DOES SLAVE LABOR AND GENOCIDE MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE?

[Jnew28]

Please read (Two Part Series):

http://stupidpartymathvmyth.com/1/post/2016/02/slave-labor-genocide-make-economic-sense-part-1.html

http://stupidpartymathvmyth.com/1/post/2016/02/slave-labor-genocide-make-economic-sense-part-2.html

[bbgrunt]

1. people are hesitant to click on bare links. You might

get a better response if you included a few paragraphs from the article(s)

[Igel]

2. Well, there are several claims that it does.

Without clicking on your link.

Classical arguments was that chattel slavery, at least chattel slavery in the US, was ultimately uneconomic. It left the south backwards and would have had to die an ugly death in a few generations.

Counterarguments are that slaves were being corralled and used increasingly in factories. Predictions were that this would continue successfully. Moreover, the net profit/worth of slaves being traded in the years running up to the Civil War had been increasing, mostly because new territories had been opened, and this, of course, would continue. Nobody likes to counter those arguments because to do so is to argue against a desirable conclusion.

Texas' history with slavery is informative. It had slavery, and imported slaves. It's one of the reasons for Texas' secession from Mexico. However, Texas isn't big into the Black Belt (which was and to my non-sociologist's mind still relates to soil taxonomy and not population). Apart from parts in the east which still show South dialect and culture, most of the state didn't do plantation culture. They tried. It flopped. It needed different dry land crops, or irrigation, or ranching. Slavery worked in the SE with sugar cane, a bit with rice, but apart from certain crops the slave owners and slaves had about the same crappy lives trying to be cotton farmers. Slavery petered out as it went west because it had to. It took a generation for this to become apparent.

It was during this "generation" in places like Kansas and Oklahoma and N. Texas that saw the upsurge in buying slaves, and the uptick in the profitability of slaves. It wasn't slave holding that was profitable; it was slave "production." It was almost certainly a bubble, as far as expanded agricultural use of slaves was concerned.

As with many other things, I'm not going to say US chattel slavery was clearly going to die. Just that the predictions it would die might have been supported by some facts and the time but was undermined by facts, but the prediction it would clearly continue indefinitely was also just that--a prediction. We like to confuse comfortable, pleasing predictions with fact. We should remember that predictions are necessarily a kind of irrealis mood. They are not factually true and do not reflect reality. They might become true--but, then again, they might not, and before accepting one you have to dig in the assumptions and methodology of the prediction. (I keep saying that the only economic predictions from the first two years of the Obama administration that are still considered true are those that couldn't ever be tested, either because the effect was small, the prediction rested on a confound, or it was acknowledged that the assumptions so changed that the prediction couldn't hold; every prediction that was testable flopped, often horribly. How we can assume such a failure rate for one set and such a success rate for the other and keep a straight face is a mystery to me.)

The "Black Belt" reference wasn't an accident, either. Russia had serfs, which in many ways resembled chattel slavery in practice if not de jure. The structure of serfdom was radically different from the structure of slavery. Serfs were most common in Russia's Black Belt, the chernozem' belt that stretched from Ukraine up through Russia (chernozem' is "black earth", with a soil type not that different from the rich black soil in parts of the US South so favorable to plantation culture). There were large landed estates, structured as were plantations in the US. There were house serfs. And as Russia tried to industrialize there were factory serfs. As long as the production was simple and labor intensive, as long as the machinery was fairly straightforward and simple, as long as free riff-raff and serfs had the same required skill-sets and standards of living it worked. Salt peter? Sure. More complicated things? No. The serfs weren't educated enough, and while pulling beets or harvesting grain they "got" readily enough and there were punishments that could get them to work a bit harder if necessary, that didn't work in the factories. If the equipment wasn't really basic, it could easily be sabotaged, by intent or by omission. As abolitionists worked to train the serfs, they acquired skills and could very easily vanish and get work elsewhere--even without the difference between free and slave states, enforcing serf status was a bear. American Southern factories dependent on slaves were simple and labor intensive. Northern industry was already moving past that, and again the South was being left behind. The prediction that slaves would basically run Ford plants or computer assembly lines--which is where those predictions inevitably would have to lead--seems pretty obviously "there's a desired conclusion to be reached, we will reach it." Some of the tacit assumptions about how US society would have to be in 1900 in those analyses are pretty grim.

The second big claim that slave labor makes economic sense comes from Russia proper and the GULag system, which at its height had millions of essentially slaves. They were rounded up, sentenced, exiled, set to work. If you were uneducated or at some GULag installations, you worked for food and shelter. Kolyma, or places in Kazakhstan, for instance. At places like Akademgorodok the zek-academics engaged in math, physics, aerospace research, reverse engineering of Western tech, etc., worked for perks and people--they, too, could be sent to the places where you worked for food but they also had relatives, sometimes close relatives, who could be sent to the places where you worked for food. If your daughter was an engineer and had a family and you were told to solve some engineering problem as a zek, you know the threat: Your daughter could wind up being sentenced to 5 years in a camp with an average life expectancy of 18 months, and her kids would be undesirables, sent to an orphanage, not denied any post-secondary schooling, Party membership, and good jobs or housing.

Anyway, there's a nifty correlation. As the GULags swelled the Soviet economy did better; Lenin re-instituted the worst of the worst GULags primarily for state gold and wealth, to help the budget. As the GULags were drained of manpower, the Soviet economy flagged. The GULags provided very cheap labor, often skilled because of the sheer ruthlessness of the regime and the inability for anybody to escape the system (chattel slavery in the US and serfdom in Russia were "leaky", people could and did leave, and few slave owners would be content with half of their slaves dying each year--they were slaves and subhuman, and often expensive, not enemies being punished just for the heck of it and deemed a burden on society). One analysis pointed out that the difference in subsidies between a workforce outside of the GULags that produced the GULags' output and the workforce inside the GULags was very nearly the difference between the times of the USSR's economic growth and economic stagnation. The problem is that the GULags depended on a very specific kind of rigid, through-going state-controlled society, one in which an escapee really couldn't escape to a better life and in which relatives really had a lot to lose.

This analysis came along just as Putin was being elected. Before Putin came to power, one could and often did talk about the atrocities under Stalin and Brezhnev and even Lenin. After Putin came to power, these were "excesses" and finally all of that was billed as the 1% whining about how horrible the privileged "children of the Arbat" had it, when Stalin and Brezhnev did such wonderful things for the common folk. (Putin was great at setting groups at each other, and still is. (Some of the LNR and DNR agitprop basically relishes reprising the '30s on the current children of the Arbat.) In any event, all the internal splits and divisions are smoothed over by sheer reliance on the leader and on paranoia about external threats. He learned the former from the Horde and Ivan IV. And both from Stalin.) In other words, this analysis, like so many as to why the USSR collapsed economically, vanished from the pages of time. In meme stadium, where the question is, "Whose thought regime shall reign supreme?" the answer was Iron Chief Putin's paranoid delusion that ultimately the CIA and subversion inside the USSR was responsible for the USSR's collapse. Along with some fundamental flaws in which Lenin displayed too much milk of human kindness, things like permitting ethnic identity to forestall ever wider-spread russification and centralization.


As for genocide, there's a large chunk of research saying that one traditional way of ending wars was genocide. Perhaps you eradicate the other population's males and forcibly assimilate those remaining--you lose 100 men today, but at the gain of not having to lose 20 men every decade for the next 100 years, plus you gain a lot of women to have more children (and you get the territory). Perhaps you disperse the population, as the Ottomans and Russians sometimes did, or settle your reliable population among troublesome minorites as the Chinese are doing in Tibet and as Putin did with a fair number of Ukrainian "Russian" refugees in regions of Buryatia that aren't sufficiently russified. Even if the populations keep the irrelevant bits of culture that we think of as the "real" culture--food, fashion, festivals, and even folklore--the culture is eviscerated. You get a chuchelo, a taxidermically stuffed version of the original culture. Looks the same, but it's not.