Marx on Slavery and Capital in the American Civil War

Abstract

This article rereads Marx’s journalism on the US Civil War as a major development in his historical materialism and theory of capitalism. Against the view that Marx regarded American chattel slavery as a holdover of precapitalist social relations (and that he disregarded the significance of slavery in social history as a result), I find in his writings on the Civil War a complex analysis of the capitalist plantation and of the agency of enslaved laborers in the revolution against it. Contextualizing Marx’s wartime analysis within the longer trajectory of his work on the way to Capital, I situate his account of the American conflict within his wider attention to ecology and technology in the critique of political economy. Through his analysis of the environmental dynamics of plantation slavery and the political trajectory of the Civil War, Marx developed a materialist but non-deterministic account of the interconnection between technological change and political struggle; Marx’s wider account of capitalism and its history was reshaped by the lessons of Southern plantation capitalism and its military defeat.