SELF VALORIZATION

Only Early Birds Will See Acropolis as Workers Strike Over Heat

Security guards and others say the extreme temperatures in Athens and at other historical sites are dangerous for them and for tourists. The employees are stopping work at noon at least for now.

Tourists at the Acropolis in Athens on Thursday.Credit...Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

By Niki Kitsantonis
Reporting from Athens.
July 21, 2023, 

The suffocating heat in Athens has forced its top attraction, the Acropolis, to close to tourists in the afternoons for the second time this month, with plans to open up in the cooler hours of the evening. But a strike by workers at that site and others, over dangerous working conditions, will likely also keep it closed after 12 p.m. while the extreme temperatures endure.

Greece is suffering through its second heat wave in as many weeks, and temperatures are expected to reach 111 degrees Fahrenheit, or 44 Celsius, in Athens on Sunday. Workers say the heat poses a potential risk to them and to visitors, and they stopped working at noon on Thursday and Friday and plan to continue doing so until at least Sunday. Their union says they will reassess the situation on Monday.

Speaking to Greek radio on Friday morning, the head of the union, Ioannis Mavrikopoulos, said the temperature on the site of the Acropolis, home to the gleaming white marble Parthenon monument and few shade trees, had reached some 118 degrees Fahrenheit, or 48 Celsius. The Acropolis is perched on a rocky outcrop high above Athens.

Mr. Mavrikopoulos claimed that between 20 and 25 visitors fainted at the site daily, adding that similar problems had been reported at two other popular sites: the ancient palace of Knossos on Crete and Ancient Olympia in northern Greece.

A tourist was taken to an ambulance after fainting near the Acropolis on Thursday.

Credit...Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The walkout means that the Acropolis will be accessible to tourists for only four hours a day, from its opening at 8 a.m. until 12 p.m. The site has had about 21,000 visitors a day this summer, up by more than a third from last year.

Despite the sweltering temperatures, tourists continued to try to visit the Acropolis, Greece’s ancient citadel, known as a model of classical architecture but also for the sculptures that were hacked off the Parthenon in the early 19th century and have since sat in the British Museum.

The site draws millions of people ever year, and this summer they have been waiting under canopies set up on the paths up to the Acropolis as Red Cross volunteers hand out bottles of water to keep them hydrated. The turnout seems to have ebbed slightly compared with early last week when televised footage showed huge crowds shuffling through the site.

Visitors who booked in advance but were unable to gain access to the Acropolis will be able to use their tickets any time over the next year, a Culture Ministry official said.

Forecasts suggest that Greece will see a small dip in temperatures on Monday but that is expected to be followed by a third heat wave two days later. With sweltering temperatures enduring well after sunset, it is likely that the country’s archaeological sites will continue to restrict afternoon visits.


Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times. More about Niki Kitsantonis

Time For The Four Hour Day

And the Four Day Week.


While surfing I came across this interesting site on an alternative to downsizing workers, downsizing the work day. See links below.

Not a new idea but one that resurfaces when whenever capitalism adopts new technology to reduce labour costs. As Dr. Marx pointed out the class struggle is all about reducing the work day.

This began with the 10 hour movement during the late 19th Century, and quickly grew into the 8 hour movement. You know the saying, "The Weekend,brought to you by the Labour Movement".

The Syndicalist movement in North America called for a 4 hour work day. This was advanced by the IWW in the 1920's!!!. In the 1920's folks. 75 years ago. And today folks are working two jobs and most are working 44-50 hours a week to make ends meet.

Work time has increased, while wages have decreased in real money, and work has become contracted out and precarious.

In the 1930's the Progressive Labour Party and others in the labour movement called for a 32 hour work week, in otherwords a four day week. Even this revisionist demand was met with capitalist distain. Today France has a 35 hour work week which was not without controversy.

Today as more workers are laid off, the Canadian Autoworkers Union has fought and bargianed against forced overtime in favour of increased jobs.

We still hear from folks who offer the 32 hour week as their minimum demand, and thats the problem, its a minimum, and even then capitalism has not embraced it with anymore enthusiaism than the 4 hour day and the 4 day week.

Reducing Working Time

The European Union (EU) Directive on working time (Directive 93/104/EC) required member states to introduce national legislation that would reduce working time to a weekly average of forty eight (48) hours in a year. The 'Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997' has transposed the EU Directive into law in Ireland. This new law has impacted on the dependence that enterprises can have on excessive overtime working. It also reduces the maximum number of hours that employees are allowed to work. In this context both employers and unions are exploring the possible potential of combining changes in work organisation with changes in the pattern of working hours. While employers and unions can have different aims for any reorganisation of work and working time, a recognition of the interdependence of these aims should provide a basis for joint examination of what can be done. In short, the chances for employees to improve guaranteed earnings while working fewer hours are likely to be better if working time can be more effectively matched with the actual needs of the enterprise.

Another group influenced by the IWW and North American Syndicalism was Technocracy Inc. which also adopted the idea that the MAXIMUM labour required to maintain an advanced industrial society is wait for it, yep, a 4 hour day, 4 days a week.

The Price System be abolished, and be replaced with an Energy Credit”-system. The Energy Credit is an electronic distribution unit of which the value is determined by the resources which the system could distribute to it’s clients, and the costs is equivalent with the production costs – because profit is eliminated. The investments could instead be developed through the total independence and autarchy of the system, and in time, the system will be impossible to destroy. The Energy Credit could never be bartered, loaned, speculated, inflated, stolen or be misused for corrupt purposes, because it’s value and areas of legitimacy is fixated. All inhabitants within the borders of the Technate are given a standard income of energy credits, free residence of living, free means of communication, free clothes, free food, free healthcare, free education, and free recreation. The work time is 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, but it will in each case be a hard task to give everyone a job, but that is not a problem, because everyone will prosper and survive, work or no work. “Machines work, humans play”, as one of the mottos sound.

For a larger picture of this chart click here.

The Passing Of The Wage Slave

The Mystery of Money G. D. KOE, CHQ • 1938

The machine is here to stay. It is emancipating the wage slaves who in ever increasing numbers are becoming like the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin. The machine does not strike nor talk back and it requires no relief when unemployed. If you wish to continue your Price System you will have to breed a new race of men, men that can lie fallow for a season, or can be stored away in warehouses till they are required.

Human labor means wages. Wages means purchasing power. Purchasing power means profits and profits means savings. Savings mean more and more means of production. And so round and round the endless chain of the Price System. Men work so that they may consume, and consume so that they may have strength to work some more so that they may continue to consume, while close behind comes the grim spectre of scarcity. To protect themselves they saved themselves into the jaws of unemployment. Savings built machines.

When electric power came, human labor lost. Electric power works twenty-four hours and it draws no wages, but the owners pile up savings. More savings, more machines, more production, more machines, less wages, less purchasing power, less employment, larger relief rolls, over production. Still more dividends are being paid and still more savings are being added to the debt structure. A considerable part of the population have become paupers but they have to be clothed and fed that the Price System might still be operated and savings steadily increased. Production slowed down. Fewer new machines for a time and a steadily increasing liquidity in the banks and financial institutions.

Today, liquidity is approaching its maximum and soon the banks, insurance companies, and financial houses will fade quietly away, except as governmental institutions. They cannot earn enough to pay their overhead and must go into voluntary liquidation or they will fail. Any industrialist that does not modernize his equipment (and that means mechanize) must shut up shop. With an ever increasing velocity the Price System approaches its inevitable end. The Price System is a gigantic debt system and the cancellation of debt is but the foundations of that System crumbling into dust. It is wisdom to make your choice now, before you come to the parting of the ways. Then it may-be too late. Which will you have? Chaos or Science? Scarcity or abundance? Disorder or order? Death or life? The choice is yours; but the necessity for the choice cannot long be delayed. Technocracy alone, offers life.

Note this was written in 1938 when automobile production, called Fordism, was rapidly industrializing America as it is now doing in China and has done in the newly developing industrial economies of Korea and the post war development of Japan.

And speaking of Ford he already introduced the idea of increased wages for less work with his new mode of production, of course to encourage increased consumption of his product, and to control his workers by keeping the unions out.

From World's Work, October 1926 pp. 613-616.

HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

The automobile manufacturer in this authorized interview tells Mr. Crowther why he reduced the working week in Ford plants all over the world to forty hours with no cut in pay*

We now face a political economy of outsourcing and contracting out work, flexible working conditions where you are expected to 'multi-task', which is deskilling of the workforce yet making us pliable for being multi use cogs in the machine of capital production. And yet we still have unemployment, and we are working more for less, and for longer hours.

Yet the society in which we live could provide abundance for all. Strange that.

As Dr. Marx points out in his work the Grundrisse, as automation increases, and allows for greater freedom of the worker, the capitalist system cannot adapt fast enough forcing the workers to give up their lesisure time, in favour of either wage slavery or unemployment.

Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Hence surplus value can never sprout out of the equivalent; nor can it do so originally out of circulation; it has to arise from the production process of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed in this way: if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.

The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this 'use value', regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters' impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption. As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital, but rather as relation of domination [Herrschaftsverhältnis]; thus, the relation of domination is the only thing which is reproduced on this basis, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth itself, and which can therefore never create general industriousness. (We shall return to this relation of slavery and wage labour.)

It is time to take back our time from the machine, not through reforms like increased paternity leaves paid for out of EI, but in actual time to be with our families and friends by reducing our work time. Not adapting to flexible organisation of the workplace, where we 'job shre', that is share our poverty, our waged work. But rather the fight for the 4 hour day in the 4 hour week for 40 hours pay, is not a utopian ideal but a radical demand upon the system of capitalism.

Capital adapts such demands with its illusionary flexible working conditions for the professional classes. These are based on salaried wages, and give the illusion of a beneficient and paternalistic management in the workplace. In reality it is NOT the reduction of work time, nor its radical transformation into playtime. It is simply the sharing of surplus value time, at our own expense.

Or in the case of working from home, here the benefits of daycare, etc. are absorbed by the worker, costs that would normally acrue to the capitalist and his state.

Just as in self employment, the very basis of the wage slavery of the mercantile classes, which includes trades men, white collar managers, owners of fast food franchises, etc. the classic petit-bourgoise, here we now have the contracting out and privatization of public sector jobs to a sector that now must pay the burden of benefits and insurance, and pensions, out of their own pocket with not employer contribution. Hence most don't and end up destitute later on due to accidents, health problems, or catastrophic personal financial burderns. Thus the self employed are the self deluded, thinking they are no longer wage slaves.

This is one of the consequences of downsizing. The other is the quick capitalization and valorization of the business as the workers are disposed of but their surplus value is kept. Wages, benefits, pension funds, all are disposed of as liquid capital, which is why after downsizing corporations see their share price rise on Wall Street. Regardless of the socio economic grouping that gets laid off, waged employees, salaried employees, white collar, blue collar, support staff, production staff, distribution staff, or management.

All are one class; the wage slaves to the machine of capital.

New Study Reveals One in Three Americans Are Chronically Overworked
Triggers for Overwork and Solutions for Workplace Stress are Explored

Key Study Data

• One in three American employees are chronically overworked.
• 54 percent of American employees have felt overwhelmed at some time in the past month by how much work they had to complete.
• 29 percent of employees spend a lot of time doing work that they consider a waste of time. These employees are more likely to be overworked.
• 79 percent of employees had access to paid vacations in 2004.
• More than one-third of employees (36 percent) had not and were not planning to take their full vacation.
• On average, American workers take 14.6 vacation days annually.
• Most employees take short vacations, with 37 percent taking fewer than seven days.
• Only 14 percent of employees take vacations of two weeks or more.
• Among employees who take one to three days off (including weekends), 68 percent return feeling relaxed compared with 85 percent who take seven or more days (including weekends).
• Only 8 percent of employees who are not overworked experience symptoms of clinical depression compared with 21 percent of those who are highly overworked.

Study: Reducing hours isn’t always a career killer

By Kathy Gurchiek

Choosing to cut your workload to three or four days a week is not a career killer for top-level employees, according to Crafting Lives that Work: A Six-Year Retrospective on Reduced-Load Work in the Careers and Lives of Professionals and Managers, a study that was released Feb. 16. 2005

“Many leading employers have been formally and informally offering alternative work arrangements such as reduced-load work for many years,” according to the executive summary of the report by McGill State University, Canada’s leading research-intensive university, and Michigan State University (MSU).

“However, little research has been conducted on how choosing to use these new ways of working affects individuals, their careers, and their families over time.”

The study followed up with 81 of the original 87 salaried, nonunionized participants interviewed in 1996 to 1998 who voluntarily cut back from full-time to part-time status at 43 companies in the United States and Canada. Ages ranged from 33 to 58. Men were included, but most participants were women, and the typical one was 45, married, a manager, and had reduced her workload to 66 percent of full time.

Nearly half of those working part time were still doing so six years later, and most of those no longer working a reduced schedule wanted to return to it, according to the study, funded by the nonprofit philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In addition, it found that a significantly higher percentage of those working reduced work schedules had elder care responsibilities, family health problems or major personal health problems compared to those working full time. A high commitment to family and the need or desire to spend time with their children were the reasons why more than half of the participants continued working a reduced schedule.

Timesizing versus Downsizing
we address the two biggest questions of our times:
(1) When introducing technology, how, without makework, can CEOs avoid downsizing employees & the consumer markets they represent? (2) Then how do we shift from maximizing consumption to save the economy, to minimizing consumption to save the planet?
Two answers, two 'gears'. (1) Timesizing = trim workweeks, not workforce & consumer base; make not taxpayer-support but self-support easier; re-employ & re-activate all marginalized consumers. (2) Once everyone is included in the worksharing system, economic growth becomes optional instead of desperately needed, because for the first time growth can be limited without starving the now well-employed 'poor'. So we then cut the workweek further to downshift production & consumption and "save the planet," that is, ecosystems and the whole biosphere.

The big picture & the-time-trilogy

We had a lot of help, but not from standard economists. They hate people like us. We're mavericks. Most of us are indeed dreaded "autodidacts" - self-taught people with no particular stake in any particular economic conclusion - except that maybe our whole economic juggernaut could be a lot more "win-win" than it is. Charlie Kindleberger, despite being personally a nice Ray Bolger-type of guy and a bit of an outsider himself (an American historical economist is a rare bird), said, with reference to Jane Jacobs, "All of us hate these autodidacts." (Warsh, Economic Principles, 396.) One of us autodidacts didn't get translated into English for 162 years (Sismondi).

OK, part of our problem is that we're not win-win with standard economists. We badmouth them. Jane Jacobs says economics is a "fool's paradise" and what's needed now is a wholesale rethinking of the field, a "trip back to reality." (Warsh, 396.) Joan Robinson called economics a branch of theology! And Sismondi opposed economic systems and all forms of dogmatism. But let's face it, standard economists deserve it.

We discovered that over the years, indeed the centuries, there were other autodidacts and mavericks who went over much of the same ground as us ("us" is maverick-correct here, an English disjunctive attested in Chaucer) and they laid down a pretty good foundation. In the last 20 years, Ben Hunnicutt. In the 1950s, Nobel-reject John Kenneth Galbraith. Art Dahlberg and Ed Filene in the 1930s. Lord Leverhulme (a "Lever Brother") and Stephen Leacock (a Canadian Mark Twain) in the nineteen-teens. Thorstein Veblen in the 1890s. Jean-Charles Sismondi in the early 1800s and Sir William Petty in the 1600s - see our bibliography. There are probably a lot more but they're tough to find because the mainstream does little or nothing to publicize them. None of these people get Nobels. Guess they make in-the-box thinkers uneasy. Kindleberger went on to say, "We are in the business of teaching people, and we want them to learn our stuff, not make it up." Sounds like primitive territoriality.

Another Canadian Site is:

Welcome to the TimeWork Web: the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.

And of course they have created a Workless Party, Parteee..the site is located in BC which is a wonderful land to want to work less in and play more.

I could party for that.

"Workers of the world - RELAX !!!!"

Work Less Party

Work Less, Consume Less, Live More!!!

240-Minute Man

Gabe Sinclair Has Seen the Future, and It Includes a Four-Hour Workday

By Michael Anft

Baltimore City Paper: 240-Minute Man (March 21 - March 27, 2001)

THE IDEA

At the beginning of the last century, the tractor and the assembly line revolutionized the American economy. The eight-hour workday and the forty-hour week soon prevailed as a natural consequence of these innovations.

The computer and other minor miracles have since opened glorious opportunities for a further reduction of our drudgery, yet nothing of the kind has happened. Modern life remains a headlong rush into long commutes, two-income families, late nights at work, and exhausting recreation. How could this be? What is it about our collective personality that drives us over this cliff of endless rat race?

The Four-hour Day Foundation exists to assemble a particular coalition of people prepared to question the fundamental assumptions of how we labor and how we distribute our immense wealth. Two percent of Americans now grow all of our food and then some. Another thirty million or so do all the mining, manufacturing, and construction. If this minority can produce our modern cornucopia, then the four-hour day is within easy reach. If we can rearrange world politics so as to honestly collaborate with other nations, anything is possib

Concessions Don't Work

Concession bargaining is always a defeat for workers, it never results in any real gains, and is always presented by the bosses as the alternative to unemployment and job loss. Want job security give us back wage and benefit gains you have made. It is an example of one step forward two steps back. And it is the contradicition which exposes the fallacy that business unions are weapons to defeat capital, rather they bargain workers labour for a seat at the table of capitalism, but that seat keeps getting kicked out from under them and they are shocked.

Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.
Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, Addressed to Working Men, The First International Working Men's Association, 1865.


As these news stories show nothing has changed. Concessions are demanded and plants still close. And the current crisis of capitalist credit is used as an excuse to demand more from workerrs in order for the bosses to capitalize their bottom line.

The union representing 85 striking and soon-to-be unemployed workers at Mercury Graphics Corp. has filed charges against the company for poor bargaining practices.
A major sticking point of plant closure negotiations is severance pay, said Cossar. Under the collective agreement and the provincial Labour Standards Act, employees should recieve two weeks of pay per year of employment. For people who have worked for the company for 25 to 30 years, that means a severance payment between $40,000 and $50,000.
The company has offered its employees $2,500 in severance, she said.
"It's an absolute insult to offer someone twenty-five hundred bucks for someone who has invested 25 years in a company," Cossar said. "It's appaling behaviour on the part of a company who didn't need to close down in the first place."
At the company's request, the union agreed to some concessions -- worth $300,000 -- to keep the plant open, Cossar explained. Mercury Graphics, however, wanted more, she said.

Court Rules in Favor of Wage Concessions for Frontier Airlines
Bankruptcy Court today granted Frontier Airlines relief it requested regarding its collective bargaining agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). The court granted Frontier's request for wage concessions from the IBT and adopted the airline's proposed heavy maintenance plan. Frontier's plan allows the company to furlough its heavy maintenance workers during periods Frontier does not require heavy maintenance work and recall these workers during periods Frontier has work available.
"Our inability to reach agreement on outsourcing heavy maintenance, given our reductions in fleet size, would have put Frontier at a competitive disadvantage and required heavier operational outlays than we feel are appropriate in this competitive market and in these difficult economic times," Collins said. "This ruling allows us to continue to perform heavy maintenance with our trusted employees, while providing us the option to outsource if court-approved milestones are not met."

Toronto workers to fight for 'sick bank'
Unionized City of Toronto workers will strongly resist any attempt to take away a perk that gives them up to six months' pay from cashing in unused sick days when they leave the job.
The issue of the "sick bank" – a relic of the days before short- and long-term disability programs – came up in 2005 contract talks, and management is expected to raise it again in talks due to start soon, said Brian Cochrane, chief negotiator for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 416.
"We understand that they are going to try and take away the sick banks," Cochrane said. "To what extent we won't know until we hit the bargaining table."

Issaquah school unions file unfair labor charge
“The Issaquah School District is not negotiating with their employees,” Powell said. “The district is not negotiating in good faith. The district is demanding language concessions in our agreement that has nothing to do with economics and that our members will never agree to.”
If district officials are found, regarding either of the unions’ charges, in violation of state law by not passing through the cost of living adjustment and added health benefit increases, commission investigators can mandate that district officials pass through each, dating back to Sept. 1.
Neither union’s employees are receiving their cost of living adjustment nor their health benefits increase this year.
Each employee is paying an additional $25 per month to compensate for district officials not passing those through, in addition to their out-of-pocket medical expenses, Powell said.

Michael Russo's Sunday Insider: NHL players brace for concessions
Goals and assists, wins and losses are issues NHL players care most about, but Paul Kelly is giving his players a lesson on economics.
As the NHL Players' Association executive director began his second fall tour last week, one key topic was explaining why the union has decided to put 13.5 percent of each player's salary into escrow.
Under the collective bargaining agreement, players put money into escrow in case salaries exceed 57 percent of hockey-related revenues. If that happens, money is refunded to the owners from the escrow account after the season.
NHL revenues reached a record $2.6 billion last season, but because of the uncertainty in today's economy and the decline in value of the Canadian dollar (down to 83 cents against the U.S. dollar Friday), Kelly proposed the record escrow number.

It was the tactic of the bosses during the recession of the eighties. A recession directly caused by the neo-con agenda of Reagan and Thatcher. And both of them challenged the unions with state power giving the signal to the bosses that concession bargaining was ok.Reagan attacked PATCO air contollers and Thatcher the powerful Mine Workers Union. And again during the debt nd deficit hysteria in Canada during the ninties concession bargaining was demanded by Bob Rae and the NDP in Ontario of public sector workers, and in Alberta with Safeways demanding concessions and a 5% roll back from UFCW leading to Ralph Klein calling for wage and benefit cuts to Alberta's public sector workers.

Canadian unions, like their counterparts in most other developed countries, were on the defensive from neoliberal policies of wage restraint and fiscal austerity long before the crisis hit. Struggling with hostile employers – whose anti-union repertoire includes shutting down locations where workers are involved in organizing drives, to back-to-work legislation against public sector strikers, the re-organization of work processes and the deployment of organizational forms that are resistant to the control of industrial and craft unionism – unions were pushed back and forced to accept concession bargaining. Thus, they may not be in a position to successfully resist employers' pressure for wage-cuts

During the fifties and sixties wages and benefits for private sector and public sector workers, who actively fought for the right to unionise, increased. With the oil crisis and post Viet-Nam war downturn in the economy a recession occurred and the State attacked workers rights through wage and price controls. The latter being far less effective than the former.

Taking its lead from the state right wing think tanks like the Cato Instititue and Fraser Institute promoted the idea that their neo-con state could reduce workers wages and benefits increasing the bottom line by attacking the uniion movement. Their ultimate plan has always been to smash unions but when this could not be done, the bosses demanded concessions and claw backs from workers. The bottom line was to increase profits, the threat was plant closure or lay offs.

Even as the economy boomed workers were asked for concessions and as taxpayers were asked to bail out companies like the Big Three automakers. Who came with cap in hand in the eighties to ask taxpayers (workers by any other name) to bail them out. And returned again over the past two years as the market for their SUV's and Trucks collapsed.

The recent downturn in the economy is only an excuse to demand more concessions, and whipsaw workers by moving jobs out of Canada. Here is another reason we need to nationalize the auto industry under workers control. Clearly tax investments as well as concessions do not mean job protection nor are they an industrial strategy.

Navistar to slash jobs at Ontario truck plant
TORONTO, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Navistar International Corp confirmed on Thursday it will lay off as many as 499 workers at its Chatham, Ontario, truck plant early next year due to deteriorating market conditions.
The union and the company squared off in 2003 when Navistar said it was going to close the plant in Chatham, which is about 65 kilometers (40 miles) east of Detroit and has a population of about 100,000, and move production to Mexico.
In the end, the CAW said it agreed to significant concessions to keep the plant in Ontario and the federal and provincial governments kicked in C$65 million ($54.6 million) to sweeten the pot.
"We had an incredible struggle five or six years ago in that community to save that manufacturing plant," said CAW President Ken Lewenza.
"We believe it (the layoff announcement) violates the spirit of the agreement that we struck," he said, adding that the company now plans to increase production in Mexico.

Ontario could claw back investment in Chatham truck plant
Navistar International Corp. "will pay" if hundreds of job cuts at its truck plant in southwestern Ontario violate the terms of a government bailout agreement it signed five years ago, Economic Development Minister Michael Bryant vowed Thursday.
The Illinois-based company (NYSE: NAV) received millions of taxpayer dollars to keep open the plant in Chatham, Ont., and will have to pay some of that back if it fails to live up to its end of the deal, Bryant said.
"There is an agreement in place. Taxpayer dollars have been spent," he said.
"Navistar has to fulfil their obligations, which is what we want them to do. But if they don't, we will enforce that contract and we will make them pay."
The job cuts announced Wednesday will affect 470 employees at the Navistar-owned International Truck and Engine Corp., which faced closure in 2003 during a downturn in the heavy-truck market.
The layoffs start Jan. 31 and will leave the plant with about 400 employees.
Bryant didn't provide any details Thursday about the amount of money the company received, the terms of the agreement or how much it may have to repay.
But the Canadian Auto Workers union says International Truck received a $60-million government bailout package to remain open, along with $44 million in annual concessions from workers.
Bryant called the job cuts "totally unacceptable" and warned that Navistar would face repercussions if the layoffs breach the contract it signed back in 2003 under Ontario's previous Conservative government.
"I'm sure that Navistar would not want to damage their international reputation by not responding to a government – provincial and federal – that provided millions of taxpayer dollars in exchange for investments and jobs," Bryant said.
"What's important here is that taxpayer dollars are spent as they are supposed to be. But there is no free lunch, I say to Navistar, when it comes to investments in the province of Ontario."
NDP Leader Howard Hampton dismissed Bryant's remarks as "nothing more than media spin" as the province continues to be hammered by massive job losses in its troubled manufacturing sector.
The governing Liberals invested $235 million to help General Motors (NYSE: GM), only to see thousands of workers laid off, he said.


tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, taxcredit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, Buzz Hargrove,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch says historians 'exaggerate' the importance of slavery and colonialism to the Britain's growth as a world power saying it was really down to 'ingenuity and industry'

By DAVID WILCOCK, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 04:20 EDT, 1 May 2024 | UPDATED: 04:21 EDT, 1 May 2024

Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch today accused historians of exaggerating the importance of colonialism and the slave trade to the growth of Britain as a world power.

The Business Secretary and Equalities Minister said that UK's economic success is instead the result of 'British ingenuity and industry' as she welcomed a new book by a rightwing think tank.

Despite the British Empire once being geographically the largest the world has ever seen, political economist Kristian Niemietz claimed Britain's growth was not financed by the slave trade or its imperial possessions

Writing for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Dr Niemietz has argued that colonialism made only a 'minor contribution' to Britain's economic development, 'and quite possibly none at all', with the benefits outweighed by the military and administrative cost of running an empire.

He added that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was no more important to the British economy than sheep-farming or brewing, and most trade was with North America and Western Europe rather than the colonies, even if some individuals did become 'very rich' from 'overseas engagement'.

Writing in support of the work, Mrs Badenoch said the book was 'a welcome counterweight to simplistic narratives that exaggerate the significance of empire and slavery to Britain's economic development'.

The Business Secretary and Equalities Minister said that UK's economic success is instead the result of 'British ingenuity and industry' as she welcomed a new book by a rightwing think tank.

Despite the British Empire once being geographically the largest the world has ever seen, political economist Kristian Niemietz claimed Britain's growth was not financed by the slave trade or its imperial possessions.

She said: 'This paper... shows it was British ingenuity and industry, unleashed by free markets and liberal institutions, that powered the Industrial Revolution and our modern economy.

'It is these factors that we should focus on, rather than blaming the West and colonialism for economic difficulties and holding back growth with misguided policies.'

But specialist historians have criticised the claims, saying they are based on 'cherry-picked' data and 'straw man' arguments.

In a blog post, Alan Lester, professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex, said: 'Historians have demonstrated in thousands of research publications that British investors' ability to appropriate land and subordinate people in some 40 overseas colonies, ensuring a supply of commodities such as tea, cotton, opium, rubber, meat and wool produced with free or low-cost labour, made a significant contribution to Britain's economic growth.

'Because this is so self-evident, to challenge it would be absurd.'

Prof Lester said the claim that military costs of empire outweighed the economic benefits was 'risible', and while the Government at times thought the cost of empire was too high, they mostly 'adjudged that the returns to British investors and settlers made such expenses worthwhile'.

He concluded: 'If Britons had continued to invest in the maintenance of colonial rule and the denial of self-determination to their colonial subjects against their own aggregate material interests for over 300 years, what does that say about the spirit of British entrepreneurship.'

Mrs Badenoch, who is seen as a frontrunner to replace Rishi Sunak if the Tories lose the next election, made a similar intervention on the subject earlier this month as she tries to woo grassroots Tories. 

In a speech she attacked claims Britain is only wealthy because of 'colonialism and white privilege'.

The Business Secretary told the CityUK international conference the establishment of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law was at the heart of the country's success.

She also hit out at calls for mandatory ethnicity quotas in the financial sector, jibing that her job often involved 'killing bad ideas'.

She highlighted that financial services 'exploded' after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II was deposed by Parliament and a swathe of reforms were brought in under Mary II and William of Orange.

Ms Badenoch said the ideas that took root in England eventually 'spread around the world, sometimes freely sometimes not, but eventually they do lift billions out of poverty and lead to unimagined wealth globally'.

THE ANTITODE TO THIS REVANCHISM IS:

Capitalism & Slavery PDF

Yale University

https://glc.yale.edu › pdf › capatlism_and_slavery

PDF

slave planter, in the picturesque nomenclature of the South, is a "land-killer." This serious defect of slavery can be counter- balanced and postponed for a ...

Capitalism and Slavery: Reflections on the Williams Thesis

By Guy Emerson Mount  November 21, 2015 1

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              The thing we call slavery and the thing we call capitalism both continue to provoke scholars with their incestuous relationship.  In 1944 Eric Williams published his classic Capitalism and Slavery which sparked a scholarly conversation that has yet to die down in 2015. In many ways, the debates it generated are more vibrant now than ever and promise to be a lasting touchstone for historians well into the future. As a new generation of young scholars insist upon blurring of the lines between our modern world’s two founding institutions, an old guard committed to the transformative power of emancipation similarly demand a careful specificity that will delineate and distinguish capitalism from slavery.   Few doubt any longer that an intersection, or at least a set of shared coordinates, exist between slavery and capitalism.  What is currently at stake, however, is exactly how wide and dense that relationship is and where its causal directionalities can be found.  Also at play are the very meanings of ‘capitalism’ and ‘slavery’ themselves, along with their disaggregated component parts.  Are the current scholarly conceptualizations of slavery and capitalism even productive frameworks to begin with? Do our very thoughts about slavery and capitalism simply obfuscate the underlying realities behind them— substituting an abstract set of intellectually imposed paradigms to construct two discrete categories where none might actually exist?   If not, then what, in fact, is the relationship between a more compartmentalized notion of slavery and capitalism and what kinds of assumptions are we consciously missing by framing the question in a way that asserts their separateness to begin with?

At its most basic, (and setting the question of semantics aside for a moment) the Williams thesis held that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery that they needed in order to bankroll their industrial revolution.  After providing the material foundation and the trade infrastructure that fueled Europe’s dramatic transformation towards modernity, slavery, according to Williams, began a rapid decline in the early nineteenth century. As the new global standard of industrial capitalism took hold, Williams found that antislavery sentiment conveniently accelerated in support of an apparently more efficient and less capital intensive method of commodity production.  Slavery, in short, was no longer needed. Ideological superstructure followed the economic base. Labor coercion continued postemancipation in the form of sharecropping and wage peonage as former slaves quickly experienced proletarianization. In the end, technological change, modern agricultural methods, and industrial factories supplanted traditional agrarianism and ended the older feudalistic relationships of slavery.

Nearly every aspect of this thesis has been scrutinized, amended, embellished, and/or overturned by subsequent scholarship.  Attempts to delineate the precise features of capitalism and slavery while tracing their relationships to one another over time also proliferated well beyond William’s original set of questions.  Perhaps the most sweeping account to recently push outward from the Williams thesis is The Making of New World Slavery (1997) by Robin Blackburn.  For Blackburn, slavery not only enabled European capitalism but also the entire cornucopia of European modernity itself.  In exploring the interdependence of slavery and capitalism it turns out that, for Blackburn, Williams actually did not go far enough.  Blackburn details how a vast cosmos of forces from modern nation-states, tax systems, financial industries, consumer economies, and a host of other political, ideological, economic, and cultural transformations were all built upon the backs of enslaved Africans.  Rather than finding a stark shift in the age of emancipation from slavery to capitalism, however, Blackburn describes an ever thickening dialectic between slavery and modernity at large, with capitalism serving as only one of many transformative processes that grew directly out of slavery between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.  While Blackburn would argue against the idea that slavery was unprofitable or on a path towards natural extinction at the dawn of the nineteenth century, he does find that Williams was generally correct in describing the role of slavery’s surplus capital in fueling industrialization in the European metropole.  With Blackburn, however, capitalism didn’t replace slavery, instead, slavery was infused into every nook and cranny of modern capitalism.  Whether any particular aspect of slavery at any given time or place crossed some scholarly threshold to qualify as certifiable ‘capitalism’ is not a primary concern for Blackburn. Yet drawing clear lines that define where one system stops and where the other begins seems almost inescapable if one does speak of them as two separate things at all, as Blackburn clearly does.

Yet, Blackburn’s larger synthesis rested upon several previous scholars whose variations on the Williams thesis were also less concerned with these semantics and more interested in the nuts and bolts of slavery as the starting point.  Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman produced a detailed economic analysis in 1974—Time on the Cross—indicating that nineteenth century slavery was highly profitable, on the rise, and able, at the least, to compete favorably with agricultural wage labor and yeomen farming if not full scale mechanized agribusiness.   Even though these finding may have shown that Williams got the driving force of antislavery thought and emancipation wrong (at least on economic grounds) it amplified the powerful and durable effects of slavery on the material development of capitalism and the modern world.  By demonstrating how closely slave labor resembled wage labor (at least when analyzed financially for profitability) Fogel and Engerman opened the door for Blackburn and many others to explore the fluidity between slavery and capitalism as conceptual means of organizing labor.

Yet slavery (however modern or traditional it may or may not have been) was much more than a system of labor management.  It was also a property regime, a social and cultural generator, a legal category, and an ideological touchstone that often drove national politics. Notions of freedom during the American Revolution, minstrel-watching white immigrants, and black nationalist projects, all at different times engaged ideologically with slavery as a discursive and cultural category.  Also important was the connection between capitalism as a consumptive enterprise and slavery as a site that produced consumer goods for the metropole.  Sindey Mintz wrote a truly benchmark book in the field of commodity studies that led historians to think increasingly about this connection between consumer capitalism, slavery, and material culture in general.   In Sweetness and Power (1985) Mintz argues that European industrialization, urbanization, and class formation were all fueled by sugar from slave plantations.  Consumers in Europe were at once purchasing an abstract commodity removed from the brutal system that produced it, while at the same time enmeshing themselves in a transatlantic trade network that tied the daily nourishment that they put into their bodies directly to the institution of slavery and the slaves that suffered to produce it.  Surplus calories from sugar thus combined with surplus capital from slavery to provide energy not only to fuel capitalism’s industrial march but also its expanding culture of unbridled consumption.  Slavery consumed slaves in order to produce consumer goods, all while providing a market for finished manufactured goods from European centers.  Slaves would be compelled to consume before they were themselves consumed.

In this way, we see that standing at the center of the Williams thesis are living, breathing slaves and the question of emancipation.  Despite William’s best efforts, capitalism to a certain extent often appears as a liberating force in his account rather than the postemancipation nightmare that it became for the vast majority of the formerly enslaved.  While Williams is certainly critical of the kind of exploitation that the shift to wage labor entailed, his thesis still depends upon capitalism’s invisible hand and the purported virtues of free labor that were espoused by abolitionists and helped cause the end of slavery.  Like many contemporary lay-interpretations of the Civil War, Williams found two competing systems, capitalism and slavery, tangling horns and duking it out.   Capitalism ultimately won because it was in some (vague) way a ‘better’ system by which to organize an extractive economy.  While the value of self-ownership and the end of state-sanctioned slavery cannot be overstated from the perspective of former slaves, Williams’s largely unintended valorization of postemancipation capitalism is a problem in and of itself.  Additionally, with the presumption of slavery’s unprofitability now largely discredited, his causal argument regarding emancipation and the abolitionist thought preceding it still leaves these question largely unexplained.

Combining the ever-compelling Du Boisian thesis of a self-emancipating general strike with a new twist on the old William’s thesis, Thomas Holt’s The Problem of Freedom (1992) offers a potential way out of this dilemma.  Emancipation, for Holt, involves the constant agitation of slaves forcing liberal British capitalists to acknowledge the ideological incompatibility of an Adam Smith inspired free market capitalism with slave labor.  In an argument that also speaks to Edmond Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), and American emancipation in general, Holt argues that freedom (and as well as various forms of unfreedom) were a constant problematic for an emerging capitalist system.  In a system that claimed to believe in free markets populated by non-coerced individuals pursuing their own economic best interests, the freedom to not participate in such an endeavor to begin with was an impulse that had to be quelled at all costs.  Liberal capitalism thus insisted upon the personal freedom of workers all while enforcing strongly coercive labor control mechanisms to keep that freedom at bay (along with any genuine democratic yearnings that might threaten ‘the free market’).  As this moral and logical dilemma worked its way through British and Jamaican politics, emancipation did not require slavery to be unprofitable, only unpopular.  In a nuance not evident in William’s original account, Holt shows how capitalism was as much a political ideology as an economic philosophy.  Slavery, profitable or not, ended for one simple reason in Jamaica: it was voted out of existence.   By tracing the complex political negotiations that got the nation to a vote for emancipation, Holt frees the process of emancipation from being characterized as some kind of a natural death through market forces.  The political struggles between former slaves and former owners, however, were not settled by emancipation but continued long after the coming of freedom.  Under the banner of capitalism, further agitation on behalf of black Jamaicans once again pressured the colonial overseer to formally relinquish legal possession of the island’s peoples and expand the meaning of freedom a second time in favor of independence to match the then current British political rhetoric.  Predictably, mother England responded in kind by installing a neocolonial regime to insure that people of African descent not take their newly earned freedom too far (again).  For Holt, slavery and capitalism as distinct categories need to be disaggregated into their component parts (labor, politics, economics, etc.) with a firm eye towards everyday people and their experiences on the ground.  What slaves, former slaves, and their descendants actually experienced is much more important than what name (capitalism and/or slavery) scholars use to describe these experiences.

At the same time, relationships between the various aspects of slavery and the many forms of capitalism cannot be dismissed as mere scholarly abstractions.  Describing historical contexts accurately and understanding what his actually happening at any given spatial and temporal location is a fundamental prerequisite for good history writing.  Details matter but so do producing useful generalizations that make sense of the world, and at their best, offer a springboard for positive political programs.  Much of the recent scholarship has approached the connection between slavery and capitalism through an admirable critique of twenty-first century capitalism.  By demonstrating capitalism’s deep roots and operational similarities to a chattel slavery (in a way that even the most committed laissez faire capitalists would find repulsive) historians are offering a new moral compass to anti-capitalist struggles taking place around the world.   This move has the added benefit of connecting the African diaspora to the history of global capitalism while at the same time refusing to allow contemporary politics to dismiss slavery as a thing of the past that is best forgotten as a failed project of a bygone era.  But is this good history?  By brining slavery directly into the present, the allure of an ever-thinning line between slavery and capitalism is difficult to resist.   Several unsettling ramifications of this categorical collapse are readily apparent. For one, such a rendering of ‘slave racial capitalism’ poses serious challenges to not only for the meaning of emancipation but also for the underlying cause of the Civil War.  Additionally, it also may unwittingly undermine a full accounting of the distinctive horrors of chattel slavery by collapsing such experiences into just one of many forms of capitalist exploitation.

Writing in the wake of Blackburn and Holt’s reformulation of the Williams thesis, Walter Johnson brought the connection between slavery and capitalism to one of its most intimate and well-studied junctures: the master-slave relationship.  Arguing directly against Eugene Genovese’s long standing contention that slavery was a fundamentally pre-capitalist enterprise that operated hegemonically through a dialectical system of paternalism, Johnson in Soul By Soul (1999) found slavery itself to be thoroughly capitalistic and governed by the brutal realities of the chattel principle through the slave marketplace rather than any traditional patronage relationship.  By focusing on the actual lived realities of slaves being bought and sold, Johnson also called attention to the consumptive nature of slavery. Slaves not only produced commodities but were consumed as commodities.  White planters bought more than just labor on the auction block.  They learned through their purchases how to fulfill their wildest fantasies in a theoretically always open and seemingly limitless marketplace.  They discovered how to affirm their identities based on who they bought.  They taught their children how to ignore any moral inhibitions that might curtail their buying habits or dilute their purchase as anything less than the unrestricted orgy of consumption and self-indulgence that they were designed to be.  As for slaves, Johnson found that they were fully aware of these market realities and skillfully manipulated them to fullest extent possible.  Slaves knew they were little more than a person with a price to their owners but also knew that, as such, they were a valuable financial asset and a crucial source of cultural capital for white owners.  Slavery as a property regime was not only prototypically capitalistic for Johnson, but slaves themselves were the idealized embodiments of not only capital but also labor and consumer products in a capitalist economy.

Johnson’s work inspired a number of other historians most notably Seth Rockman in his 2008 book Scraping By.   Moving Johnson’s story temporally from the antebellum era back to the early national period, Rockman takes Johnson’s welding together of slavery and capitalism to its logical conclusion by exploring the wide continuum between slave and wage labor in Baltimore.  While still concerned with the idea of slaves as human property Rockman is more interested in how slave labor was organized alongside the poverty inducing wage labor that also characterized early Baltimore and, by extension early America.  Rockman found highly entrepreneurial capitalists designing a flexible labor market that depended on a vast spectrum of unfreedoms from poverty stricken white day laborers to legally captive black slaves.  Many would accuse Rockman of skirting the truly distinctive horrors of slavery and the special burden of blackness that people of African descent experienced but when looking strictly at labor procurement, employers seemed to make little distinction between free workers, rented slaves, or bounded slaves except as it related to particular job requirements and capital availability.   Rockman contends that this model in Baltimore was a microcosm for the nation as a whole.  When viewed nationally, producers in early America exploited a mixed labor force using different degrees of free and slave labor as local circumstances, geography, and conditions dictated over time.  For Rockman, there is little doubt that the demands of capitalism governed life throughout America. What is noteworthy in his account is the idea that capitalists pragmatically switched back and forth between slave labor when it suited their purposes and wage labor or hired slaves when that seemed to make more sense.  Overall, wage labor didn’t replace slave labor in Baltimore or in America before the Civil War.  Both operated side by side on a sliding scale for most of American history. The lack of any real freedom at the heart of slavery was never altogether lost on those trying to eke out a living on starvation wages.  This doesn’t mean capitalism is slavery but it does mean that everyday workers in their most desperate moments might reasonably question exactly where they stood along the continuum of unfreedom.

Where does all this leave the history of capitalism and the study of slavery?  Can the master narrative of “slave racial capitalism,” as Walter Johnson described it in his 2013 book River of Dark Dreams, be adequately integrated into the historiography of American imperialism, world history, and geopolitical relations?  Where does this leave the more parochial fields of American and African American history?  On this final point Seth Rockman and Sven Beckert published a New York Times essay in 2011 implying to a general audience that the convergence of slavery and capitalism might necessitate a dramatic rethinking of the cause of the Civil War. Just as Genovese had wondered a generation earlier what a full blown capitalist South might have meant for the Confederate project, Rockman and Beckert—convinced of just such a reality—see a huge hole in current Civil War historiography.  Slavery might not have been its cause.  If a collapsed slavery/capitalism was a national institution, then what was the real rub between the North and the South? Why did capitalist slaveholders still find a reason to secede from their Northern capitalist partners in crime when both were capitalists and both benefited from slavery?  In a new way, Genovese’s old question still stands. If capitalism and slavery were really part of the same globally connected economic order—and essentially compatible with one another—why was the South so resistant to wage labor?  Perhaps more importantly, if James Oakes’s new book Freedom National is to be believed, why was the North so intent on abolishing an aspect of the wider system that they profited so handsomely from?

Part of the answer may involve a return to ideology. The material realities of trade networks, commodity markets, and labor struggles can at times prove largely out of step with how everyday people perceived these forces through thick ideological lenses.  Politics can zig while economics zag. Understanding how people thought about slavery and capitalism might ultimately be just as important as how these systems functioned empirically.  Perhaps a study similar in form to Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract (1998) might help bridge the gap between intellectual, cultural, social, and economic history while insisting on the centrality of emancipation as a transformative event in American life.  Thinking about capitalism as a worldview and political ideology as Holt and others have done in different contexts may also help answer the Civil War and emancipation questions.  A system that was profitable, expanding, and in accord with its Northern business associates might still have seen itself as otherwise while being seen as something different once the complex dance of electoral politics, popular culture, and finicky ideologies start to move.

Lastly, more work needs to be done on how African Americans themselves perceived and interacted with various capitalist forces.  Initial evidence shows that black slaveholders, for example, may have been working on an alternate brand of capitalism—and consequently an alternative modernity—of their own design.  Dylan Penningroth in Claims of Kinfolk (2002) details the informal economy and unique understandings of property that African Americans developed during slavery and that were carried forward after emancipation as a means of challenging dominate conceptualizations of property and ownership in American law and the marketplace at large.  Studies on black nationalism and the reimagining of Booker T. Washington’s self-help philosophy also point to a distinctive brand of black capitalism that gave different meanings to an otherwise disempowering economic regime.  Adam Green’s Selling the Race (2007) brings this tradition firmly into the twentieth century as he points out the often conflicted predicament that African Americans faced as they tried to use their power as consumers and producers in a segregated marketplace to harness the reins of capitalism in the hope of racial uplift.  Even in the post-industrial era, hip hop’s brazen black consumption aesthetic and entrepreneurial spirit  might be read as an attempt to make a favorable deal with the devil in world where power continues to be measured in dollars and cents.

By way of a tentative conclusion, slavery and capitalism might best be described as inseparable yet also irreducible to one another.  They must be understood as both distinctive yet permanently connected.  Certain aspects of each system overlap with one another while other parts of each system seem to stand apart.  Yet thinking of either institution as a fully coherent system with a stable set of principles, ideological foundations, or fixed operational protocols largely misses the point.  It would also be ahistorical.  The contingencies, possibilities, and fluid variations within capitalism and slavery mean that both ideas themselves must be described with extreme care and with a full appreciation of their internal complexities and diverse elements which shift dramatically over different temporal and spatial domains.   While our current political needs are unquestionably urgent, the narrative of slavery and capitalism must not just be a useful story, but a precise one as well.  Seeing connections has its advantages.  Yet understanding the incomparable horrors of slavery and the transformative rupture of emancipation does as well.  In the rush to write ‘the new history of capitalism,’ historians, in short, would be wise  to also remember its past.

Copyright © AAIHS. 

Guy Emerson Mount

Guy Emerson Mount is an assistant professor of American History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University focusing on the intersection of Black transnationalism, Western modernity, and global empires. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2018 where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Social Sciences. He joined the faculty at Wake Forest University after previously teaching at Auburn University. Follow him on Twitter @GuyEmersonMount.