--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780374601096" library_document_id: "bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac" source_sha256: "45471347e0e686b66f3481397bd511a5c46b474acffb6e4f58511a1e4c2be228" pdf_physical_page_count: 681 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 370 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac?start=370&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac.md?start=370&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac.md?start=360&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac.md?start=380&limit=10" --- # Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=370 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In discussing these practical details, Kumarappa sounded rather like William Thompson or Charles Fourier, more than a century earlier, explaining how their new communities would function. The early socialist intellectuals didn’t live to see their ambitious visions become a reality, and neither did he. He died in 1960 in Madurai, a city in his native state of Tamil Nadu. He was sixty-eight. The Congress Party was still in power, and it was still pursuing a strategy of state-led growth, although the outcomes were deteriorating. (During the Second Five-Year Plan, annualized GDP growth was more than 4 percent; during the Third Five-Year Plan, which was in operation from 1961 to 1966, growth slowed to below 3 percent.) At the end of the twentieth century, after the Soviet Union collapsed, India would do an about-face and embrace deregulation and market forces, but the underlying policy goal remained the same: maximizing economic growth and making the country richer, or at least less poor. Over time, this goal was accomplished. According to figures from the World Bank, India’s GDP per capita in inflation-adjusted terms rose from just \$305.80 in 1960 to \$2,239 in 2023, with most of the gains coming in the era of liberalization.)48 The social and environmental consequences of this transformation were also dramatic, however. Income inequality rose, and there were a series of environmental calamities, including the infamous Bhopal disaster of 1984, when a highly toxic gas leaked from a Union Carbide chemical plant, killing nearly four thousand people in the immediate aftermath. “Whether under state planning in the past or under the business-friendly regime now in place, India’s economic and technological policies have taken little (often no) account of the country’s resource endowments or of broader questions of environmental sustainability,” the historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in his authoritative 2018 biography of Gandhi. Consequently, Guha went on, modern India is “an ecological disaster zone, marked by deforestation, species loss, chemical contamination of the soil, declining soil fertility, depleting groundwater aquifers, and massively high rates of atmospheric and river pollution.”49 This outcome wouldn’t have surprised Kumarappa. Despite his close ties to Gandhi, his economic ideas didn’t have a great deal of impact during his lifetime or in the decades after his death. As a new millennium dawned, however, a new generation of environmental activists and progressives hailed him as a prophet of sustainability and degrowth, a status he certainly earned. “This is not an impossible ‘heaven on earth’ that we are seeking,” he wrote at the end of Gandhian Economic Thought. “Humanity is being driven by force of circumstances towards self-sufficiency in food and primary needs. If this tendency is resisted persistently the other alternative is the wiping out of the human race by competitive armament and progressive destruction and annihilation of one nation by another. Will man have the foresight to choose the right path?”50 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=371 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=372 | PRINTED_PAGE=20 “Vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians” Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism In the summer of 1935, as Keynes was revising the final manuscript of The General Theory in Cambridge, a twenty-three-year-old Trinidadian named Eric Williams sat for his final examinations in modern history at England’s other ancient university, Oxford. Three years earlier Williams had received Trinidad’s Island Scholarship, the highest academic honor that a high school student could attain on the small British colony located in the southern Caribbean, close to Venezuela. Despite the social, racial, and geographic gulfs that separated Oxford from Trinidad, Williams had settled in, doing well academically and playing cricket for the university. His tutor at St. Catherine’s College, R. Trevor Davies, a Welsh clergyman who was an expert on Imperial Spain, served as his mentor and friend. Still, taking finals in Oxford is a grueling challenge for anyone, and Williams’s ordeal was extended when, after completing his written papers, he was summoned to an additional verbal examination, known as a “viva voce.” When he arrived to meet the examiners he got a pleasant surprise. Rather than grilling him on his written answers, the chief examiner informed him that he had achieved a distinguished first-class degree and inquired about his interest in colonial history, which he had chosen as his elective. “Well, I am a colonial,” Williams replied. The examiner asked if he meant that there was a connection between a scholar’s own environment and their studies, to which Williams replied that he didn’t see the value of study unless such a connection existed. The examiner “then congratulated me on my excellent performance in the examination,” Williams recounted later in his life, “commented on the regularity of my handwriting and the speed with which I could obviously write, and wished me success in my future career.”1 20 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=373 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED He had already come a long way. The eldest of twelve children, one of whom died in infancy, Williams was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 1911. His father, Thomas, was a postal clerk whose lack of “social qualifications” had frustrated his own hopes for career advancement. “The necessary social qualifications were color, money, and education, in that order of importance,” Williams recounted in his autobiography. “My father lacked all three.”2 His mother, Eliza, was a homemaker who supplemented her husband’s modest income by baking and selling bread and cakes. Perennially struggling to make ends meet, the family moved from rental to rental, “and in one bad case the bailiff arrived,” Williams recalled.3 These sorts of privations were far from atypical on an island that had long been organized to benefit its colonial rulers. (Before Britain claimed sovereignty in 1802, Trinidad had been a possession of Spain.) Its biggest industries were exporting cocoa, sugar, and oil, and the companies that dominated these industries were largely British owned. The island’s heterogenous makeup also reflected its colonial history. Its residents included African descendants of slaves who had been transported in the triangular trade; Indians (and some Chinese) who had been imported as indentured workers following the abolition of slavery; white colonial administrators and property owners; and many people of mixed race. The Williams family had African and French heritage, and, despite their financial challenges, they considered themselves middle class. Beneath them on the social totem pole were manual workers and, at the very bottom, indentured Indian workers, who lived in poverty and squalor. At the age of eleven, Williams won a scholarship to the top high school on the island, Queen’s Royal College, where students wore uniforms, played competitive sports, and studied a rigorous curriculum modeled on what was taught at private schools in England. Williams racked up an impressive academic record, particularly in Latin. One of his history teachers was the Trinidadian author C. L. R. James, who was a graduate of the college and just ten years older than Williams. Outside of the classroom, James was a budding writer and anti-colonialist activist. He and Williams shared a love of cricket, but Williams, in his autobiography, said that another teacher, W. D. Inniss, had had more influence on him.4 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=374 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Having received an outstanding degree, Williams, on the advice of his Oxford tutors, decided to stay in England and pursue further studies. He applied for a prestigious prize fellowship at the graduate-only All Souls College, but the application process, which included attending a formal dinner at high table, didn’t go well—a failure he attributed to racism. “It was not that I felt that I had won the fellowship,” he recalled years later. “I knew I had not. But I knew that I could never win one. This is one of these difficulties that whites can never understand. Only Negroes and other racial groups exposed to racial prejudice can.”5 Despite his disappointment, Williams stayed in Oxford and began working on a doctoral thesis. The government of Trinidad agreed to fund him for another year. As his research topic, he chose the British abolition of slavery, which, according to the standard accounts, had come about after William Wilberforce and his colleagues in the early nineteenth-century abolitionist movement persuaded the House of Commons that the institution was a moral abomination. Williams regarded this story as self-serving and inaccurate because it omitted the role played by economic factors, particularly the declining profitability of Britain’s Caribbean slave plantations during the post-Napoleonic era. After delving into the imperial archives in Oxford and London, he wrote a thesis entitled The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery. The work took longer to complete than Williams had hoped, and he was short of money. But finally, in December 1938, he obtained his doctorate. In August of the following year, the month before Hitler’s forces invaded Poland, he sailed for the United States, where he had been offered a teaching post in the political science department at Howard University in Washington, DC. Howard was the most prestigious Black college in the country. During the nine years he was there, Williams taught a freshman survey course on the history of civilization and published two books. The first one, The Negro in the Caribbean, was an introduction to colonialism and slavery in the islands. It came out in 1942 and was praised for filling a big gap in the literature. This success set the stage for Williams’s second book, a broader look at the economics of slavery, which expanded his doctoral thesis to include the relationship between the triangular trade and the industrial revolution. After completing a manuscript in early 1943, he submitted it to the University of North Carolina Press, along with a onepage prospectus that said it “attempts to place in historical perspective the relation between early capitalism in Europe, as exemplified by Great Britain, and the Negro slave trade and Negro slavery in the West Indies.”6 After receiving positive comments on the manuscript from several more established academics, the university press agreed to publish it on the proviso that Williams pay \$700—a considerable sum in those days—to help cover the cost. The press could hope for sales of just four hundred or five hundred copies, its director explained. Eager to see his work published and hopeful that he could somehow raise the money, Williams agreed to the terms, and, after some more haggling, the publisher accepted the title he suggested: Capitalism and Slavery. The book was published in November 1944. Although some of its claims are still disputed, it is today widely regarded as a classic text. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=375 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ★ ★ ★ In addressing the economics of British colonialism, Williams entered a debate that can be dated back at least to 1776, as discussed earlier, when Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, described the colonial system, including the slave labor and mercantilist policies that featured prominently in it, as hindrances rather than fillips to economic development.7 In volume I of Capital, Marx took a very different view, emphasizing how colonialist plunder and slavery helped to generate the seed capital of industrial capitalism, a process he termed “primitive accumulation.”8 Subsequently most British economic historians followed Smith, downplaying any linkages between slavery and the industrial revolution. In explaining the genesis of industrialization, they emphasized internal factors, such as technological advances, population growth, the ready availability of energy from coal, and a culture of entrepreneurialism. Although Williams wasn’t a Marxist, his approach to this question was more in the Marxian tradition. He placed Britain’s industrialization in the context of its role in an international economic system characterized by colonialism and slavery. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=376 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Williams wasn’t the only Black scholar who was reassessing slavery and its aftermath. In the decade from 1935 to 1945, three remarkable books appeared: Black Reconstruction in America, by W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist; The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution, by C. L. R. James, Williams’s former high school teacher; and Capitalism and Slavery. Each of these books presented a distinctive thesis, but they all emphasized the economic importance of slave labor and challenged existing interpretations. Du Bois wrote about the failure of Reconstruction in the face of determined (and often violent) resistance on the part of the Southern whites. James told the epic tale of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian general whose army of former slaves routed the French colonialists from Saint-Domingue, which he described as “an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation.”9 It is surely no accident that these three seminal works appeared within ten years of each other. Du Bois, James, and Williams were all supporters of a decolonization movement that had grown in strength since the First World War, during which the imperial powers had enlisted in their armed forces large numbers of colonial citizens from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The anti-colonial struggle was primarily concerned with ending imperial rule, but it also involved a reassessment of colonial history, a conscious effort to supplant the narratives and interpretations established by white historians, and a more critical assessment of the ties between capitalism and racial exploitation. The cataclysms that befell the international system between 1914 and 1945 gave further impetus to the anti-colonial movement. In 1900, the European empires had seemed indestructible. By the 1930s and ’40s, the earth was shaking beneath the imperial core, raising new possibilities for its colonial subjects, who, partly through the works of writers like Williams, James, and Du Bois, were finding a public voice that had long been denied them. Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and was a generation older than the other two. A founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he was also a major figure in the Pan-African movement, which promoted independence for African nations and unity among Black people everywhere. During the early 1930s, James left Trinidad for England, where he earned a living as a cricket journalist. He also worked on his own writing, joined a Trotskyite group, and edited a newsletter for a Pan-African group. Williams, in his formative decades, didn’t express strong political views, but, as he indicated to the Oxford examiner during his viva voce, his entire outlook had been shaped by his upbringing in a British colony. The Californian scholar Cedric Robinson, in his 1983 book Black Marxism, which introduced the term racial capitalism to intellectual discourse, discussed at length the contributions of Du Bois, James, and Williams, whom he described as part of a group of highly educated “black radicals.” Citing the Black novelist and poet Richard Wright, Robinson argued that the critique of capitalism developed by these thinkers was “grounded from below in the historical consciousness of black masses.”10 Whether this reading is accepted or not, Black Reconstruction in America, Black Jacobins, and Capitalism and Slavery were undoubtedly products of their moment—a time when global capitalism was convulsed with the dual crises of depression and fascism, decolonization was becoming a more realistic prospect, and fresh thinking was demanded. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=377 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ★ ★ ★ Du Bois, in the decades since the publication of his classic work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, had become increasingly influenced by the classbased economic analysis of Marx and other socialist thinkers. In 1926, he had visited the Soviet Union, where he was impressed by the efforts to build a classless society. In writing Black Reconstruction, he adopted a broadly materialist approach, emphasizing the role that economic factors played in creating and sustaining the racist ideology of Southern whites before and after the Civil War. “The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry,” he wrote.11 After the Emancipation Proclamation, he pointed out, the Southern planters were desperate to find cheap labor, and working-class whites feared that free Blacks would undercut their wages and take their jobs: “It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on its foundation.”12 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=378 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED But even as Du Bois adopted a class framework, he also emphasized that the history of the South couldn’t be understood without introducing racism, not merely as a consequence of capitalism, but as an independent factor that undercut the binary Marxian taxonomy of capitalists and proletariat. In the Southern states, he pointed out, there were two separate proletariats—a Black one and a white one. This fracturing had prevented the emergence of a working-class movement unified by a class consciousness and opposition to capitalist exploitation, which is the principal agent of history in the Marxist model. “Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South,” Du Bois wrote, “and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved effort, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there are probably not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”13 These racial antagonisms were a key factor in the perpetuation of white rule through the passage of Jim Crow laws and the effective disenfranchisement of many Blacks, Du Bois pointed out. He also noted that the principal beneficiaries of this reconstituted system of racial domination were former planters and Northern capitalist “carpet baggers” who moved to the South in search of easy profit. Working-class whites also supported and benefited from the system, Du Bois said, because “while they received a low wage, [they] were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks and the best schools.” On the other side of the color line, the Black Southerner was “subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of white children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.”14 In emphasizing racial divisions within the working class and invoking the concept of a “psychological wage” that white workers derived from structures of racial oppression, Du Bois went well beyond the traditional ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=379 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Marxist framework. His analysis can be seen as a way of answering a question about capitalism that had long perplexed leftist thinkers: How could such an exploitative system prove so difficult to dislodge? The answer Du Bois gave was that, at least in the case of the American South, any coherent account of capitalism’s endurance has to consider race and racism alongside class. It has to examine how racial cleavages and racial discrimination map onto the basic economic division between propertyless workers and owners of capital. This approach clearly had implications for interpreting other multiracial societies, and the global capitalist system, in which the division of labor was partly, or even largely, arranged along racial lines. It’s easy to see why Cedric Robinson and others viewed Du Bois as a progenitor of the theory of racial capitalism, which emphasizes that capitalist elites exploit racism to entrench their power, and that capitalism and racism have been associated since the rise of capitalism. Du Bois was ahead of his time, though it should also be noted that, at this stage of his life, he regarded the racial lens as an essential companion to class analysis rather than an alternative to it. The result of racial divisions in the South, he wrote in Black Reconstruction, “was that the wages of both classes”—working-class Blacks and working-class whites—“could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes being threatened by the substitution of white labor.”15 ★ ★ ★ Williams, during his years as a scholar, was less overtly political than Du Bois and James, but he was equally intent on forging new narratives that reflected new realities. “Every age rewrites history, but particularly ours, which has been forced by events to re-evaluate our conceptions of history and economic and political development,” he said in the preface to Capitalism and Slavery.16 In the book’s first chapter, “The Origin of Negro Slavery,” he discussed the economic roots of the transatlantic slave trade, pointing out that European plantation owners in the Americas turned to Africa as a source for labor after initially relying on Indigenous slaves and white indentured workers. “Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the negro,” Williams wrote. “A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”17 Williams described how indentured whites, some of whom were convicts or Irish rebels, were “packed like herrings” into diseaseplagued ships for the journey across the Atlantic, to work in British colonies in the Caribbean and on the mainland of North America.18 The main reason that the plantation owners switched to African slave labor, he explained, was that it was more economical: “The money which procured a white man’s services for ten years could buy a Negro for life. As the governor of Barbados stated, the Barbadian planters found by experience that ‘three blacks work better and cheaper than one white man.’”19 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac.md?start=380&limit=10)