Why plantation slavery was capitalist

This is a preview of the Patreon episode "Atlantic Slavery and the Plantation System w/ David McNally." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going.

In this episode we're joined by David McNally to discuss his new book, Slavery and Capitalism: A new Marxist History, a systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. David McNally is a radical socialist activist and award-winning scholar. He currently holds the Cullen Distinguished Professorship of History & Business at the University of Houston.

The conversation opens with an introduction to the idea that the Atlantic slave system and the plantation system were forms of capitalism using the example of Barbados and George Washington in Virginia to explain the industrial-scale level of this system and its position in global capitalism as a node of commodity production. We explore the idea of modes of production and what Marx had to say about colonialism and slavery before we discuss race-making as a modality of capitalist discipline during slavery. We discuss the difference between constant and variable capital and why this is important in understanding the capitalist nature of the plantation system.

We then discuss the nature of class conflict on the plantation, exploring how Atlantic bondpeople were the first workers of the industrial age to use the mass strike as a weapon of struggle and emancipation, and what this tells us about enslaved labor under capitalism. Finally, our conversation ends with an examination of the intersection of Marxism and revolutionary abolitionism in the US and how they dialectically informed one another.

Further resources:

• Slavery and Capitalism: A new Marxist History, by David McNally
• Marx at the Margins, by Kevin Anderson
• The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by C.L.R. James
• Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, by W.E.B Du Bois

Related episodes:

• Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes
• Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen
• Marx's Capital Vol. 1 w/ David Smith
• Marx's Capital Vol. 2 w/ Richard Wolff and Shahram Azhar
• Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly

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