Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin

[TBF]

8.1.14 ~ by Alex Gourevitch
Our notions of freedom emerge from and depend on slavery

In 1855, Herman Melville published “Benito Cereno,” a novella about a New England ship captain who suppresses a slave rebellion onboard another ship discovered off the coast of Lima, Peru. The story takes place in Melville’s favorite setting, a ship in open water, and deals with one of his main preoccupations: slavery. As it happens, it is also true. Thanks to Greg Grandin’s masterful Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, we now know that history.

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Grandin’s book not only reconstructs these events, but in the process takes us from Duxbury, Massachusetts, to Bristol, England, to Senegambia, to Lima, to trace the complex threads of the slave trade that tied sealing captains like Amasa Delano to West African slave rebels like Babo and Mori to Latin American captains like Cerreño.

Along the way we learn how capitalism, slavery, and competing notions of freedom have been historically related; how doctors used slaves in early experiments with vaccination; how the slave trade was the chrysalis out of which came modern tort law and financial instruments; that Islam spread among slaves and became the basis for a number of slave revolts; that ships were floating tyrannies and seal hunters barbarians of a special sort; and much more ...

Much more here (and very much worth the long read): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/capitalism-and-slavery-an-interview-with-greg-grandin/

[2banon]

1. wish I could rec this a 1000 times...

[TBF]

2. A very interesting article

Showing what capitalism is made of - roots in slavery and all.

[YoungDemCA]

3. "Freedom" in the context of liberal capitalism is bourgeois freedom

The freedom to exploit, to destroy, to steal, to manipulate and con and lay waste, to treat the working class as expendable and to sneer at poorer people as less than human, deserving of nothing but scorn and contempt.

In practice, bourgeois freedom is an elite privilege-not a universal right, by any means. To look at this from a Hobbesian, International Relations perspective: the United States (as a State) has the single-most powerful and coldly efficient military in the world, not to mention all of its economic, political, cultural, and social power and influence around the world.

The reason that middle and upper-class bourgeois Americans feel "free", "safe", and "secure" in their class position is because of the monopoly of violence that the American State (which is a historical creation of the bourgeoisie, both as an abstract institution and operationally/in practice) has over the rest of the country-and the world.

I would like to close this post with the following quote:

"Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker."

-- Karl Marx

EDIT: K&R for the article and post.

[TBF]

4. Great Marx quote -

and crush us at will. Did you see the other story in here about the explosion at the Chinese factory? Business as usual.