Brad’s Reviews > Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History > Status Update
Brad
is on page 93 of 368
"In Marx's terms, enslaved workers actually represent variable capital in the production process."
— Jul 16, 2026 06:45PM
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Brad’s Previous Updates
Brad
is on page 250 of 368
Final chapter, "Empires of Capital":
1. "Abolitionist Marxism"
2. Geopolitical economy of militarized trade liberalization and subaltern resistance.
3. Marx anticipates anticolonial anti-imperialism.
"There was no question of seeing the colonial world, or even relations of New World slavery, as outside global capitalism. Rather, the world capitalist system was a unitary but complexly differentiated totality."
— Jul 25, 2026 10:53AM
1. "Abolitionist Marxism"
2. Geopolitical economy of militarized trade liberalization and subaltern resistance.
3. Marx anticipates anticolonial anti-imperialism.
"There was no question of seeing the colonial world, or even relations of New World slavery, as outside global capitalism. Rather, the world capitalist system was a unitary but complexly differentiated totality."
Brad
is on page 206 of 368
— Jul 23, 2026 04:19PM
"All claims to freedom were inherently criminal in slave society. To claim a ‘property’ in oneself was to violate the property rights of masters. And it again reminds us why bondpeople were not constant or fixed capital. Dead labour does not plan, organize, and fight for freedom. But enslaved people did. Over and over again."
Brad
is on page 200 of 368
Jacobs's article, Urban proletariat with peasant characteristics.
Embedding that liminal class in systems thinking evokes many threads:
- Federici: expropriation of feudal commons as counter-revolution.
- Cabral: "Return to the Source", modern reimagining of customs.
- Pittaway & Szymanski: impeded collectives' productivity -> IMF debt.
— Jul 21, 2026 07:57PM
Embedding that liminal class in systems thinking evokes many threads:
- Federici: expropriation of feudal commons as counter-revolution.
- Cabral: "Return to the Source", modern reimagining of customs.
- Pittaway & Szymanski: impeded collectives' productivity -> IMF debt.
Brad
is on page 199 of 368
"Proletarian struggles over time thus carved out alternative spaces and hours of ‘peasant’ production, exchange, and recreation. And this required securing possession (at least in practice) of land and the goods produced there."
In Reconstruction, emancipated slaves sought to retain such liminal "spaces of reappropriation", thus forming what Ricardo Jacobs terms "a proletariat with peasant characteristics."
— Jul 21, 2026 07:20PM
In Reconstruction, emancipated slaves sought to retain such liminal "spaces of reappropriation", thus forming what Ricardo Jacobs terms "a proletariat with peasant characteristics."
Brad
is on page 156 of 368
"No matter how compelling the evidence of a mass movement for self-emancipation, the liberal tradition ultimately assigns meaningful agency to elite actors."
🔥🔥🔥
— Jul 19, 2026 07:54PM
🔥🔥🔥
Brad
is on page 156 of 368
Love when just as I think "I hope the book mentions this", it does!
The pathologizing of dissent is a topic of fascination to me. Unfortunately the other mention of drapetomania that comes to mind is by Thomas Szasz.
— Jul 19, 2026 12:20PM
"So persistent was the phenomenon that one New Orleans physician racially pathologized it as a Black disorder—drapetomania—defined as ‘the disease causing Negroes to run away.'"
Love when just as I think "I hope the book mentions this", it does!
The pathologizing of dissent is a topic of fascination to me. Unfortunately the other mention of drapetomania that comes to mind is by Thomas Szasz.
Brad
is on page 152 of 368
"Resistance by exploited classes is almost always tentative, not insurrectionary."
— Jul 19, 2026 11:12AM
Brad
is on page 133 of 368
"The receipt of wages does not on its own make plantation slaves into a proletariat; it is the production of surplus value and working-class forms of resistance that do that. But the reality of monetary payments to bonded labourers disrupts the formalist correlation of wages with free labour. And it reminds us that enslaved people did...at times sell their own labour-power."
Next section addresses constant capital.
— Jul 18, 2026 02:14PM
Next section addresses constant capital.
Brad
is on page 125 of 368
"Although outlawed at some point in every Southern state, self-hiring (semi-independent hiring out of chattel slaves 'on their own time', even for wages) by chattel workers continued unabated."
— Jul 18, 2026 12:23PM
Brad
is on page 88 of 368
On the previous note: McNally passingly critiques forms of World Systems theory which "fails to differentiate among the many forms of integration into the capitalist system. In particular, it elides the distinction between formal and real subsumption of production by capital."
The focus here is on racialization and capitalization as lived processes>/i>, rather than categorical structural integration.
— Jul 16, 2026 01:54PM
The focus here is on racialization and capitalization as lived processes>/i>, rather than categorical structural integration.
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Jul 16, 2026 06:53PM
How can he swing that one? Considering the fact slaves were (quite literally) tied the land and therefore could not be disposed of with market fluctuations like workers could?
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Fair question! He goes into some detail on scientific management techniques and how slaves' labour as living labour (unlike, say, their tools/machinery...constant capital) produces surplus value, with fluctuations contingent on reproduction costs of labour/resistance.From page 92 (bolded parts are my emphasis):
To focus on the "asset values" of slaves is to substitute the prices of bondpeople for the value of what they produced. It is to treat them as simple commodities rather than as commodity producers, that is, living labour...
neoclassicists tend to reify bonded labour---literally thingify them---by treating them as units of capital whose market values are what determine profit or loss. The productive powers of bonded labour---the fact that they expend living labour to create value and surplus value---are annulled via the attribution of labour's creative powers to capital. In Marx's terminology, this is a form of capital fetishism.
if we treat labourers as technical factors of production, we also occlude their capacity for resistance and social transformation.
Finally, on the widespread practice of renting out slaves:
As one detailed survey of antebellum Louisiana showed, "lending practices were influenced primarily by income streams [from slave labour - DM], not rising asset values."
Maybe rejecting the "constant capital" classification altogether overstates the case (versus something like a dual function?) insofar as slaves could be considered functionally capital and not only produce but explicitly "embody" a certain abstract outset asset-value, (even their labour power is purchased and tied to the land with, as McNally acknowledges, the uniquely relevant standard natural-environmental constraints on agricultural labour on a given plot, and hence generally expected quotas). But this is fairly early on in the book's section on "The Political Economy of the Plantation System", and I've got an interview of him queued up to watch (Emancipations Podcast) where he probably addresses this further.
Good response thanks!