by GARIKAI CHENGU
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.
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