PROPOSITION 3: Slavery arose from, and was the logical consequence of, capitalism. This theory is based on the undoubted fact that the cotton cloth business–from the growing of cotton to the sale of cotton clothing– was the world’s first globalized and truly capitalist industry. Is it an accurate statement, as applied to capitalism as a whole?
No–it isn’t even accurate as to agriculture as a whole. Slavery doesn’t make economic sense on subsistence farms, and it is not necessary on farms on which technology permits the replacement of a large labor force by machines. It certainly doesn’t apply to factories, which have never depended on slave labor. Any suggestion that industrial workers were and are just “wage slaves” focuses solely on the imbalance of negotiating power between capital and labor and ignores the profound difference between an individual actor with all of the rights of a human being and a person treated as livestock by the law.
Cotton production is an outlier; the large, docile workforce is still required today, even after centuries of technological improvements. It is a single globalized business out of many. It does not stand for capitalism as a whole.