Slavery & Capitalism: Debates on the Marxist Left
July 2015
There is much theoretical debate among Marxists about the relationship of slavery to capitalist accumulation. This is often formulated as a debate about stagist theories of history, modernizationist/developmentalist theories, and/or theories of modes of production. This paper takes up the debates and explains how they present & configure the problem of value realization in its relationship to global capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A theoretical exposition of the relationship between slavery and capital accumulation must answer some key questions: (1) How does slave labor advance the realization of value? (2) How do we conceptualize the dependence of free labor on slave labor? (And how does this affect our understanding of free labor?) (3) How could we accurately describe slavery as “capitalist” in any meaningful sense? Or, rather, does slavery remain a “pre-capitalist” system of social relations even when incorporated into the larger system of capital production? (4) Lastly, how does this study deepen our understanding of the nature of capital accumulation?
The following is an attempt to make sense of this relationship through a theoretical investigation. Throughout, the work of Karl Marx, Eugene Genovese, Rosa Luxemburg and Jairus Banaji will provide the tools to advance our inquiry. We must note here that this investigation takes as its point of departure a specific relation between slavery and capitalism: We are dealing with the question of slavery in the context of already established free-labor relations in Western Europe, and not, as the work of Eric Williams tried to show, on whether (Caribbean) slavery was the necessary grounds for the emergence of industrial wage-labor in England. Thus, throughout the essay the case of American Southern slavery will provide us with material for our inquiry, i.e., a case of established slave relations within the context of the nineteenth century, wherein free labor relations in Western Europe are already bound to the production of industrial capital. The question could be made more explicit thus, if we ask: what is the relationship between slavery and capital accumulation in industrial society?
Marx: C-M-C'
In Marx’s section on primitive accumulation (Capital, Vol. 1), he writes,
While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the new World as its pedestal. (Marx, 925)
From this passage would can surmise two things: according to Marx, the incorporation of slavery into capitalism required a transformation that deepened already existing exploitative relations (i.e., “patriarchal slavery”); and that the free labor in England was dependent on the unfree labor production in the American South. The first statement regards the intensification of production for exchange (i.e., for the market). Whereas small slave holdings (1-2 slaves) were not primarily producing for exchange, large planters in the South who wielded command over the production of cotton in North America were producing for the global market. And if slave cotton-extraction was conditioned by global market relations, the cotton producing South was deeply embedded within the larger circuit of capital production. A brief outline of this circuit would serve us well here:
(1) slaves bought as property by Southern planters worked the land;
(2) the fruits of their labor, embodied in the cotton extracted, was then brought to the market by Southern plantation owners (if credit was required for extraction, it was advanced by Southern banks, which provided loans only for two things: (a) slaves and (b) land);[1]
(3) Slave cotton was then shipped to textile manufacturing centers, e.g., Lancashire and Manchester, wherein they would be worked on by free laborers who would transform the raw material into commodities (as a result of mixing these raw materials with their labor);[2]
(4) This production process provided the basis for the surplus value extraction by English capitalists, who would then use their gains to add to the accumulation of capital (i.e., total social capital)[3]
(5) Value was then realized once capitalists invested their surplus into manufacturing and industry (thus expanding global capital production);
(6) In this the advancement of capital created the conditions for (a) the expansion of free labor in England, but also (b) the investment in cotton extraction across the Atlantic.
If this is outline is correct, then the circuit of capital accumulation contained within it an apparent contradiction: while it advanced the conditions for the reproduction (and expansion) of free laboring capacities in England, it also created a greater demand for intensive cotton extraction from the slave South. This apparent compatibility of free and unfree labor raises questions about the nature of slave production in America. Namely, how do we characterize production relations which are thoroughly unfree and thus do not generate consumers for a market, but, rather, create greater demand for slaves, that is, to those who do selling their labor-power (as wage laborers) and are reducible to “working property”? Moreover, if Marx, presented the key social relation in capitalist production as the emergence of the “doubly free” laborer, i.e., as the laborer who has nothing but his labor- power through which to attain the means of his subsistence, how do we make sense of the continuation (and deepening) of slave relations in America in and through capital accumulation?
Genovese and the American Slave South
In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams argued that plantation slavery was lucrative when specific conditions were present, namely lack of free labor; vast tracks of land; and the cultivation of crops like sugar, cotton and tobacco, where larger units result in a significant reduction in the cost of production. Under these conditions, vast profits from the use of land could stand the expense of inefficient slave labor.[4] However, by the nineteenth century, changes in the mode of production corresponding to the emergence of free proletariat labor transformed the relationship between England and its colonies, and with its ex-colony, the United States.
Historian Eugene Genovese supported Williams’s formulations but emphasized the role of ideology in the persistence of slave labor in the United States during the nineteenth century. He insisted that although wage labor relations were at the center of industrial commodity production, the relics of commercial capitalism—“merchant capitalism” for Genovese—in the US South restricted free-labor relations from full realization. For Genovese, the remnants of commercial capitalism had “a retardive effect on the process of national capitalist development” (my emphasis). What precisely are these “relics?” For Genovese, the slave-based society of the South represented a “pre- bourgeois” form of labor relations, a relic that in the nineteenth century was increasingly dependent on the political power exercised by the planter ruling class against the manufacturing North. Southerners in the nineteenth century rebelled against what they recognized as a challenge to their slave-based society. Genovese’s early work on the slave South highlights the global historical conditions that shaped this form of specifically American Southern slavery, and characterized the dominant planter class as a “ruling class of a new type,”[5]
"[The planters] constituted a new class, paradoxically prebourgeois in their fundamental social relations, and postbourgeois, as Marx brilliantly perceived, in that their class position depended wholly on the existence of a world market built on free labor elsewhere." (Genovese, 23)
Herein lies the difficulty in Genovese’s formulation, cofounded by an apparent contradiction: the planters were both “prebourgeois” and “postbourgeois.” They were “pre- bourgeois” insofar as they did not adopt bourgeois free wage labor – which for Genovese was at the center of capital relations—and they were “post-bourgeois” (“paradoxically”) in the sense that, by the arrival of the nineteenth century, the very basis for the planters’ existence was now fully dependent on the expansion of free-labor in England and the Northern states. However, Southern slave society depended on the ideological refutation of proletarianization. For Genovese, the South was not “feudal,” but it was generative of a “retardive” force borne in and of the modern capitalist world; as he wrote, “it fed off existing modes of production, however backward.”[6]
Although Genovese was critical of historian Robert Fogel’s work on Southern slavery, it is important to note that he defended Fogel’s challenge against the claims that slavery was an “inefficient” form of economic exploitation––a claim borrowed from dominant nineteenth century anti-slavery thought.[7] Although the two historians held antithetical positions on the long-term viability of slave labor, both of them refuted the economically determinist narrative that Southern slavery was an inefficient and dying system that would have eventually succumbed to the forces of industrial capitalism. Genovese, unlike Fogel, grounded his reasoning on the class politics of the antebellum U.S., specifically on the obstinate character of the Southern planter class and their ability to wage their fight politically, on the world’s stage. For Genovese, it was significant that “The planter class in the Old South, in partial contrast to Brazil and contrast to the West Indies, was able to capture political power…deeply influencing national politics for more than half a century.”[8]
Luxemburg
According to Genovese, slave relations in the South contained a retrograde quality. Genovese’s emphasis on the retarding effects of merchant capital raises questions about his conception of the temporal dynamics behind slavery: Are slave relations “backward,” i.e., do they lag behind “advanced” free-labor relations? Or, are both constitutive of a larger (global) dynamic in which such combined and uneven development was taking place? How do we make sense of this “unevenness”? Did the U.S. South simply need to “catch up” or, rather, were slave relations kept in place by the very process that advanced free labor elsewhere? What is the spatial and temporal logic of such a process?
Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913) offers some answers. While Luxemburg did not write extensively on the slave relations in the American South,[9] she presents a schema of colonial relations to the metropole (“core-periphery” relations) that may deepen our understanding of the spatio-temporal logic of value realization.
The Accumulation of Capital was a response to Marx’s Capital (with an emphasis on the later volumes, 2 & 3). Throughout, Luxemburg critiques Marx for taking as his point of departure a world (“as one nation”) wherein “capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.”[10] Whereas Marx is unfolding the process of capital accumulation in “a society consisting exclusively of workers and capitalists, under the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production,” (333) Luxemburg argues, this description “flies in the face of the actual course of capitalist development” (342). Moreover, she notes, “On [Marx’s] assumptions, the natural increase of the working class is the only source of extending the labor supply commended by capital. This view, however, is contrary to the laws governing the process of accumulation (361, my emphasis).”
Luxemburg’s point of the departure is the world of uneven capital relations, where free labor, slave labor, petty production, etc., participate in the system of capital accumulation (insofar as they advance capital in some form). She uses this schema to study the logic behind imperial colonial policies in the early twentieth century, within her analysis of imperialism. For Luxemburg, “Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment” (466). Thus, clarifying how imperial policies in the colonies were connected to the on-going process of capitalist accumulation, she notes that under colonial rule, the process of accumulation is one in which “direct exploitation and those of the realization of surplus-value are not identical” (344), that is to say, these two moments—(1) exploitation and (2) value realization—within the production of capital are both “separated logically, as well as in time and space” (344). While extraction in the colonies appears distant (both temporally and spatially) from capital expansion in the imperial metropole, it is in fact (by means of violent political subjugation) part and parcel of this process. Moreover, primitive working conditions in the colonies allow a greater drive for production “through far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions (365).” Thus, for Luxemburg, force (i.e., extra-economic coercion) by imperial subjugation is an essential weapon of capital accumulation.
In a passage on the American Civil War, Luxemburg writes,
When the War of Secession interfered with the import of American cotton, causing the notorious 'cotton famine' in the Lancashire district, new and immense cotton plantations sprang up in Egypt almost at once, as if by magic. Here was Oriental despotism, combined with an ancient system of bondage, which had created a sphere of activity for European capital. (358)
By way of historical example, Luxemburg draws attention to the embedded nature of American slave cotton production within the system of capital accumulation. As this example shows, when cotton production in the South was interrupted by the war, English capital had to find another source for accumulation, i.e., Egyptian production of cotton. This formulation exemplifies the spatial and temporal non-identity in the realization of value produced by American slaves—as described in the first part of this essay (the circuit of C-M-C’). Thus, in a similar way that colonial policies allowed for the expansion of capital accumulation, slave production in the nineteenth-century American South advanced the accumulation of capital on the global stage.
Banaji
Let us return now to the problem of how to theorize the social relations of slave labor within the American South. Borrowing from Marx, the work of Jairus Banaji provides us with a guiding insight. He begins with the distinction between the formal versus real subsumption of labor under capital. First, a summation of Marx’s thought on the matter, via Banaji,
There is scarcely any doubt that Marx came around to seeing the Southern plantations (based on slavery) as capitalist enterprises. Thus the overworking of slaves in the Southern states of the American Union was, he tells us in Volume I, a question of the ‘production of surplus-value itself.’ In the Grundrisse, he refers to ‘[t]he fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists’ and implies that these ‘anomalous’ forms of capitalist enterprise could exist because capitalism as a whole was based on free labor. (My interpretation of this is: the American slave-owners are capitalists because they are part of the total social capital.) In Theories of Surplus Value, he writes that the ‘business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists’, though this is qualified by saying that here the capitalist mode of production ‘exists only in a formal sense’. Finally, in Volume III of Capital, he writes, ‘Where the capitalist conception prevails, as on the American plantations, this entire surplus-value is conceived as profit’, and, in Volume II, slaves are described as ‘fixed capital’. (Banaji, 143)
A key part of this passage for Banaji is the formulation by Marx that in the American South the capitalist mode of production ‘exists only in a formal sense.’ In line with Luxemburg, Banaji argues that the liberal conception of capitalism narrowly presents the sole basis of accumulation in the individual wage-earner, however this erases the active role of both enslaved and collective (family) units of labour-power in advancing capital accumulation (Banaji, 145). Banaji thus wants to show how unfree forms of labor remained be critical to the process of accumulation, they are not “pre-capitalist” but thoroughly capitalist.
In his “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Banaji asks how the labor by peasant producers in the Deccan connects back to the process of capital accumulation. He argues that while the nature of production in the countryside has been transformed by its connection to capital—so that now capital commands labor in the Deccan districts—in some instances, the customary character of social relations of production remain. Under these conditions, Banaji writes, “the labor process itself remains external to the movement of capital” (281, my emphasis). Here, Banaji uses Marx’s distinction of the “formal subsumption of labor” from the “real subsumption of labor,” the latter corresponds to a situation wherein all inherited forms of existing labor processes alien to the pure motion of capital have been done away with. Banaji argues that the peasant producers in the Deccan are in fact part of the capital value-making process, even before they become dependent on the market to produce their own subsistence, because in this historical instance, capital was able to penetrate the Deccan through the activities of merchants and money-lenders.
The peasant producers’ growing dependence on merchant activity and credit advances transforms the nature of their labor, although the form of production relations remained the same. Perpetual indebtedness in the Deccan districts is key to understand how peasant production is subject to process of capital accumulation. Thus, this form of economic dependence leaves the labor-process the same as that of earlier modes of labor, while “‘the process of production has become the process of capital itself’”, i.e., of the self-expansion of value, of the conversion of money into capital. This implies that capital has become ‘the immediate owner of the process of production’ and that the immediate producer is merely ‘a factor in the production process and dependent on the capitalist directing it.’” (Banaji, 281, quoting Marx).
Lastly, while Banaji describes the relative “incomplete” character of formal subsumption of labor (versus that of real subsumption), he writes that “there might be historical situations where in the absence of a specifically capitalist mode of production on the national scale, capitalist relations of exploitation may nonetheless be widespread and dominant” (282, emphasis in original).
With this theoretical exposition at hand let us now return to the problem of American slave production: Important parallels connect Banaji’s Deccan example to the historical development of the American South. Here we find planters who, despite their own understanding of the process,[11] are in fact advancing capital accumulation. But this penetration of capital into the American South did not transform the labor relations into wage labor, rather, capital absorbed the absolute surplus production of slave labor into the accumulation process through the command of the planter class (and the organized Southern system of credit). Thus, we can say that capital commanded labor in the slave South while the production relations maintained their coercive form.
This exposition has established the following: (1) Slave production is one moment of the accumulation of capital, and thus advances capital through its relation to the expansion of free-wage labor relations elsewhere; (2) The dependence of free labor on unfree forms of labor is often mediated through political coercion and force; (3) Slavery in nineteenth century America is not pre-capitalist, but rather, as a function of its role in the accumulation of capital, is an integral part of capitalist production; (4) We cannot evaluate the process of value-realization in the abstract but must place the inquiry within a specific historical and geographical point in order to unfold the dynamic of capital accumulation.
1. Banks were closely supervised by the planter dominated state legislature. They were intimately tied to the planter class and often found it necessary to add prominent planters to their board of directors. Credit on the South was advanced solely for land and slaves.
2. “Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation. It began by being £100, it is now £110, and so on. But the money itself is only one of the two forms of value. Unless it takes the form of some commodity, it does not become capital.” Karl Marx, “Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital” in Capital, Vol 1.
3. “The capitalist buys not one but many individual labour capacities… Their own association in labour— cooperation—is in fact a power alien to them; it is the power of capital which confronts the isolated workers… They find that they are agglomerated… The work takes place under conditions in which the independent labour of the individual cannot be carried on—and indeed these conditions appear as a relation dominating the individual, as a band with which capital fetters the individual workers.” Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts (1861)
4. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
5. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), 5.
6. We have to be careful in unfolding Genovese’s argument, for while he sees merchant capital as a restrictive force, in part of the book, he also treats it as bringing forth a new order. As the following passages suggest, Genovese has an understanding of merchant capital as embedded within a social system of production (in contrast to Wallerstein). He writes, “Historically, merchant capital proved a proverbial Janus, looking at once forward and backward. It bound within the market system both archaic and revolutionary social relations. It even generated rationalized and, in time and place, efficient variants of archaic relation of production, above all the slave economies. Within the economic sector, the decisive threshold lay at the transformation of labor-power into a commodity. But merchant capital could not itself cause this transformation in the manner suggested by some scholars, most notably Immanuel Wallerstein. Rather, it contributed to organizing economic space and exchange in a way that permitted the eventual emergence of a fully developed capitalist system. As understanding of this process requires full attention to the role of politics, and especially state power, in assuring the ruling class adequate command over its resources, including labor, and an adequate share of the international market. From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that the abolition of slavery in the United States occurred not through a simply economic transfer of resources, or through internal social reform, but through a bloody civil war.” Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capitalism, 36, (my emphasis). Furthermore, “Merchant capital did play a revolutionary role in the rise of capitalism, but only within limits that must be clearly delineated. Under certain specific historical conditions, analysed with particular effectiveness by Karl Marx, Maurice Dobb, and other contributors to the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism, merchant capital acted as a powerful solvent or feudal social relations and as an agent of primitive accumulation. But these contributions of merchant capital to capitalist development, while necessary, occurred only under definite conditions of production and represented the great, if spectacular, exception to its common role throughout history. On balance, indeed overwhelmingly so, merchant capital proved conservative: it fed off existing modes of production, however backward. Normally, merchants and financiers adjusted their interests to those of the prevailing ruling classes and resisted all attempts to introduce revolutionary transformation into the economy, into politics, into class relations. In a word, they normally lived as parasites on the old order.” Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capitalism, 5, my emphasis.
7. Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974); Richard Fogel, The Slavery Debates, a Retrospective 1952-1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).
8. This class relation was shaped by the ideology of Southern planters but the origins of their self- understanding remained enigmatic for Genovese,
How could a socioeconomic system embedded in a world capitalistic market and presided over by those whom bourgeois historians—from Phillips to Stampp, from David and Temin to Gutman and Sutch, and beyond—have regarded as capitalist not exhibit a capitalist culture and a bourgeois social psychology, without which such a culture could not have been transmitted? (Genovese, 167)
9. However, she does dedicate an entire chapter to the American small farmer and agricultural transformation in the West.
10. Luxemburg, 331, quoting Marx, Capital vol 1., 594, footnote 1.
11. Actual nature of production logically distinct from the forms in which those relations of production and exploitation are portrayed or ‘represented’ in the consciousness of its agents (Banaji, 148)
