For February 7, 2022
Interlude
August 30, 1800. An enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel organizes the so-called “Prosser Rebellion” but is betrayed by some of the other men and later tried and hanged.
“Trouble the Water” by Barry Jenkins retells the story of Gabriel and the possibly 1,000 men he had gathered, making the point that “Prosser” is the last name of his enslaver and shouldn’t be associated with him. He was executed on October 10, 1800 (25 others were too); his betrayers, Tom and Pharoah, were paid $ 1,000 and manumitted–but he was set free by his integrity and his death.
January 1, 1808. The date by which the importation of slaves becomes illegal as per the constitution. It leads to more internal slave trade and the separation of families, so it is a double-edged sword.
“Sold South” by Jesmyn Ward is a vignette that tells the story of enslaved people being walked across the South to New Orleans to be sold, from a first-person plural point of view.
Chapter 5: Capitalism, by Matt Desmond
This chapter tracks the intimate connection between American-style capitalism, with its lack of a social support system and protection of the people within the capitalist economy and slavery. He argues that the type of “low-road capitalism” we have, which makes us score really badly when it comes to social equality (“one of the most unequal societies in the world”) is directly traceable to slavery, which was in itself a foremost example of “low-road” capitalism. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism” (Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 2016) and still has an effect on society today.
He starts with the Constitutional Convention and the question of slavery as a stumbling block; Southerners were exacting huge compromises or they were not going to “play”–most notoriously, the 3/5th clause, which basically guaranteed that the South has an advantage in the House and also, via the Electoral College, in the choice of president (hence, the early presidents are all Southerners). But even when the clause was later removed, the four-stop veto system that was created alongside this mechanism makes American democracy have four “veto points” where most other modern democracy have just one, and give the states tremendous power, causing the federal government to be sluggish and weak. That weakness made it hard to regulate not only slavery but a host of other things, including specifically TAXES.
He points out what I had NEVER thought about–that while the Southerners wanted 3/5th of a Black person to count towards the population count for voting, they did not want Black enslaved people to count for taxation, because that would have meant more taxes for the South, and the constitution’s compromises on taxes that resulted have caused a mess that we are still in. Initially, only an import tax was levied, so that meant empty coffers for the US government (and thus no $$ for a social safety net, infrastructure, etc.). The first income tax came with the Civil War and wasn’t made permanent until much later (the feds did not have the power to collect income taxes until 1913!) And that set the stage for a constant pushback to any levying and/or increasing of taxes, while European democracies had those taxes baked into their constitutions from the beginning. We ended up with a tax system that is “regressive and insipid in part because it was born out of political compromise steered by debates over slavery.”
Apart from taxation problems, there is the whole issue of private property, “the cornerstone of capitalism”–when that includes the ownership of people, who MIGHT JUST TRY to resist the idea of being possessions, you have to create a system that protects property that is not otherwise required: militias, slave patrols, legal hurdles to retaining or even proving one’s freedom, the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act are all part of this. He mentions the work of historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property (2019) which addresses specifically the role of upper-class / slave-owning white women, whose dowry often included enslaved people and who were very much involved in defending their ownership rights.
Desmond then discusses the fact that the post-bellum 13t/14th/15th Amendments that were meant to protect and lift up the freed Black population were in fact mostly used to bolster corporations and laissez-faire capitalism. He points to the 1886 Santa Clara County court decision that paved the way for treating corporations like individuals and caring more about their rights than about the rights of Blacks. He actually points to a study conducted in 1912 on the first 600+ 14th Amendment cases and that found that more than half were about corporate rights and only 5% about the rights of Blacks (and those were mostly lost). The “defense of corporate personhood” has actually continue until today, for example when it comes to corporate campaign donations / Citizens United.
Desmond shifts to another slavery-connected reason why the US ended up with its “low-road” system: the fact that 19th c US wealth came, first and foremost, from cotton, the oil of the 19th century–a crop that is tied from the start, to “our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people.” Cotton picking and cotton processing is incredibly hard; enslaved Blacks were forced to work very long hours, at all ages, and the Northern factories profited as much from this as the Southern landowners who planted and harvested the crop. Since cotton also needed land (and very quickly exhausts the land), it is also directly linked to the expropriation of Native American land and its cultivation by enslaved people. The incredible wealth produced by cotton also led to wild speculation, the mortgaging of enslaved people as “security” (collateral) and market fluctuation, including the crash of 1837, which (in a familiar process) made the richest of the rich (and the richest of the rich banks), who could sit out the panic, even richer. He also points out that the banks who accepted these securities and gave these loans were often the very same British banks that took such pride in having “abolished” the slave trade.
He then discusses the idea (a little bit far-fetched, I think–at least in the aggregate, although certain facets of this ring true) that the corporate organizational structures, accounting systems, and calculation of depreciation, optimizaiton, and individual worker’s “yield” all come from systems developed for slavery–that they predated industrialism and that the violence that they were built on (and which was “a rational part of the plantation design”) spilled over into all these systems. (That would basically mean that modern corporate practices in Europe or Asia would not have these practices or that they wouldn’t have developed there in very similar ways, and I do not think that that’s true.)
I think he is on firmer ground with the next point, about the link between slavery and the fundamentally weak American labor movement, in which the “wedge” (Du Bois uses the term, actually, in Black Reconstruction in America) between slave labor and free labor, and later between Black and white free labor, was time and again a reason that labor did not gain enough followers and enough traction. There was no solidarity and the corporations were able to pitch Black strike breakers against white unionized laborers who wouldn’t let Blacks joint their unions, etc. Hence no socialism, no Labor Party, and no social-democratic “capitalism with a human face” like in Western Europe (as the Christian Science Monitor once called it memorably in the late 1980s when the Wall came down in Germany). The wedge strategy also worked really well to keep white Southern laborers from seeing that they were not really better off than their Black counterparts (this is very much Heather McGee and the zero-sum thinking again).
The bottom line is that the social inequalities we see today go all the way back to the 19th century system and were reinforced by way of racism all the way through the 20th century, and that’s how we end up with a country where “the richest 10 percent of Americans own over 75 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent owning well over a third” and where the Black -white wealth gap is growing wider. (He doesn’t mention that there was a huge step back that came out of the 2008 mortgage crisis — there had been some progress up to that point in some areas of wealth generation, but that was basically wiped out. The 2018 median net worth, i.e. assets minus liabilities, of white households was $171,000, that of Blacks $17,600.)