Everyday Seems Like Murder Here
Race, Class and the Origins of Plantation Capital in the Mississippi Delta
The Plantation (c. 1825), artist unknown
Everyday seems like murder here (my God I’m gonna sing ‘em),
Everyday seems like murder here,
I’m gonna leave tomorrow, I know you don’t bit more care.
— Charley Patton, “Down the Dirt Road Blues”
In my last post, the examination of definitions of race led to a path down the origins and character of Marx’s treatment of categories in historical material. Those notes led to a general position, one still rather ambiguous, that race and class need to be developed as a historical dialectic, two categories that cannot be neatly separated or clearly defined except in their living, historical interrelationship and reciprocal determination. This becomes, then, a concern of historical method, or rather, an attempt to distinguish Marxism as a critique operating in the register of totality from sociological concerns of cleanly delineated, unchanging in their social significance. To even understand race as a historical construction, as Ira Berlin does, requires a theory of what history is. The objective, however, is not merely to develop at the level of the understanding. To proceed to the movement of reason, to the development of a logic of historical development, and thus a historical consciousness that is constitutive of praxis, necessitates a methodological orientation to the historical actuality of social life. István Mészáros states that what is novel to Marx’s method is his insistence that the categories of social life “are produced by objective historical development as ‘forms of being’ [Daseinsformen], becoming manifest in the practical interrelations of the social world before they can be conceptualized by philosophers and ‘political economists’ in a general form.”1 In the Grundrisse, Marx remarks upon how his development of the category of labor proceeds from labor as a form of being:
As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice […] In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject – here, modern bourgeois society – is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such; this holds for science as well.2
The abstraction of labor proceeds from the actuality of labor as a general condition of the intelligibility of human social activity. It is “true in practice,” and the specific, historical form in which social life is organized is what is given as the reality of that category. Through this we come to know that it is this abstraction of labor that is the condition of existence for the specific form of wealth in bourgeois society, its specific representation of value. Important to our purposes here is not the specific development that this takes in Capital, but the observation that as a point of methodological development, we inherit categories as forms of being in which the historical form of social life is axiomatic to their significance. It is from this inheritance that we are able to construct a dialectical development from the apprehension of a category in its dual-sided character as both abstract and concrete, subject and object.
As this regards the dialectic of race and class, it is to say that these categories arrive to us as forms of being. The problem of their interrelation is the problem of the actuality of racial and class struggles that have made necessary the study of their relative determination of conditions of existence. That is, while class may denote a universality of a determinate function in the reproduction of social life, it is a universality that is internally mediated by racial forms of social life. The structural antagonism of class society that is the animation of capitalist reproduction is in turn animated by an ongoing process of the differentiation of subjects within and across class categories. As a proposition, which I aim to develop upon and explore further here, we may say that while class is a form of being that denotes a specific role or function within the reproduction of capitalist social relations, race is an operational and constitutive limit to that function.
This appears, at first, a mechanical reduction. However, it is not intended to be merely applicable in a straightforward fashion, but tested and further developed along with the critical engagement of historical content. Historical time informs all examinations of these forms of being and the formulation above, including the implicit telos of “function.” For it is not a telos assuming a single direction of history, but the open-ended teleology of labor as purposive activity that informs this proposition. It is in and as labor that race and class both take on their significance as coordinates of exploitation, but it is also as labor that they form the historical basis for political organizations of social resistance to these forms of exploitation. For the dialectic of race and class to be an emancipatory concept, it must be developed from within the history of the movement of labor.
I will begin this here through an ongoing development of the notion of white supremacy as a social relation of production in the capitalist mode of production. Many, I am sure, will object to this as an application of a geographically and historically specific racial doctrine to a globally-constituted process. However, I believe the dialectic of race and class reveals to us something of the global character of white supremacy in the epoch of the capitalist mode of production. Likewise, it appears to be the case that this has yet to be transcended as a global problem, seen in the increasingly uneasy manner by which liberal governance’s principles of equality straddle the uneven and combined character of international development that is the form of surplus value. When W.E.B. Du Bois declared the color line the essential problem of the twentieth century, he was remarking upon a world-spanning condition of existence. As he famously concludes the chapter of “The Black Worker” in Black Reconstruction, it is “out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal,” and it is this that is “the real modern labor problem.”3 The history of the cohesion of whiteness in this determination bears examination, and how the formation of whiteness also directly creates this claim to emancipatory universalism of the “dark proletariat.” As an entry point, let us take up the broken continuity of the planter class of the US South in its fate after the defeat of the Confederacy:
With the Civil War, the planters died as a class. We still talk as though the dominant social class in the South persisted after the war. But it did not. It disappeared. Just how quickly and in what manner the transformation was made, we do not know. No scientific study of the submergence of the remainder of the planter class into the ranks of the poor whites, and the corresponding rise of a portion of the poor whites into the dominant portion of landholders and capitalists, has been made. Of the names of prominent Southern families in Congress in 1860, only two appear in 1870, five in 1880. Of 90 prominent names in 1870, only four survived in 1880. Men talk today as though the upper class in the white South is descended from the slaveholders; yet we know by plain mathematics that the ancestors of most of the present Southerners never owned a slave nor had any real economic part in slavery. The disaster of war decimated the planters; the bitter disappointment and frustration led to a tremendous mortality after the war, and from 1870 on the planter class merged their blood so completely with the rising poor whites that they disappeared as a separate aristocracy. It is this that explains so many characteristics of the post-war South: its lynching and mob law, its murders and cruelty, its insensibility to the finer things of civilization.4
At the time of his writing, no examination of this transformation in the social relations of the South existed. He was dealing with a popular historical memory of Reconstruction conjured up by historians at Columbia and Harvard that attributed the failures of that epoch to “negro incapacity,” frequently lauded the honor and heroism of the Confederates, and saw a great deal of charm to the genteel civilizational ideals of the planter class. What Du Bois contributes here is a correction to the assessment of just how devastating war was to the continuity of plantation production, and this is an important condition to the possibility of the dictatorship of labor that he later sees as immanent to the movement of abolition-democracy, or the black suffrage and governance in the Reconstruction state governments of the South. But the assumption that the planter class had survived results from a real self-mythologization of these new whites, a historical claim to their origins, much like the folkloric Scottish fantasy of Sir Walter Scott that was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. The challenge to develop from here is the question of how the appearance of the planter class’ continuity develops from the aftermath of its dissolution, and how the plantation model was preserved in a new iteration, also still under a white ruling class.
Clyde Woods’ social and historical geography of the reproductions of the plantation model of development in the Mississippi Delta is instructive. In Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, Woods traces the continuity of the plantation as a form of capitalist production through its various transformations from the 17th century through the 1990’s. The content of this continuity is the constitutive struggle between the antagonistic mobilizations of the white planter bloc, the dominant regional class of capital, and those of the African-American regions collectively known as the Black Belt, a name derived from the region’s two primary sources of wealth: the combined exploitation of rich alluvial soil and black labor. For Woods, “there is a tendency to superimpose categories created for the study of Northern manufacturing-based cities onto the social and institutional histories of these rural regions,” which makes obscure the manner in which plantation bloc leaders “asserted the superiority of the plantation system and of their leadership while continually advocating the expansion of their monopoly over agriculture, manufacturing, banking, land, and water.”5 The reproduction of the plantation bloc as a class mobilization leads Woods to assert the lesson learned by the communities of resistance that have formed against plantation monopoly since the 17th century: “slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it.”6
This intervention is crafted by Woods to reorder existing assumptions about the role of the black working class in the US, as well as the historical interpretation of Southern social relations that consigned the plantocracy to the dustbin of history as a non-capitalist, semi-feudal formation. Originally published in 1998, this work predates much of the so-called “new histories of American capitalism” that have rightfully been foregrounding the role of plantation slavery, and still reaches heights that many of that new scholarship has yet to attain. While many schools of thought have traditionally held fast to the notion that unfree labor systems such as slavery are antithetical to capitalism, Woods demonstrates that “capitalist dynamism, adaptability and innovation” prevailed in plantation labor regimes, a dynamic drive produced by “the construction of an inherently explosive social order where supervision is never-ending and where management decisions are a matter of life and death.”7 Thus, “we can begin to understand how the region’s so-called ‘backwardness’ and poverty may actually be the result of too much profit-oriented development,” rather than the result of an absence of capital’s accumulation. As a form of the capitalist exploitation of labor, “plantation regimes create, institutionalize, and manage extreme levels of conflict,” developing a system from its constitutive moments in clearing land and securing a supply of labor-power.8 Planter bloc mobilization occurs as the process of the plantation system’s formation, “a method of colonization that imposes upon social landscapes a distinct regime of political, economic, and ethnic regulation. Central to these regimes is their monopolization ethic: the total elimination, marginalization, or exile of indigenous people and small landowners. Therefore, the expansion of the plantation regime southward and westward resulted in the destruction of one Native American nation after another.”9
From 700-1500 AD, the Lower Mississippi Valley was integrated into the broader Aztec and Mayan cultural and economic spheres, resulting in a regional adoption of the institutions of “communal ownership, hierarchical religious structures, centralized government, large towns, formalized class structures, mound building, and a corn-centered agricultural economy.” According to Woods, due to their position along the Mississippi river, nations such as the Tunica, Yazoo, and Natchez occupied a critical link in trade routes extending from Guatemala to Wisconsin. The institutional order of this epoch dissolved rapidly with the onslaught of European colonization, beginning an “age of uninterrupted warfare” with the military expedition of Hernando de Soto in 1539.10 Indigenous expropriation was the simultaneous movement of engaging the Mississippi Valley as a frontier exchange economy. The region did not see the cohesive institution of a plantation monopoly until the late 18th century, when American Independence provided the national consolidation of the colonial ruling classes in a State capable of carrying out such a developmentalist agenda. Competition between European presences in the region manifested as endemic colonial fronts of continental warfare between the French, Spanish, and English, with Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans occupying positions as essential factors in military decision-making. Full-scale conquests and shaping of the broader Mississippi Valley proved untenable for some time, but the exchange of venison, deerskins, and fur for European metal goods, alcohol, and firearms developed the foundations for a market economy.11
At the onset of the 18th century, this foundation led to an initial drive of colonization that saw the importation of enslaved African labor-power into the region. Following the model of Saint Domingue, early colonists relied upon a model of supplying labor that simply maintained an ongoing shipment of new slaves, and could not develop conditions that would lead to a self-reproducing labor force, as was the case in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and Southeastern North American plantation orders. Overwork, physical exhaustion, and consumption by disease was the norm in this period. Yet unlike in the Easternmost plantation regimes, the colonists of the Mississippi Valley did not struggle with the challenge of forging legal institutions for regulating slavery along a strict racial order. This arrived through the inheritance and implementation of the French Code Noir, instituted by the French monarchy in 1685 and introduced to Louisiana in 1724, which regulated not only the practice of slavery in the French colonies, but also extended into the production of race relations of free persons. The Code Noir weighed heavily against manumission and discouraged self-purchase, favored former owners in determining the affairs of recently manumitted slaves, and created a basis to more harshly punish free black residents than whites.12
At the same time, this legal order did not alone provide the means to overcome Indigenous resistance to attempted colonial encroachments to the interior of the valley. Likewise, the abandonment of plantation labor by enslaved Africans led to the establishment of maroon communities, some in collaboration with local Indigenous peoples. These autonomous formations were dangers not only to nearby plantations seeking to secure their labor force, but also to the general colonial order, as they could be easily tapped by competing European governments in exchange for guarantees of their freedom.13 This would also lead to French colonial officials to in turn make their own appeals to secure the loyalty of black labor, including manumission through military enrollment, although this was deployed selectively and to a limited extent. The instability of the Mississippi Valley in the 18th century prohibited the establishment of a plantation regime akin to that underway in the English colonies.
Ira Berlin notes a particular event which destroyed the prospects of such a regime for several decades: the Natchez Rebellion of 1729. The Natchez rose up against the encroaching plantation economy, and recently arrived African slaves of largely Bambara origin rose up and massacred 200 French settlers, liberating hundreds of slaves in turn. The governor of New Orleans would in turn deploy a black slave regiment to subdue Indigenous peoples south of the city, along with Choctaws recruited against the Natchez. By 1731, the colonial government was able to force the Natchez into negotiations for their surrender, and securing the return of former slaves that had been emancipated in the revolt. Slaves that had stood with the French against the Natchez and maroon formations were rewarded, often with a permanent position in the colony’s defense force.14 The existence of a legal constitution to regulate a racializing labor system was challenged by resistance to its expansion, and resistance sufficient enough to stave off the consolidation of a plantation regime, for a time creating conditions where a creolized free community could develop in the region’s urban centers.
The colonial front of the Seven Years’ War intensified this problem of the ability of competing colonial powers to exploit social antagonisms on the North American mainland, as Native nations and slaves could be mobilized against English colonists under the promises of restricted colonial encroachment and emancipation. As the social order that the colonists had attempted to weave unraveled in conflict, an overextended empire needed to adapt. In 1763 the Crown under King George III prohibited expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains, facing as they were the pan-Native alliance organized by Pontiac along this frontier. Following the victory of the Seven Years’ War, however, American settlers and merchants were poised to usurp Crown control of the colonies, as France ceded claims to Louisiana and Canada, and the Spanish in turn theirs to Florida. The plantation regimes of the Southern colonies were situated to overtake the preeminence of the Caribbean colonies in the sugar and rum trades. Debates across the Atlantic in Parliament over the abolition of the slave trade intensified due to the tenuous nature of the colonial order revealed in the war, as well as the endemic character of slave revolts throughout the Caribbean islands. In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams famously notes how this conflict between New Englander and British merchants over control of the plantation trades was the primary motive behind the American Revolution, citing John Adams’ confusion as to why so many Americans “should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.”15 Gerald Horne investigates this rationale further, extending the historical exegesis to uncover the inability of colonial governance as dependent upon the Crown, and restricted by its charters and dictates, to sufficiently secure the viability of African slave labor regimes. The essential counterparts to dominating colonial trades were securing supplies of enslaved labor and the mainland frontier, two needs of the planter class that became vital drives for American independence.16
The political consolidation afforded by American independence, and the constitutional provision of the 3/5ths compromise that ensured the slave population a disenfranchised share of slave states’ elected representation in Congress, contributed to a planter-dominated mobilization for capital accumulation via slave labor. This political consolidation of state power allowed for the American acquisition of colonial territories. As the French, Spanish, and English began to be ousted from their dominant positions in the hemisphere, so too were their clashing and competing regulations of racial orders between colonies. The planter bloc of the newly-founded United States of America would be much more informed of the necessity of maintaining a social order more insulated from the possibility of rebellion than its Caribbean antecedents.
Just as importantly, the rebellion in San Domingo’s escalation into the emancipatory moment of the Haitian Revolution ushered in a new era of planter consolidation and expansion on the North American continental mainland. With the destabilization of French colonial prospects, Southern American colonies, now states under the recent ratification and adoption of the constitutional republic, became the preeminent center of plantation production. As upheavals drove planters and their slave holdings from the islands to the American South, knowledge of cotton production spread, and by the 1790’s America began a rapid shift of rededicating channels of tobacco’s production and trade to the growing prominence of King Cotton. The combination resulting from San Domingo’s revolutionary removal from the cotton trade, the rapid expansion of mechanized textile production in the United Kingdom, and the arrival of fleeing French planters and their knowledge of the crop’s cultivation, led to a critical price boom in cotton that dramatically incentivized its adoption as a plantation standard.17 In 1798, Natchez planters organized the boundaries of the original Mississippi Territory, extending from the Chattahoochee to the Mississippi Rivers, and maneuvers began to expel Native nations from these lands, foremost those that had sided with the English, now American, colonists during the colonial wars just decades before, such as the Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Choctaw nations, once known as the “civilized tribes,” now dubbed savages and drunks. Pan-Native alliances in these newly proclaimed territories were dissolved through the imposition of debt regimes, forced assimilation, and a shifting terrain of opportunistic military alliances to subvert resistance to frontier expansion, culminating in the mass expulsion known as the Trail of Tears. This combinatory accumulation of state capacity gained in independence, the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from land, and the plantation model as the teleological positing of space for capitalist production and the abstract domination of monetary representations of value is captured by Walter Johnson in an account of land surveyorship in the Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century:
The work of the Land Office was to make the concrete landscape abstract: to turn this salt lick into a salt lick; to turn a trail blazed through the woods into field notes in a field book; to turn the surveyors’ recorded experience into maps to be sent to Washington; to turn those maps into an “offering,” which could be represented in the space of several printed pages, and then circulated to potential buyers, wherever they were. The business of the land office was to translate the practical knowledge of the surveyor into the abstract knowledge of the investor, to refashion the particularity of the landscape into terms susceptible of generalization and comparison, to make the land legible—and salable—at a distance. The process generated an enormous amount of clerical labor. If surveyors represented the advance guard of capitalist transformation, they preceded an army of clerks producing maps, registering claims, overseeing the payments, and engaging in countless other tasks while struggling to keep pace with mounting responsibilities. Despite their labors, the boom years of 1831–1835 brought a sort of bureaucratic apocalypse to the district land offices of the Mississippi Valley. In Mississippi, a few beleaguered clerks were dwarfed by towering stacks of field notes, and planned sales were repeatedly postponed; in Arkansas, an overwhelmed and dismissed Surveyor General left behind him more than 5,000 miles’ worth of unprocessed reports, more than twice the length of the Mississippi River itself. Despite spending much of December 1832 personally signing land patents, President Andrew Jackson soon fell so far behind that he convinced Congress to appropriate money to pay a full-time clerk with the sole responsibility of signing the president’s name to land patents. The rectangular grid expressed the sovereignty of the United States of America over the landscape of the Mississippi Valley. It made the Mississippi Valley measurable, governable, and salable. It transformed territory into property. And it touched off the greatest economic boom in the history of the United States to that point. In the aftermath of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, capital flowed into the Lower Mississippi Valley. Global capital investment translated into easy money in the Mississippi Valley. Mushroom banks—quickly chartered, lightly capitalized, virtually unregulated—flourished in the state of Mississippi during what came to be known as “the flush times.” Because banks in Mississippi were not restrained by any effectual laws requiring them to maintain a reasonable ratio of specie (gold and silver coinage) to banknotes, the Valley of the 1830s was awash in paper money: banks provided credit by printing money. “The State banks were issuing their bills by the sheet,” wrote Joseph Baldwin, “like a patent steam printing-press; and no other showing was asked of the applicant for the loan than an authentication of his great distress for money.” Where money was cheap, everything else was expensive. Baldwin continued: “Under this stimulating process prices rose like smoke. Lots in obscure villages were held at city prices; lands, bought at the minimum cost of government, were sold at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, and considered dirt cheap at that.” Carried along by a floodtide of money, the “empire for liberty” was transformed into a frontier of accumulation.18
We can see clearly in this account the manner by which, as said above by Clyde Woods, plantation slavery proved a pillar of capitalism. Yet the abstraction of value’s prominence in the organization of capital through commodity circulation is far less controversial than the debate over the capitalist nature of slave labor, antithetical as it is to the notion of wage-labor’s essential character in the capital relation. To this, Woods draws upon Marx to situate the role of slavery in the plantation regime to the violence of abstraction that is actualized as proletarianization. The historiographic problem here is the traditionally accepted notion of a modernization paradigm, where the planter class is represented as an anachronistic form of class rule, a false aristocracy that would be inevitably displaced and withered by the relentless onslaught of Northern manufacturing and industrial capital. While this is clearly not the case, as the fact of the Civil War as the actuality of emancipation as an act made possible only in war demonstrates, the question remains of the compatibility of unfree labor to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This leads to a crucial formulation of interpreting the expropriation of African labor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the colonial-plantation complex as a process of proletarianization:
This modernization paradigm is more prescriptive than descriptive. First, it exhibits an urban, trade, and manufacturing bias. Merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism are discussed without considering the possibility that capitalist development often, as in the case of England, is established in the countryside first. Second, since free labor is considered to be a prerequisite for capitalism, it is argued that enslaved laborers could not be part of the working class. This theory ignores the fact that enslaved Africans had been “freed” or alienated from their land, tools, communal rights, hereditary privileges, and subsidies of nature. They were subsistence wage workers, and the largest section of the US working class. The mere fact that major rural Southern planters did not talk or dress like urban Northern manufacturers does not change the fact that both were capitalists. Neither does it change the reality that capitalism in every period, including the present, can exist and thrive based on slavery and other forms of unfree labor.19
Woods in turn cites Marx’s remarks on the essential contribution of plantation slavery to the formation of industrial capital:
Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industry today as machinery, credit, etc […] Without slavery no cotton, without cotton no modern industry. It is slavery which has made the colonies valuable; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is a necessary condition of large scale machine industry […] Thus before the traffic in Negroes began, the colonies supplied the old world with only very few products and made no visible change in the face of the earth. Slavery therefore is an economic category of the highest importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive country, would be turned into a patriarchal land. If North America were wiped off the map of the world, the result would be anarchy, the total decay of trade and modern civilization. But to let slavery disappear is to wipe North America off the map of the world. Since slavery is an economic category, it has existed in every nation since the world began. Modern nations have merely known how to disguise slavery in their own country while they openly export it into the New World.20
In Capital, Marx would also articulate this transformation of slave labor, from its continuity through antiquity to modernity, as a form of surplus value production in the formal subsumption by capital:
As soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, the corvée, etc. are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc. Hence the Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.21
Woods draws upon these passages to establish the capitalist character of antebellum slavery and plantation production from within the terms of Marx’s critique of political economy. First, there is the proposition that proletarianization need not solely be defined by the direct subsumption of the dispossessed worker into wage labor upon the terms of equality that are presupposed by the categories of classical political economy in the mutual benefit of exchange. The alienation of labor from the producers’ command of their purposive life-activity fulfills the condition of becoming a proletariat in this regard. Second, there is the acknowledgment from Marx of the essential contribution, indeed the condition of possibility, of New World slavery for the development of modern industry, presaging the coming necessity of a conception of combined and uneven development, of unfree labor’s compatibility within the capitalist mode of production. And finally, we find that slave labor in the US is identified with the production of surplus value, with bonded or unfree forms of exploitation understood to be historical antecedents of properly capitalist social relations, but capable of transforming this labor process into one uniquely capitalistic in the internal transformations induced by the imperatives of its production for a global market.
The use of these passages here aim to lay a foundation by which we may come to understand this process of colonization as the capitalist materialization of the Mississippi Valley. Contra the argument of slave labor’s incompatibility to capitalist social relations, we have a conception of the historical totality of capital accumulation in its actuality. Despite the absence of African slave labor’s mediation by a direct purchase and sale of labor-power, the slaveholder maintained a direct interest in the black worker as a bearer of alienable labor-power. The labor-power of the black worker, even while enslaved, was exploited as labor in the abstract. The abstraction of labor proceeded through its representation in monetary value, the means by which the commodities of the plantation model were circulated and exchanged as raw material for other sites in the capitalist mode of production. If the plantation owners of North America were not capitalists traditionally understood, even bearing a greater resemblance to a feudal seigneurial landed aristocracy as Eugene Genovese claimed, then they were still the proprietors of a globally integrated site of capital’s primary accumulation. If not directly capitalists hiring wage workers, then still overseers of the discipline of a labor force for the expanded production of monetary representations of value as the general form of wealth.
Yet this static picture of the plantation as a developmental model is far from the demonstrable flexibility displayed in its course of reproduction. The mere presence of exchange on a market would not be sufficient to characterize plantation production as capitalist, but the subsumption of its labor process and generation of technological developments in the production processes of planter capital by the dynamics of global competition and labor conflict certainly would. This would entail the applicability of the relative production of surplus value in the plantation production process. It is easy to point to the absolute production of surplus value in the prolongation of the work day, but the seasonal limits of agricultural production in the plantation South, the underdevelopment of the technical conditions of the production process compared to industrial capital, and the ability for slaves to collectively limit temporally-constant exploitation necessitated a certain dynamism.22 The gang labor system of organizing slave labor on plantations exploited the cooperative potential of combined labor. The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790’s and its introduction constituted an extent of mechanization that expanded the productive potential of enslaved labor.23 The combustion engine and its deployment in the steamboat revolutionized the potential for market expansion, compelling even more intense exploitation on the plantations, as commodities could finally move against the current of the Mississippi River, the temporal imperatives of surplus value and capital accumulation annihilating the spatial barriers of nature.24 To mitigate the damage of annual flooding to investment in the region, Mississippi planters organized the General Levee Board in 1858, leading to the construction of 142 miles of levees between Memphis and Vicksburg before the Civil War.25
The patriarchal character of class domination in the South, its aristocratic aspirations of planter rule, and the resistance to the centralization of federal authority and the free labor regime of Northern industrial capital were not impediments to development of a distinctly Southern modernization paradigm based upon the plantation form of production. The capitalist subsumption of plantation production processes further integrated the planter class into institutional arrangements with international merchants and European industrial interests, increasing their economic autonomy relative to the US nation-state. This, however, was a relative autonomy also bolstered by the political strength of planter representation in the federal government. The successive legislative compromises of the 19th century contested the exact nature of strategies of capital accumulation that would be pursued in Western territories acquired by the US. Partisan political movements within the state saw fractures corresponding to these disputes. The Democratic party split along lines over the plantation-dominated wings that were increasingly pro-secession, as presaged in the Nullification Crisis of 1832, and other elements of Jacksonian democracy that were dominated by small farmers and seeking the spread of suffrage for white property holders. Despite the many maneuvers in favor of the planter bloc found in various juridical and legal struggles of federal institutions, the political encroachments of the newly founded Republican party and the Free Soil movement jeopardized the longevity of their hold on national politics. The maneuver towards secession was one of a move towards sovereignty that they believed their position within the world market could sustain.
The social order of the US South at this time, however, was distinct from the kind of homogenization of racial antagonism that would result after the defeat of the Confederacy. Du Bois’ remark above on the dissolution of the planter class is crucial, for the antebellum planter bloc was not uniformly in league with all white residents in the South, many of whom amongst the lower classes shared an antipathy towards the planter class. This was not, however, an antipathy based on abolitionist sympathies, but one based on a hostility to the agricultural monopoly of plantation production and a resentment towards the primacy of enslaved black labor. This was productively exploited by planters in the employment of local whites in a number of roles, from which Du Bois noted that “above this lowest mass rose a middle class of poor whites in the making,” which included small farmers that could hold their own within the constraints of planter monopoly, overseers to slave labor, local police that largely served to surveil the movement of slaves between plantation boundaries and among urban centers, a merchant class that traded with slaves and free blacks, aspiring to rise to the role of a larger-scale broker for planter goods.26 This intermediate class acted as a buffer to class antagonism between the poor whites and the planter ruling class, instilling a Southern peculiarity to the American Assumption identified by Du Bois, that belief in the accumulation of capital by the self-employment of one’s own labor. An essential part of this formation is the aspect of whiteness’ cultivation as a compensation, what Du Bois identifies as a “public and psychological wage” that included the lower classes of whites in the South amongst all other whites in certain arenas of public life.27 This is the foundation that would have to collapse into a more general class collaboration after the Civil War if a planter bloc were to reassert itself once again in power. Just the same, it was also the major challenge to the general political cohesion of a multiracial working class in the region, as emancipation brought on the challenge of Reconstruction’s ability to build newly democratic political representation and egalitarian economic relations upon these foundations, where racial supremacy could be developed as a uniting front for previously distant planters and various classes of whites.
I will end this leg of the journey here, and aim to take up the political consolidation of Reconstruction’s class struggle under the organizations of white supremacy, the remobilization of the planter bloc, and the implications this had for the reproduction of the dialectic of race and class in the next post. For now, the conclusion of this piece at least sets the stage for the foundations of the capitalist mode of production’s presence in the Mississippi Valley through the plantation model. In turn, we can see how regimes of racial identification began to solidify in the stable reproduction of the plantation order in the course of both national state consolidation and capitalist subsumption. Where there may have at first been competing and contingent factions of racial codifications, the monopolization of plantation agriculture and the regional supremacy of US state interests after independence laid the foundation for the homogenization of a specific trajectory. Rather than interpreting white supremacy as a preceding form of racism that resulted from the European exploitation of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, there is an argument to further develop that it is a social relation that developed in the course of capitalist modernity, along with the continuing reproduction of a logic of race attending a social reproduction based upon class antagonism. We have at the outset of the capitalist mode of production’s origin the positing of a global working class, a universal function of the reproductive order, beginning to mark itself by an internal differentiation of its capacities. The international division of labor is not merely a delegation of tasks amongst disparate sites of commodity production, but the beginning of a self-alienation of human beings from their own purposive activity in an increasingly fetishistic form, branded in the body as distinct races.
Postscript:
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Meszaros, Istvan. 2011. Social Structure and Forms of Conciousness, Volume 2. Monthly Review Press. P. 39
Marx, Karl, and Martin Nicolaus. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London; New York: Penguin Books In Association With New Left Review. Pp. 104-106
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: [1860-1880]. New York, NY: The Free Press. P. 16
Ibid, p. 54
Woods, Clyde and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2017. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London ; New York: Verso. Pp. 4-5
Ibid, p. 6
Ibid, pp. 6-7
Ibid, p. 40
Ibid, p. 41
Ibid.
Usner, Daniel H. 1992. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. UNC Press Books.
Berlin, Ira. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard. Pp. 78-79
Horne, Gerald. 2016. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: New York University Press.
Berlin (1998) pp. 88-90
Cited in Woods (2017) p. 42
Horne (2016)
Beckert, Sven. 2015. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books. Pp. 100-102
Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press. Pp. 36-37
Woods (2017) p. 46
Quoted in Ibid.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. P. 345
Genovese, Eugene D. 1976. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books. Pp. 285-294
Woods (2017) p. 47
Johnson (2013) pp. 73-96
Woods (2017) p. 59
Du Bois (1998) p. 27
Ibid, p. 700