True, except, we gave ourselves room to be more than 40% wrong. We change. Not well, we’re not even good at it.
I have no idea what you meant with that. I’m not saying this to be snarky, I really didn’t understand what you’re getting at
Not op, but I was thinking they were referring to the process to amend the constitution
Founding Fathers, who were mostly abolitionists: “Slavery is surely a dying institution, we can just put it on the back burner and let it wither away, that way we can avoid a civil war.”
In their meager defense, they were correct at the time, slavery was a dying institution. It wasn’t until the later invention of the cotton gin that slavery exploded in profit. By then, it was too late. The economic interests of the slavers had grown and entrenched, and the war became inevitable.
Not to defend the slavers, or their advocates among the founders, just to explain the founders’ reasoning a little more.
For further reading, the Wikipedia page for the Cotton Gin goes into some detail.
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day. The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. The invention of the cotton gin led to increased demands for slave labor in the American South, reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century. The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe’s first agricultural powerhouse”.
Huh. You’d think the cotton gin would’ve allowed them to get by with fewer slaves.
That would’ve maintained production at the level it already was (and also reduce prices and profits).
Under capitalism, you can’t just maintain production. You gotta EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND.
See Wage Labor and Capital for an explanation for why this must be true, if anyone doubts this statement.
You don’t have to subscribe to Marxian economics for this to be true, though Marx and those who listened to him are the only people who dwell on the topic for long.
Part #1 of my statement is pretty much self-evident. Part #2 is the very premise of market competition, no?
You don’t have to, no, but Marx makes a compelling case and explains it simply, and thoroughly. It’s easy to think that Capitalists can just maintain production, but this doesn’t bear out in reality.
Additionally, Marx points out what are the necessary consequences of these forces.
