To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!

[BainsBane]

31. "free labor"

You are not calling slavery "free labor." FFS. I'm familiar with the origins of racism that emerged as a justification for slavery. My point is that slavery, according to Marx, is a pre-capitalist mode of production. The idea that slavery has no relationship to racism today is completely and absolutely wrong. Its evolution can be charted through the development of laws enforcing slavery.

Slave owners showed a clear preference for African labor over, for example, enslaved Indians. Sugar mill owners in Brazil estimated African slaves to be worth four times that of an Indian. The preference was not racial but had to do with the strength, skill brought from W Africa, and the fact they were unfamiliar with the land and therefore had greater difficulty running away. At that point, however, the 16th century, the justification for slavery remained religious rather than racial. Racism emerged in conjunction with slavery--but slavery is not capitalism. I repeat, it is a pre-capitalist mode of production. Fernando Novais, borrowing from Eric Williams, argues it provided the primitive accumulation of capital that gave rise to capitalism, but that is not the same as being capitalist itself. Orthodox Marxists define capitalism as being characterized by free-wage labor. Your use of the term free labor is the sort of thing one sees in undergraduate essays. Slave labor was not "free," not to slave owners. One of the advantages of free-wage labor under capitalism is it actually was cheaper. They pay wages only when they need laborers, don't have to maintain them during the dead season, and have no up front costs. Free-wage labor is variable capital, whereas slave labor was fixed. The abolition of slavery was therefore an essential stage in the development of capitalism.