A few hundred capitalists and a few thousand workers in the ancient Western Mediterranean were not enough to make the antique slave states 'capitalist' even though they were engaged in capitalism. Nor were the capitalists and workers of the Middle Ages in Europe enough to make them capitalist rather than feudal societies. Likewise, the number of bonded and enslaved people in the Middle Ages didn't make those societies Antique Slave societies.

So I don't really see a fight-to-the-death conflict between these different systems - more a fluid coming-to-terms-with. Capitalism has driven out feudalism only when feudalism proved itself incapable of adapting to changed circumstances. It took the British bourgeoisie 100 years, for example, but between 1640 and 1746, it established its political power, came to an agreement with much of the aristocracy, retained the monarchy, and settled down to rule the country and then Empire. But just because 19th-century Britain was in many ways the exemplary bourgeois state, it doesn't mean there aren't a lot of feudal hangovers (obviously, many of them are still around in the 21st century). The change from one economic form to another - at least, in class societies - is not a total process; there's a certain amount of messiness involved.

That's what I figure anyway.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

People who say that they are incompatible are wrong, because wage slavery is slavery. The true basis of slavery isn't ownership of human beings as property, but domination and subjugation of them.

Also,

Slavery is now everywhere a crime, it does not co-exist peacefully. I suppose the last official slave state was the Confederate States of America, which only lasted 4 years.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

The US/Western conception of slavery is still marked by the early form slavery took with an intrusive mode of slave recruitment where slaves were stolen from outside the society, (represented as "intruders") from Africa, whereas nowadays it is predominately an extrusive mode of slave recruitment, i.e. slaves get excluded from the society they come up in. One reason people don't fathom contemporary slavery as a "true" slave system is because of this mutation it has undergone.

[MarxSchmarx]

Slavery is now everywhere a crime, it does not co-exist peacefully. I suppose the last official slave state was the Confederate States of America, which only lasted 4 years.

Actually the last official slave state was the African country of Mauritania that abolished slavery in 1981 (as best I gather slavery was restored after independence from France?). Legal slavery persisted in much of the middle east (presumably also reinstated after the end of ottoman rule) and Tibet until the mid 20th century.

[Hiero]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

Marxist dialectics exists to explain what seems like co-existence, as conflicting opposites. But it takes time for those conflicts to emerge and antagonise into change. I guess the outcome from the labour of slavery evolved to a certain point that the social relations become a fetter on the advancing means of production, and restriction for an emerging capitalist class. Slave owners would be restricting capitalist access to a labour pool, while at the same time slavery before was building the capital for capitalism. So it is little quantitative changes lead to a qualitative change. Or look it at in terms of negation of negation. I think its Engel’s explanation in Anti-Duhring where he explained how individual ownership of small means of production in England, like furnaces, and their production of goods, was the seed for their own negation. As they began producing, it created the initiative for people to buy these small furnaces’ and turn them into larger production sites by amalgamating the production onto one site, and negating the originally negation as those small time produces were wiped out.



Sorry if this doesn’t help, but I have written this pretty sloppily and it takes so much time to explain dialectics in this fashion without key details of the change from slavery to capitalism in the USA and other countries. I am sure someone else can do it more justice.

[Astarte]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

Strictly speaking, capitalism finds "free" wage labor to be cheaper and more efficiently exploitable; it is simply more apt for mass production and the machine age as it reduces labor power itself to a mere commodity rather than the person as in slavery. Capitalism is A. not obligated to directly provide the necessities of life the worker needs to replenish themselves as the slave owner is if he wishes to protect his investment in human chattel property and B. because the capitalist does not legally own the worker, the laborer can be "worked to the bone" via an intensification of the exploitation of the relative surplus - if the worker dies, or becomes so in enfeebled that he can no longer work, no actual property of the capitalist is lost as in the case of the slave owner. Lastly, but not least, the long march of historical progress demands that the contradictions of capitalism must be higher than that of the slave mode and that exploitation and coercion be hidden by ideology at the political level in that the immediate appearance of the bourgeois state is "liberty, equality, and fraternity", but actually just boils down to who has the largest accumulations of property and capital.

[tuwix]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

Just due to bourgeois propaganda. Paid slavery is a base of capitalism.

[subcp]

Capitalism is A. not obligated to directly provide the necessities of life the worker needs to replenish themselves as the slave owner is if he wishes to protect his investment in human chattel property and B. because the capitalist does not legally own the worker, the laborer can be "worked to the bone" via an intensification of the exploitation of the relative surplus - if the worker dies, or becomes so in enfeebled that he can no longer work, no actual property of the capitalist is lost as in the case of the slave owner.

This. However, free laborers, like slaves but to a larger degree, require a massive repressive apparatus to contain them. We see this moreso today than at any point in history- the level of surveillance, the advanced nature of prison-control-military technology, advanced policing methods, the scale of the repressive apparatus.

The journal Sic has an article that explores the Engels/Luxemburg concept of 'socialism or barbarism' in the age of imperialist wars (and decadence); they put forward that there may be unseen levels of exploitation that could result from either catastrophic economic crisis or another failed revolutionary wave- one that they mention specifically is some kind of modern, generalized slavery (enforced with a scaled-up version of the repressive apparatus designed under capitalism). The underlying idea being: slavery is not necessarily incompatible with capitalism (even if it is not efficiently compatible), and that we have no way to know now what evolutionary path capitalism will take given the right circumstances or series of events.

[Comrade #138672]

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

The fact that two systems can co-exist 'peacefully' for some time, does not imply that the two systems are not contradicting each other. It can not remain stable for a long time.

[Blake's Baby]

I dunno, Britain has been a bourgeois parliamentary monarchy since 1688, and it's been pretty stable. How long is 'a long time'?

[Lucretia]

In order for capital to be, well, capital (self-expanding value), a value relation must exist between the owners of the means of production and the direct producers. Without wage labor, the workers are effectively "constant capital," and this would create a variety issues that would prevent the laws of capitalist accumulation from unfolding -- one of the most important being the lack of incentive for the owners to reduce production costs through labor-saving technology, since the owner would not be able to shed his human "constant capital."

There are also other issues, such as the related one of how labor would be divided between commodity-producing industries. If people would be bought and sold on a slave market, they would be bought and sold at the price of capitalized anticipated surplus produced -- in other words, the same way all other constant capital is bought and sold. This would mean that the market on slaves would be structured to prevent the production of surplus value by the slaves, lest any one slave-owner lose value to another by selling the slave at a price less than the value the slave would be capable of producing over his or her life. This would make production of surplus value impossible for the entire economy. Or for industries with a higher organic composition of capital, it would actually increase the value of purchasing slaves (since the slave's labor would be more "productive" of surplus by being augmented by dead labor/fixed capital), and make the cost for labor greater than in low-organic-composition industries. This would actually create an incentive NOT to innovate, lest the investment in constant capital actually transfer to other industries through the differential pricing of slaves that I just noted.

In short, capitalist relations of production are incompatible with slavery. An economy premised on a developed division of labor and generalized commodity production depends upon the commodification of labor power also as a way of distributing that labor power as abstract labor to competing units of production. Selling labor power as constant, in contrast, entails the selling of labor as concrete -- again, with the price determined on the basis of the capitalized anticipated return from the slave's lifespan working in a concrete industry (which would result in the different prices I alluded to above). This is why slavery was only compatible with far more rudimentary forces of production, and a correspondingly far less advanced division of labor, such that a slave's labor tended to be directed toward the same kinds of activities regardless of where he or she was sold. Or in the case of cash crop plantations, activities with roughly the same level of fixed capital.

[RedMaterialist]

Actually the last official slave state was the African country of Mauritania that abolished slavery in 1981 (as best I gather slavery was restored after independence from France?). Legal slavery persisted in much of the middle east (presumably also reinstated after the end of ottoman rule) and Tibet until the mid 20th century.

Good point. Although, slavery was "legal" in Nazi Germany; a lot of German industrialists made a lot of money off it.

[RedMaterialist]

Why are these two modes of production said to contradict when throughout history they've shown to be capable of co-existing? The cotton economy of the Southern US actually contributed a great deal to Northern US and English capitalism with its exports. Even today human slave trade exists in the criminal underworld of many capitalist nations.

So why is it said that these two contradict when they've been capable of co-existing peacefully in certain times?

Slavery is not only contradictory with capitalism, slavery also contradicts feudalism. The slave is the personal property of its (sic) owner. The feudal serf does not belong to a master but rather is tied to land. The capitalist worker is free, to sell his labor as a commodity (but only that commodity), to leave his work and go work for someone else, he is "free" to contract his labor with the capitalist.

In the sense that serfdom develops out of slavery and capitalism out of feudalism, all three economic systems "contradict" each other, at least in the dialectical sense. And before slavery there was patriarchy, and before that primitive communism.

[Ocean Seal]

They are said to contradict as a means of rhetoric and not much else. That being said, even the so called pure capitalists Miseans and so on are occasionally proponents of slavery.

[Raúl Duke]

I think the reasons are a combination of factors mentioned, at least in a "contradiction" sense but not exactly in an opposition/antagonism sense; capitalism could function with widespread slavery like in the case of the US south but it did create "problems" (contradictions) for the capitalist mode of production.

As mentioned before, slaves were basically somewhat a "human capital" and thus there was an issue of "in-house maintenance." The cost of this lowers the incentive for machines to "increase productivity" of each worker (among other de-incentivizing factors). Slaves also required perhaps more control and monitoring and so forth, naked exploitation being obvious and odious. Slavery was usually tied to land and perhaps other limited forms of commodity production; there are probably a few reasons why there wasn't much "industrial slaves" (perhaps an element is that industrial workers need some basic education to be effective in some industries, like the arithmetic and literacy; education for slaves was viewed as anathema for the continued survival of that system).

Another issue is that slaves are quite limited in being consumers for commodities. While their owners may incur the cost of acquiring some commodities for them, they mostly stuck to the essentials. Capitalism thrives on a consumer society, it's an inherent quality in capitalism and one that is contradicted by slavery.

[Let's Get Free]

Slave labor was one of their bases for what MarX called 'primitive accumulation.' But yes, it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, to assign slavery to some 'pre capitalist' stage of history. For more than 300 years, slavery persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion. This would mean that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggle would prove inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial manufacturing centers of capitalism.