[TEASER] Atlantic Slavery and the Plantation System w/ David McNally

Mar 3, 2026

David McNally, radical socialist scholar and author of Slavery and Capitalism, offers a concise tour of Atlantic slavery as a capitalist, industrial-scale system. He contrasts modes of production, reframes plantations as nodes of commodity accumulation, and discusses race-making, class conflict, and mass resistance by bonded laborers.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Plantation Slavery Operated As Capitalism

Atlantic plantation slavery functioned as capitalism when it produced commodities for world markets and generated monetary profits rather than household consumption.
David McNally points to reinvestment, competition between plantations, and productivity improvements as classic capitalist dynamics present in Barbados and other colonies.

ANECDOTE

Personal Roots In 1970s Radical Movements

McNally traces his radical commitments to the 1960s–70s movements, linking activism to his scholarship on capitalism and racism.
He describes organizing for Angela Davis and arriving in Houston before the George Floyd uprising, connecting place to research.

INSIGHT

Marxism Clarifies Slavery's Role In Capitalism

New historians uncovered slavery's ties to capitalism but often lacked a theory; McNally fills that gap with Marxist analysis to show structural integration.
He emphasizes attending to enslaved people's struggles as central to understanding emancipation and working-class history.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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:

Related episodes:

For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.