Further Thoughts on "Slavery as the Foundation of America?"

I see there is some confusion in the comment section of my post, "Slavery as the Foundation of America?".

For example, one commenter writes:

 I found an article in Forbes Magazine entitled, "The Clear Connection between Slavery and American Capitalism," where Forbes Magazine interviews Harvard University historian Sven Beckert.

During the interview Professor Beckert says,

"There are very many economic links between the southern plantation complex and the development of American and global capitalism, involving trade, industry, banking, insurance, shipping, and other industries. The most prominent link developed around cotton.

"As you know, the cotton industry was crucial to the world-altering Industrial Revolution as it first unfolded in Great Britain and then spread from there to other parts of the world, including the northern states of the Union. Until 1861, until the American Civil War, almost all cotton used in industrial production was grown by enslaved workers in the southern parts of the United States. Slavery thus played a very important role in supplying an essential raw material for industrial production."

But this perspective needs to be expanded far beyond that of Beckert.

Consider this Gedankenexperiment.

Let us assume that there is a flower nursery nearby, where the flowers are put in healthy soil, watered regularly and a yellow bow tied around the stems.

We could recast the Beckert argument this way about the flowers in the nursery:

"There are very many economic links between the yellow bows and flowers grown in nurseries.The most prominent link developed around the yellow bow. It involved manufacturers, middlemen, transport, salesman, accountants, bankers and designers."

Just because something is present doesn't mean it is a necessary or significant factor. Just because a yellow bow was present on each flower does not mean it was foundational to the growth of the flowers. It wasn't.

Likewise, with slavery, it was certainly a part of the economy but it was not the fundamental driver of the growth of capitalism. The fundamental factors were private property, the rule of law and the increase in savings which produced great amounts of capital. None of this required slavery.

Further from Mao's China to Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union slavey was present but this did not produce a booming capitalist economy.

In Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, in R.J. Rummel writes:

Far above all is Gulag - the Soviet slave labor system created by Lenin and built up under Stalin. In some 70 years it likely chewed up almost 40 million lives, well over twice as many as probably died in some 400 years of African slave trade from capture to sale in an Arab, Oriental or New World market.

The cotton growing industry in America, itself, did not require slavery. Laborers could have just been bid for on the open market. Indeed, the cotton industry in the United States now is a $25 billion per year industry that employs over 200,000 people-none slaves.

This latest claim that slavery is foundational to the growth of capitalism in America is just another con of the free market haters.

 -RW