Following “Empire of Cotton,” about which I posted two years ago, an essay in the 1619 Project apparently views slavery as a manifestation of capitalism, which has obvious implications for our socio-economic system today. Jamelle Bouie similarly argues that systemic racism has its roots in capitalism. Is this line of thinking correct?
No. Southern cotton plantations might have been part of a large, globalized industry, but they were no more “capitalist” than a Roman plantation similarly run with slave labor 2,000 years earlier. Notwithstanding the arguments about the pervasiveness of the cotton business in antebellum America, capitalism survived and thrived after slavery was abolished. Even today, the cultivation of cotton is an extremely labor-intensive business that involves practices which look a bit like slavery in foreign countries. In short, cotton production is an aberration within the capitalist system, not the norm.
The bottom line is that slaves are property, and workers in a capitalist system, regardless of whether the balance of power with capital operates in their favor or not at any given time, are free agents. Slavery is the antithesis of capitalism, not the product of it. As to racism, our money is green; it doesn’t see black and white–hence, the growth of “woke capitalism.”