Berzerker
Deity
How are you guys defining capitalism? Abducting millions into slavery doesn't strike me as a free market so it must mean something quite the opposite.
Socialism & Capitalism
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How are you guys defining capitalism? Abducting millions into slavery doesn't strike me as a free market so it must mean something quite the opposite.
Lexicus
Deity
Capitalism is antithetical to free markets.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
The regulation of society by capital accumulation via profit, and its underpinning domination of time through labor.
Its treating people as a commodity. That seems very free market.
In the US and UK the slave trade and the cotton industry provided much of the capital that made our industrial revolutions possible. You didn't have to be a slave trader or a plantation owner to benefit from slavery. Finance and shipbuilding also benefited. The cotton industry was a driving force in the development of use of machines, the development of factories, the building of canals and railways. Railways led to a massive increase in demand for coal and steel.
Berzerker
Deity
Must be if slavery is or was its foundation
That doesn't sound like capitalism if people (slaves) are banned from accumulating capital.
Aren't people a commodity in every system?
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Who says everyone gets to be enfranchised in a capitalist society?
GoodEnoughForMe
n.m.s.s.
I guess theoretically the lack of bodily autonomy is vaguely anti-capitalist in the sense of some sort of unrealistic utopian libertarian perspective in which even having everything owned by corporations doesn't mean you can't do whatever you want to your own body (lol), but wage slavery very much is capitalist and the slave trade was embraced by capitalist economies, industrialists, wealthy landowners ( just capitalists all themselves really), and enshrined as the bedrock and economic cog of the western world's 'free market' production and trade.
EgonSpengler
Deity
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I agree. Slavery seems like a natural outcome of free market capitalism taken to a ridiculous extreme.
At least in the United States, I'm not sure slave-owners regarded slaves as people. I haven't read every one of their articles of secession, but I think the states that joined the Confederacy cited the violation of their property rights as their main grievance, and at least some noted that, in their minds, it was "unnatural" to want to give Africans equal freedoms.
Right, capitalism and liberty aren't linked. In fact, in many ways they're in tension, and it's market regulations and labor laws that prevent the 'free' market from trampling everyone. Again going back to the Civil War, some Southerners called the Northern states hypocrites because of how workers were treated there, and they weren't wrong. A business owner obeying purely capitalist reasoning would have to be a fool to pay his workers when he could get their labor for free. A business owner with a conscience would just get crushed in an unregulated environment (e.g. organized crime - that's why the illegal drug trade is so often so violent, they're unregulated so the Al Capones and El Chapo Guzmans take over).
Berzerker
Deity
Who says they dont? According to your definition the only exception is lacking capital and acquiring it isn't prohibited under capitalism. It was prohibited under slavery...for slaves anyway.
The north was capitalist and it banned slavery. I imagine many capitalists were anti-slavery but saw trade as an avenue to ending it short of war. We buy stuff from China and other places suffering from abysmal conditions with the understanding systems improve as wealth accumulates. On the other hand boycotting those systems might bring about change faster, but cultural exchange seems to be a valid means to that end.
Labour is. Slavery goes a little further.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Slavery and colonialism may be suboptimal forms of capitalism in the late game but that doesn't mean the accumulated means of violence and time-sensitive competition to win in exploiting that violence doesn't lead to the game-theoretical correct move of colonizing and enslaving in the earlier stages.
My derived definition didn't make any such claims.
Lexicus
Deity
Well I'm glad you're beginning to get it.
The problem with imagining that labor can be a commodity, to paraphrase Polanyi, is that labor cannot be separated from the humans who provide it, and that ultimately capitalist discipline over labor means capitalist discipline over people. That is the subjection of life itself to the market, as @Hygro is alluding to with the clock thing.
civvver
Deity
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It's a broken model in the end. Society now has a much better standard of living as a whole than those plantation owners did, like I like better than those plantation owners did with the internet, ac, refrigeration etc. even if I have less comparative wealth. Really they should've paid the plantation workers enough so they could buy clothes made out of cotton which ensures a market for their product. That's what Henry Ford did, paid all his workers far beyond minimum wage so they could in turn buy the cars they were producing and poof, demand out of nowhere and the beginning of the middle class.
Its an improvement over the subjection of life itself to the master under slavery.
I'm not sure that the commodification of labour is in itself a problem. The unequal power relationship between capital and labour is, especially with trade unions emasculated.
Lexicus
Deity
I don't mean to suggest it isn't an improvement over slavery. Nor that the commodification of labor as such is a problem. But when the greater the power imbalance between workers and employers, the greater the degree to which labor is commodified. Merely to treat workers as persons with rights on the job is incompatible with treating labor as a 'pure' commodity.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Ford's comparatively high wages had zero to do with generating a market and everything to do with an unsustainable staff turnover. It's a pleasant myth perpetuated by the Ford Motor Company in service to the myth of Ford the Genius.
Is it possible to construct a system that allows labour to be treated as a commodity, but labourers to be treated as human beings, that isn't under enormous structural tension? Tension which is heightened with every crisis?
I mean, this isn't abstract theory. We tried this, in the post-war period. It didn't work. It doesn't seem plausible that this model should have near-simultaneously imploded across the entire planet simply because of some ideology or other.
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civvver
Deity
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Nice. Well you still need consumer demand from somewhere. I guess plantation owners in the 1700s had plenty of demand from elsewhere but when that dries up what next?
Lexicus
Deity
Come on, if I knew this I'd be
wait a minute...
Well, yeah, Kalecki Was Right and all. Problem is I don't believe in Utopias or Ends of History without tension of some kind.
In the aggregate, you're right. If all the capitalists don't pay all the workers a total amount of money that's enough to buy a certain amount of stuff you get problems. We call them recessions now, though they used to be called Panics and other cooler things.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That wasn't really in their hands. They didn't sell the cotton to the public, they sold it to textile millers, in Britain or the Northern states, who spun and wove the raw material into finished cloth, which was then re-exported to the South. The plantation-owners were too many steps removed from the point of consumption to have much meaningful say in it.
This isn't just "tension of some kind". This is the specific tension between labour and capital. This is... well, it's class struggle, not to put too fine a point on it. It's not enough to say that you don't believe in Utopia for the central line of conflict running through modern society to become a question of mere policy.
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That tension between labour and capital existed when the state was the capital owner as well and not just in Communist countries.
People working for the NCB or British Leyland didn't think they were working for themselves.
I'm not sure its possible to eliminate it. Perhaps coops or worker control might.
