Opinions differ as to whether the end of slavery should be considered an important turning point in American history, or merely a reconfiguration of a repressive regime, in which a prominent American writer and academic sees the victory of white race as the primary economic engine of American history.
Nicholas Lyman said in a report published by The New Yorker that before the American Civil War between North and South, southern slave owners used to claim that their system of work was more humane than "wage slavery" in the industrial factories of the North, and 12 southern white writers published articles to support that The idea.
The professor of journalism at Columbia University who grew up in New Orleans (southeastern United States) stressed that the social indicators in the south - such as income, health, and education - were deteriorating compared to the north, due to the exploitation and political weakness that accompanied the system of ethnic classes, which he considered Worse than capitalism, not some kind of it.
The author pointed out that many years ago, historians disagreed over how the South and slavery were related to capitalism. For example, author Eric Williams in his book "Capitalism and Slavery" - published in 1944 and largely ignored over half a century - defended the centrality of slavery and its role in the rise of capitalism; However, this reference is no longer an inspiration for a new generation of current studies.
Today, the southern slave owners are seen as experts in exploiting workers and subjecting them to hard labor practices. Instead of representing an alternative system of northern industrial capitalism, it enabled American farms (in the south where slaves work) to develop a system that allowed them to supply cotton fabric factories in Manchester and Birmingham that were used to weave fabrics with the new English working class.
A recent history of slavery
In 2018, Walter Johnson, a major historian of slavery, said, "There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery."
Johnson noted that the new history of slavery seeks to obscure the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the south and the north, by showing that they were part of one system.
Opinions differed as to whether the end of slavery should be considered an important stopping point in American history, or merely a reconfiguration of a repressive regime.
Johnson added that for some, the system has witnessed a slow development towards a more just and democratic society. But for others, differences remain over the ethnic hierarchy and their relationship to economic exploitation.
Once slavery is established as the basic institution of American capitalism, the country's later history can be portrayed as an extension of this fundamental dynamic. This idea was supported by historian Walter Johnson in his new book, "The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States."
Johnson's book was inspired by the Ferguson turmoil in 2014 that left the killing of the defenseless black teenager Michael Brown, by a police officer named Darren Wilson. Johnson used the term "racial capitalism", as racism was a technique for him to exploit blacks and stir white hostility toward the working class of blacks, in the interests of white capitalists.
The history of wages
Johnson insists, "It must be emphasized that the history of ethnic capitalism is the history of wages, as well as the history of whips and factories, as well as farms and white race versus black and freedom against slavery." For white politicians, he says, the American West has undergone a racist, fundamentalist concept of the world, imperialist settler policies, and white ethnic cleansing.
Johnson criticized the fact that these politicians are mentioned in the textbooks today as historical heroes, among them: John Fremont the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party who was "imperialist, according to modern standards: a war criminal", and Ulysses Grant, who adopted a basic military policy based on " Deadly Anger, "as well as Abraham Lincoln who started his career" as a settler militia element, "and for the remainder of his life" remained committed to ethnic cleansing. "
Lincoln developed a political program in which he opposed slavery mainly because it competed with the economic interests of farmers and white workers, and the liberal republican movement founded by Horace Greeley in the aftermath of the civil war, based on a “white nationalist” ideology, was “the expected outcome” of genocide, according to the author .
Crime and Punishment in America
Unlike Johnson's new book, other researchers have found different ways of interpreting modern conditions in miserable black neighborhoods similar to what happened in the past. For example, James Foreman, Jr., in his book "Crime and Punishment in Black America", showed how a series of police and sentencing activities in the late twentieth century put a large number of blacks in prison, and how it made matters worse in black societies.
The author explained that the results that can be drawn from this type of book are that political changes would support the cause and struggle of black societies, a conclusion that was mentioned in many previous books on African Americans in the twentieth century, including one St. Clair Drake and Horace Kaiton, "The Capital of the Blacks" of 1945.
According to the author, the idea of racism being linked to capitalism has been around for a long time, but the question about this is how this association can happen.
In this context, Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his great speech on the steps of the Alabama State Council in 1965, "The separation of races was indeed a political trick used by the interests of the Bourbon (startup for wine production) in the south, to keep the crowds in the south divided and to keep employment South is the cheapest in the land. "
At the time, King was trying to push for the activation of the Voting Law and other civil rights legislation. Within a year, King led demonstrations against real estate owners in Chicago's slums, and called for the activation of new forms of national legislation.
In 2018 Nicholas Lyman says that more than 90% of African American voters in Missouri voted against Republican Josh Hawley, who now presents himself as a critic of global capitalism without mentioning race; It is possible to be anti-capitalist without being anti-racist, or anti-racist without being anti-capitalist, according to the author, and through all of this, black neighborhoods - especially the poor - still moan under the grievances of history.
"I have never found myself in a more wonderful and hopeful place in my life than this," Johnson wrote recently. Indeed, what underlies his optimism is an implicit conviction that the search for help from the larger community will not work, and victims of injustice must find for themselves the path to progress.
The author stated that when he was young, he often heard bitter adult conversations about the hypocrisy of white liberals in the north, as he grew up in a conservative white environment. Walter Johnson offers a great deal of experimental support for such views, and his novel commends much hope for past events, such as the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment or the major civil rights victories of the 1960s.
The writer said that democratic politics - especially in a country with a racist history such as that of the United States of America - are necessarily messy, dirty, and able to achieve no more than partial victories, but recklessness and lessening the progress that these policies have made in the past would lead to a defeatist spirit This distracts from the kind of economic, educational, and criminal justice reforms that progressives hope to enact.