Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it

Evidence

The formal endings of slave systems of production in the nineteenth century marked the beginnings of a profound reorganization of the capitalist world system. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through the deepening penetrations of monopoly capitalism and the impositions of hegemonic colonialisms, slaves were displaced as a source of cheap labor power by peasants and migrant laborers. In Africa, whereas the slave trade had dislocated the reproductive cycles of certain social formations along the coasts of West and southern Africa, the “new imperialism” of monopoly capitalism demanded a more destructive form of appropriation and exploitation. The colonial state parasitized the peasants of the continent’s agrarian hinterlands, transforming traditional economic sectors from the project of reproduction into the source and support of forcibly recruited labor and the sites of cash-crop monoculture and the extraction of minerals and raw materials. To the extent that wage labor expanded in Africa, its level of support was limited to maintenance and not reproduction of labor. In the New World there were also changes. The systems of reconstitution of Black communities were, as well, assaulted by forms of forced labor: peonage, share-cropping, and less than subsistence farming. Moreover, Black workers were subject to displacement from productive land and to publicly and privately organized campaigns of terror and intimidation. Ineluctably, resistance was propelled toward new forms, new consciousness, and new ideologies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on; Impending abolition drove slave prices to ruinous levels for planters — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 583; British capitalism ended West Indian slavery but thrived on American, Cuban, and Brazilian slavery (+8 more)

Related

• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms (similarity 0.91)
• Depression and slavery-era crises both fundamentally transformed capitalist relations (similarity 0.90)
• Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth (similarity 0.88)
• Racial repression shifted form with each change in Black labor exploitation (similarity 0.87)
• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.85)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.85)
• Capitalism’s own matured interests destroyed the slave system it had built. (similarity 0.84)
• Abolition of US slavery relocated capital to colonial slave agriculture globally (similarity 0.84)
• Black labor exploitation persisted in new forms beyond slavery’s legal end. (similarity 0.83)
• Industrial capital dismantled the slave system it had built once slavery became unprofitable (similarity 0.83)
• British condominium urban labor demand created a feared detribalized slave-descendant class (similarity 0.83)
• Slaves and agrarian workers, not industrial workers, attacked capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Crises in capitalism do not inevitably dissolve pre-capitalist modes. (similarity 0.83)
• European capitalist hegemony reduced African labor to pawning across the world system (similarity 0.82)
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.65) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434
• Slaves and agrarian workers, not industrial workers, attacked capitalism #expands (0.60)
• Slave strikes and labor disruption forced planter concessions and overseer removal #expands (0.60)
• Wright saw capitalism’s destruction coming from its own brutalized social force #exemplifies (0.55)
• Depression and slavery-era crises both fundamentally transformed capitalist relations #corroborates (0.50)