Depression and slavery-era crises both fundamentally transformed capitalist relations

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it; Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434; Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (+8 more)

Related

• Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it (similarity 0.90)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms (similarity 0.89)
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.87)
• Racial repression shifted form with each change in Black labor exploitation (similarity 0.85)
• Crises in capitalism do not inevitably dissolve pre-capitalist modes. (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois read the 1930s Depression and the slavery crisis as analogous capitalist transformations (similarity 0.84)
• Slavery was systemic to modern capitalism, not an historical aberration. (similarity 0.83)
• Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth (similarity 0.83)
• European capitalist hegemony reduced African labor to pawning across the world system (similarity 0.83)
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Black labor exploitation persisted in new forms beyond slavery’s legal end. (similarity 0.82)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.82)
• Abolition of US slavery relocated capital to colonial slave agriculture globally (similarity 0.81)
• Slaves and agrarian workers, not industrial workers, attacked capitalism (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution #corroborates (0.70)
• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 931
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor #corroborates (0.70)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism #corroborates (0.65) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 584
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition #corroborates (0.65)
• Post-emancipation forced labor pushed Black resistance toward new ideologies #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on #corroborates (0.60)
• Slavery’s abolition parallels the conceivable abolition of prisons #expands (0.50)