Paige McLoughlin’s Reviews > Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History > Status Update

Marx and Marxists' interactions with slavery during the Civil War era and the inklings of an anti-racist labor movement.

slaves in the South and Caribbean had a culture of freedom with many aspects, from work songs to passed on stories about freedom from bondage, in some ways had clearer conceptions of freedom than free people.

Slave women and the struggle for reproductive freedom, especially in terms of the fight for time with childcare and birthing.

Often the domination of the slave is supposedly characterized as "total," but slaves could withhold labor the same tool as the proletariat, and could collaborate with other slaves in an organized way to win back concessions from the slavemaster despite their legal status.

slaves were often hired out for wages, and part of all of the wages went to the owner. Slaves were only given subsistence or a portion of the wages.

Comparing free labor and its wages to the predicament of bonded labor, there is surplus labor time as a source of capitalist profit, which is one thing in common, and maybe the tools of violence available for physical harm rather than the threat of deprivation and starvation in the case of free labor..

slaves were used as labor for profit. Some of their labor was used for their upkeep, and the rest was surplus labor time, which was added to the surplus labor time after wages for free labor.so conflict was over this surplus labor time for slaves who tried to win over as many moments for themselves against the tyranny of the taskmasters.

The process of running plantations like a capitalist enterprise exacted a barracks-like discipline on slaves. A regimented style of gang labor that took a great deal of coordination to be extracted from the laboring slaves.

Case study of Washington and his plantation. Although slaveowners liked to portray themselves as paternalistic aristocrats, they were very much running large scale operations like capitalists, looking at expenditures and timing workers' efficiency at labor, and managing a large plantation like a company.