Review of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

Nick Nesbitt and Charlie Post

July 28, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/KVO6XEP7

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

by David McNally

University of California Press

2025

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate on the social character and dynamics of plantation slavery in the Americas.¹ The book successfully avoids the theoretical and historical problems characteristic of the two main interpretations of this form of social labor. On the one hand, much of the recent historical writing on plantation slavery by the “New Historians of Capitalism” equates practically all forms of profit-oriented commodity production and circulation with “capitalism.”² On the other hand, historians inspired by the work of the late Eugene Genovese view the slave societies of the New World as “non-bourgeois civilizations” ruled by paternalist aristocrats motivated by a desire for personal domination rather than profit.³ McNally constructs his alternative to these familiar positions based on a theoretical specification of capitalist production, which he defines as “the production and appropriation of surplus-value by commodity-producing units locked in market competition.”⁴ The planters’ debts to merchants and bankers, secured with their land and slaves, compelled the slave owners to economize the amount of abstract human labor embodied in the commodities they produced. Those planters who failed to hold their place in the competitive global markets for sugar, tobacco, and cotton would face bankruptcy. While lords and peasants marketed surpluses of agricultural products for millennia without fear of losing land and tools if they failed to cut costs, production only became capitalist when both nonproducers and direct producers became subject to market coercion.

Along with the work of John Clegg, Slavery and Capitalism demonstrates that the slaveholders, whatever their subjective motivations and self-conception, were compelled to act as “profit-maximizers.”⁵ However, McNally, like Clegg and others, further argues that slaves themselves were legally coerced wage laborers, who could easily be replaced with labor-saving tools and methods.⁶ The fourth chapter of Slavery and Capitalism is composed almost entirely of historical cases in which chattel slaves, in addition to their forced and unpaid labor, performed work for monetary wages. This is historically indisputable and, while McNally does not clearly theorize this distinction, his point is well taken.⁷ We would argue that, in such cases, persons were both chattel slaves (when performing forced, unpaid labor) and, at other times, wage laborers.

To be clear, although Marx’s abstract critique of human rights argues that the worker in capitalism must “be the free proprietor of his own labor-capacity [and] hence of his person,” capitalism’s fundamental social relations of production—wage-labor and capital—do not necessarily require the idealized legal freedom of direct producers.⁸ As long as the exploiters command the labor process and can easily expel labor from production—where capital can discharge workers at will in order to adjust output or replace workers with machines—the law of value operates. Legal-juridical bondage and other nonmarket compulsions on direct producers to sell their labor power do not indicate “the absence of capitalist production relations, but the extent to which capital has been able to historically subject wage-labor to its discipline.”⁹

Such forms of bondage are common when workers are separated from the means of production but capital still has yet to subsume the labor process to its command in more than a “formal” manner—that is, when production is seasonal or where profits margins are so low that profitability depends on purchasing labor power below its costs of reproduction.¹⁰ Unlike slaves, such legally coerced wage laborers do indeed “own” their labor power. At the same time, they face legal and juridical restrictions on the sale of their labor power—from the criminalization of unemployment, to fines or incarceration for leaving employment before their labor contract expires, to restrictions on their geographic mobility. Finally, McNally not only argues that slaves were coerced wage laborers who were easily expelled from production to allow technical innovation and productivity gains, but further claims that the enslaved were a “chattel proletariat” who “constructed cultures of freedom central to which was a producer ethic based on the right of workers to all that they produced.”¹¹ Put another way, McNally argues that slave laborers were proletarians who embraced democratic and collectivist—that is, socialist—aspirations for freedom.

Slavery and Capitalism makes a strong case on a number of key issues. It is indisputable that the social survival of the planters—as owners of slaves, land and tools—depended on successful market competition. In English speaking plantation regions, land, tools and slaves were collateral for loans, compelling the slave-owning planters to produce and sell cash crops at or below the competitively set socially average necessary labor time.¹² If they failed, they faced the loss of that collateral. Nor is there any question that planters organized production in many ways similar to capitalists—they engaged in rigorous cost accounting; organized cooperative, “gang” labor processes (at least in sugar and cotton) under their command; and strove to both lengthen and intensify the pace of labor in order to “squeeze the pores of the working day.” Finally, there is ample evidence that the enslaved, both organized their class struggle in similar ways as wage-laborers—slowing-down the pace of work, feigning illness, refusing to work beyond “customary” hours, destruction of tools, and so on—and did not aspire to become the juridically “free,” individually acquisitive subjects of classical liberalism.

McNally successfully transcends the increasingly sterile debate between those who equate any form of commodity exchange with capitalism and those who insist that slaveholders were paternalist lords uninterested in cost cutting and profit making. However, McNally’s claim that slavery in the Americas was of a capitalist form and the enslaved were a “chattel proletariat” is not convincing. There is strong evidence that planters did not purchase the labor power of the slaves, but instead purchased the enslaved as “means of production in human form.” McNally exaggerates the ability of planters to easily expel labor from production in order to introduce labor-saving technical innovations—that is, to replace living with dead labor—through slave sales and rentals. The resulting restrictions on the planters’ ability to expel labor production shaped the way in which slaveholders responded to “market coercion,” as well as the goals of the slaves’ struggles for self-emancipation. Technical innovation under slavery did not take the uniquely capitalist form of being relatively continuous and labor saving. As Dale Tomich argues, the limits on the planters’ ability to make slaves redundant gave technical innovation under plantation slavery a “once and for all” character, usually coinciding with the introduction of new crops or movement to a new frontier of cultivation. Generally such technical innovation did not necessitate making slaves “redundant” through sales.¹³ Finally, the relatively inflexible costs of slave labor required planters to put the enslaved to work producing their own subsistence, often on “garden plots” or jardins creoles tilled independently by the bondspeople. The slaves’ independent household production shaped the form and goals of the quotidian and revolutionary class struggles of the enslaved in ways fundamentally different from those of wage laborers.

Slave-owning planters used their legal-juridical authority to transform other human beings into their property as means of production in human form.

Expelling Labor From Production

Without clearly acknowledging this, McNally does implicitly recognize a fundamental difference between slaves and wage-laborers. Despite claiming that the slaves’ labor-power was “commodified,” he contradicts this position to correctly argue that slave prices, like land prices, represented a capitalization of “anticipated surplus-value production.”¹⁴ In other words, slaves were “priced” along the same criteria as land—as a means of production. By contrast, as discussed above, wages are determined by the value of labor power, itself determined by the value of the commodities required to reproduce the workers’ ability to work. “Anticipated surplus-value production” serves to determine whether or not capital will purchase labor power, but it does not determine the value of labor power. From this perspective, and this is a crucial theoretical point that Dale Tomich and Charles Post have emphasized, the pricing of slaves means that the productive capacity of slaves must be “used up” in much the same way as the investment in land and tools—over several production cycles. Slaves can only be made “redundant” with difficulty—the planter must either find a buyer for their “excess” slaves or keep them working over their life cycle. In contrast, the value of labor power of wage workers is “used up” after a set period of time, enabling capitalists to discharge them at will. As a result, slave-owning planters are unable to easily introduce labor-saving tools and methods—the characteristic way capitalists consistently raise the productivity of labor.

McNally’s argument repeatedly manifests a peculiar theoretical projection. He explicitly claims that Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery ignores Marx’s crucial distinction between transhistorical, anthropological human labor and the commodity labor power, which is sold only within specific social forms (that is, capitalism).¹⁵ Instead, we would argue that it is McNally’s argument that actually conflates living labor and the commodification of labor power. There is no question that “chattel workers” were living laborers who were “bearers of labor power” that generated immense profits for their masters.¹⁶ However, this formulation confuses the human capacity for self-consciously purposeful labor with the commodification of labor power; and, confuses what Anwar Shaikh has termed, “profit on alienation” with the production of surplus value. Put another way, all humans possess the capacity to labor, but it is only under capitalism that nonproducers purchase the direct producers’ labor power for a set period of time. It is only under these conditions that a social surplus of labor time takes the historically unique form of surplus value. Similarly, profit exists as a form of surplus labor in all commodity producing noncapitalist societies, but in the form of “profit on alienation” rather than the specifically capitalist forms of surplus value.

There is no question that the enslaved were human beings and thus capable of purposeful labor. They were clearly persons who were compelled to perform surplus labor and produce a surplus product. Nor is there any doubt they consistently resisted exploitation. However, the same is true for rent-paying peasant producers in tributary societies. Neither the noncapitalist lord nor the slaveholder purchase labor power. The lord deployed their legal-juridical authority to compel peasants—who have effective possession, if not legal property, in land and tools—to perform surplus labor on the lords’ lands or to hand over their physical surplus as rents. Slave-owning planters, in turn, used their legal-juridical authority to transform other human beings into their property as means of production in human form. This human property, lacking juridical freedom and all means of production other than their non-commodified labor power, could be compelled to work producing goods for the market.¹⁷

In neither slavery nor tributary societies (that is, the various forms of peasant-based production where nonproducers use legal and juridical power to extract “tribute” in the form of rents and taxes) does the surplus product take the form of surplus value. As discussed above, in capitalism, surplus value is produced through the exchange of equivalents. The wage-worker is paid the value of their labor power—the value of all the commodities required for their social reproduction. The capitalist “consumes” this labor power, leveraging the market dependence of wage laborers to compel them to produce commodities whose value exceeds those of their labor power to produce surplus value. Under tributary forms and slavery, surplus product takes the form of what Shaikh and others have dubbed “profit on alienation.”¹⁸ Compelled legally and juridically to “alienate” the product of their labor without receiving the full market value of their labor power in exchange, noncapitalist direct producers produce surplus product which yields a profit on the market as a form of “unequal exchange.”¹⁹ The ability of the planter to produce more cheaply than nonslaveholding competitors allowed them to accrue profits on alienation when they sold this product at world-market prices.

McNally’s conceptual confusion of the human capacity for purposeful labor and the buying and selling of labor power, as well as of profit and surplus value lead him to exaggerate the impact of two historical features of southern US slavery. The first is the vibrant market for the enslaved. In the antebellum United States, slaves were a highly “liquid asset” that could easily be sold to other slaveholders. The second was the practice of “slave-hiring.” Slave owners were able to lease their slaves for set periods to others who would put the enslaved to work. Together, slave sales and leasing purportedly gave the planters a flexible labor force whose size could easily be adjusted to changes in market conditions and to introduce labor-saving tools and methods. However, a closer examination of the concrete dynamics of both the domestic slave market and slave hiring in the United States reveals a more complex phenomenon that depended upon the coexistence of both a “slave society” and a “society with slaves” in the US South.

The distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves,” first introduced by the classical historian M.I. Finley and applied to the US experience by Ira Berlin, recognizes that slavery as a legal status has existed in almost all class-divided societies before the late nineteenth century.²⁰ Most of these were “societies with slaves”—that is, societies in which slavery did not structurally dominate social production. Instead, slaves coexisted with artisans and peasant-farmers of a variety of legal statuses in ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, the Middle East, and many Asian tributary societies. By contrast, slave societies have been relatively rare—limited specifically to the New World slave colonies and Ancient Rome.²¹ In these societies a large proportion—but not necessarily the majority of producers—are enslaved and toil in

cooperative labor processes under the command of their masters to produce the bulk of the surplus product.

The tobacco regions of the southern mainland British American colonies transitioned from a “society with slaves”—in which a minority of slaves worked side-by-side with a much larger group of indentured servants—to a “slave society” based on African chattel slavery in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676–77.²² However, as tobacco prices plummeted and its large-scale cultivation in Maryland and Virginia became unprofitable in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the “upper south” again became a “society with slaves.” “Agrarian reform” in the upper south saw most planters abandoning tobacco cultivation, and instead shifted to growing wheat and other small grains as petty-capitalist farmers working alongside household members and a handful of enslaved people in the early nineteenth century.

Genovese, in one of the few arguments he made that has withstood decades of criticism, points out that the success of “agrarian reform” in the upper south required a market for “redundant” slaves both to reduce the labor force and to finance the purchase of new tools, seeds, and the like.²³ The “liquidity” of the slave asset depended upon the continuous geographic expansion of a relatively technically stable cotton frontier in the lower south. In addition, the internal slave trade—both the sale of “surplus” slaves from the upper to lower south and sales resulting from bankruptcies and the like—affected only 16 percent of the total slave population over the half century

between 1810 and 1860, an average of a mere 1.6 percent per year.²⁴ In sum, the dynamic internal slave market depended upon the transition to a “society with slaves” in the upper south and impacted relatively few enslaved people—providing little “flexibility” to the labor force of the “slave society” centered on cotton production for the capitalist world market.

Slave leasing was a form of legally bonded wage labor, where employers could easily expel direct producers from production at the end of a time-limited lease. It was also centered in those areas of the US South where slavery was one of a number of forms of dominated labor. The most recent study of slave leasing found that at most 10 percent to 20 percent of slaves were leased at any time in the antebellum United States.²⁵ However, the vast majority of slaves were leased in areas that were “societies with slaves”—the upper south and the southern urban centers. The largest share of slave rentals, between 30 percent and 40 percent of the total, were to urban employers who put slaves to work, often side by side with legally free laborers, in domestic service; as skilled construction workers (masons, carpenters); and in unskilled work as teamsters, warehouse and longshore workers. The next largest share (10 percent to 30 percent) was leased to capitalist industry (iron, textiles, mining) or deployed on public works (roads and so on). Another 10 percent to 20 percent were leased by petty capitalist farmers in the upper south to their neighbors in the region. Fewer than one in ten slaves were leased on the cotton frontier, and most engaged in preparing the land for cultivation, removing boulders and tree trunks, and some in the first cotton planting. However, once cotton production was established, almost all the enslaved laborers became the property of the planters. Put simply, slave leasing was a marginal activity in the main locus of the southern “slave society”—the “cotton kingdom” of the lower south—and had little impact on its cultivation.

It was the noncapitalist master-slave social relation of production that was the obstacle to “labor-shedding” technical innovation.

Pace of Technical Innovation

The “whip of competition” compelled planters to strive to economize necessary labor and maximize the appropriation of surplus labor, as under capitalism. However, the methods they employed were only superficially similar to those used by capitalists. Planters attempted to extend the working day and the organized slaves into collective labor processes (“gang-labor”) and “squeezed the pores” out of the working day. These were forms of absolute surplus extraction, which was the only means of systematically increasing labor productivity in noncapitalist societies. However, we find few examples of the specifically capitalist form of surplus extraction—that is, relative surplus extraction through the regular introduction of labor-saving technical innovations that reduce necessary labor—under plantation slavery. As Tomich notes, “because the person of the laborer was appropriated as property… the master… had to provide for their maintenance whether they worked or not.”²⁶ The impossibility of a “reserve army of labor” in a slave society made relative surplus extraction and the replacement of living with dead labor—the roots of capitalism’s unique dynamism and crisis tendencies—a highly episodic phenomenon. The most important of these technical innovations—the replacement of the hoe with plows, the mechanized ginning of cotton, and the replacement of the “Jamaica Train” with the vacuum pan in sugar refining—coincided with either the introduction of new crops or the migration of plantations to new agricultural frontiers. Once a new crop was introduced or a new frontier came under cultivation, slave plantation economies experienced no labor-saving technical innovation.²⁷

McNally and many other scholars rely on the pioneering work of Olmstead and Rhode to bolster their claims that there was a relatively continuous process of labor-saving technical innovation under slavery, especially in the development of cotton hybrids that were easier and faster to harvest.²⁸ A careful reading of Olmstead and Rhode’s work reveals that most of the gains in labor productivity in cotton harvesting were the result of the introduction of the petit-gulf strain in the 1830s. Other cotton strains introduced in the 1840s and ’50s did not yield significantly larger and more easily picked cotton bolls. The well established and continuous improvements in the productivity of cotton-harvesting labor during the last three decades of slavery were the result of two processes. The first was the “once and for all” introduction of the petit-gulf strain on the cotton frontier, followed by its diffusion to the older areas of cotton cultivation. The second was the geographic expansion of plantation slavery to new and more fertile lands. Finally, productivity gains were for the most part limited to harvesting, while planting and cultivation remained technically unchanged, allowing increased output per worker without a reduction in the slave workforce.

McNally acknowledges the “limits on mechanization” in cotton cultivation, but attributes them to characteristics of “agrarian production in general, not the use of enslaved labor.”²⁹ He relies on Mann and Dickenson’s classic essay on agriculture, claiming that the absence of labor-saving technical innovation is rooted in the surplus of production time over labor time in agriculture and other nature based production processes. However, Mann and Dickenson argue that the “excess of production time over labor time” and the resultant “slack season” led to overcapitalization of capitalist agriculture, with “constant capital lying idle during the excess production time.”³⁰ Historically, cotton cultivation posed no insurmountable technical obstacles to mechanization. In the US South, cotton production began to be mechanized in the early twentieth century—immediately after the transformation of sharecroppers from tenant farmers who organized household cultivation to wage workers working, again, in cooperative gang labor. Almost immediately, we see the introduction of horse-drawn plows able to make multiple furrows (replacing a mule-drawn simple plow), and horses were replaced by petroleum powered tractors during the first World War in planting and weeding. By 1940, cotton harvesting was thoroughly mechanized as well.³¹ In sum, it was not the nature of agricultural production, but the noncapitalist master-slave social relation of production that was the obstacle to “labor-shedding” technical innovation.

The slaves’ resistance had fundamentally different goals than that of wage workers.

“Chattel Proletariat”

McNally correctly points to the similarities in the ways in which slaves and wage workers, both engaged in cooperative labor processes under the command of their exploiters and resisted exploitation in the day to day and periods of open insurrection. The enslaved resisted exploitation through slowdowns, brief work stoppages, absenteeism, and sabotage. They also periodically engaged in mass strikes to achieve self-emancipation. However, at high points of revolutionary class struggle, the slaves’ resistance had fundamentally different goals than that of wage workers. At these moments, neither the enslaved nor wage workers sought to become competitive, property-owning proprietors. Instead, the “freedom dreams” of wage workers envisioned a democratic and collectivist appropriation of the means of social labor.³² Those of the enslaved projected a society of independent peasant producers that would combine “dedication to the advancement of the household with a commitment to the collective well-being of a community locked in conflict with the master class.”³³ Like peasants in almost all parts of the world, former slaves established villages, many of which, in particular in the postrevolutionary rural Haitian lakou, were “egalitarian systems without the state.” Village organization took on “the tasks of social organization” usually associated with state institutions, including “regulation of inheritance, land ownership, and family relationships.”³⁴ Individual households organized the cultivation of their plots using family labor, engaging in “safety-first” agriculture, prioritizing the cultivation of crops for consumption, and selling only physical surpluses on local or regional markets to obtain the cash to purchase goods that could not be produced in the village.

As in peasant villages globally, rural Haitian families relied on limited forms of cooperative labor between individual households (the Haitian konbit or combite) to build houses, clear fields in preparation for planting, or harvest (usually the most time-sensitive part of rural production). Wages and money were not exchanged; instead, this type of “neighborly exchange” cemented bonds of reciprocity among peasant households. In sum, former slaves in the New World aspired to and created a noncapitalist social form that maintained small-scale farming, mutual aid, and solidarity among production units. ³⁵ By contrast, revolutionary wage workers envisioned, and at times established, democratic collectivist organization of social production. The “freedom dream” of socialized production was not limited to urban or industrial workers historically. Agrarian wage laborers on plantations such as those in Andalucia during the Spanish revolution occupied the latifundia, and did not divide them into household plots. Instead, they collectively planted, cultivated, and harvested crops.³⁶

The differences in “freedom dreams” between wage workers and slaves are rooted in the specific character of slaves as “means of production” in human form who had to be maintained even when they were not engaged in commodity production for their masters. In an agricultural context, where production time is greater than labor time, planters were compelled to find ways to reduce the costs of maintenance during the “slack season” for the main cash crops. Throughout the slave societies of the New World, especially after the abolition of the African slave trade, planters strove to put the enslaved to work producing their own subsistence. Plantation self-sufficiency in food, which became near universal in the nineteenth century, took different forms.³⁷ On the larger cotton plantations in the US South, the masters would organize gangs of slaves during the cash crop’s “slack season” to plant and harvest corn for the direct consumption of slaves and to feed livestock eventually fed to the enslaved.

Almost all New World planters allowed the slaves to engage in independent production on garden plots or provision grounds year-round during their “free time.” As Dale Tomich points out, this “proto-peasant” activity—the slaves’ independent household production—“offered a space for slave initiative and self-assertion” that “allowed them to begin to construct an alternative way of life” from that of gang-labor producing commodities for the world-market. As a result, “the bonds of dependence of the slave on the master slowly began to dissolve, and the activities of the slaves gradually transformed the foundations of slave society itself.”³⁸ Put another way, the division of the slaves’ working time between collective labor under the masters’ command on “cash crops” and independent household labor on garden plots producing for their own consumption defined both the contours of day to day class struggle and their “freedom dreams” in revolutionary periods where emancipation from bondage was on the historic agenda.³⁹ On a quotidian basis, slaves struggled to limit the length of the working day to maximize their time “working freely,” and contested with their masters over the control of their children’s labor power to devote more household labor to their independent production.⁴⁰ This lived experience, based in the distinctive master-slave relation of production, produced the slaves’ definition of “freedom” as neither petty-bourgeois entrepreneurship nor democratic collectivist reorganization of social production, but as independent household production—peasant production and “safety-first” agriculture. In sum, the “general strikes” of the enslaved did not seek to establish the collective rule of the producers, but a society of small producers secure in their possession of their individual farmsteads. The revolutionary enslaved envisioned “freedom” not as socialism, but as a “peasant democracy.”⁴¹

abolition, Capitalism, Marxist Theory, slavery

Nick Nesbitt and Charlie Post

Charles Post teaches sociology at the Graduate Center-City University of New York, is a member of the Spectre editorial board and the Tempest collective. He is also the author of The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict 1620-1877 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). Nick Nesbitt is a Professor of French at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author most recently of Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025) and The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022).

Review of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

Nick Nesbitt and Charlie Post

Expelling Labor From Production

Pace of Technical Innovation

“Chattel Proletariat”

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