Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person – David Korten
Southern ownership of human beings as private property has informed the most extreme legal vision of property in the world. This article discusses the following two books:
Ned and Constance Sublette. The American Slave Coast – a History of the Slave- Breeding Industry. Lawrence Hill. 2016.
Edward E Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told – Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books. 2014
Both books are big and far-ranging books that detail the economics of slavery and slave-breeding, which was originally based in Virginia and Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay. To document the full moral depravity of men who would rape their slaves for profit, and sell the children for interest on their loans, the authors cover the entire history of capitalist slavery in the US up to the end of the Civil War. Baptist’s book covers the same period with a slightly different perspective.
By 1860, the 4 million slaves were far and away the largest form of capital and private property both in the South and in the whole United States. Slavers had carefully cultivated and expanded this pool of capital since the mid-1600s. Though private property was worshipped both North and South, the rise of slaves as property informs the particularly aggressive form of American private property.
The Latin model of slavery in the Americas, the one that prevailed south of the United States, protected the integrity of the plantation as landed private property by treating slaves “as immovable assets, or real estate, which could not be separated from the plantation as a whole” (S, p 135). The tendency was to maintain family ties among the slaves.
“The other, the Anglo-Saxon model, protected the creditor by treating slaves as chattel, or disposable personal property, like furniture, and allowed the dismantling of a plantation for the instant conversion of its labor force into cash, breaking up family relations among the enslaved wherever it was financially expedient.” (S, p 136)
The chattel principle created local and global markets for slaves and made creditors more secure in investing in slaves. Slaves were invariably the most valuable asset a planter possessed. Thus in the South the rights of property were sacrosanct and absolutized as the foundation of society.
Property Rights
Antebellum slavery was a set of property rights that made laborers into “financial products: merchandise, cash, productive capital, collateral and (financial) bonds” (S, p 39). Slaves were also commonly rented out for private profit. Slaves, of course, were used to generate revenue when sold as cash. But they were also risk-free collateral to generate credit for the planters in a system where credit drove the whole process and cash money was scarce.
The word “credit” comes from the Latin “credere”, meaning “to believe”. As we saw in the 2008 financial crash, as long as people “believe” that they can turn their credit into money, it is possible to extend paper promises far, far beyond the actual money supply. The financialization of enslaved people made them fundamental to the economy of the credit-driven slave society. If the crop failed, the laborers could be seized and sold on the open market. The value of slaves regulated the price of all the rest of the slaver’s property (S, p 40).
Thomas Jefferson renovated Monticello (near Charlottesville!) by mortgaging the slaves who did the work. During 1859, Louisiana slavers raised $25.7 million, 75% of the value of the cotton crop, by mortgaging their slaves (B, p 353) Like house mortgages today, slaves were security to guarantee the loans. If people were money, children were “interest”. In many Mediterranean languages, the word for “interest” literally means “offspring”. One function of money is that it serves as a unit of account. Slaves were the savings accounts.
“The reason slaves could not legally be created equal was not merely that appropriating one hundred percent of their labor was wildly profitable. Nor was it the many forms of comfort and pleasure they afforded their owners, nr even the owners’ routinely expressed fear that if freed, the blacks would do to the whites what the whites had done to them. It was that attributing fully human characteristics to the enslaved would have debased the coin of the Southern realm. The four million enslaved in 1860 were not merely a labor force; they were the South’s capital stock…. Whether a slave child was ever sold on the market or not, his or her birth created money, in the form of credit, so the growth to four million enslaved people was in itself an economic expansion. The bottleneck in the creation of this unique form of money was the capitalized womb.” (S, p 44-45)
The Constitution’s notorious three-fifths clause was explicitly designed to allow the South to vote their wealth, making slaves “a unit of account for what was literally political capital.” (S, p 43) The Constitution was explicitly made voting power based on wealth. However this applied to only one kind of wealth – slaves. No Northern state had its principle form of wealth used as a basis for representation in government.
Beginning in the 1820s, William Lloyd Garrison regularly made rousing speeches against slavery on July 4. As part of the presentation, Garrison would burn the US Constitution. This dramatic gesture emphasized what the Constitution actually did to consolidate slaves as money.
“The three-fifths clause did not mean, as some have complained, that the enslaved were considered only three-fifths of a human being. Politically, the enslaved were zero-fifths human. The three-fifths clause was a politically acceptable accounting gimmick for figuring out how much to rig the national vote on behalf of the slaveholders….” (S, p 292)
The Constitution completed the transformation of slaves into money that supplements their use as a unit of account. Slaves also satisfied the other conditions of money:
“Condition One, medium of exchange: from their first appearance in the colonies, slaves could be exchanged for anything money could buy, and moreover were a fundamental part of the collateral that numerous distinct credit systems were based on.
“Condition Two, retains its value (thereby becoming a store of value – sm): by virtue of owning descendants in perpetuity, slave property did not die, but had eternal life the way real estate or gold does, and even provided an annual increase to counter interest and inflation.” (S, p 292)
Contracts and Speculation
As the Constitution was being debated in 1789, the race was on to extend slavery westward all the way to the Pacific Coast. Slave markets rose in New Orleans and Natchez to mobilize the productive power to clear the dense vegetation of “Yazoo” – Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Georgia claimed the land westward to the Pacific Coast. The state legislature engaged in two scams to sell what was billed as the best land in the world to investors and speculators. At best this land was infertile pine-barrens. Due to fraudulent practices, most of this property was simply fictitious. This scheme soon collapsed.
In 1795, Spain surrendered its claims to the territory; the Georgia legislaturethen “sold” 35 million acres of “Yazoo” to another set of pigeons. Most of these paper fortunes were made by New England land companies, infuriating the Georgia electorate of property-owing white males. The following year the legislature overturned the land grant. Prominent Southern Federalists in Congress, however, blocked the repeal. The legal dispute went to the Supreme Court, where, in 1810, Chief Justice John Marshall decided the issue.
Whether or not the people of Georgia could overturn the original sale – even though much of it was recognized as fraudulent – clashed with the issue of how far a contract could legally go. Marshall, holding that the contract clause of the Constitution made the rights of property absolute, held that a contract is inviolable. Though Marshall’s decision never mentioned slave property, the implication was clear: legislatures or any government body had no rights to take slaves away from their owners.
By the 1830s, the land rush was on and white males demanded ever more credit, taking on ever more risk, to build southwest empires out of credit and enslaved human beings. By 1832, the Bank of the United States lending to the lower Mississippi Valley was 16 times greater than in 1824 (B, p 238). Most people were leery of paper money and little metal currency was available. So slaves were collateral that guaranteed the loans. The 2 million slaves of that time were the biggest pool of collateral in the US, if not the world. They were the 20% of all wealth in the US and the largest pool of liquid wealth (B, p 245). By that time, Southern cotton was the world’s most valuable commodity and the driving force of industrialization and the expansion of capitalism (not to mention child labor) in both the North and in Europe, particularly England.
In 1827, Louisiana slaver, JB Moussier created a new concept in debt, a then-new financial instrument. What if slaves could be used to guarantee local bonds to Northern and European capitalists? Slaves had already been mortgaged; now they were bundled together to securitize the bonds. Louisiana created a property bank where the property was slaves.
“Tens of thousands of enslaved people named in (financial – sm) documents were still used as collateral mortgaged to a lender… but the banks’ bonds securitized the slave mortgages. Securitization is the pooling of debt from many borrowers so that it can be sold off in uniform chunks, reducing the risks inherent in lending to one person at a time. Now, all bond-buyers would share in the profits… while being shielded against the kind of catastrophic individual losses a single lender would suffer if, say, a borrower’s slaves died en masse at a malarial-infested camp, or floods destroyed a cotton crop.” (B, p 247)
“A British bank could now sell a completely commodified slave: not a particular individual who could die or run away, but a bond that was the right to a one-slave sized slice of the pie made from the income of thousands of slaves. (B, p 248)
Then the kicker: these bonds would be guaranteed by the State of Louisiana. In other words, the people would be in hock to cover any losses. We all have immediate experience with this form of financial chicanery because the 2008 financial crisis came from bundling home mortgages into financial instruments. And again, as in the South almost 200 years ago, the American people had to cover the loans.
Slavery and Corporations
Like in 2008, the orgy of slave credit ended in financial disaster – the Panic of 1837. By that time, Abolitionist petitions were flooding Congress to ban slavery from federal territory and end the slave trade. John C Calhoun, the theoretician of slavery, from South Carolina, turned the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, into an absolute defense of slavery. The Amendment states that “no one can be deprived of his property without due process of law”.
Calhoun declared that due process could only mean a trial by jury. Therefore government had no power to prevent people from buying or selling property. Now slavers were protected from legislatures and state mandated emancipation was illegal, and any limitations to the extension of slave property into the Territories was a violation of the Constitution. This was the doctrine of “substantive due process.”
“After the Civil War, pro-big business legal thinkers from the North would, ironically enough, take up a version of Calhoun’s idea. From the 1890s through the New Deal era, the Supreme Court repeatedly used due process to strike down legislative attempts to regulate Gilded Age industry, protect workers’ rights, or break up monopolies. Substantive due process shaped (and continues to shape) the political economy of the United States in enduring ways. Like his modern cousins, Calhoun offered in his argument for substantive due process a doctrine of unfettered property ownership. It implied that enslavers were forever protected from popular majorities that might try to prevent them from taking full advantage of the boundless resources of a conquered continent and an ever-growing world market. (B, p 320)”
Robert Barnwell Rhett, another South Carolina theoretician, held that slavery was superior to free labor. According to him, slaves were better off that free laborers because they were both labor and capital, therefore Ol’ Massa’ would “take better care of his capital!! Rhett proclaimed, “There is but one state of society in the world, where labor and capital are identical in interest, and that is where domestic slavery exists… Labor, there, is capital and capital is labor.”
(S, p 500)
Anti-Communism
By 1848, Southern visionaries were already agitating for secession from the Union. Marx and Engles had published The Communist Manifesto in February. This small piece was immediately greeted by a wave of revolutions that swept across Europe and ended the political power, and much of the property, of the feudalism that still controlled many countries. Suddenly the abolition of property was in the air.
In South Carolina, Langdon Cheves formulated the “first generation of American anticommunist rhetoric”:
“Cheves denounced abolitionists as communists, a term recently current from its use during the European-revolutionary year of 1848 in Marx’s Communist Manifesto and which would carry radicalized connotations in Southern rhetoric into the Jim Crow era, when the Communist Party (of the USA – sm) was the only one to call for full racial equality. Cheves conflated communism with democracy, as well as with Jacobinism and anarchy (B, p 575).”
Cheves was quite clear:
“What we call the rights of man, or the admission of great masses to the power of self-government has brought into action the minds of persons utterly unqualified to judge the subject…. This agitation has recently reached the United States. It has been introduced by European agents, and has brought under its delusions the subject of African slavery in the Southern States. It is of the family of communism, it is the doctrine of (the anarchist) Proudhon that property is a crime. It is the same doctrine; they have only blacked its face to disguise it (B, p 576)”
Ironic words from a representative of the planter-capitalist class that systematically seized and abolished the property of Native Americans, abolished the rights of Africans to even own themselves, and who waged constant war against the property of the poor white yeoman farmers of the era.
The very work that Cheves deplored – The Communist Manifesto – puts all this in context:
“The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of the Communists. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historic change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property….
“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend….
“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.” (Marx, Engles, The Communist Manifesto. Chapter II, Proletarians and Communists.)
Abolishing Slave Property
The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, did not apply to the enslaved anywhere in Union-controlled territory. It did immediately however abolish and wipe out $4 billion in property as slaves, the largest expropriation of private property in history up to that point. Slaves were no longer money, could not be mortgaged, no more securitizing, European banks did not recognize them as collateral. The capitalized womb was decommissioned. The slaveholders’ wealth crumbled into dust.
“The Emancipation Proclamation and the coming of the greenback were concurrent and were intimately related. Once the enormous appraised value of the bodies and reproductive potential of four million people was no longer carried on the books as assets, dwarfing other sectors of the economy on paper and generally distorting the economy, the financial revolution of a national paper money was able to happen. (S, p 641)
Absolute Privatization
The rise of digital technology, computers, telecommunications, robotic-production and surveillance has created a polarization of wealth that dwarfs even that of the slavery era. The South Carolina slave theoreticians recognized what Marx proved – that wealth and private profit is created by exploiting labor. Now that human labor is systematically being replaced in production by technology, rather than labor being identical with capital, capital is now severed from its wellspring. Therefore, augmented by this technology, capitalism is directing its corporations to seize every form of public property, as well as dispossessing people from the personal property they own. These forms of property are now passing into private property in the greatest wave of privatization in human history.
Since the 1990s, corporations have made it legal to privatize your DNA, your body chemistry, entire species, the rich native pharmacology from across the world, water everywhere, public spaces and even cities.
John Deere Corporation is currently arguing that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means only corporations can own property! The DMCA makes any attempt to bypass software locks a felony. Tractors today are run by touch screens, guided by satellites and software, which you license, but do not own. Corporations are seeking to extend the principle to hardware. It won’t stop with tractors.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, head of a project to reorganize the federal government, including privatizing many of its functions. Kushner is clear about his job, “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
Customers have few rights as compared with citizens. Customers can’t vote; do not have a right to know; and are rapidly loosing their right to sue corporate people. Customers also pay corporations for services. Since privatization’s reach includes the government, the police and the military, and we pay for it, the working class is being compelled to pay for its own oppression! “Privatize” has the same root as “deprive”, “privilege” and “privation”. All require police power to be effective.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision gives corporations the rights of people (they, in fact, have far more rights!) and makes money speech. Corporations, like the slavers, can vote their wealth as political capital. By criminalizing anyone who did not turn over African-Americans in the North to Southern slave-catchers, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision privileged slave property over personal property. The Southern campaign of the 1850s to make slave property sacrosanct and above the law is being strikingly repeated today.
In that decade, the slavers controlled Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Corporations have the same breadth of absolute power today. By abolishing federal regulations by decree, virtually across the board, Trump is carrying the absolutization of private property another step forward.
The US Revolution in 1776 succeeded in abolishing the property of the monarchy. The Civil War succeeded in abolishing the property of the slavers. The slavers ultimate justification was that slavery was untouchable because it was private property. It’s time to finish the job and pull private property out by the root.
Steven Miller writes about privatization, science and historical materialism. He taught science for 25 years in the Oakland Flatland high schools of Fremont and Life Academy. He observed the intense privatization of public schools, out-of-control police, and the growing dispossession of three generations of families from their communities
Signed articles are the responsibility of the author.
November 25, 2017
Nanodog2@hotmail.com
