Caption: Enslaved people picking cotton while watched by a white overseer on horseback. Picture taken circa 1850 in the American South.

For Marx as for many of his fellow “48ers,” looking forward meant looking westward, from the old world to the new.

For Marx as for many of his fellow “48ers,” looking forward meant looking westward, from the old world to the new. His autopsy of the 1848 revolution in France was written for a German-language magazine in New York, addressed to the rush of refugees from the similarly failed revolution in Germany who transplanted their lives and radical politics across the Atlantic. In 1852, Marx became the European correspondent for the New York Tribune, contributing hundreds of articles over the next decade as the American republic hurtled into its own constitutional crisis. He reported avidly on the American Civil War for European newspapers, laying the intellectual groundwork for the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (or “First International”) in 1864 and the publication of volume I of Capital in 1867.³ If the prose in Marx’s critique of capitalism described the class struggle in Europe, much of its poetry came from the revolution that overthrew slavery in the United States.

Two bracing new history books explore the distinctly American meaning of workers’ emancipation as well as exploitation for Marxism: David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History and Andrew Hartman’s Karl Marx in America. Together they explain why Marx was so strongly inspired by America, and Americans so long inspired by Marx. They refute stale stereotypes of Marxism as un-American and inapplicable to the distinguishing features of U.S. labor history, including the centrality of slavery and racism. But they also raise an unintended question about Marxism as a guide to America’s future as opposed to its past, at a time when what Marx called “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” appears to have been overtaken by crony capitalism and reactionary despotism.⁴

By “real movement,” Marx meant that the true “human emancipation” that communism would bring was not an “ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” but an outgrowth of capitalist development itself. “‘Liberation’ is a historical and not a mental act,” he wrote in his early philosophical treatise, The German Ideology (1845-1846), “and it is brought about by historical conditions, the [development] of industry, commerce, [agri]culture, the [conditions of intercourse].”⁵ Marx saw the essential conditions that made possible genuine freedom from economic and political oppression arising in antebellum America, and the crucial first phase of the revolution he sought in the abolition of chattel slavery. In Marx’s understanding of liberation as the real material movement of human history, McNally finds the key to Americans’ formative class struggle over the conjunction of slavery and capitalism, taking the perpetual “aspiration for freedom as the index of truth.” Hartman likewise sees the source of Marx’s lasting claim on American dreams and social designs in his “powerful theory of freedom—one that doubled as a map of an alternative American future.” Can those who share Marx’s vision of emancipation still find its latent pattern and promise within current conditions?

The Enslaved Working Class

In the tradition of Marxist political economy, David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is a work of both capacious synthesis and sharp critique of prior scholarship. It draws deeply on the century-long line of studies highlighting the capitalist character of American slavery and the centrality of bound labor to industrial development, from the classic work of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams in the 1930s and 1940s to that of economic historians such as Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in the 1970s and 1980s and the spate of scholarship on “slavery’s capitalism” and “racial capitalism” in recent decades.⁶ For the most part, historians of the United States no longer seriously debate whether the Atlantic and domestic slave trades and the slave-based sugar and cotton kingdoms were essentially capitalist agro-industries driven by the pursuit of private profit, as they did fifty years ago in response to Eugene Genovese’s once-revisionist, anti-capitalist interpretation of planter class paternalism.⁷ What remains in dispute is, first, how capital commanded the sprawling plantation complex in the Caribbean and mainland North America; second, what kind of resistance it faced; and third, why its means of class rule changed over the course of slavery’s career and beyond.

If the prose in Marx’s critique of capitalism described the class struggle in Europe, much of its poetry came from the revolution that overthrew slavery in the United States.

McNally’s most illuminating intervention comes in response to the first two questions. Much recent historical scholarship focuses on planters’ buying and selling of enslaved people and borrowing and speculating on their property value. Slaveholders appear like stockholders whose fortunes derive more from their management of financial assets than from the productive enterprises to which they are tenuously tied, and enslaved people figure more as human capital, collateral, and commodities than as workers.⁸ By contrast, McNally brings a classically Marxist focus on the mode of production and the exploitation of labor to bear on the class relations of enslavers and enslaved. Planters’ profits, he reminds us, depended on purchasing a chattel workforce’s capacity for productive and reproductive labor, by buying, renting, and hiring enslaved persons and paying the costs of sustaining their labor power; on selling the commodities that enslaved workers produced; and on systematically structuring, supervising, and compelling their collective labor, whether on the gang or task system, so as to maximize the surplus value distinctively derived from their work. In rigorously and ruthlessly subjecting enslaved workers to the imperatives of ever-increasing productivity and profit dictated by the competition for capital, credit, and customers on world markets, slaveholding “laborlords,” as McNally follows the historian Gavin Wright in calling them, applied the same “law of value” to the production of slave-made staples as the employers of industrial wage labor who followed in their footsteps—quite unlike proto-industrial merchants who contracted with small households for the products of family labor without controlling the workers and work process itself.⁹ Of course, the means of subjecting labor to capitalist dictates widely varied between enslaved people and wage earners along with servants, convicts, sailors, and other constituents of the emerging working class—distinctions that mattered more for laborers’ lives than they do for McNally’s analysis. But his book amplifies the critical point made by Jairus Banaji, John Clegg, and other Marxist theorists that different modes of exploiting labor were integrated in a shared mode of production directed and driven by the pursuit of monetary profit and capital accumulation.¹⁰

Moreover, McNally makes a compelling case that what he calls, following the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, the “chattel proletariat” shared with other categories of workers a growing class consciousness manifested in individual and collective resistance to the universal requirements of labor under capitalist auspices, chief among them efforts to lengthen the hours of work, heighten workers’ productivity during those hours, and reduce payments or provisions for their subsistence to a bare minimum.¹¹ In recalling the myriad ways in which enslaved people managed to circumscribe and strike against the exploitation of their labor, eventually building on such work actions to overturn the system of slavery itself, McNally offers a vital corrective to recent scholarship that often limits their agency to struggles to survive and to challenge or subvert their social status as property rather than persons.

But it should be added that, as was true for other workers, the changing relations and conditions of enslaved people’s exploitation formed the foundation as well as the target of their resistance. In a shifting relationship between capitalism and slavery that McNally treats too one-dimensionally, capitalist development played a dialectical part in the liberation of enslaved workers as well as their bondage. It was capital, after all, that created the basis for the “revolutionary combination” of enslaved as well as paid laborers. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “Slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny.”¹²

The Transition to Capitalism

A singular strength of the Marxist tradition lies in enabling a multidimensional explanation of two kinds of basic change over time: qualitative development (as opposed to quantitative growth) of a system of productive relations, on the one hand, and fundamental transitions between distinct forms, phases, or structures of accumulation, on the other hand. McNally’s book brilliantly charts an epochal transformation: the dual progression of slavery and capitalism in British America and the United States. But while it carefully follows the journey of plantation slavery from Barbados to Jamaica to the mainland American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from the colonial era to the so-called “second slavery” of the industrial era, it frames this long history as a narrative of largely seamless expansion across time and space, with the antebellum cotton kingdom appearing as the apotheosis of the capitalist principles and practices pioneered on the early sugar estates of the British West Indies. A single intrinsic conflict emerges at the core of McNally’s sweeping saga—the mounting struggle between the nascent chattel proletariat and the ascendant planter class—and their contest likewise seems to snowball from their isolated island beginnings to their continental clash in the Civil War. Largely absent from this epic account are other deepening fissures between different sections, sectors, and segments of colonial and early national society, along with the seismic shifts in the social order that created the conditions for both the second slavery and emancipation. The book leaves out the transition to capitalism in America and what it meant for slavery, and the transition from slavery and what it meant for capitalism.

If capitalism names a form not of enterprise or industry but of society as a whole—a form of what Marx called “the relations of production in their totality”¹³—then McNally reviews its emergence in England as the outcome of a searing societal upheaval over the dispossession of laboring people from rights to land and livelihood and the dismantling of seignorial structures of property and production. But he describes the creation of racial slavery in America as staving off the kind of resistance to the rise of capitalism that took place in Britain, as Africans arrived already dispossessed, with no long-established rights or resources that planters had to overthrow, allowing the reign of capital to follow smoothly and swiftly upon the conquest of native land and the founding of British colonies. It is as if not just capitalist production, but an embryonic capitalist society arrived in America “in the first slave ships,” to paraphrase the historian Carl Degler’s famous formulation.¹⁴ That may be a fair description of the Caribbean islands, largely operated by absentee investors and their overseers as offshore sugar factories and slave labor camps. But the mainland North American colonies, with their much larger and more diverse settler populations, bore a different relationship to the capitalist revolution that propelled them across the Atlantic.

While most migrated as dispossessed, unfree laborers of one kind or another, as McNally well observes, they created societies in which land ownership was comparatively widely dispersed among households engaged mainly in mixed farming for local use rather than prioritizing the production of cash crops. Money figured for most colonists more as a means of keeping accounts and settling debts than as the ends of production and exchange, and, unlike the transatlantic merchants and slaveholding planters among them, most Americans did not compete to improve productivity and profit.¹⁵ As McNally acknowledges, the household economy distinguished slavery in the mainland colonies from its contemporary counterparts in the Caribbean and its successors in the Deep South of the antebellum era. On the eve of the American Revolution, the average enslaved worker in Virginia or Maryland toiled on a family tobacco farm with just four other enslaved people, producing a mix of goods for local use along with staple crops for export, instead of being relentlessly required to maximize monetary revenue.¹⁶ The point is not to imagine that bound labor was less brutal when driven by household competency instead of capital accumulation. It is rather to apprehend the decisive force of the transition to capitalism in transforming slavery itself between the Revolution and the Civil War, when planters’ unprecedented demands for labor and land gave rise to a spiraling crisis of the new market society with slavery at its center.

Slavery and Free Labor

As a result of that crisis, American slavery was brought to an abrupt end at the very peak of its power and prosperity, while capitalism rose to new heights. Why? McNally contends that emancipation was the work of an anticapitalist as well as antislavery uprising of enslaved workers themselves, building on the mass strikes and revolts that had brought abolition to the British Caribbean thirty years earlier, allied with a fledgling transatlantic labor movement for which Marx and his followers offered critical support. “No inescapable logic of capitalist development squashed slavery,” McNally writes. “Only sustained revolts of enslaved people did that.” He is surely right to underline the agency of the chattel proletariat and its wage-earning comrades, as Marx did with great eloquence and effort, and as the historian Manisha Sinha has recently argued in her preeminent study of abolition, aptly titled The Slave’s Cause.¹⁷ But radicalized workers did not break the chains of slavery solely by force of their own work and will. They joined and transformed a sectional struggle and Union Army larger than their own movement. They seized the moment of an escalating crisis of capitalism created by broader social fractures born of the market revolution in the early American republic.¹⁸

In his extensive correspondence on the Civil War, Marx traced the origins of the conflict to the sectional divide over the expansion of slavery into new western territories, rooted in what he called “the violent clash of the opposing forces” of two different ways of organizing the relationship between capital and labor, two interdependent structures of production for profit whose diverging prospects had formed “the moving power of [American] history for half a century.” Slavery would be abolished not by subaltern resistance alone but by its crucial role in channeling a powerful confluence of economic competition and political mobilization, culminating in secession and war. “The present struggle between the North and South is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, between the system of slavery and the system of free labor,” Marx wrote, echoing Abraham Lincoln. “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.”¹⁹

Marx deemed the distinction between “free labor” and chattel slavery paramount in dividing the capitalists of the North from those of the South, collapsing their long profitable partnership, even as he strove to unite their working classes across lines of race, region, and legal status. Capital’s own civil war, its intra-class conflict with itself, helped to explain why slavery ended while workers’ struggle shifted onto a new terrain.²⁰ As Marx had earlier made plain in a popular introduction to political economy, slaveholders principally purchased their workers’ entire capacity for lifelong labor from other slaveholders, not piecemeal from those they employed. “The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions,” he wrote. “He auctions off eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and means of life, i.e., to the capitalist.”²¹ Following emancipation, the postbellum labor movement soon focused on the fight for shorter hours, launching the crusade for an eight-hour workday in which Marx’s American followers played a leading part. “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery,” Marx wrote in Capital’s devastating documentary chapter, “The Working Day,” depicting employers’ draconian efforts to command every hour and minute of wage laborers’ lives. “The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.”²²

A strong strain of historical scholarship has drawn out the broad commonalities and continuities of oppression and popular resistance in America from the beginnings of European colonization to today.²³ But Marx showed how qualitative changes in the forms of exploitation created the conditions for fundamentally different kinds of labor struggle, as the trajectories of slavery and capitalism fatefully converged and then explosively diverged during his lifetime.²⁴

Marx’s Intellectual Career

Andrew Hartman’s Karl Marx in America picks up where McNally leaves off, richly chronicling Marx’s intellectual career from his own day to ours. But rather than tracking the dual development of capital and labor or the changing conditions of class struggle since the Civil War, Hartman’s synthetic survey charts the stages and styles of American Marxism itself.²⁵²⁶ His is a history not of Marx’s “real movement” of communist principles within capitalist practices, but of how Marxist ideas and ideals emerged from struggles among socialists who viewed modern America as the crucible of their cause. “In the last historic analysis,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1929, invoking a favorite Marxist phrase, “all the problems of our planet will be decided upon American soil.” He might have added: for better or worse.

A different kind of slavery forms the antithesis for the fertile visions of freedom at the heart of Karl Marx in America: the popular caricature of American Marxists’ reflexive obeisance to rigidly deterministic and Eurocentric models of industrial development and Soviet-style rule. The historical hallmarks of his subject, Hartman persuasively shows, have generally been wide-ranging debate rather than narrow dogma; searching attention to complex questions of collective agency and individual alienation, of class consciousness and cultural conformity, instead of impersonal abstractions and iron laws; and sustained engagement with the main currents of modern American social thought, from populism and pragmatism to New Deal liberalism and neoconservatism, as opposed to parochial devotion to an essentially foreign philosophy.

If Marxism nevertheless has largely remained on the margins of American life, where Marx once saw its ripest revolutionary promise, a long line of scholars has found the underlying reason in what the Marxist historian David Montgomery has called “the fall of the house of labor”: the precipitous making of a militant American working class in the nineteenth century gave way to its prolonged unmaking in the twentieth, undermined by competing allegiances among workers and by a mix of liberal cooptation and conservative repression from employers.²⁷ Others have foregrounded the repeated ferocity of right-wing reaction, from the sweeping crackdown on radicalism after the Haymarket Affair in 1886 to the red scare following the Russian Revolution and World War I and the far-reaching advent of McCarthyism after World War II.²⁸ Hartman, by contrast, focuses on neither the labor movement nor its red-baiting opponents, emphasizing instead the role of sectarian divides among left-wing thinkers and activists themselves in shaping both the surprisingly broad influence and the self-imposed limits of Marxism in America across a century and a half of struggle.

Elegantly framing his riveting narrative are four pivotal periods of growth and development for the movement, each sparked by a deep societal crisis that provided an opening for a new image of Marx: the searing contrast of unprecedented industrial progress with mounting poverty in America’s late-nineteenth-century Gilded Age, when Marx appeared as a tribune of the embattled new working class; the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many looked to Marx as a prophet of capitalism’s imminent collapse; the spiraling protest movements of the 1960s, when Marx found a youthful following as a freedom fighter on the New Left; and the stark political and social polarization of the past fifteen years, when Marxism gained a new audience among activists for economic justice from Occupy Wall Street to the Bernie Sanders campaigns to the revitalized Democratic Socialists of America.²⁹ Yet in each earlier era, Hartman finds that efforts to unite and organize emerging constituencies were tragically hobbled by conflicts between rival factions claiming the Marxist mantle.

Sectarian Struggles

Marx lived just long enough to play a part in the first internecine fight, over control of the American wing of the First International, siding with German immigrant comrades focused exclusively on workers’ power against native-born “Yankee radicals” supporting woman suffrage and “free love” along with labor rights.²⁹ No sooner did the International dissolve in 1876 than its short-lived Marxist successor, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, was pulled apart by a related struggle pitting social democrats advocating for pro-labor public policies through electoral politics versus syndicalist socialists urging workers to look solely to their own organizations and not the bourgeois state for support. Russian-Jewish immigrants devoted to radical trade unionism took the helm of American Marxism in the Socialist Labor Party in the 1890s, only to be splintered by a schism over whether to bore from within the mainstream labor movement or form “dual unions” of their own.

For a heady dozen years on the left flank of the broad-based Progressive movement in American politics, the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debs managed to bring together “sewer socialists” promoting public utilities in Milwaukee, evangelical “prairie radicals” demanding land reform in Oklahoma, cosmopolitan bohemians flouting puritanical conventions in Greenwich Village, and hardscrabble miners and loggers fighting a bloody class war against brutal bosses and their hired guns in the Rocky Mountains, as the historians Nick Salvatore and Michael Kazin have previously shown.³⁰ But in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the full-scale mobilization of the U.S. government against radical organizations for the first time, “right-wing socialists” split from “left-wing socialists” over competing loyalties to American democracy and to the world’s first avowedly Marxist workers’ state, launching what the historian James Weinstein has called a “long detour” on the left, dominated by intense infighting around the American Communist Party.³¹

New York in the 1920s and 1930s became the unofficial capital of the exiled Trotskyist movement, the foremost international rival to the Comintern in Moscow and its Stalinist satellite in the United States. They took opposing approaches to the shared challenge of cultivating class consciousness among American workers drawn alternatively to Fordist consumerism and New Deal liberalism—not to mention home-grown strains of fascism, to which we will sadly return.³² The Communist Party regarded art and literature as blunt instruments of popular indoctrination modeled on Soviet proletkult (proletarian culture), while heterodox Marxists like the literary critics V. F. Calverton and Kenneth Burke saw individualism as more deeply rooted in American culture, hence more resistant to heavy-handed revolutionary rhetoric. Among Hartman’s most incisive contributions is his analysis of how Communists and their left-liberal allies seeking to “Americanize” their message came to leave Marxism behind, even as Trotskyist intellectuals remained committed to Marxist ways of thinking long after many of them lost faith in socialism itself by the end of World War II.³³

In the face of postwar disillusionment with Marx as a “false prophet” whose economic theories had fueled new forms of totalitarian domination, a new generation of anticolonial and civil rights activists recovered the romantic “young Marx,” more focused on liberating human nature from spiritual estrangement and alienation than on freeing the forces of production from private property and profit. But as American politics turned sharply rightward and many on the left moved from activism to academia by the 1980s, Marxism became a source of conflict among radical thinkers, waged largely on the level of cultural theory.

Hartman forcefully refutes scholars who found Marxism lacking a critical understanding of racism, slavery, and colonialism.³⁴ But his larger point is to lament the eclipse of the “revolutionary Marx” that roused earlier class struggles by the “theoretical Marx” of the culture wars, and to learn from the long history of self-destructive sectarianism the imperative for the current Marxist revival to avoid falling victim to intramural strife. Hartman leaves us, in other words, with an implicit reminder of Marx’s most basic statement of his aim and his means of achieving it, inscribed on the front of his London tomb: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” And: “Workers of all lands, unite!”³⁵

The Revolution Underground

Yet if Marxism seeks to change the world through class struggle, it also aims to understand the world as it is so as to enable such struggle to succeed. What distinguished Marx from what he called “utopian socialists” was not his dedication to the fight but his map of the field. “Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans,” he and Friedrich Engels wrote of their rivals in the Communist Manifesto.³⁶ The divides in the movement that Hartman describes were superficially debates about propaganda and plans. Such contests could conceivably be overcome in the interests of uniting to struggle for common goals. But what made Marxism prone to forming sects and schisms was that its plans were predicated on its analysis and interpretation of changing conditions, on theoretical and empirical arguments about what was true as well as what was right. Theory and practice went hand in hand.

Conflicting maps of capitalist society are less amenable to compromise than competing blueprints for rebuilding it. But the bigger question left out of these two much-needed books is not how to unite and fight. It is where we have come from and where we are heading.

Looking forward is Marxism’s ultimate orientation, uniting nearly all its adherents across its history. Marx’s guiding premise that the long-term development of capitalist relations pointed toward freedom, even in the darkening depths of slavery, gave the working class a crucial ally in “future history” itself. It allowed him to find in every serious setback, from the downfall of the 1848 revolutions in Europe to the abortive end of Reconstruction in the United States and the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, the signs of a greater victory beyond the horizon. That faith in the future guided Marxist historians and other scholars of the past, who studied the transition to capitalism and the overthrow of slavery with an eye on the transition to socialism.³⁷

The most disorienting change in historical perspective over the past few decades has been the pervasive loss of that revolutionary prospect. The displacement of utopia by dystopia as the dominant outlook on the foreseeable future can be traced to many long-term developments, perhaps gravest among them climate change and species extinction. But the enduring ascendancy and radicalization of right-wing politics most pointedly call into question the Marxist presumption that such intrinsically “reactionary” movements run counter to the fundamentally “progressive” destiny of modern society.

Shortly after Hitler took office in Germany, the Marxist and Jewish historian Arthur Rosenberg wrote a remarkable essay on the origins of fascism. “The fantastic and utterly illogical explanations that circulate regarding fascism have created the strange conviction among democrats and socialists that there is something irrational about their main enemy,” Rosenberg wrote, “—something that defies argument.” Wrongly regarded as an elemental eruption of racism and nationalism rooted in the roiling resentments of a struggling lower middle class, fascism actually emerged from a stratum of prosperous and powerful corporate capitalists, violently opposed to “the liberal gospel of ‘Freedom, Free Trade and Peace,’” who had first risen to power in England and France as well as Germany and Italy in the late nineteenth century. “When the fog that fascism creates in all countries clears away, behind it one sees an all-too-familiar figure. This character is, of course, neither marvelous nor mysterious, he brings no new religion and certainly no golden age,” according to Rosenberg. “He is the counter-revolutionary capitalist, the born enemy of all class-conscious workers. Fascism is nothing but a modern form of the bourgeois-capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask.”³⁸

If anti-liberal authoritarianism increasingly appears as a feature rather than a bug of American capitalism as well, where might we find the material foundations favoring the class struggle for freedom today? In a time of tyranny, Marx imagined revolution as a mole burrowing deep below the surface of society, preparing the conditions to emerge strengthened by its season underground.³⁹ Can we still sense its movement in the earth beneath our feet? McNally and Hartman’s inspiring work renders the challenge all the more pressing.

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Notes

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 608, 594, 616, 617.

2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document, ed. Phil Gasper, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 49; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 606, 594, 597.

3. Most immediately, Marx’s coverage of the campaign for an eight-hour workday in the United States, emerging directly from the labor movement’s wartime role in the abolition of slavery, informed his extended analysis of the class struggle over the working day in Capital, discussed below.

4. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845-46), in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 162. (Italics in original.)

5. Marx, German Ideology, 162, 169. “Human emancipation” is from Marx’s 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question” (in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 46).

6. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy, eds., Histories of Racial Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition, 3rd rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

7. Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

8. Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (New York: Basic Books, 2021); Sharon Ann Murphy, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023).

9. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

10. Jairus Banaji, “Reconstructing Historical Materialism: Some Key Issues,” in A Marxist Mosaic: Selected Writings 1968-2022, ed. Jairus Banaji (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 425-38; John Clegg, “A Theory of Capitalist Slavery,” Journal of Historical Sociology 33 (2020): 74-98.

11. Demetrius L. Eudell, “From Mode of Production to Mode of Auto-Institution: Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis of the Labor Question,” Small Axe 20:1(49) (March 2016): 47-61.

12. Marx, German Ideology, 169. “Revolutionary combination” is from the Communist Manifesto, 49.

13. Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 29.

14. “Capitalism came in the first ships.” Carl Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 1.

15. See Christopher Clark, Daniel Vickers, Stephen Aron, Nancy Gray Osterud, and Michael Merrill, “The Transition to Capitalism in America: A Panel Discussion,” The History Teacher 27, no. 3 (May 1994): 263-88.

16. Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 95; Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

17. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

18. For a pathbreaking recent study of the broader capitalist roots of the Civil War, see Ariel Ron, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

19. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, ed. Richard Enmale, 2nd ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 8, 81-82. On Lincoln and “free labor,” the indispensable study remains Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

20. For a Marxist analysis of the relationship between class struggle and intra-class competition among systems of capital in more recent times, see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (London: Verso, 2006).

21. Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 20 (Italics in original.)

22. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 414. On the eight-hour movement and its long legacy, see David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (New York: Praeger, 1989).

23. For a classic synthesis, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 2017, copyright 1980).

24. For a related critique of recent historical scholarship, see Stephanie McCurry, “Plunder of Black Life: The Problem of Connecting the History of Slavery to the Economics of the Present,” Times Literary Supplement (19 May 2017): 23-25. For a Marxist exposé of the shifting forms of capitalist exploitation and labor resistance in the twenty-first century, see Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

25. The major prior overview is Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: Verso, 1987). See also John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism (London: Verso, 2011).

26. Leon Trotsky, “A Letter to the American Trotskyists,” The Militant, Vol. II No. 10, 1 June 1929, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/03/letter-american.htm.

27. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Work of Class in American History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16, no. 4 (Dec. 2019): 11-28.

28. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? ed. C. T. Husbands (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1976); Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 57-80; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little, Brown, 1998). Cf., James Livingston, “Why is There Still Socialism in the United States?” Reviews in American History 22, no. 4 (Dec. 1994): 577-83.

29. On the renewed interest in Marxism since the financial crisis of 2008, see also Jeffrey Sklansky, “Marxism in the Age of Financial Crises: Why Conventional Economics Can’t Explain the Great Recession,” New Labor Forum 21, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 49-56.

30. For an important new study, see Isobel Plowright, “The International Workingmen’s Association in the United States, 1865-1876,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2025.

31. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982); and Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011). See also Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). Sectarian struggle continues in historical scholarship on the subject; for opposing Marxist assessments of the mutual exchange between Debsian socialism and liberal pragmatism in the Progressive Era, see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

32. James Weinstein, The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003).

33. On popular American far-right ideology during the 1930s, see Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982).

34. For an alternative interpretation of the “Popular Front” alliance between American Communists and left-liberals, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). On the shifting politics of Trotskyist writers and scholars, see Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

35. Cf., Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1983); Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End Press, 1983).

36. The first quote comes from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 145 (italics in original). The second is the final line of the Communist Manifesto.

37. Communist Manifesto, 75-76. See also Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1892), in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 683-717.

38. “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.” Paul Sweezy, “The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” Science and Society 14, no. 2 (1950): 134-167, at 134. For profound second thoughts on “Marxism, the Party of the Future” from a leading social historian, see Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 148-52.

39. Arthur Rosenberg, “Fascism as a Mass-Movement” (1934), republished in Historical Materialism 20, no. 1 (2012): 144-89, at 146, 148. See Jairus Banaji, “The Political Odyssey of Arthur Rosenberg, Germany’s Forgotten Marxist,” in A Marxist Mosaic: Selected Writings 1968-2022, ed. Jairus Banaji (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 563-73.

40. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 606.

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Author Biography

Jeffrey Sklansky is a professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago, specializing in the history of American capitalism. He is the author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).