How Slaves Built American Capitalism
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Today
marks the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in America and
contrary to popular belief, slavery is not a product of Western
capitalism; Western capitalism is a product of slavery.
The
expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American
Independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
Historian
Edward Baptist illustrates how in the span of a single lifetime, the
South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations
to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a
modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.
Through
torture and punishment slave owners extracted greater efficiencies from
slaves which allowed the United States to seize control of the world
market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution,
and become a prosperous and powerful nation.
Cotton
was to the early 19th century, what oil was to the 20th century: the
commodity that determined the wealth of nations. Cotton accounted for a
staggering 50 percent of US exports and ignited the economic boom that
America experienced. America owes its very existence as a first world
nation to slavery.
In
the abstract, capitalism and slavery are fundamentally counterposed
systems. One is based on free labor, and the other, on forced labor.
However, in practice, Capitalism itself would have been impossible
without slavery.
In
the United States, scholars have demonstrated that profit wasn’t made
just from Southerners selling the cotton that slaves picked or the cane
they cut. Slavery was central to the establishment of the industries
that today dominate the U.S. economy: real estate, insurance and
finance.
Wall
Street was founded on slavery. African slaves built the physical wall
that gives Wall Street its name, forming the northern boundary of the
Dutch colony designed to ward off resisting natives who wanted their
land back. To formalize the colossal trade in human beings, in 1711, New
York officials established a slave market on Wall Street.
Many
prominent American banks including JP Morgan and Wachovia Corp made
fortunes from slavery and accepted slaves as “collateral”. JP Morgan
recently admitted that it “accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved
individuals as collateral on loans and took possession of approximately
1,250 enslaved individuals”.
The
story that American schoolbooks tell of slavery is regional, rather
than national, it portrays slavery as a brutal aberration to the
American rule of democracy and freedom. Slavery is recounted as an
unfortunate detour from the nation’s march to modernity, and certainly
not the engine that drove American economic prosperity. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
In
order to fully appreciate the importance of slavery to American
capitalism, one need only look at the torrid history of an antebellum
Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers. Warren Buffet is the
CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and the richest billionaire in America.
Berkshire Hathaway’s antecedent firm was a Rhode Island textile
manufacturer and slavery profiteer.
In
the north, New England was the home of America’s cotton textile
industry and the hotbed of American abolitionism, which grew rich on the
backs of the enslaved people forced to pick cotton in the south. The
architects of New England’s industrial revolution constantly monitored
the price of cotton, for their textile mills would have been silent
without the labor of slaves on distant plantations.
The book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by
Anne Farrow illustrates how the Northern bourgeoisie were connected to
the slave system by a million threads: they bought molasses, which was
made with slave labor, and sold rum as part of the Triangle Trade; they
lent money to Southern planters; and most of the cotton that was sold to
Britain was shipped through New England ports.
Despite
being turned into a civil rights hero, Abraham Lincoln did not think
blacks were the equals of whites. Lincoln’s plan was to send the blacks
in America back to Africa, and if he had not been assassinated,
returning blacks to Africa would likely have been his post-war policy.
Lincoln even admitted that the emancipation proclamation, in his own
words, was merely “a practical war measure” to convince Britain, that
the North was driven by “something more than ambition.”
For
Blacks, the end of slavery, one hundred and fifty years ago, was just
the beginning of the as yet unachieved quest for democratic and economic
racial equality.
In
the era before WWII, the American elite consensus viewed capitalist
civilization as a racial and colonial project. To this day, capitalism
in America can only be described as “Racial Capitalism”: the legacy of
slavery marked by the simultaneous, and intertwined emergence of white
supremacy and capitalism in modern America.
Black
people in America live in a Racial Capitalist system. Racial Capitalism
exercises its authority over the Black minority through an oppressive
array of modern day lynchings by the police, increasing for-profit mass
incarceration and institutionally driven racial economic inequality.
Racial Capitalism is unquestionably a modern day crime against humanity.
Seeing
an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery
would be exciting if only black equality indicators were not tumbling.
In fact, during Obama’s tenure the black-white median household wealth
gap is down to seven black cents on the white dollar. The spread between
black unemployment and white unemployment has also widened by four
points since President Obama took office.
The
nation’s police historically enforced Racial Capitalism. The first
modern police forces in America were Slave Patrols and Night Watches,
which were both designed to control the behaviors of African Americans.
Historical
literature is clear that prior to the Civil War a legally sanctioned
police force existed for the sole purpose of oppressing the slave
population and protecting the property and interests of white slave
owners. The glaring similarities between the eighteenth century Slave
Patrols and modern American police brutality in the Black community are
too salient to dismiss or ignore.
Ever
since the first police forces were established in America, lynchings
have been the linchpin of racial capitalist law and order. Days after
the abolition of slavery, the worst terrorist organization in American
history was formed with the US government’s blessing: The Klu Klux Klan.
The
majority of Americans believe that lynchings are an outdated form of
racial terrorism, which blighted American society up until the end of
the era of Jim Crow laws; however, America’s proclivity towards the
unbridled slaughter of African Americans has only worsened over time.
The Guardian newspaper
recently noted that historians believe that during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century on average two African-Americans were
lynched every week.
Compare
this with incomplete data compiled by the FBI that shows that a Black
person is killed by a white police officer more than twice a week, and
it’s clear that police brutality in Black communities is getting worse,
not better.
Lynching
does not necessarily mean hanging. It often included humiliation,
torture, burning, dismemberment and castration. A lynching was a
quintessential American public ritual that often took place in front of
large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands and children
played during the festivities.
Shortly after the abolition of slavery in 1899 the Springfield Weeklynewspaper
described a lynching by the KKK chronicling how, “the Negro was
deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded
pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on…before the body
was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones crushed into small bits…the
Negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver…small
pieces of bones went for 25 cents…”.
Central
to the perpetuation of Racial Capitalism is racial terrorism, which is
why to this day, the US government refuses to designate the KKK as a
domestic terrorist organization.
Racially
terrorizing Black communities goes hand in hand with the systematic
containment and imprisonment of Blacks. Thanks in large part to the
racially motivated War on Drugs, the United States right now
incarcerates more African-Americans as a percentage than South Africa
did at the height of Apartheid.
Private
prisons were designed by the rich and for the rich. The for-profit
prison system depends on imprisoning Blacks for its survival. Much in
the same way the United States was designed. After all, more Black men
are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850
before the Civil War began.
America’s
“take-off” in the 19th century wasn’t in spite of slavery; it was
largely thanks to it. Capitalism was created by slavery and slavery in
turn created the enduring legacy of Racial Capitalism that persists in
America today.
There
has historically been a sharp contrast between America’s lofty ideals,
on the one hand, and the seemingly permanent second-class status of
African Americas, on the other. The late 19th century irony of a statue
named Liberty overseeing the arrival in New York’s harbor of millions of
foreigners, even as black Southern peasants, not alien, just profoundly
alienated, were kept enslaved at the social margins. The hypocrisy of a
racist ideology that openly questioned the Negro’s human worth
surviving America’s defeat of the Nazis. To this day, far from being a
“post-racial” nation, American racial equality indicators and race
relations are at a new low.
The
race problem is America’s great national dilemma that continues to pose
the greatest threat to America’s democratic experiment. Simmering
discontent in Black communities will continue to rise towards a
dangerous boiling point unless and until slavery’s greatest legacy of
ongoing Racial Capitalism is exposed and completely dismantled.
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