/lit/ - Literature

Here's a description of his book "Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters" (1857):

>Referencing the French proletariat, various Gypsy peoples, and the Irish peasantry as groups oppressed under capitalism, Fitzhugh likewise presents the poor working and factory class conditions in England as evidence that the southern institution of slavery, modeled after a pre-capitalist, feudal society, is economically justifiable. Furthermore, he argues capitalism, as practiced in Europe and the North, produces a form of moral cannibalism, replicating the master/slave dichotomy by turning capitalists (or the professional class) into masters and free laborers into exploited slaves. Within a capitalist society, the very labor and skill extracted in pursuit of profit enslaves these workers, leaving them far more disenfranchised than their slave counterparts. Specifying capitalism's many "evils," Fitzhugh notes that it encourages falsehood and hypocrisy, impedes scientific modifications of supply to meet demand, demeans labor's value and nobility, and results in the greater impoverishment of already poor peoples while augmenting the wealth of the affluent.

>According to Fitzhugh, under the humane code of southern paternalism in which masters labor on behalf of their enslaved workers, African American slaves—unlike those miserable participants in free labor's "White Slave Trade"—are happy and free. They enjoy those comforts and necessities granted them under a mutually beneficial, supportive system and community. To address the charge that slavery results in immorality, namely through illicit sexual liaisons, Fitzhugh suggests that contact between the ignorant and the more enlightened acts as a natural form of education.

>>19248564
>working all day in a field in the sweltering southern heat and going home to a shack is better than a factory job
kill yourself

>>19248564
He was trolling them only in the sense that he was being deliberately provocative, and indeed making his argument with a certain degree of black humor and "attitude" (e.g., his line that calling free labor "wage slavery" was "a gross libel on slavery").

With that said, I think his arguments were quite serious, and seriously intended. And indeed those arguments still carry weight today, although they're undercut, in part, by the existence of a (hardly comprehensive) social safety net.