People say the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, but wasn't slavery basically feudalism...

People say the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, but wasn't slavery basically feudalism? Was it an extra-brutal midway point between feudalism and capitalism?

I guess so, never occurred to me.

Good post!

Slavery is an economic system unlike feudalism that is based on both the superstructure and base of society. This is the reason why we can have slavery still applied in middle-east these days where as cast-system of feudalism has broken away in these countries(with expectation of monarchy and high nobility)

Wat. Feudalism is an economic system that was maintained by ideology as well…

Wat again. Some of the ME states with the most slavery, such as Saudi Arabia, are also the most feudalistic.

Capitalism with slavery is not feudalism.

feudalism = base
chattel slavery = superstructure

There were essentially two Americas for a long time before and after the revolution. The industrial north and the agrarian south. In terms of world politics and economics cotton was important but the south was always seen as being subordinate to the economic interests of the north/new England. So you could say it was capitalism and feudalism at the same time because the norths economy was a modern capitalist economy and the south was the bread and cotton basket of feudalism.

Also by your definition I could say capitalism has never existed because sweat shops and prison labor are just slavery by another name and capitalism is heavily reliant on both. I don't have a problem with that being the case definition wise just pointing it out.

The American Revolution wasn't really a revolution, in the historical sense of the word. It was simply a case of a people forming a separate nation, who wished to govern themselves. The structure of society remained basically intact before and after.

No. The relations of production are the base of society. It is possible for a base to comprise more than one system. Serfdom existed side-by-side with limited (proto-capitalist) commodity production, for example. And ancient slavery, which was mostly urban, was coupled with a rural agricultural economy similar to the manor system.

No, not at all. The economy of the antibellum South was not feudal nor was it its own seperate entity. The South served as a resource extraction node in an Atlantic capitalist network. Cotton and other cash crops were grown in the South before being shipped to either the North or to Europe where they would be put through an industrial process before being sold as a finished product. The South was what banana republics are today.

I think its fair to say it was, but the civil war was even more-so.
The north wanted to push wage slavery into the south and expand markets - slaves don't have money to spend on products for example.
While slavery was wrong and the south was spooked as fucked, many new this was what was coming so its part of why they fought so hard to get away from the claws of the factory owners.

Chattel slavery is not culture or ideology or whatever, it is a concrete relation of labor and property… it is squarely in the base.

No, wage slavery has definite distinctions from traditional slavery.

Was it market feudalism?

I wouldn't really consider either of those wage slavery though.

I guess that prison labor at least can be seen as a unique feature of capitalism given the protestant work ethic and consequentalist ideals.

Slavery and feudalism are two different relations. Feudalism bound the peasantry to the land as peasants by law had to live were their lord told them to live and in return had to rent to their lord (with the rent and debt determined by their lord). This meant what gave the landed aristocracy power over the peasantry was rent and being able to bound them to the land.

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Oh, I wasn't thinking about prison labor, just sweatshops. Prison labor is a lot closer to traditional slavery I guess.

So apparently I can post whatever I want, except what I really want to post. Rad.

No. Feudalism implies serfdom . Slavery and serfdom are very different, though they are both forms of exploitation (along with capitalism).
No, but the agricultural slavery of black Africans was unique, in its basis on race, in its brutality , in its rural character, and in its scale.

just post a pastebin or screenshot then

Early America was not one single system but a combination of early capitalism and slavery. The whole concept that an entire country or region is going to be one, and only one form of economic relation is sheer autism. The economic procession of history can't be taken as some literal guide on how things are exactly going to go, it's a much broader look at how history slowly pushes itself. That doesn't mean it's never going to fall back, or anomalies won't happen, but rather that these things are going to eventually be overcome by the long process of human history.


Feudalism in the US took the form of sharecropping. This is, actually, a great point to see how superstructure and base work together. The feudalist system in Europe attempted to defend and justify itself using divine right, while the sharecropping system used the much more acceptable defense of property rights.

It would probably be in our good interest to use this as a stepping stone towards showing how property rights can be used to trap people, seeing how the US Supreme Court ruled that it was effectively slavery by a different name.

You know sharecropping still exists in the US, right?

It was a bourgeois revolution but the bourgeoisie were the progressive class back then. Dialectics m8.

That is correct. It was a part of a trans-Atlantic system.

It wasn't a revolution of any kind, bourgeois or otherwise. It was a nationalist rebellion.

...

Ignore the flag, I had it on because I couldn't post and I thought I might have accidentally been flagged as a bot, so I picked the first flag I clicked on.
Anyway, it's true. Revolutions, in the historical sense, change the fundamental structures of the societies in which they occur. A bunch of colonies fighting for independence, but keeping the same type of society they had before, is not a revolution.