Reddit reviews The Ruling Race

Where to begin...

>You could absolutely have capitalism without slaves.

First of all, you appear to have misunderstood what I meant when I said slavery was part of the foundation of capitalism. I did not mean that every capitalist society has slavery. Rather, the Atlantic slave trade provided the economic foundation on which the capitalist system was built. Capitalist merchants and shipping were sustained by the slave trade, while major cash crops such as sugar and tobacco were grown by slaves. Like it or not, the development of capitalism was contingent upon slavery.

>slavery in the US, which disappeared despite (or I would argue, in part because of) it being a capitalist country.

Wrong. Slavery did not disappear because America was a capitalist country. If anything, slavery, which had started to decline after the Revolutionary War, experienced a renaissance in the early nineteenth century as plantation owners started growing cotton to supply capitalist merchants in the North and capitalist industrialists abroad. Slavery became intertwined with American capitalism, with slaves serving as capital for banks and the stock markets trading in futures on slave crops. Slave owners even started to employ capitalist labor management techniques. For more information see Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and James Oakes's The Ruling Race.

This is not an isolated incident, as it has occurred repeatedly in the history of capitalism. For example, the Firestone Corporation employed forced labor rounded up by government soldiers in Liberia during the 1920s. (It also covertly supplied Liberian warlord Charles Taylor during the 1990s as part of a deal to protect its rubber plantation in the country.) Similarly, capitalist corporations such as I. G. Farben profited from Jewish slave labor in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.

>it's about the individual actors that make up a system making decisions, not the system itself.

By that logic, authoritarian communism shouldn't be held responsible for the abuses of the Soviet Union, Cambodia, the People's Republic of China, etc.

>So I take it you'd rather have the other choice be death?

Where did I say that?

>I'll close by pointing out that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other economic system.

A brief examination of the article you linked showed that it relied on biased sources such as The Economist magazine and the Cato Institute. Not very reliable.