[NietzscheanNull]

Drug dealing is profitable. Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable.

To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.

[pibaker]

> Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable.

This isn't true on a societal scale even though a few slaveholders built a bunch of grandiose mansions. Enslaved people were less economically productive than free people. It also locked economies into less productive, lower sectors like agriculture. The South resisted industrialization despite it being more profitable because it was incompatible with an economy built on minimally skilled slaves.

It was not profit that kept slavery alive well into the 19th century in the Americas and Muslim countries. It was something more sinister and evil.

[hellisothers]

Lobbyists?

[spwa4]

In early islamic texts you will find making slavery easier again (the Eastern Roman Empire was phasing it out and tightening the rules significantly, because Christianity) was a goal of the early muslims, and you will find exactly why it was such an explicit goal, ie. what they wanted those slaves for ...

https://sunnah.com/muslim%3A1438a

https://sunnah.com/abudawud%3A2172

https://sunnah.com/bukhari%3A6603

So to answer your question: why bring back slavery? Free prostitutes, or even better: getting paid to rape random women you just abduct.

Ie. Why? Some things are just not available for free in any other system.

... and this is still being done today in some societies for that same "reason". So you can say it succeeded.

https://archive.ph/JYcJg

[Natsu]

The problem with capitalism is that it gives people what it wants, and some people want bad things, or are at least indifferent to getting what they want despite bad externalities.

The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.

And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).

[OhMeadhbh]

Oh man. Don't google "sackler family" or "purdue pharma".

[EDIT: Added after that one person upvoted this comment.]

Slavery was big in the south because there wasn't enough low-skill labor to feel threatened. The north didn't care for it as much because a higher percentage of labor was what we would call semi-skilled or skilled today. That labor was FREAKED OUT about the idea of slaves taking over their jobs and they were able to organize before being eaten by the capitalist leviathan.

I'm pretty sure there were more abolitionists in the north than the south, I don't think your average northerner cared about the plight of southern slaves other than the institution being a threat to their livelihood if it moved north.

If you were making the assertion moral concerns or ethical behaviour eventually influenced american capitalism, I disagree. The capitalist monster acts "moral" or "ethical" because at the current time, to do otherwise is invite political dissolution. I fear the shadowy cabal of capitalist masters will move to reinstate chattel slavery. We did not respond with outrage when red-lining disenfranchised large portions of the populous or when usury was slipped back in with high credit card APRs and payday lending. We are asleep.

[keybored]

Did the Union have economic use for chattel slavery or “wage slavery” as some called it around that time?

I’ve never heard of mainstream economics serving people. Maybe Keynesianism did?

[doubletwoyou]

The cotton picked by slaves processed by the North into textiles etc. was a large portion of the economy.

[Barrin92]

>Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable.

it wasn't. Slave economies are exceptionally unprofitable and unproductive. To take the US as an example. Liquid wealth, i.e. capital, was vastly larger in the North than in the slave owning states, the industrial output of New York exceeded the entire Confederacy and it was that profitability, wealth and mechanized agricultural production that did them in.

Even Marx recognized this by the way, following feudalism capitalism was a progressive force, it was profit, productivity and surplus that enabled civil society, the north was more civil because it was rich and had unlocked modern forms of production. The problem of capitalism is not profit or lack of civil society.

[GerryAdamsSF]

It was profitable for the slave owners.

History is not a Paradox game where there is rational top down control.

[gruez]

Profitable/unprofitable is the wrong way of looking at it, because it implicitly ignores opportunity costs. Putting your money in a savings account at a big bank might be "profitable" in the sense you're getting paid some meager interest rate (eg. 0.1%), but it's definitely not the best option, like a money market fund or equity ETF. What OP probably meant was that slavery was worse than the alternatives, like putting your money in a savings account with meager interest rate.

[chadgpt3]

Then why didn't slave owners sell all their slaves and put the money in savings accounts?

[tonfreed]

I think you're missing the point OP was making. He's saying it's profitable but not optimal, those who recognised that quickly outstripped the slave owners in wealth.

I could ask you about your spending habits and why you don't pump all your money into an S&P 500 ETF, but that's ignoring time and consumption preferences you have, as well as perceived opportunity cost. It's not a useful observation to make at an individual level.

[watwut]

None of that implies slavery was not profitable. You got richer by owning slaves. You got a lot of profit out of them.

[Zigurd]

True, but "better than slavery or feudalism" isn't a winning tagline. Nor should it be an excuse for letting capitalism tear down civil society as it has been doing in the US recently.

[OhMeadhbh]

I'm going to start singing the Internationale here in a second.

(not snarky. I'm feeling pretty revolutionary after that last comment.)

[greenie_beans]

a major source of the north's wealth was because of its trading relationship with the antebellum south

[ch4s3]

Contemporary anti-capitalists are way to influenced by the "king cotton" theory, which as you point out is completely wrong.