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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Founding Fathers, who were mostly abolitionists: "Slavery is surely a dying institution, we can just put it on the back burner and let it wither away, that way we can avoid a civil war."
Thanks guys. Really saved us.
In their meager defense, they were correct at the time, slavery was a dying institution. It wasn't until the later invention of the cotton gin that slavery exploded in profit. By then, it was too late. The economic interests of the slavers had grown and entrenched, and the war became inevitable.
Not to defend the slavers, or their advocates among the founders, just to explain the founders' reasoning a little more.
For further reading, the Wikipedia page for the Cotton Gin goes into some detail.
Huh. You'd think the cotton gin would've allowed them to get by with fewer slaves.
That would've maintained production at the level it already was (and also reduce prices and profits).
Under capitalism, you can't just maintain production. You gotta EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND.
See Wage Labor and Capital for an explanation for why this must be true, if anyone doubts this statement.
You don't have to subscribe to Marxian economics for this to be true, though Marx and those who listened to him are the only people who dwell on the topic for long.
Part #1 of my statement is pretty much self-evident. Part #2 is the very premise of market competition, no?
You don't have to, no, but Marx makes a compelling case and explains it simply, and thoroughly. It's easy to think that Capitalists can just maintain production, but this doesn't bear out in reality.
Additionally, Marx points out what are the necessary consequences of these forces.
I agree, but quoting Marx is a little counterproductive when the audience is primarily not socialist and, indeed, might be apprehensive towards the concept due to the Leninist dictatorships and Western corporate propaganda.
Lemmy has a very strong leftist base, especially Marxist as the devs are Marxist-Leninists, and there are many progressive liberals who would do well to read theory. I disagree with it being counterproductive to suggest reading Marx.
The tankies over on Lemmygrad and Hexbear (aka the Dessalines and people like him) have very much left (heh) a very sour taste in the mouths of many locals.
Some Lemmy users are against leftism, sure, but the majority of Lemmy is Leftist leaning at minimum. That's kind of the entire point of Lemmy's structure, and the broader culture has morphed around that fact.
If I had to guess, most Lemmites are socdems, not socialists.
It is very easy to overestimate how common one's own viewpoint is, especially when in a filter bubble.
What makes you believe that to be the case? Lemmy.world is overwhelmingly liberal/socdem, but the broader Lemmyverse is Socialist leaning, whether Marxist or Anarchist.
Lemmy has ~390k users. Just over 150k are on World. That's almost 40%.
Another ~50k are on NSFW, and can thus be assumed to not care. If we remove them from the equation, we get ~44% being on World.
The third-most popular instance after World and NSFW is .ee. The people there are broadly progressive but usually not socialist. They have just under 29k.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
Have you done a poll of the percentages that identify as liberal vs socialist on these sites, or do you genuinely believe there are no Socialists on .world or .ee?
Are these active users, or total users?
I'm doing this on the digital equivalent of the back of a napkin. I have not done any surveys. This makes me curious though. Does Lemmy have polls?
I believe that's total users. We can also go with number of comments per week, according to Lemmyverse:
World - 41,575
.ee - 8,605
NSFW - 820
My own instance - 777
Here we can also see our leftie friends starting to appear:
Hexbear - 14,411
db0 - 2,632
Lemmygrad - 2,220
SLRPNK - 1,435
So you have a good amount, you're still missing lemmy.ml, and are still assuming everyone on .ee or .world are not Socialist.
I'm not assuming everyone there isn't socialist. I assume that most aren't, based on anecdotal experience.
For some reason lemmyverse, where I got the other stats, doesn't mention .ml, though it mentions the Enterprise subdomain, which I hear of for the first time.
If you can find out the number of comments per week on .ml, I would be glad.
If you're just working off of vibes, then what's the use?
Either way, I am unsure of the comments per week or active user count of Lemmy.ml, but it is large, larger than Lemmygrad or Blahaj, and probably larger than Hexbear.
You yourself said that World is mostly socdems and liberals. Once you're here for long enough, some patterns become visible.
Either way, I think I'll try to cook up a poll so we can measure the class consciousness of Lemmy, haha. Do you think asklemmy will accept such a post?
Depends, Lemmy.ml's? Probably. .world's? Probably not.
The point is that Lemmy.world is mostly liberal, but Hexbear, grad, etc. are 100% Socialist. There aren't 100% liberal instances.
I looked up the rules. .ml bans politics. World doesn't. So the inverse.
For the purpose of on-the-napkin statistics 98% is good enough.
That's communist thinking. In communism, we only produce as many goods as people actually need, and nobody goes without, so demand is always fixed. But in capitalism, there's always more poor people going without you can sell to, and even if demand is fully met, you can keep producing goods to sell to stores who'll throw them in the garbage, and you still make money.
A lot of very bad decisions have been made by people who expect a capitalist economy to work like a communist economy. This is a completely reasonable mistake to make, because human beings are naturally communist. But it's still important to remember that we don't live in an economy that matches our natural intuitions. We live in capitalism.
The plantation owners sold cotton for a profit, so they were financially incentivized to expand production to increase profit. They could get by making the same profit with fewer slaves, or they could use the same number of slaves to make more profit, and with more profits, they could buy more slaves and make even more profit.
The entire economy of the south quickly became dependent on the institution, as capital investment solely flowed into slave plantations, while the industrial sectors stagnated. It took the war to change that system, and turn investment towards industry.
It wasn't just the cotton gin though.
I don't think the founding fathers realized the sheer agricultural potential of the country, especially if you compare the size of the country's territory to that of what it would be by the Civil War.
Then there's their backgrounds from the British, where an abolitionist movement had already existed for quite some time and the fact that the British were already industrializing and needed slavery even less. Great Britain was fairly liberal in general, so I'm sure that had a lot of influence on the founding father's viewpoints. For context, during the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Castlereagh the main British representative managed to sneak in a handful of statements on slavery, suggesting the other powers should eventually end the practice. This was more so to impress the British people due to the current on-goings of British politics, but it's still only 30ish years after American Independence.
That's an interesting point, about the Founders under appreciating the land itself.
I'm not sure what you were arguing with the second point, about the liberalism of the British. Are you suggesting the British abolitionist ideas influenced the Founders towards abolitionism?
You're right, though, it wasn't just the Cotton Gin. There were a number of factors, and the Founders limited knowledge effected their reasoning. Again, there were also the slavers amongst them, who actively advocated for the maintenance of the system of slavery.
Absolutely. Although we parted ways with the British you can't deny the roots from where we originated. Especially when you look at the founders who were of the first generation during the severed connection.
Of course, as we carved out more of an identity for ourselves some of those roots and beliefs seem to have diminished.
They should have told the gentlemen from Georgia and Carolina to suck it, held the war without them, and proceeded to flatten both colonies once we kicked the Brits out of the other 11 colonies.
We missed starting the country as an abolishonist state because of two men, and one single vote. Had anyone else voted to abolish, we would have told Georgia and Carolina to shut up about it.
I understand the sentiment, but the Union was in no position to fight a civil war immediately after, let alone during, the Revolution. The Union nearly collapsed from debt in the early years, and if the northern states tried subduing the southern states, the British, Natives, and maybe even the Spanish would all take advantage of the disarray to put the rebellion down.
I do think more could and should have been done, but the whole point of the "meager defense" I put up was the lack of foreknowledge on their part.
Yeah. That's the issue with caution, though - especially in the political arena, conditions can change at the drop of a hat.
I think their caution was somewhat warranted, given the relative novelty of the Republican experiment. They were fist and foremost concerned with keeping the union from collapsing, and were horrified at how the French Revolution turned out. They knew perfectly well that conditions would change, which is why they made a system to amend the constitution. If anything, they expected more change, but didn't know just how much entrenched economic interests would mold politics. And to the extent that they did, they didn't have any way of preventing it, at the time.