Brad DeLong — Caitlin Rosenthal : How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management

There. Someone finally said it.

Grasping Reality
Caitlin Rosenthal : How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

See also from BDL

Economist : Why is macroeconomics so hard to teach?

CNN — People for sale [in Libya]

Intended consequences of "spreading freedom and democracy" with bombs.

Not that slavery isn't endemic in some parts of the world. But not in Gaddafi's Libya. That was then.

CNN
People for sale [in Libya]

Nima Elbagir, Raja Razek, Alex Platt and Bryony Jones

Sputnik — IOM Reveals Slave Markets Operate in Southwestern Libya

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Tuesday about the existence of slave markets in Northern Africa, in which hundreds of African migrants and refugees bound for Libya are being sold.

The report emerged amid the rescue of a number of sub-Saharan migrants after they had been sold and held captive for months in slave markets in Sabha in southwestern Libya.

Collateral damage. But getting rid of Gaddafi was worth, right? (snark)

Sputnik International
IOM Reveals Slave Markets Operate in Southwestern Libya

Thom Hartmann — The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the framers knew the difference -- see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason and James Madison were totally clear on that... and we all should be too.…

Hartmann delves into the history and historical documents.

Truthout | News Analysis (5 January 2013)
The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
Thom Hartmann

See also

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad [R] said Monday that he doesn't agree with the decision by U.S. Rep. Steve King [R] to display a Confederate flag on his congressional office desk.

Sioux City television station KCAU ran a Thursday news report on a bill that King supports. The footage showed King's desk with several flags, including a Confederate flag, which southern states used during the Civil War.

The flag has been a source of pride for some Southerners and others, which King has said he understands. However, increasingly such flags have been pulled out of Southern-state public displays as some contend the flags symbolize bigotry in the aftermath of the war that gave African-Americans freedom from slavery.

King, a Republican from Kiron, Iowa, is a 14-year officeholder. It is not known how long the flag has been on his desk, amid others that include a U.S. flag and one with the phrase "Don't Tread On Me."

“I don’t agree with that. I guess that’s his decision," Branstad said about the desk flag during his Monday news conference. “People have a right to display whatever they want to, but I’m proud to say that (Iowa was) on the side of the Union and we won the war."Gov. Branstad criticizes Steve King's Confederate desk flag

Sioux City Journal

Gov. Branstad criticizes Steve King's Confederate desk flag

Bret Hayworth

'What to the Slave Is 4th of July?' — James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass' Historic Speech [with transcript]

Lest we forget.

Democracy Now!
'What to the Slave Is 4th of July?': James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass' Historic Speech [with transcript]
Amy Goodman

Brad DeLong — Econ 210a Memo Question: Slavery and Serfdom

Another paradox of liberalism.

In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith confidently asserted that slavery was uneconomic–that in commercial society, manumission was the road to higher productivity because the carrot of working for yourself is much more efficient than the stick of being whipped by others.… 

Can we rescue Smith's optimal, Panglossian view of the historical destiny of unfree labor? Why, in history, didn't Smith's argument work?

Evolution programs alphas to dominate?

Grasping Reality
Econ 210a Memo Question: Slavery and Serfdom
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Joshua D. Rothman — The new history of slavery and capitalism

Questions about the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the United States have animated historians for nearly a century, and they have never really been resolved. Where some scholarshave argued that profit motives, entrepreneurialism and market relations defined American slavery, others have insisted just as emphatically that the slave society of the southern states lacked a truly free labour market and precluded the cultivation of bourgeois values and the development of large cities, which are distinguishing characteristics of capitalist society.

In the past several years, however, the former view has been clearly ascendant, with historians producing a steady stream of scholarship advancing the argument that slavery in the US was both itself deeply capitalistic and made profound contributions to the burgeoning industrial world whose guns, ships and bombs would eventually bring about slavery’s demise. Books by Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert and Walter Johnson have made the most noise. But their work, along with that of the historians Daina Ramey Berry, Seth Rockman, Caitlin Rosenthal, Calvin Schermerhorn and many others has effectively launched an entire subfield of literature dedicated to exploring the ways that human bondage gave rise to a modern Western superpower.

Unsurprisingly, it is an avenue of enquiry that has roiled academics and the public alike. For some, the definition of capitalism in recent works is too imprecise or insufficiently grounded in theories of political economy to take seriously. Some question whether the authors of these works have an understanding of economics deep and thorough enough to sustain their claims. Still others are underwhelmed by arguments they feel they have heard before and found less than convincing the first time. And for some people the very idea that slavery could be integral to capitalism is anathema, because to them capitalism is the foundation of freedom itself.

There is some irony in all this reactionary hodgepodge, because whether it comes from the left or the right, the hostility toward the new history of slavery and capitalism frequently seems rooted in disdain that is as much a matter of dogma as of analysis.

Aeon Magazine
The new history of slavery and capitalism

Joshua D. Rothman | Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, University of Alabama

See also

Karl Marx On American Slavery by Ken Lawrence

Throughout Karl Marx's long career as philosopher, his- torian, social critic, and revolutionary, he considered the enslavement of African people in America to be a fundamental aspect of rising capitalism, not only in the New World, but in Europe as well. As early as 1847, Marx made the following forceful observation:

"Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

"Without slavery North America, the roost progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy — the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.

"Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.1" 

1. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: A Reply to M. Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, New York, International Publishers, n.d., pages 94-5.

Also

Counterpunch
A History Defined by the Trade in Human Beings
Ron Jacobs

Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood — Capitalist dispossession and new justifications of slavery

Discussions of migration are becoming increasingly dystopian. Based upon either exclusion or exploitation, new neoliberal arguments for open borders are not about freedom, but institutionalised domination.

Open borders where migrants agree to be come essentially slave labor. The new slavery. Such a deal.

....a new ‘economic’ argument has entered the debate. Recently put forward by Chicago University law professor Eric Posner and economist Glen Weyl, and pitched to the World Bank, this is a ‘pro-slavery’ argument for the free movement of unfree labour. An echo of their argument is heard in the suggestion by Italian interior minister, Algelino Alfano, that migrants should be made to work for free....

Wouldn't you know. University of Chicago stuff. You have to read it to believe it.

Maybe they should run it by Pope Francis and see what he thinks.

OpenDemocracy
Capitalist dispossession and new justifications of slavery
Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood

Denise Oliver Velez — Thomas Jefferson, hypocrite. Robert 'Councillor' Carter, emancipator

Every time I have to hear yet another paean to the Founding Fathers, or see George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as graven images on Mount Rushmore, I think of the blood, backs, and bones of those enslaved black people they built their wealth on—some of whom were my ancestors—and I want to puke. I've grown weary of hearing Jefferson lauded for hypocritically stating that "all men are created equal" out of one side of his mouth, while buying, owning, selling humans, and siring children on his wife's enslaved half-sister. I've already discussed my perspective on George Washington, the slaveholder, in George Washington is not my 'Great White Father.' I hold Jefferson in even lower esteem.

What is not generally known is that Sally Hemings, reputed to be the concubine of Thomas Jefferson who bore at least some children to him if not all six, was seven-eighths white but was considered a slave by property law since she was born to a mother in slavery. Sally Hemings mother had three white grandparents, and she bore Sally to the white father of the woman whom Thomas Jefferson married, making Sally Hemings Jefferson's wife's half-sister.

What is not mentioned above about Jefferson is that in addition to "buying, owning, selling humans, and siring children." he bred slaves for sale. This became very profitable after the slave trade was made illegal and slaves had to be bred domestically.

If this country needs to applaud and honor any of the early slave-owning historical figures from the days of the founding, my choice would be the man who was the contemporary of and antithesis to Jefferson—Robert Carter III, known also as "Councillor" Carter. His story is told by Andrew Levy in The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves

Daily Kos
Thomas Jefferson, hypocrite. Robert 'Councillor' Carter, emancipator
Denise Oliver Velez

What is not generally known is that Sally Hemings, reputed to be the concubine of Thomas Jefferson who bore at least some children to him if not all six, was seven-eighths white but was considered a slave by property law since she was born to a mother in slavery. Sally Hemings mother had three white grandparents, and she bore Sally to the white father of the woman whom Thomas Jefferson married, making Sally Hemings Jefferson's wife's half-sister.

See also

AlterNet
Where the Bible really stands on slavery
Valerie Tarico

Jerry Toner — Were Roman slave-owners the first management theorists?

Weekend reading. Some interesting parallels.

Aeon Magazine
Were Roman slave-owners the first management theorists?

Jerry Toner

Robert Parry — Will the Right’s Fake History Prevail?

History lesson.

Constortium News
Will the Right’s Fake History Prevail?
Robert Parry

Magpie — The Marx of the Master Class

Short review of Hofstadter's essay "John C. Calhoun: The Marx of the Master Class"

Magpie's Asymmetric Warfare
The Marx of the Master Class
Magpie

Capitalism and Slavery — Alex Gourevitch interviews Greg Grandin

Interesting article of the evolution of liberalism as a social, political, and economic theory out of slavery, including wage slavery. Liberalism is work in progress. Humanity has come a long way, and still has a long way to go before realizing the ideal of liberalism, if that is even possible practically.

Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The wealth created by slavery generalized these ideals, allowing more and more people, mostly men, to imagine themselves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-interests not subject to the jurisdiction of others. Slavery was central to this process not just for the wealth the system created but because slaves were physical and emotional examples of what free men were not.

But there is more. That process of individuation creates a schism between inner and outer, in which self-interest, self-cultivation, and personal moral authority drive a wedge between seeming and being. Hence you have the emergence of metaphysicians like Melville, Emerson, and of course Marx, along with others, trying to figure out the relationship between depth and surface.

Enslaved peoples multiplied the fetish power of capital at least fivefold: they were labor, they were commodities, they were capital, collateral, and investment, they were consumers (since in many parts of South America, they were paid wages), and, in some areas, they were money, the standard on which the value of other goods was determined. They were also items of conspicuous consumption.…

There are numerous figures who affirm the value of freedom, the right of self-government, and at least some of whom will go on to engage in republican revolution against colonial domination. Yet these same individuals show little to no sympathy for the slaves, or even participate in their re-enslavement.…

That contradiction was the structuring contradiction of the day (and still is, no?). Spanish-American merchants wanted “more liberty,” and they defined liberty as their right to buy and sell humans as they would. In the United States, Kentucky’s 1850 “bill of rights” stated that the “right of an owner of a slave to such a slave, and its increase, is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.”…

Others have made this point, including David Brion Davis, that the struggle over slavery, both for and against, had the effect of reifying slavery as the supreme evil, and reifying freedom — defined as the absence of formal slavery — as the supreme good. The issue is complex, obviously, since for enslaved peoples slavery was indeed the absolute evil, and they valued political freedom as a supreme good. And there were many abolitionists who viewed chattel slavery within a broader spectrum of exploitation, including wage slavery, that needed to be abolished. And I know that scholars of the US have shown that conceptions of US citizenship, and freedom, are layered, complex, and contradictory.

Still, as someone who has worked primarily on Latin America, I can’t help but compare that region’s deep tradition of social rights to the US’s antipathy to those rights, at least among a mobilized and consequential sector of the US public.

Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America. 

The cult of white supremacy that grew out of that history evolved into today’s cult of individual supremacy. Paul’s statement would be totally incomprehensible to most people in Latin America, indeed the world, as silly as anything that came out of Alice’s mouth: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” The problem is that the US has had a world of its own, so the idiocy of white supremacy, and its progeny, individual supremacy, is perpetuated.

Jacobin
Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin

Alex Gourevitch, assistant professor of political science in the Department of Political Science, Brown University interviews Greg Grandin, professor of history at New York University

Thom Hartmann — The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.…

The Smirking Chimp
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
Thom Hartmann

David Graeber — Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery

The modern liberal concept of liberty has roots in Roman law and the Roman understanding of the master and the slave. We need to unpick that heritage to imagine a better basis for our political aspirations.

Our idea of human freedom, with its origins in Roman law, is permeated through and through with the institution of slavery. But its links to slavery twisted the meaning of "freedom" from an empowering notion of what it is to live with dignity in a society of equals to one of mastery and control. Understanding the history of the concept should help us to regain the first and fight the second of those notions....

To understand the history and, ultimately, incoherence of the notions of liberty grounded in Roman notions of dominion is to potentially free ourselves to re-imagine liberty. For example, to recognise the forgotten "obligations owed everyone in the entire world" inherent in our freedoms; but also to resurrect the older notion of liberty as the state achieved by citizens acting together in determination of a common good.

Open Economy

Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery
David Graeber
(h/t Charles Hayden)

David Graeber — Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery

Some background on the development of the concept of liberty in the West. We need to examine the concept of liberty-freedom closely in light of the current conflict in economics over the market state based on the right to unlimited acquisition of property and the welfare state based on the distribution of property between private use as "utility" advocated by neoliberalism and public use for public purpose advocated by social democracy. These are based on two different notions of freedom, the first being the master of oneself and the second that of the citizen of a polis.

Resilience

Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery
David Graeber

Marty Kaplan — The Real Reason Scout Prouty Leaked the Famous Romney "47%" Video -- It Was Over Romney Profiting from Slave Labor

Yep, it's worse than you thought.

AlterNet
The Real Reason Scout Prouty Leaked the Famous Romney "47%" Video -- It Was Over Romney Profiting from Slave Labor
Marty Kaplan

Jack Balkin — The Dangerous Thirteenth Amendment

Sandy Levinson and I have posted our latest article, The Dangerous Thirteenth Amendment, on SSRN. The essay is part of a symposium on the Thirteenth Amendment organized by Alex Tsesis, and will appear in the Columbia Law Review later this year. Here is the abstract:

Read it at Balkinization
The Dangerous Thirteenth Amendment
by Jack Balkin | Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School

Modern slavery?

People need to understand that laws like Arizona's SB 1070 are designed to perpetuate modern slavery of the type described by The Automatic Earth in the above-linked post.  When a society outsources its prison systems, prisons must be profitable, and profitability must grow perpetually.  Neofeudalism is the necessary result.

Read it at Tao Jonesing
TAE: Understanding Modern Slavery

Novel way of using part of the buffer stock of unemployed to increase national productivity.

(Ashamed to be in Arizona at the moment.)

Dylan Ratigan — Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’

Dylan is on a tear these days.

“Our big story on this Martin Luther King holiday is the new math of racism in America,” he said. “The greedy bastards have rebranded racism, calling it ‘the war on drugs.’ They’ve made it both acceptable and profitable. While the concerns of racism from the 1950s and 60s have improved in this country, if you look at the numbers the war on drugs has become a racist war.”

He noted that African Americans are ten times more likely than white Americans to be imprisoned for the same drug charges. He also noted there were more African Americans in prison or on probation today than there were slaves in America before the civil war.

Read it at Raw Story (MSNBC video)

Dylan Ratigan: Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’
by Eric W. Dolan

Dylan goes on to talk about the growingly private prison industry and the rising tendency to use prisoners as cheap labor.

Chilling.