I shared an article in our local paper recently that linked the rise of forced labor-grown cotton in the USA to the end of cottage industry in Germany, which caused a mass exodus from Europe including my ancestors.

I was banking on Howard W French's thesis that although slavery existed before the plantation systems developed, it was plantation (forced labor camp) sugar that systematized mass production and turned humans into machines.

French goes to original sources to show how mass sugar production in the Caribbean predates the industrial revolution by a hundred years at least, while honing the same accounting practices that would be later used in the mines and the mills in the 1800s.

French seems to be saying that plantations were the birthplace of the industrial revolution. My thesis was that coincidently, the cheap supply of raw goods like cotton from forced labor camps fed the mills which killed the cottage industry, which caused people to move off the farms in Europe and into cities and immigration - providing more cheap labor for the mines and the mills.

As far as I can see, Capitalism has grown on two things, industrialization and private property - specifically the enclosure of the commons. If can we agree with French that industrialization is linked to slavery, then we can also see a link between private property and slavery. Enslavement is essentially enclosure of a human. Much of the modern banking system developed around the buying and selling and mortgaging of humans as chattel. Many of our laws that enshrine private property were made to protect slaveowners. Even the importance of private ownership of land (at least in the south) was largely due to the profits that could be made by working it with enslaved labor (or slave-like labor as in share cropping or tenancy situations in Ireland).

So if capitalism is founded in slavery, then it is easy to see why racism would develop hand in hand with capitalism. Ibram Kendi and others suggest that anti-Black racism developed as a justification for poor treatment of Africans and not the other way around.

Essentially: capitalism figures out ways to make huge profits using mass production and private property. The problem is that those profits rely on forced labor. The solution is to invent race and racism to justify the forced labor. Bobs your uncle.

My neighbor read my essay in the paper, which wasn't quite so scathing as this comment in regards to capitalism, but I did credit slavery in the deep south with driving emigration from northern Germany. He disagreed. He told me that in his view slavery was the last gasp of a feudal system. Capitalism requires workers to earn money so they can buy products. His view was that the Civil War was about the capitalist North against the feudal South. He thought that the south was undeveloped because their plantation economy failed to create a functional consumer class. The South had only plantation owners who could buy stuff, and that concentration of wealth led to extravagance, but little actual progress like infrastructure, schools, and government for the public good.

In his view, it was capitalism and industrialism that built the mighty North while feudalism kept the South in a state of un-development.

My neighbor might say that our current failure as a society to maintain livable wages for workers means that we are slipping into plantation-style feudalism, where the wealth concentrates and progress halts because the consumer class is hamstrung by low wages and debt. It certainly seems that way.

I was so sure of my understanding of Howard French's analysis until my neighbor used the same information to make the complete opposite argument. I think I know something about something until I read your essay or talk to my neighbor or read Laura's essay. It makes me grateful for the conversation part of this book club.