Apparently, Elon Musk's Girlfriend is a Communist

Probably the same reason they do in the US.

Because the success of a nation doesn’t depend on any one factor.

Both good answers, but also because the US has a longstanding embargo against Cuba. Any nation that trades with Cuba is at risk of incurring the wrath of the US.

That being said, Quality of Life in Cuba is comparable to the United States in terms of nutrition and health systems. In fact, Cubans live as long as US citizens, and it's child mortality rate is lower than that of the United States.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830455/

Don't read this @Jenee, holy shit it's a pile of garbage. It reads like the Heritage Foundation, or PragerU wrote it. Goddamn.

That said, here are definitely more pointed resources. Are they biased? Yeah, of course. Do they treat you like you're five? Fuck no.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gustav-landauer-anarchism-socialism
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/12/the-data-show-that-socialism-works
https://dashthered.medium.com/communism-always-works-bce14ee96f2b

If you want to read them, that's great, if not, that's fine, too. I'm not going to treat you like you're some kind of child.

Oh. Well. Yea, this one person’s opinion on an entire library of information.

If the expenses of slavery outweighed the gain, slavery would not exist.

Period.

End of discussion.

Indeed, more than 40 million people around the world are slaves. There's serious money in human trafficking:
https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/
https://globaljustice.regent.edu/2021/01/slavery-still-exists-today/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200
https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm

On why slavery is still so popular:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html
https://www.nhpr.org/post/without-slavery-would-us-be-leading-economic-power#stream/0
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/slavery-made-america/373288/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/men-who-made-slavery-big-business/618628/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/historians-expose-early-scientists-debt-slave-trade

Modern slavery and economics:
https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/f...fits-of-forced-labour-2014/lang--en/index.htm
https://news.trust.org/item/20210303131815-7j8lt/
https://www.mbacentral.org/business-modern-day-slavery/

Oh good, we can completely discount the social aspects of slavery because Jenee says so.

It’s on my to do list. However, I would not have taken you for one of those who would move the goal posts. What you “fixed” here is not what you said previously.

Forced socialization and forced labor are not the same thing. Although, I know at least one introvert who might disagree.

Not 'social' like hanging out. 'Social' as in aspects of society.

Karl Marx, Das Capital

In what aspect of society would slavery be introduced?

There's not a simple way to answer that question. Societies varied on why and how they kept slaves. I strongly doubt any of them did so PRIMARILY for financial gain. Look into the history of slavery.

Now that I'm on my computer, I'll add this: free labor that benefits the slaver is most definitely an important aspect of slavery. But slavery is more than labor; slavery is literally owning another human being. People kept slaves as status symbols, to punish and humiliate a losing side in a war, and of course because the slaves were deemed naturally 'inferior' to their masters. To reduce slavery to a simple financial transaction is to ignore the huge sociological ramifications of the institution. Even today, slavery remains so much more than just getting someone to work for you without payment. It's about depersonalizing another human being and treating them as property (among other things).

Wow. So many people don't know what capitalism is. The clue is in the name. Capitalism is not equivalent to commerce.

And in order to service that demand there had to be people trading said human bodies.

Those people made a profit.

Yes. So let's tie this back into the discussion around modern capitalism. Well before the Industrial Revolution, the African slave trade was shut down and the ban enforced by the Royal Navy. Why, if it was so profitable for everyone?

My initial response is that no one claimed it was profitable for everybody, merely that there was profit to be made.

Beyond that we all know the broad strokes here surely?

Sure, there was profit to be made, but it was still banned. Slavery--in this case chattel slavery, as the kind of slavery the Romans practiced had already fallen out of favor in the West--was just not integral to the rise of capitalism. The two were not, and are not, significantly linked. Linked, yes, but not significantly so.

I'm sorry but this is just not true.

The Triangular Trade made sugar and rice staple parts of the world's diets, making astronomical sums for major shipping concerns. The volume of slavery required to make that work was orders of magnitude beyond that practised by the Roman Empire at it's peak.

Chattel slavery was not banned for economic reasons. The sale of slaves was banned for over quarter of a century before ownership and arguably abolishing the former worsened the lot of existing slaves and started the push towards underground slavery we see today.

Make no mistake, far from waning that trade was at it's zenith during the colonial years and the early years of the burgeoning US.

All of that is certainly true, but it also backs DD's assertions that it wasn't just economic issues that were the sole cruxt of chattel slavery.

Indeed, the theory that 'slavery was on it's way out due to economics' is a staple part of the Lost Cause assertion, stating they would have ended it all anyway, when the Confederacy existed specifically to perpetuate chattel slavery and wrote in it's constitution no law could ever be passed that impacted that.

Ending slavery required public support on both sides of the Atlantic, support which was growing in direct relation to the numbers of freed slaves inhabiting population centres.

That was the catch for slave owners, sooner or later they had to free their slaves and those slaves told stories, they became visible to the public at large. The greater the demand for slaves the more visible they became until on some British colonies certainly the number of freed slaves came to rival, if not surpass, the white colonials.

Add in such high profile voices as William Wilberforce adding credibility to those tales and you can start to see a situation whereby the political pressure could well outweigh the massive financial interests of a surprisingly small number of profiteers.

One of the biggest dangers was the potential for trade to be opened up to entirely private concerns as the charter system began to fall out of favour. Imagine where greater competition over prices could have led.

I think that's a very Anglocentric take - though I must admit, I am not very informed on how it happened across the Pond, and I should expand my information on that myself. Thanks, I'll look into it more.

From an Ameriocentric POV, there's a couple of things that didn't play out that way over here.

One in particular stands out, 'sooner or later they had to free their slaves.' Yeah, that's not what was happening here in the South. Slavery went from the Peculiar Institution of the Revolutionary period, where even slave owners like Jefferson and Washington looked forward to its end (though didn't divest themselves of the slaves), to Henry Clay's 'Positive Good' that was openly praised for being sanctioned by God and allowed the finer things in the Antebellum South to exist. They certainly did not feel the need to free their slaves - they were looking for markets to expand slavery because of the population pressures it was causing in many southern states. Alabama was nearly 50% slave by the time of the American civil war.

And yes, racism was already rampant, as that was one of the twin pillars of the justification of chattel slavery, the other being religion.

Legislatures in the South were actively moving to make it impossible to be a free person and black. 9 of the 13 states that eventually formed the Confederacy had already made it illegal or require the intervention of a vote of the state legislature to even allow slaves to go free after their masters died. This means that the practice of manumission was being stopped almost entirely in the South. And during the war, Southern armies grabbed every single black regardless of their status and shipped them to the CSA to be slaves.

Southern apologists often talk like you do about how few people owned slaves, but that is misleading. If you look at in terms of families that owned slave labor, every single state that seceded had 25% or more of their families owning slaves. Every state that remained loyal had less than that percentage, these being the 4 border states that still allowed it, MD and DE.

And unlike Great Britain, there was virtually no industry in the South. They could have divested in preparation for the day slavery would end, they certainly had the money, but they absolutely refused to do so. What little existed often also used slave labor - the Trafalgar Iron Works in Richmond for example. Slaves were taught trades and that slave labor was a huge part of the economy. And even families that couldn't afford slave labor often hired it from the owners for their own ends.

Political pressure here in the US changed the very nature of slavery itself and moved the Southern legislatures to even further codify it and declare it their God given right, waving their bibles the entire time. And they were outraged and offended that anyone would claim there was a moral reason to oppose it.

And they then started a war when Lincoln was elected not because slavery was in imminent peril, but the fact it would be 20-40 years down the road.

There certainly were economic reasons to continue slavery, and profit was foremost among them. But it was also a race, religion and class issue, and those things were codified. It appears the North and Great Britain's moral stance on slavery had quite a bit of similarity, but it was totally different in the South and that led to attempted secession and brutal warfare.

Wait. Is DD’s argument about slavery being social about racism?

Ok. That is a completely different discussion than discussing economics. Not all slaves are a specific race or even a different race that their “owners”. So, while racism can be an excuse for slavery, it definitely isn’t the cause.

A deliberately Anglo centric view taken to balance out a discussion which has thus far failed to address the fact that trade requires more than one party.

We've been discussing slavery and it's abolition as American phenomena but the process of that abolition played out very differently over here and wealthy Europeans were a vital link in that chain.

That being said I'm not sure we're in disagreement about the South here. Absolutely industry was virtually nonexistent but the climate was perfect for agriculture and people often overlook the importance of rice in that equation. Slaves from certain regions (Sierra Leone being a prime example) we're in high demand not only for their labour but their expertise with managing rice crops in a wide variety of conditions. That made them a multiplier in the profit margins of farmers who did indeed represent a major part of the southern economy and an example of how slavery was very much key to the establishment of a market which survives to this day.

Hence my assertion that historically capitalism as we know it owes a great deal to chattel slavery even if we no longer practise it quite so overtly.

I'll let him respond to that, but I took it that he was saying that looking at it only in economic terms isn't always valid. Hence why Marx fails. But perhaps I'm projecting my POV on him.

I'd say there likely isn't one single reason for slavery, as there have been many different ways it's been practiced over the years.

Actually I thought dds argument was that capitalism was a restraining factor for the slave trade, which takes some stomaching given the scale and success of the commercial ventures involved.

To be honest I think you are certainly reading their points differently to the way at least @Jenee and I are.

Might be wrong.