Did Slavery Drive the US Economy? – James Oakes

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Historian James Oakes critiques the 1619 Project’s assertion that Southern slavery fueled Northern prosperity and turned the US into a “financial colossus” and discusses how we can better understand the relationship between slavery and American capitalism.

For the Record is a Jacobin channel miniseries dedicated to debunking historical myths and distortions through conversations with scholars on the left.

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Read Oakes’ article in Catalyst:
https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/what-the-1619-project-got-wrong

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21 COMMENTS

  1. All Americans did not benefit from slavery in the 1800’s but 3/5 is in the constitution, 14 amendments allow for involuntary servitude, tobacco was used to finance the war of independence to France.

  2. Sooooo…soberly accessing that Slavery was the foundation of the 13 colonies and then the country gets in the way of your post-Marxist anti-capitalism narrative. The hammer is capitalism. The anvil in the proletariat. Black people are the thing in between the hammer and the anvil. Until you all are willing to state that Liberals and Conservatives. Capitalists and Socialists…are just different sides of the same coin.

  4. James Oakes and Miss Thang are DEAD wrong and in denial like most YT on the left. You want to dominate the narrative and sweep all your dirt under the rug–settler colonialist. I know I won't listen to Custer, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson's descendants, who are invaders, genocidal maniacs, and enslavers. Yes, the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of the indigenous peoples of AmerKKK is the original sin –you can deny it all day long, but that doesn't make it accurate. You're all settler colonialists and immigrants reaping all the benefits of my ancestor's blood. All you lefties were/are in on the heist–stop lying. Face the facts. It's about how your YT and "wanna be YT) class received all those stolen goods. Give it back then.

  6. Howard Zinn wrote, "There could not have been any industrialization in north America and Europe if there were no plantation. And if there were no slavery and there could not have been any plantation

  10. Jens a closet racist too we are all waking up and those who pretended to continue the exploitation of others will pay and if they die before hand, then their descendants will be held accountable simple

  13. Bottom line we will never know if America would of been a economic powerhouse without slavery because it happened. The immigrants that came to the New World struggled to survive, they didn’t want to survive like the indigenous people, (living with nature) they wanted riches, and to conquer the new world. Many new settlers were not agriculturally knowledgeable or had the strength to work the land, so naturally they had to force a group of people to do those things for them. Whether some immigrants did not personally take part in the disgrace of Slavery, they benefited from a system of economic development which they did not benefit from in the old world.

  14. Thank you Jen! And I agree with the sentiment that the eradication of slavery has had a far greater positive historical impact on our society than the negative impact wrought by slavery.

  15. Slavery definitely drove wages down… not up. Of course, that assumes a kind of a perfect nationwide labor market. That's a bit too much of an assumption.

  16. This could have been a brietbart video. Slavery was a billion dollar industry. It would be comparable to the the fortune 500 companies of today. Slaves did a lot more than produce cotton also, they worked in factories, farms, livestock, metal refining, mining and on and on. This video is either evidence of white supremacy of the jacobin channel, or it's evidence of they're utter stupidity.

  17. Yeah the 1619 Project's and others claims regarding slavery and capitalism are Fraincoix Lyotardian based post modernist garbage. It's beyond comprehension that these assertions are even tolerated much leas celebrated but if you believe the big lie is justified if it ends systems of oppression then it's all fair game.

    But it's short sided because these claims are easily countered and unfortunately if the big lie is justified as a narrative as long as it fights subjectively ascribed narratives of oppression than ANYONE is justified in subjectively ascribing ANY narrative as oppressive in ANY circumstance and that's how you get lie after lie after lie from multiple ideological and socio political frameworks each escalating the BS factor in an endless feedback loop of horse s**t.

    No framework has done more harm to social change to address material conditions than Lyotardian post modernism. It's a f**king cancer.

  19. The key point, expressed as "although cotton was the country's main export it accounted for less than 5% of the nation's GDP prior to the civil war" would have been better given in greater detail and hammered home. Using > rather than < in the graphic (at 1.51) was stupid. Otherwise I welcome this video. I think slave cotton helped the US economy, but without it America would still have become the greatest manufacturing country by 1900.

  20. Truly an oversimplification. 1) It ignores labor value and asset leverage. 2) It assumes industrialization occurred in a vacuum independent of and unrelated to the exiting economy. It's like concluding that Amazon's growth and market valuation is unrelated to obsolete technology it no longer uses.

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