[Peace-discuss] [Prairiegreens] Krugman, "Virginia is for Haters"

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Race was “a part of slavery” as Barbara Fields explains (cf. Ireland and Russia).

Wage slavery is not the same as chattel slavery; e.g., antebellum New Orleanians would not risk the lives of valuable slaves for the dangerous job of draining the pestilential swamps around New Orleans: they hired cheap and easily replaceable Irishmen from New York. 

One distinguishing feature of the Confederacy was its explicit intention to defend the its economic and social order from the attack by the North, spear-headed by the Republican party: “...this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free ... it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

The attempt since the 1970s of US liberals to ignore issues of exploitation (wages in the US have been flat since 1973) by strenuously emphasizing issues of discrimination is increasingly threadbare - as Clinton’s defeat shows. 

—CGE

> On Oct 10, 2017, at 8:37 PM, John Randolph <jwr at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> Since it seems to be impossible to removed from this list, I think as a historian I should note that Mr. Estabrook's opinions that race was not a part of slavery is not shared by historians, that 'wage slavery' is not at all the same as chattel slavery, and that indeed one distinguishing feature of the confederacy was its explicit intention to found a racial order.  Reductivist theories of capitalism impoverish our history when they exclude race.
> 
> 
> On 10/10/17 7:39 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/columnists/virginia-is-for-haters.html>
>> 
>> [In ambiguous defense of the home of my youth.]
>> 
>> I’ve never been a great fan of Krugman’s, but he used to be the source of reliably liberal (if boring) opinions.
>> But he’s been driven nuts in the last year, like some other establishment pundits (e.g., Robert Reich), by the defeat of the neoliberal champions (Obama/Clinton).
>> 
>> He asks a good question: "Why is America the only wealthy nation that doesn’t guarantee essential health care for all? ... Why do we have much higher poverty than our economic peers … We are uniquely unwilling to take care of our fellow citizens.” But his answer is propagandistic and wrong: “...behind that political difference lies one overwhelming fact: the legacy of slavery.”
>> 
>> No; it’s the legacy of capitalism. It comes from ‘slavery' only in the sense that the Civil War was the substitution of one method of exploiting labor (wage slavery) for another (chattel slavery). In the post-bellum US, the Southern states (including Virginia) were subjected to Northern capitalism as internal, largely agricultural, colonies - generally exempt from the subsequent social progress of the industrial north.
>> 
>> Krugman follows the mythology of the Clinton campaign - that that splendid example of neoliberalism was defeated by racism. It’s nonsense. She was defeated by war and immiseration: <http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/clinton-because-communities/>.
>> 
>> In order to avoid serious criticism of the our capitalist order, liberals like Krugman are desperate to see Trump’s victory and subsequent politics as fundamentally a matter of race relations. It’s not: it’s a matter of class relations.
>> 
>> It’s a given among such people that "political difference” comes from "one overwhelming fact: the legacy of slavery” - our political and historical mythology agree. But serious US historians know better:
>> 
>> "Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the
>> United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the
>> chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy
>> rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One
>> historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’.7
>> He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating
>> Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting
>> them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved
>> the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.
>> No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the
>> Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the
>> English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served
>> nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and
>> indigenous American Indians.8 Nor does anyone dream of analysing
>> serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even
>> though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural
>> superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American
>> racists.”
>> —Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the
>> United States of America,” NLR I/181, May-June 1990
>> 
>> Krugman and his ilk are desperate to have us talk about race relations - in Virginia and elsewhere - and not look at class relations, after 40 years of increasing (and accelerating) inequality - the real reason Trump was elected, and the continuing chasm in US society - which the government, working for the 1%, covers over with war and rumors of war.
>> 
>> —CGE
>>