That much is true, at least.
And they were used successfully, too. You see it said quite a lot that slaves were incompatible with industry and couldn't have been used in a factory setting. That simply isn't supported by the historical record. Slaves were used in factories effectively and profitably. For example, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond used slaves for around half of its labor force. While people tend to mention things like slaves sabotaging equipment and overseers having to force them to work, historically neither of those seem to have been any more of an issue for slaves than they were for contemporary free labor.
There are, of course, reasons why slaves weren't more widely used in industry but the issue wasn't that it didn't work.
TBH, while I've heard claims like the bolded before on a number of occasion, I have never quite been able to find any particularly conclusive evidence, from any objective source, that sabotage was *not* an issue, speaking overall(though I am willing to grant that Tredegar may have been a particular exception). So, with that, based on what we know about slavery, and slave resistance, and the fact that industrialization of slavery was fairly limited IOTL, the only logical and objective conclusion we can make is that these problems were in fact, present to a degree.
In other words, It may have worked fairly well in some cases, but clearly there were phenomena that prevented it from being a rather larger thing IOTL.
There's actually quite a lot of discussion of this topic on the board if you know where to look. Try searching for things like "industry" and "slave" or most threads that concern slavery after the civil war. It's contentious, but reading through will give you a sense of what's been said and the evidence for it so you can go from there.
Here's a thread I found with a quick search to get you started:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/di...p?t=256405&highlight=slavery+industry+factory
There are better threads on the board, but this is the one that came up first.
I thought I'd repost some of the best points from that thread, btw, for those interested.
One problem was that slaves had no incentives to improve.Creativity is the number one driver of an economy and it's not just geeks in lab coats and eccentric scientists with mad hair, it's every person; working or not trying to make their own lives better.
Now that being said there's no problem with something like the States benefiting from the innovations of Europe while enforcing its caste system. The main problem was that to have slaves employed in industry, you needed some existing economy to build industry on (aka agriculture).
Land owners in general didn't take too well to industrialists, after all wealth shifted from land based to capital based and land owners lost out on power. There's also the problem that industrialization frees up farmers who will migrate to the cities reducing the need for slave labour. The exception to this would be a mercantile state with a low population based on mining, in essence giving land owners a stake of the profit of industrialization, I'm not sure where one would find this.
There's also a limit on how much slaves could be used in terms of education, the more educated they are the more likely they are to develop ideologies and organize. There's also the problem of sabotage, since industry is capital based it is much much easier to sabotage equipment than crops.
And last of all, there's the problem that slaves depresses wages screwing over the common man and creating massive wealth inequalities. The only work around I can see is something like the UAE where the state has some resource in great demand but lacks the population to exploit it combined with xenophobia and racism. Of course this necessitates some sort of nanny state to provide handouts for all people of the approved ethnicity and you would need a lot of slaves to pull this off (70%-95%of pop) raising the threat of revolts.
Slaves are generally poor workers, for obvious reasons, and only have incentives to work slower or more poorly.
In addition, it's generally against the interests of the master to educate slaves to a point where they could do more than insert screws or put two parts together.
I'd say the largest flaw would be "slave pace." That thing prison labor, slaves, and communist factory workers push for in which everyone does just enough work to be left alone, but not so much as to break their back.
The USSR has what I see as a realistic reaction as industrial slaves which push the qouta far beyond norm are either targeted, or discouraged amongst the work force.
You have to be joking here Thiers. The last time I checked the economics of GuLag is was accepted widely as a useless basket case, and that by the 1950s the Soviet elite were also aware of this at political committee level. Even in the 1930s, when they were not aware of the economic failure of GuLag as a system, it was not the engine of growth in the Soviet economy. Even Applebaum's atrocious book should cover this.
The engine of growth was mass proletarianisation through semi-forcible agricultural dispossession, but much more strongly through wages-pull effects. Promotions were easy (three monthly), and job mobility was incredibly high. (Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia). Talking about a captive proletariat is far more useful.
The Soviet-style societies privileged, lionised, and depended upon free labour for growth and productivity. Comparing the labour mobility of average workers in soviet-style societies to slavery is absurd. For one it obscures the real analysis required of unfree labour in capitalism (as in societies with the Value form), such as GuLag.
OP might want to look into labour productivity in GuLag, amongst Soviet POWs kept in concentration camps in Germany, and the wide discussion of the meaning, economics and social purpose of disciplinary Jewish labour in Germany. None of these labours were particularly productive, all faced extraordinarily high levels of worker resistance to labour discipline.
yours,
Sam R.
Not all forced labor projects are the same.
The chief difference is that corvee labor, like in the USSR, is allocated socially, usually for things that don't really require much skill. The actual running of factories, mines, etc., was carried out by normal workers. The prison labor system wasn't very productive, which is why is it was gradually phased out from labor mobilization schemes.
By distributing it socially, they overcame some of the problems that came with forced labor, but not all. Privately owned slaves, on the other hand, cannot be reallocated from project to project. They're with individual owners, tied usually to land and agriculture. Slavery does not allow mobility of labor, and that makes it impossible to efficiently mate to industrial scale production.
Forced labour systems in communist states would often suffer from sabotage from disgruntled badly treated workers. There's a lot more stuff about to break in a factory than on a plantation.
They really can't sell their slaves in the antebellum South. They need x number of slaves to run their plantations so they can pay back their creditors and do all the things a Southern aristocrat is expected. Their slaves are collateral on their mortgages, so they can't afford to liquidate them.
Because of these factors, slaves are very much tied to the land, and it hinders maximizing returns. Trying to get out of plantation production was both socially and economically difficult.
Historically, there weren't great movements of slaves from plantations to cities. There were, however, massive movements of free labor to cities and industrial production, with the added benefit that free laborer could at least be working towards his own benefit, however meager that turned out to be.