slavery was horrible … wage-slavery is horrible

A person owning another person. The latter person confined and constrained. Unconscionable.

Though most enslaved persons were not treated as badly as the victors of the Civil War usually portray. After all, what the slavemasters cared about most was productivity.

It wasn’t a daily horror for every enslaved person. But it was, generally speaking, a horrible situation.

I think if the South had seceded slavery would have been abolished within two or three generations. It was becoming anathema worldwide at the time. I think an organic process of self-assertion for liberation among Southern Blacks combined with self-enlightenment among Southern whites would have worked out better for all involved.

Abruptly after 1865 the “emancipated,” unprepared, were thrust with suddenness into the maw of capitalist atomization … sharecropping or working for miserable wages … confronted with the world of industrial modernity unsupported. That’s a horrible situation.

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The Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin, in his 1857 book The Political Economy of Slavery declared that “extreme want and destitution, the competition for sustenance, class-slavery of labor to capital, and pauperism, are all the incidents and necessary results of ‘free society’ and ‘free labor.’ So far as their facts and their reasoning go, and in their main doctrines, the socialists are right.” A Southern reactionary appreciating the socialist critique!

Historian Eugene Genovese was famous for his studies of the antebellum South and the plantation-slavery system. He started out as a standard leftist … focusing on the misery of slavery. But his intensive studies provoked him to come to some conclusions that discomfited many of his colleagues: the capitalist wage-slavery system that Blacks were thrown into after 1865 was even worse.

“Your whole class of manual laborers,” Sen. James Hammond (D–S.C.) told his northern colleagues in 1858, “are slaves. The difference between us is that our slaves are hired for life and are well cared for; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people.” By contrast, Hammond asserted, “yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most deplorable manner, at any hour, in any street in any of your cities or large towns.”

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We don’t want to be choosing among horrors, of course.

But I think Marx was naive to so love Lincoln and to root so hard for the northern industrialists’ side in the American Civil War.