Capitalism vs. Slavery...lefty dyslexia...a classic example...

[2aguy]

American progressives believed in eugenics...so you apologize for that all you want...

 

[bripat9643]

This article explains why capitalism cannot be equated with slavery and in fact ended slavery...

It also points out the concept of lefty dyslexia...the inability of people on the left to understand basic truths about economics, politics, the law, social systems...

For example...to a regular person...Capitalism is the freedom to engage another person in a business without government interference...the exact opposite of slavery...

To the lefty/democrat/progressive, Capitalism = Slavery

Capitalism slavery TribLIVE

But the most far-fetched myth that I've encountered recently is that the wealth of the modern Western world, especially that of the United States, is the product of slavery.

She anticipated my response. "Not directly. But the capital that made these innovations possible was extracted from slave labor. The wealth accumulated by slaveholders is what financed the industrialization that makes today's wealth possible."

I looked at her in raw disbelief. (Not a good strategy, by the way, for a public speaker.)

Collecting my thoughts, I pointed out that slavery had been an ever-present institution throughout human history until just about 200 years ago. Why didn't slaveholders of 2,000 years ago in Europe or 500 years ago in Asia accumulate wealth that triggered economic growth comparable to ours• Why is Latin America so much poorer today than the United States, given that the Spaniards and Portuguese who settled that part of the world were enthusiastic slavers• Indeed, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil -- in 1888, a quarter-century after U.S. abolition. By American and western European standards, Brazil remains impoverished.

And why, having abolished slavery decades before their Southern neighbors, were Northern U.S. states wealthier than Southern states before the Civil War?

I don't recall my young challenger's response. I recall only that I was as little convinced by it as she was by my answers.

The fact is that slavery disappeared only as industrial capitalism emerged. And it disappeared first where industrial capitalism appeared first: Great Britain. This was no coincidence. Slavery was destroyed by capitalism.

To begin with, the ethical and political principles that support capitalism are inconsistent with slavery. As we Americans discovered, a belief in the universal dignity of human beings, their equality before the law, and their right to govern their own lives cannot long coexist with an institution that condemns some people to bondage merely because of their identity.

The rest of the column is really good as well...

Whole lot of not very smart people in this thread.

The slave owners in colonial America certainly thought of themselves as Capitalists.

Yes , it's true capitalism involves the free exchange between persons, which would mean that slavery wouldn't be compatible with capitalism except for the fact that black svlaves weren't considered to be people. Their thoughts on whether they wanted to work for the plantation owner were as irrelevant as if a horse didn't want to pull a plow.

Of course today we are more enlightened and understand that slavery is incompatible with capitalism because blacks ARE people (of a sort) , but at the time things were simply different.

The word "capitalism" didn't even exist in colonial America, so your claim is obvious bullshit. To the extent that an economy is based on slavery, it isn't capitalist. Colonial America was only partly capitalist, as was the South prior to the Civil War.

Oh lord... here we go. Capitalism is not some ethereal notion which was 'established' at some date certain. It is merely the natural order of economics, wherein two or more people exchange goods and services to the profit of all parties. It is simply 'doing business' ... commerce.

That the Left needed a word to dehumanize the exchange is as irrelevant as the left itself.

True, it wasn't established at any particular date. Pre-capitalist societies evolved into capitalist societies over time. A society were serfs are tied to the land which is used communally definitely isn't an example of capitalism. Only societies were land is bought and sold and labor is freely traded can be considered capitalist. Slavery isn't any more consistent with capitalism than serfdom.

Until the enclosure movement got going, England definitely wasn't capitalist. According to WIkipedia

Enclosure - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

In agriculture the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost

Enclosure led to a vast increase in the productivity of agriculture and thereby a supply of surplus labor that became available to manufacturers. That's when capitalism really got going for real.

 

[2aguy]

If someone walks up to you and sticks a gun in your face and says give me your money or I will kill you....and then the guy goes to his friends and says....I just engaged in capitalism...I freely made an offer, his life for his goods, and he freely accepted, he chose to give me his goods...after all, he was free to choose getting shot in the face...

Now the thug,probably living in a democrat controlled paradise, may very we'll believe he is engaging in a free exchange,of goods and services...after all, the guy he robbed made his own choices...but it is objectively not capitalism....

does that help?

 

[georgephillip]

Do you think New York City banker James Brown and his family firm Brown Brothers & Co qualified as capitalists in 1842 when a quarter of their investments in the US South were directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations?

No they weren't because they were trading in slaves...people who could not freely give or not give their services and could not freely exchange goods....

Look...you lefty socialists...I get it...whenever you guys try to run things,you eventually end up murdering millions of people...and then blame capitalism...once you grow up and learn the lesson of socialism and how it can never really work...then letting people freely exchange,goods and services without you lording over them will actually make sense...

Right-wing fascists and capitalists murdered a hundred million in the two great wars of the 20th Century, but that still doesn't explain where you got the idea capitalism requires freedom of choice for those who supply the labor for its mills, markets, and plantations. Are you capable of making the connection between James Watt's steam engine and the West Indian sugar trade which used slave labor to generate the capital Watt required? Based on what you've posted so far, I'm guessing you can't.

 

[georgephillip]

I'll take your definition and point out the important part...

] In a capitalist economy, the parties to a transaction typically determine the prices at which assets, goods, and services areexchanged.[4]"

the parties to the transaction determine,the prices that are used for the exchange...so...to be real obvious about it...one of the human parties in a slave system cannot determine the price for his services or his goods...because he is a slave......his services and goods are stolen from him...see...that is the whole lack of freedom part that is missing from the capitalist part.....

I know it isn't your fault....you suffer from lefty/progressive/democrat dyslexia...just look at what you believe...put it in reverse...and you will correctly interpret the reality that normal,people understand....you can fix this problem...you just have to work at it...

Do you understand what the word "typically" means? It doesn't mean mandatory or even necessarily; typically customers in a store pay for their merchandise before leaving the premises, but shit happens, Plantation capitalists didn't just produce the commodities required by the economy, they also generated new accounting practices like human property depreciation to compensate for aging slaves and new actuarial techniques to indemnify themselves from loss or damage to those they owned; you might get your "mind" around it by thinking about human property rights. (But probably not)

 

[SmarterThanTheAverageBear]

Just because the guy who owns the slave says the slave is not human...guess what...he is still human...and therefore actually is able to be included in a free exchange,of goods,and services...except he has been kidnapped and his goods and services have been stolen...no matter how the thief defines him...

there is an objective truth here...a human is a human...no matter what a slave owner says or understands..his lack of understanding or his willful decision to call other human beings,less than human does not change "Capitalism"...Capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services between human beings...and no matter what you say...slaves are human beings...

when the African was in Africa...before other Africans made him a slave...he engaged in hunting and making things...as a human being...he could keep those things give them away or trade them...that is free exchange as a human being...if he takes,his weapons and attacks another village and simply takes,those things...that is mureder and theft..not free exchange...

So when the African sells the other African to northern Muslims, or to Europeans...that African man or woman is a human being and if you make him a slave and you take his services and his goods against his will...you are not a capitalist...you are a thief...and you have not changed that human being into something else...

no shit billy, but that isn't how they perceived it. In their minds they were capitalists, you armchair quarterbacking 150 years later doesn't change that fact.

 

[2aguy]

Right-wing fascists and capitalists

The nazis were not right wing and fascism is not capitalist...the nazis were left wing socialists...I know...again...lefty/proggressive/democrat dyslexia gets in the way of understanding the "socialist" in national socialist...yes, they were not international socialists like the communists, they just wanted to control their own people, hence "national" socialism...and the communists, who had their asses kicked by the national socialists had to come up with a reason...and a bogey man...

Socialists caused world war 2, and murdered between 75-100 million people around the world...

 

[2aguy]

no shit billy, but that isn't how they perceived it.

They can perceive it any way they want but they can't change it into something it isn't...you can call an African, sub-human...but that doesn't make him so...

I know the real world is hard for you socialist types...which is why you keep trying to make paradise on earth with the same silly ideas...and...gosh darn it...maybe if you kill another 100 million people next time around you will finally get the world to match the way you think...

 

[2aguy]

Nazism...

The Socialist Roots of Naziism

also...

Nazism is Socialism

The persecution of the Marxists, and of democrats in general, tends to obscure the fundamental fact that National "Socialism" is a genuine socialist movement, whose leading ideas are the final fruit of the anti-liberal tendencies which have been steadily gaining ground in Germany since the later part of the Bismarckian era, and which led the majority of the German intelligentsia first to "socialism of the chair" and later to Marxism in its social-democratic or communist form.

One of the main reasons why the socialist character of National Socialism has been quite generally unrecognized, is, no doubt, its alliance with the nationalist groups which represent the great industries and the great landowners. But this merely proves that these groups too, as they have since learnt to their bitter disappointment, have, at least partly, been mistaken as to the nature of the movement. But only partly because, and this is the most characteristic feature of modern Germany, many capitalists are themselves strongly influenced by socialistic ideas, and have not sufficient belief in capitalism to defend it with a clear conscience.

 

[2aguy]

on fascism...

Definition of Fascism John C. Wright s Journal

The first thing to realize is the the word has been etiolated by the Left to refer to anything they dislike, including, but not limited to, populist military dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, plutocracies, limited-government-style constitutional republics, English-style class systems, and various other forms of government which are mutually exclusive. Hence, when used by a Leftist, the word means ‘enemy’ and overlooks that fascism is merely one brand of Leftist secular doctrines of socialist utopian thinking.

Originally the word had a very specific meaning. It was coined by Mussolini, a socialist, to describe how his heresy of socialism differed from orthodox Marxist socialism.

The two main differences of doctrine are, first, that Mussolini socialism operates factories and large businesses as public utilities, where the owners are allowed to keep their businesses in name only, but in fact are reduced to mere managers under direct state control, or quartermasters. This is distinct from Marxism in that it does not consider businessmen and workingmen to be two separate species of mankind, as Marxism does, locked in a Darwinian struggle to the death for racial survival.

The second difference and related to the first is that Mussolini considered the nation, that is, a racial and cultural group sharing a language, to be the fundamental collective to which the individual was to be subordinated, and the state to be the apotheosis of the collective Will. This is distinguished from Marxism who selected the rather more abstract (and irrational) group of persons engaged in categories of economic activity to be the fundamental collective.

The short answer is that a Fascist is a Nationalist Socialist whereas a Marxist is an International Socialist.

 

[georgephillip]

Anyone who thinks slavery and capitalism are incompatible needs to take a look at where sugar comes from and who harvests it.

"This book does an excellent job of showing exactly how the development of British capitalism was dependent on slavery.

"The author is Eric Williams, an obscure PhD student at the time of writing, but later in life to become Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago.

"Williams goes through his evidence in systematic detail, examining British economic and political development in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and showing the role of slavery at every turn.

"Great banking families like the Barclays and the Barings got their start as slave traders. Insurance firms like Lloyd’s of London made big profits from insuring slave traders against the death of their cargo."

Banks, Insurance companies, and industry would not exist in anything remotely resembling their current form if not for human slavery; maybe that should tell you something about where we're headed?

Capitalism Slavery Andrew Blackman

What do railroads and textile mills have to do with slavery?
The industrial revolution didn't start until about 1820, long after Europeans started importing slaves from West Africa.

Wikipedia says Barclays started out as goldsmith bankers, so your author's claim about them appears to be bullshit.
Barclays - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

Barclays traces its origins back to 1690 when John Freame and Thomas Gould started trading as goldsmith bankers in Lombard Street, London. The name "Barclays" became associated with the business in 1736, when James Barclay, the son-in-law of John Freame, one of the founders, became a partner in the business.[5] In 1728 the bank moved to 54 Lombard Street, identified by the 'Sign of the Black Spread Eagle', which in subsequent years would become a core part of the bank's visual identity.[6]

In 1776 the firm was styled "Barclay, Bevan and Bening" and so remained until 1785, when another partner, John Tritton, who had married a Barclay, was admitted, and the business then became "Barclay, Bevan, Barclay and Tritton".[7]

In 1896 several banks in London and the English provinces, notably Backhouse's Bank of Darlington and Gurney's Bank of Norwich, united under the banner of Barclays and Co., a joint-stock bank.

Wiki also doesn't mention anything about slavery with regard to the start of Barings, so that claim also appears to be bullshit:

Barings Bank - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

Barings Bank was founded in 1762 as the John and Francis Baring Company by Francis Baring, with his older brother John Baring as a mostly silent partner.[2] They were sons of John (né Johann) Baring, wool trader of Exeter, born in Bremen, Germany. The company began in offices off Cheapside and within a few years moved to larger quarters in Mincing Lane.[3] Barings gradually diversified from wool into many other commodities, providing financial services necessary for the rapid growth of international trade. By 1790, Barings had greatly expanded its resources, both through Francis' efforts in London and by association with leading Amsterdam bankers Hope & Co. In 1793, the increased business necessitated a move to larger quarters in Devonshire Square. Francis and his family lived upstairs, above the offices.

In short, everything you think you know about slavery is pure bullshit, but we could have guessed that before we verified the fact.

The Industrial Revolution began in 1760 not 1820.
Barclay's Bank had Quaker roots so it's likely it avoided the slave trade; however, it may have purchased banks over the centuries that did profit from that trade.
Barings facilitated the biggest land purchase in history (the Louisiana Purchase) which did warm a lot of slave holders' hearts.
Railroads and textile mills benefited significantly from Watt's steam engine, and where did Watt get the capital to develop that invention? The West Indian sugar trade, maybe?

 

[2aguy]

You see, stalin and lenin needed to distinguish marxist socialism from german national socialism, so they borrowed the term from the former marxist socialist, Mussolini, who was kicked out of the party, so he started his own...

And it helps to fool people into thinking that socialism is still okay vs. being responsible for World War 2, and the cold war and the murder of close to 100 million people...from Russia, to China, to Africa and Latin America...

 

[georgephillip]

Right-wing fascists and capitalists

The nazis were not right wing and fascism is not capitalist...the nazis were left wing socialists...I know...again...lefty/proggressive/democrat dyslexia gets in the way of understanding the "socialist" in national socialist...yes, they were not international socialists like the communists, they just wanted to control their own people, hence "national" socialism...and the communists, who had their asses kicked by the national socialists had to come up with a reason...and a bogey man...

Socialists caused world war 2, and murdered between 75-100 million people around the world...

Why did Hitler murder the communists and protect the bankers? International bankers in service to global capitalism facilitated both World Wars in the 20th Century, although I suppose those ignorant enough to confuse Obama with a socialist might have trouble recognizing which side of the class war they're on.

 

[konradv]

Do you think New York City banker James Brown and his family firm Brown Brothers & Co qualified as capitalists in 1842 when a quarter of their investments in the US South were directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations?

No they weren't because they were trading in slaves...people who could not freely give or not give their services and could not freely exchange goods....

Look...you lefty socialists...I get it...whenever you guys try to run things,you eventually end up murdering millions of people...and then blame capitalism...once you grow up and learn the lesson of socialism and how it can never really work...then letting people freely exchange,goods and services without you lording over them will actually make sense...

You're just playing games with words in order to make your "socialists are murderers " point. Slavery WAS a major part of capitalism at one time, America's progressives ARE NOT "murdering commies" and, lastly. libertarians ARE the flip-side of Marxists, because in order for either philosophy to work a major shift in human nature would have to occur. Sorry, no breaks for someone that doesn't realize they're no better than a socialist!!!

That's like saying socialism was a major part of capitalism or that Social Security is a major part of capitalism. Social Security isn't capitalism, and neither is slavery. Slavery is a restriction on capitalism.

Nobody cares what you have to say, pat. give it up!

 

[konradv]

Just because the guy who owns the slave says the slave is not human...guess what...he is still human...and therefore actually is able to be included in a free exchange,of goods,and services...except he has been kidnapped and his goods and services have been stolen...no matter how the thief defines him...

there is an objective truth here...a human is a human...no matter what a slave owner says or understands..his lack of understanding or his willful decision to call other human beings,less than human does not change "Capitalism"...Capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services between human beings...and no matter what you say...slaves are human beings...

when the African was in Africa...before other Africans made him a slave...he engaged in hunting and making things...as a human being...he could keep those things give them away or trade them...that is free exchange as a human being...if he takes,his weapons and attacks another village and simply takes,those things...that is mureder and theft..not free exchange...

So when the African sells the other African to northern Muslims, or to Europeans...that African man or woman is a human being and if you make him a slave and you take his services and his goods against his will...you are not a capitalist...you are a thief...and you have not changed that human being into something else...

If you sell something for more than you got it, you're engaged in capitalism. You may be right that the whole institution can't be laid at the foot of capitalism, but it can't be absolved either.

 

[bripat9643]

Even your moron friends in this forum care what I have to say.

 

[konradv]

The plantations were capitalism, fuckwit. Jeezus...

Plantations...driven by slavery...are not a capitalist endeavor, again...the slavery part is no part of Capitalism...since Capitalism is the "FREE" exchange of goods and services...the slavery part wrecks the definition of capitalism...when you are forced to work for someone else you are not "free" when the product of your labor is taken from you, you are not "free" to decide what to do with it...

This is why I call it lefty/democrat/progressive dyslexia...slavery to them is freedom...which is why they support communism and fascism....freedom to them...as in the free exchange of goods and services without government coercion...is slavery....

With the right help they might get that cured...just like dyslexics who have difficulty reading can fix that problem...

You're playing games again. Since slaves aren't free, to call it a free market is specious, but if a slaves rights aren't held up by a government, do they really have any? Either a person maintains his own freedom or a government does. If neither does, does the concept really belong in a discussion of what capitalism is?

 

[konradv]

Do you think New York City banker James Brown and his family firm Brown Brothers & Co qualified as capitalists in 1842 when a quarter of their investments in the US South were directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations?

No they weren't because they were trading in slaves...people who could not freely give or not give their services and could not freely exchange goods....

Look...you lefty socialists...I get it...whenever you guys try to run things,you eventually end up murdering millions of people...and then blame capitalism...once you grow up and learn the lesson of socialism and how it can never really work...then letting people freely exchange,goods and services without you lording over them will actually make sense...

You don't seem to get much at all, IMO. When you're presented with facts you show your immaturity and start calling names. Once again you're playing games. Don't waste our time until you want to discuss things like a man, son.

 

[konradv]

Even your moron friends in this forum care what I have to say.

LOL!!! The morons on the board are suddenly MY friends?!?!

 

[initforme]

Capitalism when done morally is nothing like slavery. Slave owners were cowardly people. Perhaps quite lazy as well as they needed someone else to do their work for them as they weren't capable. In capitalism one is free to leave a job whenever they want (there should be no penalty ever for doing this but there is). In the end though one is free to walk away at any time. Slaves were not. They were considered property which made it even more immoral and awful. Slaves were forced to live in small cramped places and work for nothing while the owner profited. Again a truly cowardly act. Employees today once they punch out they are free to walk off the job and not think about it until their next required shift. Most employees (not all but most) have some laws for their protection and safety. Slaves were routinely mistreated and fear was used to control them.