Frederick Douglass on Capitalism, Slavery, and the ‘Arrant Nonsense’ of Socialism: New at Reason

In the decades before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, leading American socialists argued that the anti-slavery movement had its priorities all wrong. The true path to social reform, the socialists said, was the path of anti-capitalism. But the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass would have none of that, notes Senior Editor Damon Root. As Douglass himself once put it, socialism was just “arrant nonsense.”

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