> On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary
That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.
In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.
Of course, nobody is credibly arguing that we are anywhere close to the platonic ideal of a capitalist system — in the same way that at no point in the history of humanity have we had a truly communist or socialist system.
If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal.
As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society.
But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.
As I've said in another comment in this thread; each system is defined by the incentive structure it sets up.
The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for.
The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars.
> As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason
It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.
> That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise.
But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to:
1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up
2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers
Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.
That's outrageously ahistorical. The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.
If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book:
"Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".
Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?
The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.
First of all, there's nothing "ahistorical" about the simple fact that the South's economy was decimated after the abolition of slavery, and to this day the industry that utilized slavery the most continues to be weaker than elsewhere in the Union. That is your original allegation here: that slavery necessarily flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure. That's plainly untrue, because at the same time you had no slavery in the North, and its industrial economy outpaced that of the South (read: accumulation of capital, in your words).
You see this happening today as well: in countries where slavery is unfortunately still legal (Syria & Libya), they don't have any greater accumulation of capital or output than capitalist nations that do not have slavery (nearly every first world industrialized nation). On the other hand, nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They are also notably devoid of indentured/involuntary servitude while also enjoying some of the greatest accumulation of wealth and capital in recorded human history.
> The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.
Sure, nobody is arguing that people in the South were suddenly "free" after the abolition of slavery. You're absolutely correct that sharecropping and other practices essentially continued to ensnare black people in the South. The point is that this DID NOT translate to greater rewards in the capitalist incentive system. During Reconstruction, planters that exploited former "free" slaves LOST the agriculture race to the Great Plains, and the industrial race to the North.
> Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
There is nothing unacceptable about "low labor costs" in a society with robust social safety nets. Countries like Switzerland that have close to 0 poverty, the highest median wealth, and among the highest standards of living in the world also see variation in labor costs between a janitor and a doctor, or a fast food cashier and a civil engineer. Not all labor is equal in value, and the capitalist incentive structure prices labor as a function of the value that it creates for others. If your argument is that this is somehow tantamount to chattel slavery, then it's you who is regurgitating propaganda.
What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves. In fact, it's important to establish how much the cost of labour even went up after all the manipulative methods to ensnare former slaves into a new servitude were applied?
Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
> What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves
Yes, and what I am saying is that it has nothing to do with the central argument: that "slavery is capitalism" or "capitalism encourages slavery" or "slavery flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure" (there are N iterations of your argument, pick one and commit to it).
The fact that, after the abolition of slavery, the former slaves still continued to be exploited doesn't tell us much about the presence of a causal relationship between capitalism and slavery, because of course if the state sanctions slavery, you can't expect things to go back to normal by themselves without some state intervention in the opposite direction.
Further, your argument loses teeth for the following reasons:
1. We have the counterfactual in the North (successful wealth/capital accumulation + no slavery) that refute your central argument that you are yet to address. The North's capitalist economy grew more than the South even while having abolished slavery.
2. The fact that in the modern world, among the top 30 most capitalist countries in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...), only one has some form of slavery, the UAE. This refutes your central argument, and you are yet to address it.
3. The fact that in the modern world, the bottom 3 least capitalist countries in the world (same list), there are forced labor camps (North Korea) or decrees (Venezuela, Cuba). This doesn't directly refute your central argument, rather it shows that capitalism isn't a strict prerequisite for slavery. You are yet to address this.
4. The fact that agriculture became more profitable after the abolition of slavery is a direct refutation to your central argument that you are yet to address.
> Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
This is borderline word salad, but we are applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that slavery and capitalism are two orthogonal systems that are unrelated. Slavery has existed in socialist systems (gulags, labor camps) as well as capitalist systems (international slave trade). If using historical facts to make a point is considered "using the benefit of hindsight", then using the benefit of hindsight is a valid strategy...
> There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
You need to specify where the cherry picking is happening, because by and large the trend is universal. You also can't just hand-wave a correlation/causation argument just because you're unable to refute it.
That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.
In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.