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This is a really powerful, important podcast episode with Prof David McNally -- I strongly recommend it. It nicely debunks the myth that plantation slavery in the Atlantic was some kind of “pre-capitalist” mode of production – a favourite claim of those who try to sanitize capitalism of some of its most heinous crimes.
The claim shouldn’t need debunking – world-system analysts have long established that capitalism is a 500-year-old system that relied very heavily on bonded labour for centuries – but it absolutely bears repeating.
Plantation slavery was very clearly capitalist: it was commodity production for the world market (not for the consumption of the owner, as in pre-capitalist forms of slavery), geared toward profit maximization, capital accumulation, competition, and reinvestment in the expansion and intensification of production.
There are some Marxists who claim that Atlantic slavery doesn’t fit Marx’s definition of capitalism, because enslaved people were not paid wages and therefore could not produce surplus value. McNally shows this is an incorrect reading of Marx, and an incorrect view of how plantation production worked.
It’s also crucial to understand that enslaved people were at the forefront of resistance against capitalist exploitation. The British ruling class likes to claim that Britain “abolished slavery”, as though this was some benevolent gift handed down from above. Far from it. It was slave rebellions and revolutions that abolished slavery!
Specifically, the Haitian revolution in 1791, Bussa’s rebellion in Barbados in 1816, followed by the Baptist rebellion in Jamaica in 1830- some of the earliest general strikes in working-class history! This eventually forced Britain to understand they would not be able to sustain the system.
And then there was the general strike during the US Civil War, described by Du Bois, when up to 500,000 enslaved people refused to work and fled to union lines, totally crippling the plantation economy. 200,000 of them took up arms on the union side and fought the slavers, contributing substantially to the defeat of the fascist confederacy. Heroes one and all.
Teaser to the episode here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tea…. The full episode is available via Patreon subscription to @UpstreamPodcast (worth it!).
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