Julian Assele’s enjoyable review of McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism focuses on its contribution to contemporary discourse among certain historians of New World (largely American and British) slavery who have laid emphasis on its modern features and connections to the development of the capitalist world market. In particular, Assele highlights how, in contrast to the liberal “new historians of capitalism,” McNally finds consonance with Marx’s critique of capitalism rather than taking a polemical stance against it. Schematically, the NHCs have claimed, in accord with some decades of anti-Marxist liberal thought, that Marxism as an analytical framework has had no place for race, and that the Marxist tradition, in viewing slavery and capitalism as distinct systems, viewed capitalism as “deracinated” from the start. McNally, writing less a history book than an extended essay in historical interpretation, draws on a rich legacy of writers from Du Bois onwards to make a convincing case that it is in fact a historical materialist framework, in the legacy of Marx, that can account for and structure an understanding of capitalism’s emergence as a world system as marked by race from almost the start. So far, so good.

However, in his exposition of a Marxist understanding of the antebellum South, McNally follows suit with the NHCs in many unfortunate ways – accepting some of their more shallow historical claims, and most importantly, sharing their dismissiveness of Eugene Genovese, at whom he directs almost more vitriol than all the NHC authors combined.

For both schools, Genovese presents a thorny problem. For decades, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the antebellum South, he not only wrote from an avowedly Marxist standpoint, but also was politically outspoken both as a militant supporter of Progressive Labor, while also making deeply contrarian arguments about seeking to keep scholarly debates “untainted” by such political commitments. These commitments would last until late in his career, when following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he and his wife and collaborator Elizabeth-Fox Genovese made a “god that failed” turn towards religious conservatism. Most frustratingly, to McNally and the NHCs alike, one of Genovese’s hallmark contributions was a career-long insistence that to analyze the slavocracy of the American South, one must begin from the understanding of its non-bourgeois character. Thus, any attempt to characterize antebellum Southern slavery simply as capitalism must contend seriously with Genovese’s significant, well researched, and erudite body of explicitly Marxian work.

McNally makes a better run at this task than the NHCs that came before him. But, this is in the same sense that a bullfrog is better at being a cat than a rubber tire is. I will here describe McNally’s arguments against Genovese, followed by a very rough sketch of some of Genovese’s large-scale themes and concerns. An article this length cannot make the case for Genovese’s arguments and approach (and his own works would do a far superior job to whatever efforts I could muster) – but at the least it can try to set the record straight on what they were not, and encourage readers to take up for themselves a reading of the works of this oft-spurned and neglected giant.

Distortions of Genovese

We are told first that Genovese “declared that bonded people lived in ‘acceptance of the state of things.” Rather than aspire to lives beyond slavery, the enslaved are purported to have acquiesced: “The practical question facing the slaves was not whether slavery itself was an improper relation but how to survive it.’“^[1] This is a malicious distortion of a quote. Here, Genovese is not characterizing slaves in general, or even slaves in the late antebellum South - the topic of the book, Roll Jordan Roll: The World The Slaves Made [1974], from which the quote is cited. Rather, he is discussing a subset of narratives of former slaves in which they distinguished bad from good owners and described how they would judge if a “master” was a good one. He is discussing why some who did acquiesce did so, along with the terrain they navigated. Later sections of Roll Jordan Roll discuss rebellions, resistance, uprisings and acts of violence as well as situating their relative possibility and frequency within a broader hemispheric context. The conclusion sums things up in a manner that belies McNally’s smear. Genovese writes, “Accomodation and resistance developed as two forms of a single process by which the slaves accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously fought individually and as a people for moral as well as physical survival.”^[2]

The glimmer of truth that McNally passes by is that Genovese indeed did emphasize the relative weakness of mass organized resistance in the antebellum South, compared to certainly the Haitian revolution, or the mass maroonage of West Indian and Brazilian slaves, or the Berbice rebellion of Guyana. However, this was not a characterization of New World slavery as such – it was a recognition of the specific conditions of the American South, and the consequences, culturally and in class struggle, that emerged from it. When McNally himself recounts dramatic stories of large-scale collective rebellion, he finds himself drawing on the same wellspring of examples from the broader hemispheric context that Genovese recounts so grippingly in From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979).

The next, and most significant salvo at Genovese is that he engaged in “Weberian commentary on New World slavery, which sees Southern planters as ‘a pre-bourgeois ruling class,” and this was “compounded by claims that enslaved laborers were ‘constant capital’ and that, therefore, they were ‘by definition’ incapable of producing surplus value.”^[3] The reader might think that Genovese made claims about constant capital. Not so! This was only later analysts, such as Charlie Post, none especially in Genovese’s tradition. Whatever their own flaws in analysis, McNally treats them poorly as well, though we will not dwell on that here. So we are only left with an outraged claim that Genovese saw Southern planters as “a pre-bourgeois ruling class,” and more specifically presents a “cartoon version of ‘pre-capitalist, quasi-aristocratic land-owners,’ the nineteenth century’s ‘closest thing to feudal lords,’ ensconced in a stagnant and “irrational” economic system”. However, when one follows the footnotes, one learns that Genovese only discussed things in feudal terms in the first book of his half century career, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South (1965). He immediately rejected its implications as confused in his subsequent work. Genovese would characterize the South in In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (1971) as “prebourgeois in essential respects, but… far from being feudal,” a system which “arose anachronistically and as a hybrid during the epoch of capitalism’s world conquest,” which “functioned as part of the capitalist world and could not separate itself from the bourgeois economy or ideology.”^[4] By their mature phase in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983), the Genoveses would prefer to drop the pesky (and God forbid “Weberian”) “pre-” and characterize the Old South “as a bastard child of merchant capital… developed as a noncapitalist society increasingly antagonistic to, but inseparable from the bourgeois world that sired it.”^[5]

Here, McNally has picked up on a formulation that Genovese would grapple with, puzzle over, and ultimately reject. Rather than recognize Genovese’s critical distance from this formulation, McNally has instead situated it as a summation of Genovese’s thought – all the better to dismiss him. This sort of formalist sect-thought gets us no closer to looking at the problems of history itself. What he neglects are the throughlines of argumentation and analysis that persisted throughout the various, more refined formulations, and the understanding of history they let us access.

The Nub of the Argument

The core of McNally’s arguments, and where his book shines, are where he makes the case for treating the enslaved black laboring population as workers, detailing the various struggles they engaged in, both large and small, and how they came into conflict with those who owned them. His indication of if a society is “capitalist” is if it possesses class conflict – and he portrays those conflicts quite well. However, he simply has no grasp on what Genovese is getting up to, or why. For example, he complains that “Genovese tended to see the plantation only from above, reproducing the fantasized self-image of the slaveholders.”^[6] But that self-image, fantasized elements and all, is of no small import – it is the structure and ideology of the ruling class. Genovese’s investigation must be understood as following, almost to the letter, Marx’s injunction that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.”^[7]

McNally’s central argument is that New World slavery was capitalist. From the standpoint of Genovese, this is almost a nonsensical issue to debate, too broad and vague a claim to think with. Genovese’s argument was that specifically the master class of specifically the antebellum South was a noncapitalist class – distinguished not by the “noncapitalist” nature of a slave plantation, but by its process of reproduction. McNally criticizes Genovese, for example, by arguing that “If there was a paternalist shift in the US South, it occurred among the Southern gentry in the context of the Revolutionary War.” He details how the British opportunistically took up the cause of the slaves and hence “planters sought to bolster their authority by cultivating emotional attachments between master and slave. Invoking sentimentalist doctrines, they promoted ‘charity’ toward bondpeople as a supplement to violence… This analysis is, of course, a historical one, not a transhistorical proposition. It applies to a specific region (the antebellum South) at a particular period (post–Revolutionary War).”^[8] But this is precisely the sort of analysis Genovese advocates throughout – not transhistorical propositions, but regions at points in time. While McNally seeks largely to speak in terms of theoretical generalities to establish a sweeping framework, Genovese, above all a historian, operates with the historical method uniformly.

Genovese began from the standpoint that the Southern master class was a noncapitalist class, who reinvested the surplus extracted from the labor of their slaves not in maximization of the rate of profit, but in effectively “extensive” expansion of their plantation complex (in a specific mix of land, slave labor, and tools). However, this was only his starting point. His great object of study was the development of this classes’ ideology and culture – the world they built. Which is to say that Genovese’s political economy places an emphasis on the political, much more than McNally.

The world of the slaveholders was part of a broader modernizing world. While we may find that aspects of it are similar to, or even anticipatory of the world we dwell in today, it is important to understand as well the extent to which it is impossibly foreign. It was a world in which, contrary to enlightenment values, some human beings were considered fit to own others, and others were considered fit to be owned. Today, we discuss the “impersonal domination” of capital, the manner in which violence and power is exerted through abstract mechanisms, and even “mute compulsion.” This was significantly unlike the era of the plantation, where even in their largest and most “industrial” form was one in which power was held and exerted through entirely personal and direct means – through the ownership of persons, the control of their lives in all aspects, and the “right” to punish and torture them if they should refuse to appropriately docile.

These characteristics held wherever there were slaves. But, only in some areas did this slavery dominate production and all areas of social life. In fewer areas still did the slaveholding class cohere as a class, much less establish itself as a ruling class. Thus we are faced with the particular historical circumstances of the American South which distinguished it from other areas of New World slavery. Among these circumstances include domestic rather than overseas owners, a “home economy” with dense white settlement and local commerce and production of non-export goods, and the closure of the slave trade and necessity of internal reproduction of the enslaved population. In such circumstances and compacted by the external pressure of non-slave production and ideology above, the Southern slaveholders developed into a class, and a ruling class, who shaped a world as they saw fit. Every aspect of this world was marked by the essential difference of slavery, and every aspect rightfully horrifies us. Yet it had its own moral codes, its own codes of justice and sense of honor and rectitude – and eventually its own interpretation of Christianity and its own development of social sciences. Genovese insists we treat this sophisticated ideological and social apparatus seriously, and recognize that the slaveholders were no easy enemy to contend with.

Here we should note that while McNally praises Du Bois’ wonderful Black Reconstruction with equal vigor to the scorn he heaps upon Genovese, Du Bois and Genovese agreed in the essence of this analysis. While DuBois writes, rightfully, of slaves as black workers, insisting on their character as exploited human beings engaged in labor and production, he never speaks of the Southern slaveowners as capitalists. Instead, he refers to them typically as the “planter class” and describes the effective destruction of this class following its defeat in the Civil War.

Gene and Me

It is rare for an author to make a decisive impact on the life of a reader; rarer still for it to be a historian; and thrice as rare, at least, for it to happen twice. This is the case with the impact Genovese had on me, and why I now take up the pen in his defense – in hopes that others might find in his works some of the same value which I have found. The first work of Genovese’s I encountered was in the famous Aptheker debate at the Socialist Scholars Conference, published in Studies on the Left (vol 6, number 6, 1966) under the title “Legacy of Slavery and the Roots of Black Nationalism.” There, Genovese opened with a claim that shocked me then, and still shocks me to read today:

American radicals have long been imprisoned by the pernicious notion that the masses are necessarily both good and revolutionary, and the even more pernicious notion that if they are not, they should be. The principal responsibility of radical historians, therefore, has too often been to provide the masses with historical heroes, to make them aware of their glorious tradition of resistance to oppression, and to portray them as having been implacably hostile to the social order in which they have been held.^[9]

What begins as a description of the relatively low level of mass resistance in the antebellum South and its causes moves on to a discussion of the impoverished and disordered state of the black masses upon emancipation, their poor treatment by the generals during Reconstruction, and the problems they then encountered in seeking to assert themselves as they urbanized. From this, he then spins a story of the appeal of Booker T. Washington and then Garveyism, the promises and failures of King, and what seems to him the necessary and inevitable role of the Nation of Islam in addressing these conditions, concluding with a meditation on the relationship of integrationist and separatist trends, and the role of nationalist uplift organizations within this. It is a sad and brutal story, harshly told.

Even by the time of its republication in In Red and Black, he had come to regret it, as well as his one-sided treatment of Aptheker, and he published it only with a lengthy apologia as well as another essay (“American Slaves and their History”), painting a much more nuanced and complex portrait of the complexities of the daily and domestic life of slaves, and the smaller forms of class conflict, consisting of resistance and accommodation both – themes that would be developed later in Roll Jordan, Roll. But the details of the argument and its evolution are not what stuck with me.

In the initial debate, the respondents – not only Aptheker, but also C. Van Woodward (what a lineup!) aptly rise to the occasion – not only taking up the challenge of disputing historical elements, but also making the case for how these are to be understood in light of then-current debates in the struggle for black freedom. I had never read anything like it. I had never been so electrified by historical claims, nor seen any writer (much less three) make a case for their modern relevance – not merely as examples to draw from, but as the indelible facts which stamp our society and have created the landscape for our contemporary struggles and the possibilities with which we are presented. Having encountered until then largely liberal histories and just-so stories, records of great or tragic moments of the past, I had never before seen and felt why history might matter so vitally, much less why a faithfulness to even its ugliest elements might be a burning necessity. From then on, I was devoted to its study.

The second great impact on my life from Genovese was in some ways more subtle than the first. It was again not through one of his big scholarly works, but an essay – one reflecting on his own upbringing and method. I can’t recall as vividly when I first encountered it, yet its lessons are ones without which I would not have survived my education, and which I have found myself revisiting ever since. I have subsequently recommended it to every budding activist student I encounter. In “Hans Rosenberg at Brooklyn College: A Communist Student’s Recollections of the Classroom as War Zone,” a 1991 essay later published in The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (1995), Genovese describes a central figure in his own undergraduate education – a right wing but intellectually rigorous German refugee whose class on economic history included Marxist thought and hence attracted a coterie of “Marxists and other political radicals, including about a half dozen party comrades and a few of those detestable Trotskyists.” The classroom is a punishing environment. Rosenberg baits the Communists, the Communists argue vigorously against Rosenberg, and everyone attacks the Trotskyists. In this atmosphere, they learn that to defend their politics seriously, they must also be rigorous scholars. Purely theoretical arguments would be breezily dismissed, and quotes from Marx or Lenin would invite nothing but derision. Arguments had to stand on the merits of what evidence could be marshalled from the only accepted source of truth – the archives. After each class they would run to the library, divvy up research, and come to the next prepared to try again to win the arguments they had lost – taking each argumentative victory or loss against Rosenberg with the same importance they might when organizing a demonstration or a sit-in.

If before, Genovese had convinced me that history mattered, here he conveyed to me the seriousness and rigor that one must attend to it with. If before, Genovese had convinced me that political commitments could not deform our account of history, here he conveyed with equal ferocity why such commitments must nevertheless compel our study of it. Holding these views simultaneously is a sort of high-wire act – at times Genovese swung wildly one or the other way. For my own part, attempting to honor these imperatives at once has sometimes led me to paralysis. But their reconciliation is something today’s scholars seldom aspire to, and we are the weaker for it – because when they can be brought into synchronicity, that is how fire is made.

Genovese concludes by describing how Rosenberg set him off on his own path: “I have studied the Junkers, who rose to power more or less at a definite time and went kaput in 1945. Your slaveholders also rose to power more or less at a definite time and went kaput in 1865. Where could you find anything so close to a laboratory in which to study how a ruling class really rules? Why don’t you test those crazy Marxist theories of yours?”^[10] That is precisely what Genovese proceeded to do. It is a great shame that McNally and others cannot understand his career in that light.

Genovese as an Atlantic Scholar

Genovese was not of course the final word on the topics he studied. At the onset of his career there were few predecessors, and they were largely, like Du Bois or Aptheker, excluded from the academy for their politics. A bridge from the old left to the new, in his generation were other radical voices, all of whom engaged in vigorous and bruising polemics, and all of whom sought, in their own ways to tell a story of the antebellum South shorn of the “moonlight and magnolias” school of lost-cause romantics that came before. The primary way in which scholarship on slavery has evolved since Genovese’s early period has been a combination of broadening of scope with granularity of focus.

From the initial, crucial, distinction between “societies with slaves” and “slave societies” grew an increasing specificity of the slave societies of the American South across regions and time – comparative analyses between the middle ground of commercial Maryland and the vast plantation complexes of Georgia, the relative independence of rice growing communities of South Carolina, the Catholic slave codes of Spanish Florida, and much else besides. Scholars also put into conversation the vastly different slave systems of the colonial powers throughout the Americas from the sugar-dominated British West Indies to the eventually more complex and mixed economy of Brazil. Detailed examination of records of slave traders combined with the memoirs of slave-owners let scholars begin to speak more of Africa as well, chronicling from what regions and tribes Africans were imported, and how and where their cultural practices and even languages were carried to the New World: what persisted across generations, and what was lost. This more expansive view of cultural and economic currents across seas and time came to be known as “Atlantic History” and authors such as Paul Gilroy would speak of the “Black Atlantic.”

While Genovese’s most dense historical books focused in careful detail at the heart of the slave South at the height of the powers of the master class, he also made a number of early and compelling contributions to what would come to be called the study of the Atlantic world. His first such work was “The American Slave Systems in World Perspective,” in The World the Slaveholders Made. Here he drew on a vast range of sources to sketch not only the variety of economic and social forms comprising New World slavery, but their various developments as also products of the “old world” – living not only in a general world market, but as ruled and dominated by various classes from Europe – some seigneurial, some capitalist, each with their own economic and political structures, and own historically determined juridical traditions. He recognized that a test of Marxism was not only to describe slavery but to account for abolition in its variety of forms and times. Why slavery was ended relatively peaceably in some cases but only by great violence in others, and likewise why and how did the process of emancipation took nearly a century to unfold across this landscape?

In From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese would maintain the Atlantic perspective, while shifting from the slaveowning classes to the slaves themselves, the variety of situation they were presented with, and how they took up the banner of European republican revolutions in their own bids for revolution and freedom. Locating slave revolts within the wave of Atlantic revolutions, he described not only how they took inspiration from the revolutionary activities of European colonists, but in turn how their own uprisings would take a place of honor in that great upsurge, spreading their own message and acting as spurs to broader action.

What bound together this Atlantic world? The web of trade and commerce, personified in a network of merchant capitalists. Later still, in Fruits of Merchant Capital, the Genoveses would integrate their understanding of slavery and the Atlantic trade into the Marxist “transformation” debate, and the “Janus faced” nature of such capital in both creating possibilities for capitalist development but also at times seeking to foreclose it. While the NHC school (really advancing a very old historical argument) and McNally point to the fact of commerce and accounting as a-priori the fact of capitalism, the Genoveses painted a more complex picture in which the symbiotism or parasitism of merchant capital is highlighted. It seeks not to revolutionize societies, but capture them in its web, spider-like, and suck them dry, and in so doing finds itself supplicating to and reinforcing power as much as challenging it.

The above only scratches the surface of a few of his many works. They resist easy summary. Over the course of his career, Genovese frequently revised or modified his claims – including his boldest ones. And his work often did not provide pat answers, but only the evidence in all directions pertaining to problems he saw worthy of further and deeper study. As historical texts, his books seek to assemble portraits of worlds unlike our own, with different values, habits of thought and manners of interaction, and to capture that world in its dynamism and development. While informed by theory, and especially Gramscian notions of hegemony, they are not works of theory, and cannot be reduced to slogans or bumper-stickers. They follow the inner logic of the history Genovese sought to uncover, and so their narratives are seldom straightforward, as historical tendencies are always in conflict, and motion often doubles-back on itself, seldom advancing by directly logical steps.

If I cannot do justice to Genovese’s arguments and studies, at least I hope I have encouraged readers to not take the word of McNally on them, or anybody else, and to sample them for themselves. The debates we think are new have often happened before – and among more well-informed and verbally adroit antagonists than many today. It is not only history that needs preserving, but historiography as well.

What is at Stake

What is the purpose of history? For McNally, who opens his book with an injunction that to write about slavery is to write about freedom, and closes with a call to honor the injustices levied on the dead, it is perhaps an act of religious observance. For Genovese, it was among other things a place to test his “crazy Marxist theories” and a way to understand what must be done in the present. Bridging the two, I would suggest that history is also a place from which we can draw narratives for the present, to choose from yesterday’s clothes to dress up for today’s battles. If organizing is structured around building solidarity, history lets us extend that not only laterally across others today, but backwards in time to those whose struggles we find continuity with and inspiration from. It lets us reconstruct a world different from ours and see from their heights, ascend them as we leap into the open air of history.

The final chapter of Slavery and Capitalism treats Marx’s “revolutionary abolitionism” during the Civil War. However, it does not quote Marx’s most famous characterization of the war: “The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”^[11]

Sired by capitalism, a noncapitalist ruling class developed in the South, basing itself on property in the form of ownership of human beings. It developed its own culture, its own values and ideology, and was willing to wage bloody war to defend them as well as the “right” to possess humans. It had a beginning, a height of power, and then went kaput. But, it did not go kaput of its own accord. It was defeated in the course of a social revolution, through a combination of mass uprising of the laboring classes and armed force. Today, we have another ruling class that we would like to see go kaput. It behooves us to remember that classes may arise and rule, but also that they can be overthrown.

1. McNally, Slavery and Capitalism, 2.

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2. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 658.

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3. McNally, Slavery and Capitalism, 12.

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4. Genovese, “Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South,” In Red and Black, 340.

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5. Genovese and Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital, 5.

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6. McNally, Slavery and Capitalism, 59.

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7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

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8. McNally, Slavery and Capitalism, 63.

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9. Genovese, “The Legacy of Slavery and the Roots of Black Nationalism (Revised),” In Red and Black, 130.

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10. Genovese, “Hans Rosenberg at Brooklyn College,” The Southern Front, 22.

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11. https://libcom.org/library/american-civil-war-karl-marx

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