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Fuck Buchanan
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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We are talking about different things. Whether the south would have contorted the normal business model to continue to house people in perpetual slavery is a matter of historical speculation. What I’m saying is that the legal framework that allowed people to be free (as opposed to the plantation farming system) required war, or there would have just been the same level of oppression but tied to a machine.
My point is, though, that that form of labor exploitation is no longer economically viable when tied to mechanized industry. Without any mechanism for preventing free labor from coming into their markets, or destroying free labor/converting it to unfree labor wholesale, chattel slavery is simply uncompetitive, and for all of its other faults, a capitalist market system devours uncompetitive practices.
There was no point at which the south would have gone “Golly you know, we seem to be farming a whole lot less and industrializing a whole lore more, I guess we should abolish slavery because of that economic change.”
The point isn't that the entrenched slaving elite would have said "Oh gosh gee willikers, I guess it's time to give up slavery!", it's that counter-elites whose power did not rest on slavery, and whose power was often challenged by slavery, would arise, and eradicate slavery in much the same way as it had been eradicated in the North - by the withering of the economic and political pull of slaver elites until they could no longer meaningfully challenge abolitionist control of the legislature - and the same way that it was abolished in most of Europe.
The situation in the US was different. Were slaves being used on vast farms harvesting a single cash crop in Europe? Without knowing the full history of slavery in Europe, besides knowing they abolished it before the industrial revolution, I can guess not. There wasn't as strong of an incentive in favor as there was in southern states, where cotton thrived.
Slavery will never become redundant, we must fight for abolishment.