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you can't separate the civil war from a war over which type of economy would be dominant, which form of exploitation would dominate---wage slavery as over against legal slavery---any more than you can separate it from questions of state's rights.
none of the claims that slavery "would have died out on its own" mean anything. when the yes men advanced that argument a couple years ago, they did so as a satire. the sensibility they were satirizing was the one that makes such a claim seem reasonable, as if capitalism was somehow not involved with the slave trade itself (false) as if capitalism was not involved with the plantation system of production (false) as if that system represented some kind of atavism (false) waiting to be rescued from itself by the Heroic White Knight of capitalism.
but what's most ridiculous about this is the severing of the civil war from reconstruction.
if you look at that period, the south did win.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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