an absolute state

@anabsolutestate

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Bluesky

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an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jul 13

A hand shaking a set of keys to make a distracting jingling sound - a youtube title reads "10 Hours of Jingling Keys"

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 24

Correct but also a very funny opinion to put forward the day after you put forth that the simple fact of your identity allows you to redefine your position in terms of material class because you feel "pauperized petty bourgeois" provides a standpoint of insufficient rhetorical and moral worth.

@taliabhatt.itch.io
I have this really unpopular opinion that standpoint theory doesn't mean "the simple fact of my identity imbues me with the necessary knowledge and framework to properly articulate the conditions of my oppression and also
disagreeing with me is bigotry"

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 24

A tardigrade playing a microscopic violin with a scale bar marked 100 microns

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 7

A cartoon... fox? cat? reaching towards the viewer, With text reading;
Call me impact font the way I make that
BOTTOM TEXT

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 6

Fidel on comradely criticism

Tweet from Justine Medina
@jnmedina8989
"Whenever I have to criticize a comrade, the first thing! do is try to protect him, to keep the criticism from being destructive, so it won't demoralize him and so, while serving as an example for the others, it commits and stimulates him."
Fidel Castro
JEFFREY ELLIOT: Could you just embellish on that point. add to that point? What do you mean, you've never been pleased?
FIDEL CASTRO: Maybe I'm a bit of a perfectionist. always try to set the highest possible goal. If you're doing a job, you've called together a group of comrades to analyze a certain topic, after it's over, you think about all the arguments that were presented. After attending a congress and you've had to take the floor many times. as in the recent women's congress or the sessions of the National Assembly of People's Power, where many topics are broached and discussed, you run over each
point and always wonder if you could have gone a bit deeper, used more and better arguments. You may even wonder if you were rude in the debate, if the way you replied to a comrade may have hurt his feelings. I'm usually very careful about this. Whenever I have to criti cize a comrade, the first thing I do is try to protect him, to keep the criticism from being destructive, so it won't demoralize him and so, while serving as an example for the others, it commits and stimulates him. Then you stop to think about whether you did it with the utmost care or not, if you've fully achieved your purpose. You stop to think about whether or not you included all the elements in a speech, all the data, and presented them in the best possible order. And the same thing happens to me after every interview. (LAUGHTER)

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 6

CLR James in Notes on Dialectics, a text much abridged on marxists dot org due to its hostility to Trotsky, but which is invaluable for understanding the philosophical guts of Marxism.

Trotsky spent years, and we with him, pointing out how the workers were mistaken and deceived by stalinism. Some of us still say that. Hegelianism is merciless on the talk of such deception. This support for stalinism by the workers is an objective fact, one of the most potent objective facts. To say that the workers are fooled is to condemn the workers to being playthings of chance.
No. The phenomenon of stalinism requires that you take it as an impulse from below and incorporate it into your categories and drive them forward. This emphasis on the concrete is the most difficult thing to grasp about the dialectic. I'll tell you why at once, in simple terms, which will become more and more complex. It involves the mental apparatus (and this is Kant's immortal contribution) with which you look at things. Here is a crude example. Having been trained to see reptiles as a crawling snake or lizard you cannot posibly look at a bird and recognize that its structrue is so to speak reptilian. You have to strip the bird of its feathers, open it, examine it, and then this is the thing, organize in your mind a new conception of reptilian structure which includes birds. Until this is done, you will continue to exclude birds. They, you will say, are different. You reject them.
It is an elementary static example.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 6

The 'March on the Boss' tactic also works on gods.

Finding superstition still a powerful weapon in the hands of the landlord class, the Communist Party organized a special campaign throughout the district to free the minds of the people from bondage to geomancy, astrology, spirit talking, and mud idols, and to convince them that they themselves could remold the world according to their own desires. An important breakthrough in this campaign came in Sand Bank, a village several miles northwest of Long Bow. There stood a shrine to the god Ch'i-t'ien, a very powerful Buddhist deity who, when displeased, could curse one and all with dysentery.
Since people only too often died of this disease, Ch'i-t'ien was greatly to be feared.
Many a stick of incense was burned before his image and many an offering of food was left for his spirit to eat. The Party members of Sand Bank decided to attack Ch'i-t'ien just like any landlord. They figured up just how much money they had spent humoring him over the years and discovered that it was enough to have saved many lives in the famine year. When they took these calculations to their Peasants' Association, many young men and women got very angry. They went to the temple, pulled the god out of his shelter and carried him to the village office. Before a mass meeting they "settled accounts" with him by proving that he had squandered their wealth without giving any protection in return. Then they smashed his mud image with sticks and stones. Some of the older people tried to stop them. They prophesied that everyone involved would die of dysentery within a few days. But the young men and women went right ahead. When no one fell ill that night nor throughout the whole of the next day, the hold of Ch'i-t'ien on the village collapsed. Only a handful of old women ever burned incense before his ruined shrine again.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 5

It's so good being in a doggirl x foxgirl relationship

tumblr post -
user girlrats:
training your doggirl is simple pet stuff. sit, stay, fetch, give mindblowing head. easy enough
training your catgirl is all about finding healthier outlets for her natural urges. get her a good fps to play so she stops hunting the local mouse femboys for sport.
training your ratgirl is all about doing more and more complex activities to see how smart she can get. have her speedrun a game with a goal time. juice reward if she makes it, electric shocks if she fails.
user foxgirl-maybell:
but op... how do you train your foxgirl?
user bloodbathfetishist:
You fuck her
user girlrats:
You fuck her

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· Jun 1

I feel like anyone who hasn't seen the show is badly missing out on the visual.

What can only be described as a kinky sci-fi faun, complete with mesh top and nipple clamps

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 25

A twitter thread:
@enrico221960: As a Kenyan official put it - every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture
@MarkSeddon: Maybe, but how will Kenya be obliged to pay this investment back? No such thing as a free hospital?
@stillreezy: Here comes the lecture lol

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 25

LXVII. TO PANNICUS.
Do you ask, Pannicus, why your wife Caelia has about her only priests of Cybele? Caelia loves the flowers of marriage, but fears the fruits.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 22

A film poster for Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 20

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

As with women and the elderly, children of the 'popular classes' were considered so much grist for the mill. Already featured though not highlighted by me here fantasising about a panopticon workhouse, I have to stress; nobody hates Bentham enough. A truly abysmal shell of a human being.

Among the compulsory labour force called on to ensure the development of the colonies were also youngsters of poor condition, deceived with honeyed words, abducted and deported across the Atlantic.70 Alternatively, they arrived in America with their par-ents, who were often compelled to sell them, never seeing them again. The situation of children of popular extraction was not much better in England. Marx denounced 'the extensive Herod-like kidnappings perpetrated in the early days of the factory system, when children were stolen from the work houses and orphanages, and capital thereby incorporated a mass of unresisting human material'.71 Going beyond the use of orphanages as a source of low-cost and more or less compulsory labour, we can make a general observation here. If, in the proto-liberal theory and practice of the time, the wage-labourer was (as we shall soon see) the instrumen-tum vocale Burke mentions, or the 'bipedal machine' referred to by Sieyès, his children were ultimately res nullius, destined to be used at the first opportunity precisely in their capacity as work tools and machines. Locke explicitly declared that poor children, who were to be sent to work from the age of three, must 'be taken off their [parents'] hands' 72 Over a century later, Bentham's attitude was not dissimilar. He invited people to look for inspiration to 'manu-factures where children, down to four years old, earn something, and where children a few years older earn a subsistence, and that a comfortable one' 73 It was permissible and beneficial to 'tak[e] the children out of the hands of their parents as much as possible, and even, if possible, altogether'.

Bentham would have liked to proceed perhaps even
more ruthlessly with the children of the poor in England: 'An in-spection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from their birth, might afford experiments enough... What say you to a foundling-hospital upon this principle?'76
We shall see that Bentham also envisaged experiments of a eugenic character. But for now we can reach a conclusion by attending to an English economist (Edward G. Wakefield), who in 1834 published a successful book devoted to the contrast between America and England: 'it is the whole press of England, not I, that calls English children [of popular extraction] slaves'. The majority were compelled to work such long hours that they inadvertently fell asleep, only to be awoken and forced back to work with beatings and torments of every kind. As to foundlings, they were dispensed with rapidly enough: adverts were affixed to the doors of workhouses promoting their sale. In London the price of male and female children put on the market thus was significantly below that of black slaves in America; in rural regions, such commodities were even cheaper.77

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

While the conflation of petty crime with capital crime might beggar belief, the equivocation between a capital sentence and transportation makes rather more obvious sense. While obviously not reaching the extremes and permanence of chattel slavery, the parallels are obvious.

What were the characteristics of this labour relationship? Let us start with the journey of relocation or deportation from Britain. The horrors and mortality rate call to mind the famous 'middle passage' to which black slaves were subjected. Sometimes not even half the
'passengers' survived the voyage. Among them were to be found children between the ages of one and seven; they rarely escaped death. A witness related having seen thirty-two children of tender years cast into the ocean in the course of a single voyage. Diseases continued to rage even after the crossing of the Atlantic; as a result, the new arrivals were often subjected to quarantine. There then intervened the moment of the market. In the papers commercial adverts of the following kind could be read: 'Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia with about one Hundred Healthy Servants. Men, Women and Boys, among which are many Tradesmen ... The Sale will Commence on Tuesday, the 2nd of April' (The Virginia Gazette, 28 March 1771). Husband and wife were often separated, and might be separated from their children, permanently or for a long period; children under the age of five were obliged to render service until they were twenty-one. Flogged by their masters in the event of indiscipline or disobedience, servants sometimes fled, and then a manhunt was unleashed. The local press provided an accurate physical description of the fugitives who, once taken, were punished and branded with the letter R (standing for 'rogue') or subjected to the excision of ears. Thus rendered immediately recognizable, they no longer had any escape. 65

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

The post-slavery instrumentalisation of the criminal justice system as a way of reducing formally free persons to slavery is not an American innovation; it's the original model of justice under liberal democracy. An harsher early modern equivalent to '3 strikes' "justice".

The need to maintain law and order was only one aspect of the problem. Not infrequently, those sentenced to death (or even a long prison term) saw their sentence commuted to deportation to the colonies. Already in force for some time, from 1717 the practice of deportation assumed an official character and significant proportions.60 So following the Glorious Revolution, we witness, on the one hand, the enactment of terroristic legislation and, on the other, the burgeoning phenomenon of deportation to remote colonies. Is there a link between the two events? It is difficult to deny that the formation of a large compulsory workforce through drastic harshening of the legal code ultimately made it possible to satisfy 'the labor needs of the plantations' 61 On the other hand, underlying this practice was a specific theory. Locke repeatedly demanded penal slavery for those who made an attempt on another person's life or property. Already in the state of nature, '[t]he damnified person has this power of appropriating to himself the goods or service of the offender 62 Things were even clearer in the social state:
Indeed, having by his fault forfeited his own life by some act that deserves death, he to whom he has forfeited it may, when he has him in his power, delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service; and he does him no injury by it. For, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on himself the death he desires.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

The selfish sophistry undergirding that complex persists to the present day - it is the great intellectual and moral heritage about which pundits and politicians condescend to you. At its basic level it is the assertion that their person, property and personal credit is worth more than your life.

Along with the despoliation of the Indians and English peasants, Locke also justified terroristic legislation in defence of property: it was 'lawful for a man to kill a thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him in his power as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him' 54 This was only a petty crime in ap-pearance. In reality, the guilty party, if only momentarily, had deprived his victim of his 'right to liberty' and had made him a
'slave'.
At this point, no one could exclude the possibility that theft would not be followed by homicide, since it was precisely the power of life and death that defined the relationship of slavery. This was synonymous with a state of war, and hence there was no reason why the thief should not be done to death, whatever the extent of the theft.55 What Locke seems to be saying is that at stake is not only the shilling or handkerchief or whatever other rather minor stolen good: private property as such and, over and above it, liberty were in danger. Thus, what legitimized the pickpocket's killing or execution is the same liberal pathos that had presided over the condemnation of monarchical despotism as the source of political slavery.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

Enclosure, transportation, impressment, conscription, the poor laws and the workhouse all functioned together to recruit and mobilise human bodies in the service of the goals of liberal imperialism.

The problem of military recruitment is thus understandable: prisons were 'rumag'd for Malefactors'; the profession of soldier (ob-served Defoe) above all devolved on Men taken from the Gallows'. 49 Fortunately, there were plenty of them. From 1688 to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250, and they were almost always crimes against property. While attempted homicide was regarded as a petty crime until 1803, the theft of a shilling or handkerchief, or the illegal clipping of an ornamental bush, could entail hanging; and one could be consigned to the hangman even at the age of eleven.50 In fact, in some cases, even young children ran this risk: in 1833 the death penalty was pronounced on a pickpocket of nine, although the sentence was subsequently commuted.51
Even more significant than the increase in penalties was the criminalization of behaviour that had hitherto been licit. The enclosure and private appropriation of common land underwent significant development; and the peasant or commoner who was late in appreciating the new situation became a thief, a criminal to be visited with all the force of the law. This might seem an arbitrary and brutal way to behave; but that is not what Locke thought. In legitimizing the colonists' appropriation of land left uncultivated by the Indians, the Second Treatise of Government simultaneously adopted a clear position in favour of enclosure in England.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

These passages make quite ridiculous the claim that today the poor are compelled into the armed forces in the West. Modern enlisted men and women can neither claim to be fleeing the workhouse, nor subjecting themselves to a death rate comparable to the Middle Passage.

'the men of the fleet were so ill-paid, ill-fed, and ill-handled that it was impossible to obtain crews by free enlistment. Many sought to escape this kind of sequestration, but Great Britain gave chase to them, without hesitating to search American ships and take by force deserters, including those who had become US citizens in the meantime. It was necessary to resort to drastic measures to ensure the functioning of 'more than 700 warships in commission, with nearly 150,000 sailors and marines' And so, like Franklin before him, we have Calhoun denouncing 'the slavery of impressed seamen', This was a common theme in the journalism of the time. In Britain itself, defenders of slavery stressed the analogy between this institution and being pressed into the navy. Both practices were justified by exceptional circumstances—namely, the need to maintain the colonies and the navy, respectively. On the other side, the abolitionist Sharp condemned both practices. By contrast, William Wilberforce sought to make distinctions, and was accused of hypocrisy by his opponents: the pious pastor was moved by the condition of black slaves, but was indifferent to the no less grievous suffering of the kind of white slaves on whom the British Empire's military power and glory were based. The argument was far from trivial. Sailors were 'seized by press gangs from the streets of London and Liverpool; and at a popular level no institution was more hated than the press gang.

The mortality rate of soldiers en route to India was comparable to that affecting black slaves during their deportation from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Moreover, British soldiers were subject to the punishment traditionally reserved for slaves—flogging-and, paradoxical-ly, continued to be even when this form of discipline had been abolished for Indian troops.44
Power relations in the army reproduced those existing in society.
The figure of the soldier tended to coincide with that of the ser-vant. At the start of the eighteenth century, Defoe observed: 'any Man would carry a Musket rather than starve ... 'tis Poverty makes Men Soldiers, and drives Crowds into the Armies'.45 At the end of the century, Townsend reiterated that 'distress and poverty' alone could impel 'the lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them on the tempestuous ocean, or in the field of battle'. 46 Or, to put the point this time with Mandeville, '[t]he Hardships and Fatigues of War that are personally suffer'd, fall upon them that bear the Brunt of every Thing'-namely, 'the working slaving People' 47 On the other side, the figure of the officer tended to coincide with that of the master, and the contempt offi-cers/masters had for troops was professed and even ostentatious.
Troops of the line (lamented an ordinary soldier) were 'the lowest class of animals, and only fit to be ruled with the cat o' nine tails'48

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 12

It has always struck me that impressment is a gaping hole in the idea that Britons enjoyed untrammelled "freedom", many of the various incitements and punishments are clearly designed to man the navy or to provide people for the expansion of colonial ventures.

According to Locke, it was necessary to intervene thoroughly and drastically in an infected area of society that was constantly expanding. From the age of three, the children of families not in a position to feed them should be sent out to work.17 Moreover, it was necessary to intervene with their parents. To discourage the idleness and dissoluteness of vagrants, it was appropriate to proceed in areas frequented by them to 'the suppressing of superfluous brandy shops and unnecessary alehouses. 18 Secondly, begging should be discouraged and restricted. Beggars were obliged to wear a 'badge'; to oversee them, and prevent them practising their activity outside the permitted area and hours, a special body was provided, the 'beadles of beggars', who in their turn were to be controlled by 'guardians' so that they performed their task with the requisite diligence and severity. But the whole community was called upon to participate in the beggar hunt, starting with the inhabitants of the house where the wretches had requested charity. 19
Draconian penalties awaited vagrants who managed to escape this comprehensive control. It was right that those caught asking for alms outside their parish and near a sea port should be pressed into the navy: they were to be 'punished as deserters'—i.e. with the death penalty—'if they go on shore without leave; or, when sent on shore, if they either go further, or stay longer, than they have leave. The other illegal beggars were to be interned in a normal workhouse or house of correction.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

The patriarchal implications of the system are glaring; the workhouse was a repository for those rejected or neglected by structures of family and patronage. Throughline to today where disabled people are prevented from marriage & women on benefits have them weaponised to make them dependent on men.

Any kind of violence was inflicted on them, not even sparing the elderly and children, and involving particular attention to women. In practice, the inmates of workhouses were treated as objects of disgust and horror placed outside the law and the human community. Thus was explained the fact, underscored by Engels, that in order to escape the 'Poor Law Bastilles' (as they were popularly renamed), 'inmates of work houses often deliberately make themselves guilty of any crime whatsoever in order to go to prison. 14 In fact (add contemporary historians), 'many indigents preferred to die of hunger and illness' rather than subject themselves to a workhouse.15

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

At the lower end of this spectrum we'll find those we consider today to be the beneficiaries of the welfare state, under conditions which today are made relatively liveable, but still contain the germ of the workhouse; the right to family life is abrogated & the conditions of subsistence are meagre.

Calhoun positively contrasted the condition of American slaves with that of inmates of workhouses or poorhouses in England. The former were lovingly treated and cared for by the master or mistress during illness or old age, while the latter were reduced to a 'forlorn and wretched condition'; the former continued to live among their family and friends, while the latter were uprooted from their environment and also separated from their loved ones.11 The apologetic intention that governs the description or transfiguration of the institution of slavery is clear. Yet when it came to workhouses in England, Calhoun was not the only one to underscore the horror. In de Tocqueville's view, they afforded 'the most horrendous and repugnant [spectacle] of misery: on the one hand, the infirm incapable of work and waiting to die; on the oth-er, women and children massed pell-mell like pigs in the mud of their sty; it is difficult not to trample over a semi-naked body'.
Finally, there were the comparatively more "fortunate'-those in a position to work: they earned little or nothing and fed off the leftovers of stately homes.12

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

We now move into discussion of the class relations between white people, the limits of liberalism within the 'community of the free'. As we will see, there was indeed a qualitative difference which differed by the regime and status of the individual, but not one which can be called 'freedom'.

Referring to England in the second half of the eighteenth century, Blackstone distinguished between three types of 'servant in the strict sense (we ignore here personnel charged with overseeing and guarding the master's property): 'menial servants' or 'domestics,
'apprentices', and finally 'labourers, who worked outside the master's house. The most modern labour relation, least informed by feudal and servile echoes, would seem to be the last. In this con-nection, however, the great jurist indulged in celebrating 'very good regulations' on the basis of which, for example, 'all persons who have no visible effects may be compelled to work, while those who leave or desert their work' were punished. Over the domestic or apprentice, the master exercised a right of 'corporal punishment' that must not result in death or mutilation.5

But what happened if this limit was exceeded? We can infer Smith's answer: "The master has a right to correct his servant mod-erately, and if he should die under his correction it is not murther, unless it was done with an offensive weapon or with forethought and without provocation. It is difficult to regard such servants as free men even if, according to the great economist, they enjoyed
'almost the same privileges with their master, liberty, wages, etca.
In fact, what creates a radical difference is the power of correction exercised by the one over the other. The same Smith included menial servants, together with slaves proper, in the master's extended family.6

Let us attend to Hume's evidence: "At present, all masters discourage the marrying of their male servants, and admit not by any means the marriage of the females, who are then supposed altogether incapacitated for their service. The opportunity to have a family seems largely denied not only to the black slave, but also to the white domestic servant: the private lives of both were subject to the master's power or will.
Finally, it is to be noted that comparable to menial servants were
'apprentices',& whose condition, in England at any rate, had been regarded by Grotius as approximating closely enough to the slave's.
And such, basically, was also Blackstone's opinion. He reiterated the slave's obligation to provide service 'for life' with a rather eloquent argument: fundamentally, it was the same relationship that the apprentice had with his master, except that in the latter case there was a time limit (seven years and sometimes more).
As has justly been observed, '[flor most of human history the expression "free labor" was an oxymoron. '

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

The defeat of the South, which many Union political leaders sought to soften, forced the issue - liberals only stopped admitting that theirs is the ideology of chattel slavery when militarily forced to, pushed for by black revolt and the radicalism of the soldiery. It wasn't a principled change.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

The position that wage slavery and chattel slavery were and remain two species of the same genus is today held to be a position of the 'hard left', but was not by many beneficiaries of both. That the less intensive of the two has been softened by processes of historical struggle doesn't alter this.

For Fitzhugh, as was demonstrated by the examples of classical antiquity and confirmed by the reality of the modern world, work was inseparable from slavery, so that in one form or another 'slavery, black or white, was right and necessary. In justifying the slavery of the Afro-Americans across the Atlantic and branding the Irish 'black', Carlyle, admired by Fitzhugh and other southerners, and in correspondence with some of them,109 in his turn reached a general 'conclusion':
'whether established by law, or by law abrogated, [slavery] exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and ... you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!'

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

To hammer the point home, the inheritors of the Whigs and Tories are partners in an adversarial system rather than enemies. The people whose merchant fleet shipped slave cotton while dealing opium are the same who would half-ass the Civil War and get countless Union troops killed. This remains so.

Construed in the broadest sense of the term, the liberal party encompassed both Whigs and Tories. The former did not even necessarily represent the more advanced wing. Josiah Tucker was a Tory, who reprehended Locke and Burke for being followers of a 'republicanism' based, precisely, upon slavery and serf-dom. For the rest, arguing with 'Republican Zealots', he liked to position himself among the true interpreters of 'English constitutional Liberty'.105 Disraeli was likewise a Tory, who, while on the one hand echoing the arguments of the slaveholding South, on the other significantly widened the social basis of British representative bodies, granting the vote to significant sections of the popular classes and anyway extending it much further than the Whigs had.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

It seems a huge historical irony given the way that contemporary liberals deride Marx that the founders of great liberal nations diagnosed his threat to them even before he was born; if the communication of workers is in itself a threat, their concentration in cities spells disaster for the masters.

If to anyone, the category of conservatism might be applied to Jefferson. He identified cultivators of the land as 'the chosen people of God', assimilated
"great cities' to the 'sores' of a 'human body',101 and in 1812, during the war with Britain, accused the latter of being an instrument of 'Satan' because it had compelled America to abandon the 'paradise' of agriculture and engage in 'manufacturing', in order to meet the test of arms (see Chapter 8, $16). And the category of conservatism might also be applied to Washington.
He too viewed with concern the prospect that the Americans might become 'a manufacturing people', rather than continuing to be 'Cultivators' of the land, thereby avoiding the scourge of the 'tumultuous populace of large cities' 102 In particular, it is against Jefferson that Calhoun seems to be arguing when he rejects the thesis that manufacture 'destroy[s] the moral and physical power of the people'.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

Important also to note that labour being formally 'free' did not exclude corporal punishment and conditions likely to bring about an early death. The coolie system served equally well as a labour source, while UK abolition served to provide pretexts to undermine naval and colonial competitors.

The very country that elevated itself into champion of the struggle against slavery distinguished itself in completely the opposite direction: not only did it use the labour of 'slaves' in India and other colonies, but it "[held] in unlimited subjection not less than one hundred and fifty million human beings, dispersed over every part of the globe. 84 We find an even more explicit reference to the lot of the coolies in another eminent representative of the South, George Fitzhugh.
Arraigned once again was Britain, which lauded itself for having abolished slavery in its colonies. In reality, the 'temporary slaves' from Asia who had taken the place of the blacks, 'if not worked to death before their terms of service expire, subsequently died of starvation.

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

Hypocrisy and narrow economic self-interest defined what push there was for abolition. Britain did not spontaneously grow a conscience regarding slaves, slavery was beginning to be outmoded as a mode of production even while the economic value of slaves remained high.

Let us focus for now on the first point. Already during the Philadelphia Convention, the slave-owners rejected the lectures given them in the name of morality, pointing out that the North derived major benefits from the institution of slavery, since its merchant shipping transported the slaves and the commodities produced by them.80 In 1808 the ban on the 'immigration or in-troduction' of black slaves provided for by the federal Constitution had come into effect. But it remained the case (ob-served the ideologues of the South) that blacks in the North, in addition to suffering the poverty and oppression that were the lot of the poor in general there, were exposed to maltreatment and violence of every kind, as demonstrated by the periodic outbreak of veritable pogroms. Even more repugnant (stressed Calhoun, in particular, in the years leading up to the Civil War) was the hypocrisy of Britain (the country which, having abolished slavery in its colonies, had become the model for the American abolitionists).'[T]he greatest slave dealer on earth' the country 'more responsible than any other ... for the extent of that form of servitude' in the American continent, then engaged in waving the banner of abolitionism, with a view to attracting the lucrative production of tobacco, cotton, sugar and coffee to its colonies and ruining potential competitors.81

an absolute state@anabsolutestate· May 11

While a peurile attempt at a reversal, this quote introduced me to a fascinating topic which I hadn't explored before; collier and salt pan worker bondage in Scotland, where from 1606-1799 certain types of workers were bound to their occupations hereditarily.