I'm pretty sure that the US was a capitalist country when slavery was legal, it's only government regulation that stopped it.
I am not too sure about that. A market economy? Yes. But what I know as Capitalism depends on a completely different organization of labor, namely "free" workers to create a market for labor itself. That was true for non-enslaved/white workers at that time but I don't think it makes sense to say it about a whole society when its not true for such a big percentage of the economy.
Re:Amazon's German Workers Strike
by Houshalter on Monday December 16, 2013 @05:02PM
(#6918150)
The difference is slaves were forced to work and the slave master literally did make the slaves' lives worse off.
Yes, nearly everybody know that. I wrote hours ago that think working conditions in capitalism and slavery are very different, in general far better in the former, but that you could use the argumentation in favor of capitalism the parent used in favor of slavery too.
You realize that this is the labour dispute version of "literally hitler" right?
You realize that you are using a meta version of a meme instead of an actual argument?
The bad thing about "[literally] Hitler!" is that, most of the time, trivializes the Holocaust. In my "labour dispute version" of it that would have meant a trivialization of slavery which I tried to avoid in the sentence prefixed with "EDIT:". If you think I still did it please write it and add some argumentation.
One could use that argument, and the rest of the argumentation, to praise slavery. I mean it provided food, shelter and hardly anyone went on strike, right?
EDIT: I don't mean to downplay slavery. Capitalism with all it's faults is far better than slavery or even just feudalism in most or all aspects. I just think that the argument I responded to is severely flawed: Not going on strike might be a sign of satisfaction but it might as well be a sign of fear and/or a lack of alternatives.