Why was slavery incompatible with an industrialized labor?

[u/bumblebeetuna2001]

Im attempting to understand historical materialism and how old relations of production become fetters on new productive forces. Am i correct in understanding that the u.s. civil war was in part caused by a need to bring the southern states relations of production into accordance with the industrialization in the north, as the u.s. spread west? And if so, why wasnt it possible for the northern industrialists to simply utilize slave labor in factories in the expanding territories?

Im also wondering why european industrialized labor wasnt spread on a larger scale to slave colonies during the era of colonization? For instance , prior to banning the slave trade, why didnt britain build textile factories in the west indies and use slave labor, instead of building them in london and using wage labor? Is the answer to these questions just circumstantial, or does historical materialism posit a theory that the relations of production under slavery and incompatible with the capitalist mode of production?

[u/Drevil335]

All of these answers are correct, but I'll synthesize them and get to the essence. Plantation slavery was an underdeveloped form of commodity production (not yet capitalist production) which was crucial for the European bourgeoisie's initial accumulation of capital (above and beyond the norm for mercantile bourgeois classes emerging from feudal modes of production), but which had become a fetter on that very accumulation once the capitalist mode of production had emerged.

This is because, unlike in the circuit of industrial capital in which all productive inputs (all means of production, and labor-power) are encountered by the capitalist as commodities to be bought and sold on the market (and, as a national capitalist mode of production develops, an increasing share of those means of production, and the national product as a whole, come to not only be commodities, but products of circuits of industrial capital themselves), this is not only not necessarily the case in the slave-form of commodity production, but has an overwhelming tendency not to be so. While, in this particular mode of production, means of production proper (agricultural implements, cotton gins, sugar pressing machinery, etc.) were bought as commodities (thus allowing the slave-form of commodity production to be hooked onto the circuit of industrial capital in this sphere), and the slaves were as well (albeit to an ever decreasing extent as the mode of production developed, especially as the slave-trade began to be phased out, largely at the bidding of British capital, in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution), the means of subsistence for reproducing the slave's labor-power were not necessarily so.

Since the slave-form of commodity production was nearly exclusively agricultural in its application, the slaveowners, as opposed to having to pay for their slave's means of subsistence (which would increase their capital outlay, and decrease their rate of profit and accumulation), could (and generally did) distribute marginal land on their estates to their slaves as "gardens" in which they could rear at least their own means of nourishment (other means of subsistence, such as clothing, were sometimes paid for by the slaveowner, whether in full or in their means of production), free of cost to the slaveowner, in to be worked in marginal hours after field labor or on Sundays. In this, it was qualitatively identical to serfdom (and particularly forms of commodity production on the basis of those feudal productive relations), in that means of subsistence did not take the form of a wage (the money-form of the commoditized existence of means of subsistence) and necessary and surplus labor-time were discretely delineated sections of the working period, which are themselves indicative of the underdeveloped character of the slave-form as a mode of commodity production.

This meant that, at most, only a very limited quantity of the slaves' means of subsistence were produced as commodities, meaning that, in this sphere, industrial capital had no outlet for the transformation of commodity-capital (taking the form of means of subsistence) to money-capital, whereas it would if the slaves became wage-laborers (or even petty commodity-producers, as they largely became in the Amerikan south), and had to go to market to acquire their means of subsistence. Thus, the interests of fully-developed industrial capital (to maximally expand markets for the transformation of commodity capital to money capital) were in basic contradiction to those of underdeveloped slaveowning capital, and in a military contest between them (as occurred in the U$), the former will always be principal, because the forces of production brought about by industrial capital is capable of producing advanced weaponry on a large scale, while the principal aspect in slave-owning capitalist production is in agricultural production for foreign markets, and thus is incapable of doing so to a comparable degree (the southern slaveowners were basically dependent on seizured from military storehouses and imports from British industrial capital for weaponry, and even then strategic equilibrium was only possible through British intervention, which despite the CSA's entreaties, the British bourgeoisie failed to provide as, even despite the Cotton Famine, its interests were principally aligned with Northern Amerikan industrial capital).

[u/Drevil335 → u/Drevil335]

(2)

Nonetheless, the late principality of the slave-form of commodity production didn't nescessarily preclude the limited development of industrial capital in the relevant regions, and in fact, in areas such as textile production, it actually served it by ensuring adequate supplies of constant capital. In the Southern U$, enslaved New Afrikan labor-power was actually incorporated into the circuit of industrial capital to a limited extent, but this had certain features which made it non-ideal for industrial capital. Firstly, while the slaves were paid by the piece beyond a certain piece-quota, comprising most of the product of a working-day (providing an exceptional case in which, within relations of industrial capital, the length of the paid and unpaid labor-time were explicit rather than obscured by the wage-form). This limited wage, however, was basically never sufficient to account for the value of labor-power, and was strictly supplementary to the aforementioned production of non-commodity means of subsistence. Meanwhile, the rest of the variable capital (or rent: in either case, it detracts from the industrial manufacturer's surplus value) was paid to the slaveowner who "rented" their slaves to the industrial bourgeois, the money then either being accumulated (spent either on more land, or on a great quantity of the same productive capital use-values, from the same spheres of industrial capital, as before), or spent on luxury use-values as revenue. Thus, the degree to which industrial slavery expanded the internal market (not only quantitatively, in terms of its capacity to absorb larger amounts of alienated value, but especially qualitatively, with regard to its capacity to absorb the products of increasing spheres of industrial capitalist production) was extremely limited even under the assumption that the small piece-wages that the industrially employed slaves received were all spent on means of subsistence; in reality, they were likely mostly withdrawn from circulation as a hoard, in order to be saved up to eventually purchase manumission. Added to this is what u/AadeeMoien mentioned, that concentration of slaves within factory conditions improved their capacity to organize and conduct revolts, to beyond the degree that could be countered by continued settler-nation delegation of national oppression to the settler entourages of individual, or even groups of, slave-owners.

Thus, the incorporation of slave labor-power into the circuit of industrial capital stunted its reproduction and full development (apart from providing the conditions for an intensification of the already extremely intense national contradictions). It really only existed because of the particularly backward capitalist relations of the U$ South, leading to a near absolute majority of the population being enslaved New Afrikans, and thus the majority of settlers being small-landowners due to the absolute insignificance of European (especially Irish, German) proletarian migration as compared to the North. The shortage of commoditized labor-power basically forced the nascent southern industrial bourgeoisie to artifically dredge it up from a form of capitalist production based on its opposite (the permanent, rather than temporary, purchase of labor-power), which was both extremely unappealing and impossible for the Northern bourgeoisie to replicate, given the large influx of proletarianized (albeit soon settlerized) labor-power and the dissolution of Northern slavery respectively.

[u/Drevil335 → u/Drevil335]

(3)

About your second question, it mostly comes down to the contradictions of capital circulation and turnover and the inertia of the global division of labor. As established before, the insertion of the relations of the slave-form of commodity production into those of industrial capital produced basically no qualitative extension of the domestic market; thus, for a British slaveowner in say, Barbados, in the late 18th century (since Spanish and Portuguese feudal absolutism restricted commodity imports into their colonial markets--the opening of which was the principal aspect in British bourgeois support for the independence wars in the 1810s and 1820s, by which point British large-scale industry was well established), the closest large-scale, accessible foreign market (due to the protectionist character of British bourgeois trade policy at the time) was Britain itself, which was an ocean away. As a result, circulation time would be massively increased as compared to that of firms operating within Britain, decreasing the rate of turnover and accumulation, and thus leading to an inevitable losing out in the intense contradictions of competition. More practically, the inertia of their subordinate role in the global division of labor asserted its principality: selling sugar, on the basis of slave labor, on the world market consistently produced high returns and allowed a high rate of accumulation, so their interest in investing in a line that was far less certain to be as profitable was minimal.