Reddit reviews Capitalism and Slavery

Glad you looked that up, last time I checked she was proposing $100 billion which MIT Grad/Duke economist Sandy Darity said was inadequate.

>Thanks for including my comments in this important article. Just one proviso; while I do think that @marwilliamson's initial proposed amount for reparations, $100 billion, is paltry, I also think she is open to modifying her proposal toward a much larger sum.

@emarvelous:

>"Universal programs are not specific to the injustices that have been inflicted on African-Americans." Talked to some smart folks on the 2020 conversation on reparations including ⁦@SandyDarity⁩. All say start with HR40, first proposed 30+ yrs ago:

SD:

>Thank you for writing this excellent article. I am especially curious about one matter: Would Whit Ayres endorse black reparations if it was not financed "by taking money away from white people and giving it to black people"?

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He's been interfacing with Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore and was on Ezra Klein's show a few months ago:

Sandy Darity has a plan to close the wealth gap | The Ezra Klein Show

>Published on Nov 6, 2018

> Here’s something to consider: For families in which the lead earner has a college degree, the average white family has $180,500 in wealth. The average black family? $23,400. That’s a difference of almost $160,000 — $160,000 that could be used to send a kid to college, get through an illness, start a small business, or make a down payment on a home that builds wealth for the next generation, too.
>
> Sandy Darity is an economist at Duke University, and much of his work has focused on the racial wealth gap, and how to close it. He’s a pioneer of “stratification economics” — a branch of study that takes groups seriously as economic units and thinks hard about how group incentives change our behavior and drive our decisions.
>
> In this podcast, we talk about stratification economics, as well as Darity’s idea of “baby bonds”: assets that would build to give poor children up to $50,000 in wealth by the time they become adults, which would, in turn, give them a chance to invest in themselves or their future the same way children from richer families do. Think of it as a plan for universal basic wealth — and people are listening: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), a past guest on this show, recently released a plan to closely tracked Darity’s proposal.
>
> I know, I know, the election is in a day. But right now, we don’t know who will win. So how about spending some time thinking about what someone who actually wanted to ease problems like wealth inequality could do if they did have power?

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>Recommended books:

>Caste, Class, and Race by Oliver Cox

>https://www.amazon.com/Caste-Class-Race-Social-Dynamics/dp/0853451168

>Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams

>https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Slavery-Eric-Williams/dp/0807844888/

>Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois

>https://www.amazon.com/Black-Reconstruction-America-1860-1880-Burghardt/dp/0684856573/

Louis Hartz: The Liberal Tradition in America

Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (both volumes)

Eric Fromm's Escape from Freedom

Chalmers Johnson: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic


Hanah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism and On Violence

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

Capitalism and Slavery

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling

Have a look at the work of David Brion Davis, particularly The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. His work explores the cultural shifts in causing rising abolitionist sentiment, using plenty of evidence for his case. Although it is a very academic work, it can be still quite easy to read.
If you are interested in the topic overall then I'd recommend taking a look at Eric Williams' thesis Capitalism and Slavery, as well as criticisms and critiques of his work as it greatly altered the history of abolition (with a particular focus on British abolition).

Capitalism retroactively created racism to justify slavery, so is it surprising anti-racists would be for its negation?

Edit: Source

The difference is your examples are from periods scattered in time and place and from 4th and 14th century, while white supremacy as an ideology, and the scientific racism and propaganda, are being used to support subjugating people by skin color consistantly and where you are living and in this generation. Jim Crow laws that prevented coloured people from working, living, and even stepping foot in places were legally in effect until the mid 60's (asian people were legally counted as coloured in some places, and in a gray zone in other places. Asians were legally counted as coloured under apartheid). Current institutions continue this tradition of racism, like private prisons and the war on drugs^1 (education and treatment for white users, prison for black users. Congrats, Asians, we were also denigrated here!)

Slave labor from nonwhite people was pretty much the sole economic foundation ^1^2^3 of Western European development from 1500's on (the peoples who call themselves “Western culture”). It financed their age of invasion and colonialism, financed industrialization, and may be the only reason why Western European nations industrialized before China did ^video. Even after industrialization, slavery was the economic core of half of the US, and a civil war was fought to keep it that way. (today, European-American racists use the losers’ flag to show their views)

Yes, chattel slavery existed in Rome and Africa, and Israeli kingdoms both had slaves and were slaves for a while, but Western culture relied on slavery so much and on such a scale that it DEPOPULATED A CONTINENT^1, and the ideas that made it all acceptable are still around and being spread today.

People have no problems with white people, except that a significant majority of white people in Western cultures ^1 still havn’t moved on from the same ideas and associations that made slavery acceptable.

How white cultures historically define, think, talk, and write about race was not about finding objective observations for improving health as in medical research, but about findings ways to organizve and put away non-white people, finding ways to portray us as somehow less than the full spectrum of human individuality.

Today’s academic racists like JP Rushton and Charles Murray, whose works racists like to cite, are not much different from yesterday’s [Chris Meiners] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Meiners), whose work helped uphold slavery and later inspired Nazism. Those ideas made slavery, the Holocaust, and the US racial caste system acceptable.




Many European-american people TODAY are talking about Michelle Obama (as in, the eloquent and highly educated fashion icon, lawyer, activist, and First Lady) being physically similar to a monkey. White culture havn’t moved forward in this regard at all

Racists are still doing the same denigration and racist ideas though media.

Some people are genuinely trying to move mainstream white cultures forward and beyond this mindset, but many white people are either defending the old racist mindset or can’t bother to change it. Trump defends this mindset: He ran on it and 62% of European-Americans males and 57% or of all European-Americans voted for him and his ideals. It might take an external factor, perhaps a more influential China, to help move white cultures away from the associations and ideas of racism. For now, we should all call it out and ridicule it.

Furthur reading to learn how European people’s reliance on slavery and the entwined racist philosophy directly relates to why it’s so rare to see Asians in diverse leading roles on screen.
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/the-three-bears-effect/

The chattel slavery system that was used in the Atlantic Slave trade was not born from Capitalism. Capitalism didn't even exist then. At that point in history, the British empire's economic system was Mercantilism. Free-trade and competition were viewed as threats to the crown and trade restrictions were put in place so that trade heavily favored Britain and not her colonies. Mercantilism was enforced thorough laws such as the Navigation Acts. Slavery flourished under this system.

With the advent of capitalism in the 1700s, the idea of free trade and competition began to take hold, the slave trade had no chance, especially since its major usage for the British was in the Americas and the Caribbean sugar plantations. The loss of the American colonies only weakened the idea of mercantilism, as they were in part a reaction to mercantilism.

The final death blow to mercantilism and slavery were the combination of capitalism and the industrial revolution. There was no longer a need for slaves, paying more reliable workers was easier and the need for slaves in the West Indies had disappeared due to the growth of the sugar market in other parts of the world.

I would suggest picking up Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. It takes an in depth look at the issue and is used in many academic circles.

TL;DR: Slavery could only exist in Mercantilism and other undeveloped economic systems all of which capitalism killed.

>Actually no, there is no 'ignoring' anything, if the 'wageslave' had an opportunity cost(stop using economic terms you clearly don't understand) they would by definition have another opportunity, which they would select if it made them richer/more comfortable.

There are other opportunities. Just because the worker isn't aware of them (by design), doesn't mean they don't exist. That's kind of the whole point of raising class consciousness, so people can get out of the miasma of Capitalist Realism and see what could be. You are guilty of having a lack of imagination.

>Colonialism isn't liberal capitalism. Those colonial ventures literally bought and treated people as slaves and invaded/occupied sovereign nations, which isn't capitalism, just actual theft and slavery. Stop pretending like defending capitalism = defending everything bad. You might as well accuse me of defending malaria next.

Slavery was actually completely interwoven with capitalism. In fact, slavery was basically rocket fuel for the capitalist economies of industrial Britain and other imperialist powers. Here, read this. It seems like you think colonialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive models? Colonial imperialism absolutely operated under a capitalist mode of production. So please

>stop using economic terms you clearly don't understand

Thanks.