Tag: slavery

Hay Festival Forum Dallas hosts Nikole Hannah‑Jones: The 1619 Project’s racialist narrative returns to the stage.

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On October 17, the Hay Festival Forum in Dallas will host Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known for creating The New York Times’ 1619 Project, for a session titled “Reframing the American Story.” The festival’s promotional material describes a discussion on history, race, education, and national identity, highlighting Hannah-Jones’ role in transforming the conversation about the legacy of slavery in the U.S. The Hay Festival, which positions itself as a global summit of writers, intellectuals, and cultural figures, is giving a leading platform to a narrative widely discredited by scholarly research.

The festival’s presentation omits significant criticism of the 1619 Project’s reinterpretation from prominent historians specialising in the American Revolution and Civil War. Key figures like Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, and Sean Wilentz challenged its central assertion that the colonists initiated the Revolution primarily to shield slavery from British abolition efforts. In 2020, the Times subtly revised this claim to refer to “some of” the colonists, yet they did not withdraw the overarching interpretive framework. Despite this controversy, the Board still awarded Hannah-Jones the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

The core issue is not whether slavery was a central part of American history; it was. Rather, it is about how history is interpreted. The 1619 Project shifts the focus from class conflict to an unchangeable racial divide, portraying “white America” and “Black America’ as forever opposing entities. This perspective diminishes the significance of the two major revolutionary moments, the War of Independence and the Civil War, stripping them of their progressive significance. The Declaration of Independence, once a rallying point for abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Lincoln, is now seen as hypocritical. The Civil War, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of white workers and farmers fighting to end slavery and saw around 180,000 Black soldiers participate, is marginalised. Furthermore, the struggles of the industrial working class, including CIO organising campaigns and large-scale strikes of the 20th century, are scarcely acknowledged.

The political function of racialist historiography

This narrative does not develop in isolation. It reflects the political interests of a privileged upper-middle class, closely tied to the Democratic Party, for whom racial identity serves as a tool for career advancement in academia, media, corporations, and government. Over the last decade, this social segment has heightened racial discourse into a form of cultural capital. This credential grants access to grants, tenure, editorial roles, foundation funding, and corporate diversity positions. The 1619 Project exemplifies this ideological trend. By depicting racism as a permanent trait ingrained in the “national DNA” rather than as a result of specific social and economic conditions, it shifts focus away from capitalism, the root cause of exploitation across all races. It promotes a narrative that normalises division while hiding the material foundations of oppression.

This narrative’s political usefulness becomes evident amid the worsening crisis of American capitalism. Inequality has risen to levels unseen since the Gilded Age, social infrastructure is deteriorating, and the ruling elite is leaning toward authoritarian rule. In this climate, a united working-class movement would threaten the interests of the upper-middle class, which aligns its fortunes with the Democratic Party. Racial essentialism acts as a political tool to prevent such unity by dividing workers into hostile racial groups, fostering suspicion and resentment, and replacing the idea of common exploitation with ongoing cultural conflicts.

The racial essentialism of the 1619 Project is more than just a theoretical mistake; it has tangible political repercussions. By dismissing the revolutionary and democratic essence of the American Revolution and Civil War, it strips the working class of vital historical narratives that highlight their ability to unite and oppose oppression. The American Revolution, with its universalist claims of human equality, and the Civil War, which effectively ended slavery and can be seen as America’s second revolution, stand as some of the most significant examples of mass resistance in history. They demonstrate that ordinary people- farmers, artisans, workers, Black and white- are capable of overthrowing deeply rooted systems of exploitation when they come together around shared material interests.

Removing the progressive elements of these events erodes the working class’s historical memory. As Tom Mackaman and David North noted in their review, attacking these revolutions disarms the populace against fascism, depriving workers of the historical confidence essential to resist authoritarian regimes. When a society is taught that “white America” is inherently racist and that interracial unity is a myth, it becomes less able to see its own collective power.

The project’s author’s political trajectory underscores this function. Hannah‑Jones has repeatedly used the project to intervene in contemporary politics, promoting racial divisions and aligning herself with the Democratic Party’s electoral strategies. Her public interventions consistently frame political developments through the lens of racial antagonism, encouraging the view that racial identity is the primary determinant of social experience and political interest. In doing so, she reinforces the ideological framework through which the upper‑middle class maintains its privileges: a framework that elevates racial discourse while obscuring the class relations that structure American society.

The narrative promoted by the 1619 Project has become a key ideological weapon for a social class aiming to preserve its privileges by dividing the working class along racial lines. Its purpose is not to clarify history but to divert social anger from capitalism and toward a view where race, rather than class, is the main factor. This leads to an outlook that divides and weakens the working class when unity is most needed.

The social context in Dallas

The timing and setting of the Hay Festival Forum reveal important insights. Held amid a period when the working class faces growing inequality, threats to immigrant rights, and a move toward authoritarianism, Dallas symbolises more than just a location; it is a microcosm of America’s social crisis. Workers across Texas, regardless of race- Black, white, or Latino- share common struggles: the same employers, landlords, declining public services, and a political system responsible for decades of social decline. These issues stem not from genetic or racial factors, but from a capitalist system that prioritises private profit over social well-being.

Texas exemplifies this trend, with political leaders implementing policies that benefit corporations at the expense of public education, healthcare, and social services. Immigrant communities face punitive laws and increased militarised policing. Meanwhile, housing prices climb as wages remain stagnant. The rise of authoritarianism through attacks on democratic rights and expanded repression is deeply linked to the growing class conflict. In this context, the ruling class and its ideological supporters actively promote narratives that divide workers and hide the true causes of their oppression.

A portrayal of American history that pits workers against each other based on race offers no benefits. Moreover, it provides the far right with a simple caricature to use in campaigns against public education and historical study. The racialist story from the 1619 Project has already been weaponised by reactionaries trying to ban conversations about racism, thereby bolstering their authoritarian goals. In Texas, where authorities are aggressively censoring school curricula, the 1619 Project has been used as a justification to ban teaching about race, inequality, and oppression’s history. The right-wing attack on education is not about factual history but about distorting the narrative to make it easier for reactionaries to see any talk of racism as ideological. This analysis uncovers the political purpose behind racial essentialism. By framing American history as a moral story of ongoing racial conflict, the 1619 Project neglects the significant influence of class struggle and revolutionary traditions that have shaped the nation. It omits that major American milestones such as ending slavery, expanding democratic rights, and labour victories were achieved through collective effort across all races. This oversight strips the working class of vital historical memory needed to resist authoritarian threats today.

The Hay Festival Forum’s choice to highlight Hannah-Jones now is deliberate. The festival’s social circle, wealthy, professional, and aligned with the Democratic Party, is exactly the group that has adopted racial essentialism as its core ideology. For this group, racial identity serves to distinguish moral values and gain institutional influence. It offers a framework to voice social grievances without questioning the capitalist system that sustains their advantages.

For workers in Dallas, the prevailing story acts as a distraction, shifting focus away from their shared exploitation toward viewing society through the lens of racial identity as the key factor in experiences. It fosters division when unity is most needed. The true “reframing” is not the one promoted by the Times but a return to a materialist view of history, one that acknowledges the revolutionary legacy of the American working class and the importance of uniting workers across racial and national lines in the fight against capitalism.

The historical record and the materialist method

A true rethinking requires returning to a materialist view of history. Slavery was not driven by an inherent racial essence but was a system of class exploitation rooted in capitalism and the global market. It developed alongside major shifts in production, finance, and trade, transforming humans into commodities to satisfy the needs of expanding capitalist wealth. The plantation economy was closely linked to the rise of merchant capital, Atlantic trade, and the emergence of industrial capitalism in Britain and the northern U.S. Understanding slavery means understanding capitalism; dismantling it involves revolutionary change.

Abolishing slavery required a revolutionary struggle, beginning with the War of Independence, which paved the way for abolitionist activism, and then in the Civil War, often called the second American revolution, which dismantled the slave system through mass mobilization and armed conflict. Although the Revolution of 1776 did not end slavery, it laid the ideological and political groundwork for abolitionism. The Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men are created equal,” became a tool for leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other anti-slavery advocates. The Civil War, largely fueled by enslaved people’s actions and the mobilization of workers and farmers, ended the slave system and established the republic on the principles of free labor. These conflicts were fundamentally class struggles with deep democratic significance, rather than racial conflicts.

The working class needs to reclaim these traditions, not as remnants of the past but as active evidence of ordinary people’s ability to challenge established systems of exploitation. The interracial struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from the abolitionist movement to Reconstruction governments, and from the Knights of Labour to the CIO’s organising efforts, show that solidarity across racial boundaries is both possible and necessary. These struggles are not isolated incidents; they reflect the fundamental truth that workers of all races share common interests against the capitalist class.

The movement to end slavery was inherently interracial, with Black and white workers, artisans, intellectuals, and farmers collaboratively opposing the slaveholding system. During Reconstruction, Black and white workers in the South helped establish governments that expanded public education, increased political participation, and challenged former slaveholders’ influence. In the early 20th century’s industrial battles, workers from various backgrounds united in large-scale strikes that challenged the foundations of American capitalism. The CIO’s victories in the steel, auto, and mining industries came from deliberately rejecting racial divisions and advocating industrial unionism: “Black and white, unite and fight.”

These traditions expose the falsity of the racialist narrative advanced by the 1619 Project. They show that the decisive force in American history has never been immutable racial antagonism but the capacity of workers to unite around shared material interests. They reveal that progress has come not from the assertion of racial identity but from the collective struggle against exploitation.

To reclaim these traditions is to reclaim the possibility of revolutionary change today. The working class confronts a capitalist system in profound crisis marked by inequality, authoritarianism, war and social decay. Its strength lies not in racial division but in unity. A materialist understanding of history provides the foundation for such unity. It reveals that the fight against racism is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, and that the emancipation of all oppressed people requires the independent mobilisation of the working class across all racial and national lines.

A warning and a perspective

The Hay Festival Forum’s support for the 1619 Project exemplifies a wider ideological campaign designed to shift social anger away from capitalism and toward racial essentialism. It caters to a privileged elite that fears a unified working-class movement. With inequality surging to historic levels, social infrastructure crumbling, and authoritarian trends becoming more apparent, the ruling class and its allies have a clear motive to promote narratives that divide workers and hide the material roots of oppression. The 1619 Project, which emphasises race as the key and lasting factor in American society, fulfils this role.

Today, the objective is to focus on a materialist view of history that highlights the critical influence of class conflict, rather than simply reframing American history through racial perspectives. This involves understanding slavery as an exploitation system rooted in capitalism’s rise and the expansion of the global market. It also means recognising that abolition was driven by revolutionary struggles first during the War of Independence, which created the foundation for abolitionist ideas, and later during the Civil War, America’s second revolution, which dismantled slavery through mass mobilisation and armed conflict. These historic changes were driven by class forces prevailing in specific contexts, not by race or destiny.

A materialist understanding of history also requires reclaiming the revolutionary traditions that followed. The interracial struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the abolitionist movement to Reconstruction, from the Knights of Labour to the CIO organising drives, demonstrate that solidarity across racial lines is not only possible but essential. These struggles were not anomalies or exceptions to an otherwise racially determined national story. They expressed the fundamental reality that workers, regardless of race, share common interests in opposition to the capitalist class. They show that the greatest advances in American history came when workers acted collectively, not when they were divided.

The racial essentialism advanced by the 1619 Project denies these traditions. It reduces the American Revolution to hypocrisy, the Civil War to a conflict devoid of progressive content, and the labour struggles of the 20th century to footnotes in a narrative of permanent racial division. In doing so, it deprives the working class of the historical memory necessary to confront the dangers of authoritarianism, inequality and war. A population taught that “white America” is irredeemably racist, and that interracial solidarity is a myth, is a population less capable of recognising its own collective strength. It is a population more vulnerable to demoralisation, fragmentation and political manipulation.

The ideological offensive represented by the 1619 Project is therefore not simply a matter of historical interpretation. It is a political intervention aimed at shaping consciousness in a period of intensifying crisis. The upper‑middle‑class layers that promote racial essentialism do so because their own social position depends on the maintenance of capitalist stability. They fear the emergence of a unified working‑class movement that could challenge the institutions through which they exercise influence: academia, media, corporate management and the state. By elevating racial identity to the status of a master category, they seek to redirect social anger away from capitalism and toward a conception of society in which race, not class, is the decisive force.

Only a materialist perspective can counter this. Only such a perspective can give the working class the historical clarity and political confidence needed to confront the dangers of authoritarianism, inequality, and war. It reveals that the fight against racism is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, and that the emancipation of all oppressed people requires the independent mobilisation of the working class across all racial and national lines. It restores the revolutionary traditions that show what workers can achieve when united. Moreover, it exposes the racialist narrative for what it is: an ideological weapon wielded by a privileged social layer to defend a social order that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

I. WSWS Articles and Analyses on the 1619 Project

  • David North & Eric London, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History (WSWS, 2019–2020). A multi‑part series dissecting the project’s historical claims, political function, and methodological flaws.
  • Tom Mackaman & David North, The 1619 Project and the Second American Revolution (WSWS, 2021). A retrospective evaluation of the expanded book edition, A New Origin Story, demonstrating its deepened racial essentialism.
  • Tom Mackaman, A New Origin Story: The 1619 Project’s Racialist Distortion of American History (WSWS, 2021). A detailed review of the book edition, showing how it erases class struggle and revolutionary traditions.
  • Eric London, The New York Times and the Promotion of Racialist Politics (WSWS, 2020). An analysis of the political interests behind the project.
  • Interview Series, WSWS interviews with Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, and Sean Wilentz (2019). Essential primary material documenting the scholarly rejection of the project’s foundational claims.

II. Scholarly Works on Slavery, Capitalism, and the American Revolution

Foundational Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project

  • Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993).
  • Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library, 2002).
  • James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988).
  • James Oakes, The Ruling Race: Slaveholders in the South (Knopf, 1982).
  • James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States (W.W. Norton, 2012).
  • Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
  • Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Founding (Harvard University Press, 2018).

These works collectively dismantle the claim that the Revolution was fought to protect slavery and demonstrate the centrality of antislavery politics in the founding and Civil War eras.

III. Marxist and Materialist Historiography

Classic Marxist Works

  • Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865).
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
  • Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1930–32). (For method: class analysis, revolutionary agency, historical materialism.)

Modern Marxist Historians

  • W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). A foundational materialist analysis of the Civil War and Reconstruction, emphasising interracial working‑class struggle.
  • Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943).
  • Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988).
  • Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (1997).
  • Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (2011).

These works situate slavery within global capitalism and emphasise class struggle as the motor of historical change.

IV. Works on Race, Identity Politics, and the Upper‑Middle Class

  • Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (2000).
  • Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity (2006).
  • Barbara Fields & Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012).
  • Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (1983) is important but often misused; worth engaging critically.

These works critique racial essentialism and identity politics as ideological tools of the professional‑managerial class.

V. Additional Articles and Essays

  • Leslie Harris, I Helped Fact‑Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me (Politico, 2020).
  • Sean Wilentz, A Matter of Facts (The Atlantic, 2020).
  • Gordon Wood, The New York Times’ 1619 Project Is Wrong (Various interviews, 2019–2020).
  • James Oakes, Why the 1619 Project Is Wrong About Lincoln (WSWS interview, 2019).

VI. Suggested Further Reading

  1. Du Bois, Oakes, McPherson, Wood, Foner
  2. Blackburn, Fields & Fields, Reed, Michaels
  3. WSWS analyses (North, Mackaman, London)
  4. Primary sources: Douglass, Lincoln, abolitionist newspapers, slave narratives

Freedom Ship and the Revolutionary Logic of Flight: Marcus Rediker’s Maritime History of Self‑Emancipation

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Marcus Rediker’s Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea prompts a revaluation of the geography of American slavery and the various forms of resistance that challenged it. For over a century, popular culture has been shaped by a sentimental portrayal of the Underground Railroad: candlelit attics, devout Quakers, heroic white “conductors,” and grateful fugitives guided north by kind-hearted people. This myth, repeatedly shown in textbooks, museums, and liberal media, acts as a political opiate. It reassures the descendants of slaveholders and Northern allies by emphasising white kindness in emancipation, while downplaying Black agency. As Rediker’s own blurb suggests, it serves as an “alibi for whiteness.”

Rediker’s book disputes the common myth by showing that the fight against slavery extended beyond liberal America’s pastoral ideals and was rooted in the docks, wharves, and ships of the Atlantic economy, an often-overlooked proletarian landscape of resistance. The waterfronts of Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston make up what Rediker calls the “Blue Highway”: a maritime route known for mobility, communication, and interracial solidarity, which the slaveholding elite deeply feared. The core argument is that if accepted, it necessitates a major shift in how historians understand resistance to slavery: possibly up to 100,000 enslaved people escaped by sea rather than land. This isn’t a trivial change; it’s a significant shift in our understanding of the geography of self-emancipation.

The Maritime Proletariat and the Geography of Resistance

Rediker depicts a world where enslaved individuals exploited the weaknesses of the maritime economy: its mobility, reliance on Black labour, interracial crews, and porous borders to achieve freedom. The book is rich with tales of bravery and ingenuity: Frederick Douglass escaping Baltimore dressed as a sailor, Harriet Jacobs fleeing North Carolina by sea after hiding in an attic for years, Jonathan Walker branded “SS” for his attempts at slave theft, and William P. Powell’s Coloured Sailors’ Home serving secretly as a centre of information and support.

The book’s greatest strength lies not just in its individual stories but in its depiction of the social infrastructure that supported maritime self-emancipation. Rediker estimates about 20,000 Black sailors, both free and enslaved, operated across the Atlantic and coastal trade during the antebellum period. These sailors served on interracial crews, frequented interracial boarding-houses and taverns, and built communication networks spanning from New Orleans to Boston. The circulation of David Walker’s Appeal, smuggled into Southern ports sewn into sailors’ clothing, embodies this world: a radical document carried by radical workers deep into the heart of the slave system.

The slaveholding class was well aware of the threat the docks posed. Their reaction to the Negro Seamen Acts  , which mandated the imprisonment of Black sailors during their ships’ port visits,  shows a ruling elite conscious of the docks’ volatile nature. These laws were more than bureaucratic measures; they served as tools of terror to break the bonds between enslaved communities and maritime workers. Their existence highlights the waterfront’s crucial role in slavery politics.

This is Rediker at his strongest. He exposes the Underground Railroad mythology as an ideological project designed to obscure the fact that the overwhelming engine of emancipation was Black self‑activity, supported by a genuinely interracial working-class milieu. He restores the maritime world to its rightful place in the geography of resistance. He demonstrates that the struggle against slavery was not confined to the pastoral imagination of liberal America but surged through the arteries of the Atlantic economy.

Du Bois and the Theory of Self‑Emancipation

To fully understand the significance of Rediker’s contributions, it is important to situate them within the tradition set by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Du Bois argued that the enslaved were not simply passive recipients of freedom; instead, they actively participated in a broad strike against slavery. Their widespread escape to Union lines, refusal to serve their enslavers, and enlistment in the Union Army played a vital role in defeating the Confederacy.

Rediker’s maritime fugitives are an integral part of this tradition, not just isolated heroes but active participants in a broader self-emancipation movement that Du Bois identified as the driving force behind the Civil War. The docks and wharves of the Atlantic economy were more than mere peripheral locations; they functioned as centres of working-class resistance that challenged and destabilized the slave system.

Rediker does not fully position his analysis within Du Bois’s revolutionary framework. He acknowledges important aspects of self-emancipation but misses the dialectical process that turns individual acts of flight into pivotal historical moments. Du Bois held that self-emancipation becomes truly revolutionary only when it profoundly transforms the state. While Rediker alludes to this concept, he does not thoroughly investigate or articulate it.

Oakes, Hahn, and the Political Economy of Emancipation

James Oakes and Steven Hahn expand Du Bois’s analysis by situating self-emancipation within the Civil War’s political economy. Oakes contends that the Republican Party, representing a free-labour bourgeoisie, entered the war with the goal of undermining slavery, using this political opportunity for enslaved people to turn the conflict into a revolutionary fight. Hahn, on the other hand, highlights the long-standing history of Black political activism ranging from maroon communities to rural uprisings that influenced the politics of emancipation.

Rediker’s maritime fugitives fit naturally within this historiographical landscape. They were part of a wider resistance movement that included plantation uprisings, rural insurrections, and wartime mobilisations. Their actions played a role in sparking a political crisis that compelled the Republican Party to face the slaveholding class. Their escapes challenged property rights, showed the limits of coercion, and highlighted the structural weaknesses of the slave system.

However, Rediker does not embed his material within the broader political economy of the Civil War. He details the influence maritime flight had on the slave system but does not illustrate how this pressure was integrated into the fundamental conflict between two opposing labour systems, enslaved and free, that erupted in 1861. Oakes and Hahn offer the analytical framework missing in Rediker’s work: a theory explaining how self-emancipation interacts with political crises to drive revolutionary change.

Marx and the Destruction of Slave Property Relations

Marx viewed slavery not simply as a moral failing but as a particular type of labour exploitation integral to capitalism’s rise. He believed the Civil War represented a bourgeois revolution, with the slave-owning elite, a reactionary part of the ruling class, being overthrown by armed conflict. Marx also recognised that the enslaved individuals, through mass escapes and fighting, played an active role in driving revolutionary change, not just as victims.

Rediker’s book offers the empirical evidence that Marx’s theory requires. The maritime proletariat—interracial, mobile, and essential to the economy—resulted directly from capitalist growth. Atlantic docks and wharves were focal points where the conflicts between slavery and capitalism were most intense. Fugitives escaping by sea sought not only personal freedom but also to challenge the property relations of the slave system.

Rediker does not position his work within Marx’s revolutionary theory. Instead, he highlights the bravery of individual fugitives but doesn’t explain how their actions impacted the abolition of slave property relations. While he reconstructs the social landscape of the maritime proletariat, he fails to analyse its influence on wider capitalist development. Although Marx offers the theoretical framework that Rediker’s book hints at, it does not fully provide it.

The Limits of “History from Below”

Rediker’s approach, organising a series of episodes by port, creates a vivid social history but lacks political analysis. While the book is filled with compelling human stories, it offers limited insight into the underlying processes. It captures the raw elements of revolution but does not follow the development of revolutionary movements. This omission matters; it highlights a core structural limitation inherent in the “history from below” tradition that Rediker has helped shape.

Over the past forty years, Marcus Rediker has established himself as a uniquely influential and politically impactful historian within the Anglo-American academic world. His work is notable not just for its focus on sailors, enslaved Africans, pirates, dockworkers, and fugitives, but also for its methodological and political approach. At a time when much historical scholarship has shifted towards cultural micro-analysis, racial-moral essentialism, or liberal sentimentality, Rediker remains committed to emphasising collective agency, class struggle, and the violent rise of capitalism. His scholarship challenges prevailing historiographical trends, even if it doesn’t entirely depart from them.

Rediker’s body of work, including titles like *Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea*, *Villains of All Nations*, *The Slave Ship*, *The Many-Headed Hydra*, *Outlaws of the Atlantic*, *The Fearless Benjamin Lay*, and now *Freedom Ship*, represents a unified intellectual effort. It aims to chronicle the history of the Atlantic world from the perspective of the marginalised, uncovering the experiences and actions of those whose labour built the early capitalist system and whose resistance constantly challenged its stability. This is not merely “history from below” in a superficial sense; it is a structured history—an exploration of how exploited and oppressed groups influenced the evolution of capitalism through their work and rebellion.

The first type is liberal humanitarianism, which views slavery as a moral tragedy addressed through isolated acts of white benevolence. This approach has shaped the well-known imagery of the Underground Railroad: candlelit attics, benevolent Quakers, and heroic conductors—creating a narrative that, as Rediker’s critics point out, serves as an excuse for whiteness. It sentimentalises resistance, personalises agency, and masks the structural violence inherent in the slave system.

The second form is racial essentialism, exemplified by the 1619 Project and similar efforts. It depicts American history as a continuous battle between whiteness and Blackness, often neglecting class dynamics, capitalist evolution, and political economy. Instead, it portrays race as an independent force that exists outside historical context. This approach leads to a historical narrative that is morally reactive but lacking in analytical depth, loud in political stance yet superficial in historical understanding.

Rediker’s work counters both common tendencies. His histories avoid sentimentality and essentialism. They employ a materialist approach, even if not using explicitly Marxist language. He demonstrates that interracial solidarities were real and significant; that enslaved individuals were active agents rather than passive victims; that the maritime economy was a space of both exploitation and resistance; and that the slaveholding class viewed the docks as a structural threat.

His latest book, *Freedom Ship*, clearly illustrates this challenge by suggesting that tens of thousands, possibly up to 100,000, enslaved individuals escaped by sea rather than land. Accepting this shifts how historians understand resistance to slavery, replacing the traditional Underground Railroad imagery with the docks, wharves, and ship decks of the Atlantic economy. The waterfront becomes a space of movement, communication, and interracial cooperation, which the slaveholding class feared greatly.

Rediker depicts a world where enslaved people leverage vulnerabilities in the maritime economy—such as its mobility, reliance on Black labour, interracial crews, and porous boundaries—to achieve their liberation. He estimates that around 20,000 Black sailors participated in the coastal trade during the antebellum period. These sailors worked on interracial crews, stayed in interracial boarding-houses and taverns, and built communication networks from New Orleans to Boston. A notable example is the circulation of David Walker’s Appeal, which was secretly smuggled into Southern ports sewn into sailors’ clothing, symbolising this interconnected world: a radical message carried by radical workers into the core of the slave system.

The slaveholding class clearly recognised the threat. Their reaction, the Negro Seamen Acts, mandated the detention of Black sailors during their ships’ port visits, demonstrating an elite conscious of the volatile dockside environment. These laws were more than mere regulations; they served as tools of intimidation aimed at breaking bonds between enslaved groups and maritime workers. Their existence underscores the waterfront’s critical role in slavery’s political landscape.

However, Rediker’s work also highlights some limitations of the “history from below” approach. While his narratives are detailed and human, they tend to lack deep political analysis. He covers the instances of revolution, solidarity, and sabotage—the raw elements—yet does not fully connect these actions to the larger revolutionary upheaval that led to the abolition of slavery. In this context, the perspectives of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Oakes, and Steven Hahn are crucial.

Du Bois recognized that self-emancipation only gains historical significance when it intersects with a change in the state. Oakes explained how the Republican Party, representing a free-labor bourgeoisie, served as the political platform for enslaved people to turn the Civil War into a revolutionary movement. Hahn highlighted the extensive history of Black political activism that influenced the politics of emancipation.

Rediker’s maritime fugitives fit within this tradition, but his work doesn’t explicitly situate them there. He restores agency but stops short of explaining how agency leads to revolution. He rebuilds the social world of the maritime proletariat but doesn’t examine its part in dismantling slave property relations. While his work offers an important correction to liberal historiography, it remains incomplete as a Marxist synthesis.

Nevertheless, Rediker’s contribution remains significant. He has repositioned the Atlantic working class at the core of early modern history. His work demonstrates that resistance was systemic rather than isolated events. He also contests the racial-moral narratives prevalent in today’s discussions. Furthermore, he offers the empirical basis needed for developing a more comprehensive Marxist explanation of slavery’s downfall.

Freedom Ship is a truly valuable book that reestablishes the maritime world’s role in resistance history. It reveals the interracial working-class solidarities long suppressed by bourgeois narratives and challenges the liberal notion that white benevolence alone led to Black liberation. However, it stops short of offering a complete Marxist view of emancipation, which emphasizes the dialectical unity of self-activity and revolutionary crisis, individual bravery, class struggle, flight, and armed insurrection under the Union’s banner. The broader challenge—showing that slavery was ended not by moral sentiment but through revolution—remains. It is the task of Marxist historiography to demonstrate that enslaved people were not merely passengers on a “Freedom Ship,” but active participants in overthrowing a reactionary ruling class.

Notes

I. Major Works by Marcus Rediker

These are the core monographs that define Rediker’s contribution to Atlantic, maritime, and labour history.

  • Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo‑American Maritime World, 1700–1750 Cambridge University Press, 1987.
  • The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic Beacon Press / Verso, 2000. (with Peter Linebaugh)
  • Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age Beacon Press / Verso, 2004.
  • The Slave Ship: A Human History Viking, 2007.
  • The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom Viking‑Penguin, 2012.
  • Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail Beacon Press / Verso, 2014.
  • The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist Beacon Press, 2017.
  • Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (Graphic History) Beacon Press, 2021. (with David Lester and Paul Buhle)
  • Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea Viking, 2025.

II. Edited Volumes

Rediker has co‑edited several major collections that broaden the historiography of Atlantic labour, mutiny, and forced migration.

  • Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World University of California Press, 2007. (with Emma Christopher & Cassandra Pybus)
  • Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: A Global Survey Cambridge University Press, 2013. (with Niklas Frykman, Clare Anderson & Lex Heerma van Voss)
  • A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1650–1850 University of California Press, 2019. (with Titas Chakraborty & Matthias van Rossum)
  • Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 1 Pantheon Books, 1989.

III. Selected Scholarly Articles

A sample of Rediker’s most influential academic articles.

  • “The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1990).
  • “Under the Banner of King Death: The Social World of Anglo‑American Pirates, 1716–1726.” William and Mary Quarterly (1981).
  • “The Poetics of History from Below.” Perspectives on History (AHA), 2010.
  • “Reflections in History from Below.” Trashumante: Revista Americana de Historia Social (2022).
  • “Escaping Slavery by Sea in Antebellum America: A Labor History.” Mundos do Trabalho (Brazil), 2022.
  • “Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America.” Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982).

IV. Public Writing and Commentary

Rediker’s public‑facing essays extend his historiographical project into contemporary debates.

  • “Enlightenment from Below: Pirates and Radical Democracy in Madagascar.” The Nation (2023).
  • “Staughton Lynd’s Radicalism from Below.” The Nation (2022).
  • “Julius S. Scott Captured the Haitian Revolution’s Emancipatory Reach.” Jacobin (2021).
  • “Serendipity in the Archives.” Public Seminar (2021).
  • “The Forgotten Prophet.” Aeon (2018).
  • “You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th‑Century Quaker Dwarf.” New York Times (2017).
  • “America’s Dark Page.” The American Scholar (2008).
  • “Atonement for Slave Trade.” Los Angeles Times (2008).
  • “Slavery: A Shark’s Perspective.” Boston Globe (2007).

V. Secondary Scholarship and Context

These works are essential for situating Rediker within the broader historiographical tradition of Atlantic labour, slavery, and revolution.

Foundational Marxist and Atlantic Historiography

  • W.E.B. Du Bois — Black Reconstruction in America (1935).
  • C.L.R. James — The Black Jacobins (1938).
  • Eric Williams — Capitalism and Slavery (1944).
  • Peter Linebaugh — Stop, Thief! (2014).
  • Julius S. Scott — The Common Wind (2018).

Contemporary Scholarship on Emancipation and Agency

  • James Oakes — Freedom National (2012); The Scorpion’s Sting (2014).
  • Steven Hahn — A Nation Under Our Feet (2003).
  • Stephanie Smallwood — Saltwater Slavery (2007).
  • Vincent Brown — Tacky’s Revolt (2020).

Reviews of Rediker’s Work

  • Eric Foner, “Review of Freedom Ship,” New York Review of Books (2025).
  • Numerous reviews in Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, International Review of Social History, etc.

VI. Suggested Citation Format (Chicago)

Book Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.

Article Rediker, Marcus. “The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1990): 225–252.

Edited Volume Christopher, Emma, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Struggle for Human Emancipation: A Marxist Analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is one of the most politically charged texts from the antebellum United States. Beyond being a personal account of suffering, it serves as a sharp critique of a social system based on property, profit, and the systematic dehumanisation of individuals. Viewed through a Marxist perspective, Jacobs’s work exposes the fact that American slavery was not an outdated feudal leftover but a modern, capitalist system—whose brutality was deeply linked to the economic goals of the ruling class.

Jacobs’s story reveals how a society turned humans into commodities, reproductive tools, and means of surplus extraction. Her testimony, based on her own experience as an enslaved woman, challenges the ideological illusions of the slaveholding elite and anticipates Marxist ideas about racialised class control. Additionally, Jacobs’s account highlights the contradictions within Northern bourgeois democracy, where official freedom coexisted with economic reliance, racial bias, and the structural confines of capitalism.

This essay views Jacobs’s narrative as a powerful critique of society that remains relevant today, especially in an era of increasing inequality, racial discrimination, and threats to democratic freedoms. Her voice, rising from the depths of slavery, directly addresses ongoing efforts for human liberation.

The Enslaved Person as Commodity and Capital

Jacobs’s narrative clearly exposes the economic principles of slavery. In capitalism, workers sell their labour but keep ownership of their bodies. In chattel slavery, these boundaries disappear completely. Jacobs, her children, and relatives are regarded as capital assets—evaluated, mortgaged, inherited, and sold off to settle debts or increase the master’s wealth.

Her grandmother’s manumission money, raised through years of baking and selling goods, is not simply a sentimental detail; it is a stark illustration of how enslaved people were forced to buy back the very bodies that had been stolen from them. Jacobs’s fear that her children might be sold to settle Dr Flint’s financial obligations reveals the fundamental instability of life under slavery: the enslaved person’s existence is perpetually subject to the fluctuations of the master’s economic fortunes.

Marx wrote that capitalism “comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Jacobs shows how slavery, as a specific form of capitalist accumulation, was drenched in precisely such blood and dirt. The plantation was not a premodern relic but a profit-driven enterprise whose success depended on the total domination of labour.

Jacobs’s story is essential for grasping the gendered aspects of slavery. Her body serves as a site for both productive and reproductive work. The children she has are not just her own; they act as extra capital for the slave-owning elite. Dr Flint’s sexual abuse cannot be seen as personal immorality. Instead, it is deeply rooted in a structure where enslaved women’s fertility is used to generate wealth.

Jacobs’s decision to engage with Mr Sands—an act she feels ashamed of and uncertain about—should be seen as a desperate effort to reclaim agency in a system that leaves her powerless over her reproduction. This choice is also a political statement, rejecting Dr Flint’s attempts to exploit her sexuality for profit.

Marxist-feminist scholarship highlights reproductive labour as key to capitalist exploitation. Jacobs’s story prefigures this understanding by decades, revealing how slavery combined racial superiority with patriarchal authority, creating a particularly brutal form of gendered oppression.

Jacobs’s critique of Southern Christianity is among the most powerful in American literature. She highlights slaveholders who use scripture to justify torture, churches that advocate obedience to earthly masters, and ministers who declare slavery as aligned with God’s divine plan.

This represents ideology in its purest form: a superstructure that normalises exploitation and quells resistance. The slaveholding class depended on religion, law, and cultural norms to conceal the economic roots of their dominance. Jacobs’s story removes this ideological cover, revealing the hypocrisy and moral corruption of a society that professed Christianity while engaging in systematic barbarism.

Her work closely aligns with Marx’s view of ideology as a means of upholding class domination. The slave system relied not only on physical force but also on a moral and intellectual framework that justified the ownership of humans.

The Contradictions of Northern Freedom

Jacobs’s move to the North does not end her struggles. Instead, it exposes the limitations of bourgeois democracy. Free Black individuals in the North continue to confront poverty, discrimination, and ongoing insecurity. Jacobs remains financially reliant on the Bruce family, showing how legal freedom can coexist with material dependence.

Her experience echoes Marx’s critique of wage labour: emancipation from chattel slavery doesn’t eliminate exploitation; it only changes its form. Despite legal freedoms, the North remains a capitalist society where economic inequality and racial prejudice hinder true human liberation. Jacobs’s story thus questions the idea that freedom is merely a matter of legal status. She demonstrates that without economic stability, social equality, and political influence, freedom is only partial.

Jacobs’s seven-year hidden stay in her grandmother’s attic stands as one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in slavery’s history. Recent research views this period as marronage—a bold assertion of freedom within the confines of the slave system. Her “loophole of retreat” becomes a space of political independence, symbolising a refusal to engage with the master’s economy and serving as a hub for alternative social relations based on kinship and secrecy. Jacobs’s act of resistance isn’t just personal; it exemplifies a wider fight against the plantation system and the capitalist framework that supports it.

Her account shows that enslaved individuals were not merely passive victims but proactive participants in the struggle for freedom. Their acts of resistance—both personal and collective—were crucial in ending slavery and reshaping American society.

Jacobs’s authorship represents a revolutionary act. Slavery aimed to deprive the enslaved of literacy to stop them from sharing their experiences of oppression. By writing and publishing her narrative, Jacobs takes control of her own representation and directly participates in the ideological battle over slavery. Her work targets Northern women, appealing to their moral values and revealing the gender-specific violence of slavery. This broadens the political support for abolition and challenges the core beliefs supporting the slave system.

Harriet Jacobs’s Legacy in Current Historiography

Harriet Jacobs’ reputation has evolved considerably in recent scholarship on slavery, gender, and political thought. Originally viewed mainly as a sentimental abolitionist storyteller, she is now acknowledged as a key theorist of concepts like domination, freedom, and gendered oppression. Three main strands now characterise her historiographical legacy.

Initially, Jacobs is increasingly recognised as a sharp political thinker. Alan M. S. J. Coffee’s recent research for Cambridge University Press suggests that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is not just a personal story but also a philosophical work providing one of the most insightful examinations of slavery’s social dynamics. Coffee situates Jacobs within the republican tradition, highlighting how her focus on sexual violence and relationships among enslaved individuals broadens classical republican ideas into a feminist critique of control.

Contemporary scholars emphasise Jacobs’s influence in redefining concepts of freedom and resistance. Sean Gerrity’s research on marronage interprets Jacobs’s seven-year imprisonment in her grandmother’s attic as a form of internal marronage—an assertive act of autonomy carried out within slavery’s confines. This view expands historiographical perspectives on freedom-seeking strategies, positioning Jacobs as a thinker of subtle, often unseen resistance that contests limited views of maroon activity.

Jacobs’s narrative has become a crucial part of intersectional historiography. As the first published slave narrative by an African American woman, Incidents offers a unique perspective on how race, gender, and property dynamics interconnected during slavery. Modern scholars in history and literature consider her work essential for understanding sexual violence as a systemic tool within the slave system and for exploring the origins of Black feminist thought. Her story is also recognised as a significant contribution to the slave narrative genre, standing alongside the works of Douglass, Equiano, and Wells Brown in shaping abolitionist debates.

Jacobs’s impact across these areas is clear: she is now recognised not only as a witness to slavery but also as a theorist whose ideas reshape contemporary understandings of domination, resistance, and the limits of bourgeois freedom. Her work continues to influence debates on racial capitalism, gendered violence, and the importance of emancipation in both historical and political discussions.

Harriet Jacobs and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Harriet Jacobs’s *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl* remains one of the most politically provocative documents of the nineteenth century. Its impact stems not only from exposing slavery’s brutality but also from showing that oppression is rooted in material relations—property, domination, and surplus value extraction. Today, however, Jacobs’s legacy is often misused, watered down, or weaponised by the pseudo-left: the wealthy, identity-focused sectors of academia and NGOs who claim to be radical yet uphold the social structures that sustain exploitation.

Jacobs’s narrative fundamentally conflicts with pseudo-left politics. She highlights slavery as a mode of production rather than a cultural trauma. Her discussion of sexual violence is viewed not as a matter of “identity” but as a structural tool for capital accumulation. Her critique of Northern “freedom” is not a praise of liberal rights but a warning that formal emancipation, without economic change, preserves oppression. Overall, Jacobs’s analysis emphasises the need for a revolutionary societal reorganisation—something the pseudo-left opposes.

The pseudo‑left’s treatment of Jacobs follows a familiar pattern. They elevate her narrative as a monument of “Black female experience,” but strip it of its class content. They celebrate her resistance while ignoring the economic system that made such resistance necessary. They turn her seven‑year confinement in the garret into a metaphor for “intersectional subjectivity,” rather than recognising it as a form of marronage—a refusal of the master’s economy and a concrete act of class struggle. In their hands, Jacobs becomes a symbol, not a theorist; a victim, not an analyst of racial capitalism.

This distortion has a political aim. The pseudo-left’s focus on identity enables them to appear as radicals while supporting the Democratic Party, corporate philanthropy, and academia. They criticise past oppression but endorse the capitalist system that continues to cause exploitation. They reference Jacobs to moralise rather than to inspire action; to foster guilt instead of solidarity; to split the working class into conflicting identities rather than unify it against capitalism.

Jacobs personally recognised the limitations of bourgeois reform efforts. Her writing reveals the hypocrisy within Northern liberalism, the continued economic dependence post-emancipation, and the ideological tools—such as religion, law, and sentimentalism—that concealed exploitation. She understood that domination extends beyond personal relationships to structural issues rooted in property relations. Her insights prefigure Du Bois’s plantation analysis, Angela Davis’s critique of gendered labour, and the Marxist view of racial capitalism. In contrast, the superficial politics of representation promoted by the pseudo-left could not be more different.

The modern pseudo-left praises Jacobs but dismisses the conclusions her story implies. They talk about “decolonising” institutions yet support the profit-driven system. They condemn historical slavery but overlook current exploitative practices like gig work, migrant precarity, mass surveillance, and imperialist wars that characterise today’s global capitalism. They elevate Jacobs as a cultural figure to sidestep engaging with the revolutionary insights of her analysis.

Jacobs’s legacy is rooted in serving the working class, not the pseudo-left. Her story functions as a tool against racial, gender, and economic oppression, revealing the ideological falsehoods that uphold exploitation. It highlights oppressed communities’ ability to resist, organise, and change society. To recover Jacobs’s legacy is to embrace the Marxist view that true freedom demands dismantling the social system that creates unfreedom. While the pseudo-left merely commemorates, Jacobs calls for revolutionary action.

Conclusion

Jacobs’s narrative is not simply a memoir; it is a weapon in the struggle for human emancipation. It anticipates later Marxist and socialist critiques of racial capitalism, and it remains a vital document for understanding the relationship between oppression, ideology, and resistance.

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a work of enduring political significance. It reveals slavery as a capitalist institution rooted in property, profit, and the systematic degradation of human beings. It exposes the ideological apparatus that sustained the slave system and the contradictions of bourgeois democracy in the North. It illuminates the gendered dimensions of exploitation and the radical forms of resistance developed by enslaved women.

In an era marked by widening inequality, racial oppression, and the erosion of democratic rights, Jacobs’s narrative speaks with renewed urgency. Her testimony reminds us that genuine freedom requires more than legal emancipation; it demands the abolition of all forms of exploitation and the creation of a society based on equality, solidarity, and human dignity.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

  • Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
  • Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an enslaved American. Boston: Anti‑Slavery Office, 1845.
  • Wells Brown, William. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Boston: Anti‑Slavery Office, 1847.

Foundational Historiography on Jacobs

  • Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
  • Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro‑American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • McCaskill, Barbara. “’ Yours for Freedom’: The Fugitive Slave Narrative and the Politics of Agency in African American Women’s Autobiography.” American Literature 64, no. 1 (1992): 50–75.

Recent Scholarship and Current Historiography

  • Coffee, Alan M. S. J. Harriet Jacobs and the Fight Against Slavery: A Republican Theory of Domination and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
  • Gerrity, Sean. “Marronage and the Loophole of Retreat in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 38, no. 2 (2021): 217–240.
  • Mozaheb, Sara. “Harriet Jacobs and the Politics of Reproductive Labour.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 3 (2022): 611–635.
  • Spires, Derrick. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
  • Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‑Making in Nineteenth‑Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Marxist and Materialist Scholarship Relevant to Jacobs

  • Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
  • James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1963.
  • Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
  • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Secondary Works on Slavery, Gender, and Racial Capitalism

  • Morgan, Jennifer L. Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
  • Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
  • Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
  • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Works on Identity Politics and the Pseudo‑Left (WSWS‑Relevant Context)

(These are not citations of WSWS articles directly, but scholarly works that contextualise the critique of identity politics and its class character.)

  • Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New York: New Press, 2000.
  • Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. London: Verso, 2019.
  • Lilla, Mark. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
  • Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Suggested Archival and Digital Resources

  • Harriet Jacobs Papers, Library of Congress.
  • Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina (digital edition of Incidents).
  • Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery: A Materialist Reckoning with Abolition’s Sanitized Myth

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Eighty years after its publication, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) remains one of the few works of historical scholarship that a socialist reader can approach without performing the usual surgery of extracting a materialist core from an idealist narrative. Williams — a Trinidadian historian trained at Oxford and later the first prime minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago — set out to dismantle one of British liberalism’s most cherished myths: that abolition was the triumph of moral conscience over economic interest. His achievement was not merely to expose the hypocrisy of this narrative, but to relocate abolition squarely within the history of capital accumulation.

Williams develops his argument in two parts: slavery as the engine of British capitalism’s rise, and abolition as capitalism’s rational response once slavery no longer served its interests. A deeper Marxist reading reinforces both claims by placing them within the frameworks of primitive accumulation, formal and real subsumption, and the dialectic of economic crisis and political action — concepts Williams approached but did not fully develop.

Slavery as Primitive Accumulation: Capital’s Violent Foundation

Williams’ first claim — that slavery financed the rise of British capitalism — is now widely accepted, though often detached from its theoretical force. His point was not merely that Britain profited from slavery, but that the plantation complex formed a stage of primitive accumulation (Marx 1976, 873–940): capital’s violent pre-history, in which wealth was extracted through extra-economic coercion. The Caribbean plantation was a modern capitalist enterprise under conditions of formal subsumption: capital controlled the labour process without yet transforming it. Surplus was extracted through the whip, the chain, and the legal fiction of human property. Slavery was therefore indispensable to early British capitalism because it generated enormous coerced surplus, supplied capital for industrial investment, and integrated Britain into a global commercial system whose profits exceeded those of domestic production.

Williams documented this with a precision few historians have matched, drawing on shipping records, customs ledgers, and parliamentary debates (Williams 1944, 51–78). The result was a portrait of a capitalist system whose industrial future was financed by the blood and labour of enslaved Africans.

Abolition as Capitalist Rationalization: When Slavery Became a Barrier

Williams’ second claim — that capitalism discarded slavery once it was no longer profitable — remains contested. A Marxist framework, however, sharpens his argument. By the early nineteenth century, the plantation system faced structural crisis: exhausted soil depressed yields (Beckles 2013), protected monopolies clashed with free-trade ideology (Ragatz 1928), industrial capital required mobile wage labour rather than fixed chattel (Engels 1845), and the Haitian Revolution greatly increased the costs of military repression (Dubois 2004).

Slavery had become a barrier to capital’s shift from formal to real subsumption: from extracting surplus through direct coercion to extracting it through wages, machinery, and rising productivity (Marx 1976, 1019–1038). Abolition was not capitalism’s redemption, but its modernization.

Williams came close to this conclusion but never fully stated it: abolition marked the shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism, from plantation extraction to factory exploitation. The form of domination changed, but domination itself remained.

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery and the 1619 Project

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) has returned to public debate in recent years, partly because of its 2022 republication as a Penguin Modern Classic and partly because controversies around the New York Times’ 1619 Project have revived questions about slavery, capitalism, and the origins of the modern world. Williams’ thesis — that slavery built British capitalism, and that capitalism abandoned slavery only when it was no longer profitable — speaks directly to the 1619 Project’s central claims, even though the two works differ in method, scope, and political purpose.

Williams’ Thesis: Slavery as Engine and Obstacle of Capitalism

Williams’ argument has two parts. First, he shows that the profits of Caribbean slavery financed Britain’s commercial and industrial expansion, supporting port cities, banks, and the early industrial revolution (Williams 1944; Project MUSE summary). Second, he argues that British capitalism opposed slavery only when the plantation system began to obstruct further accumulation. Abolition, in this account, was not a moral awakening but a rationalization of capital.

Williams’ thesis broke with the liberal historiography that had long dominated Anglo-Caribbean history and helped open the way for a generation of West Indian scholars and anti-colonial thinkers (Marshall 1991; JSTOR summary). As the Royal Historical Society observes, it remains “perhaps the most influential book written in the twentieth century on the history of slavery” (RHS panel summary).

II. The 1619 Project: Slavery as America’s Foundational Structure

The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in 2019, makes a related but distinct argument: that slavery fundamentally shaped the United States, and that 1619 — when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia — should be understood as the nation’s true founding. Its essays contend that American capitalism, political institutions, racial ideology, and democratic contradictions cannot be understood without placing slavery at the centre. While Williams focuses on Britain and the Caribbean, the 1619 Project centres the United States. While Williams writes as an economic historian dismantling imperial self-mythology, the 1619 Project intervenes journalistically and politically to reshape national memory. Both, however, share a core premise: slavery was not an aberration within capitalism, but one of its constitutive foundations.

Williams argues that slavery financed Britain’s industrial revolution; the 1619 Project argues that slavery shaped the distinctive features of American capitalism, including labour discipline, financial instruments, and racialized class relations. Both reject the idea that capitalism and slavery were opposites, insisting instead that capitalism developed through slavery. For Williams, plantations were capitalist enterprises driven by profit, not feudal remnants. The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, presenting plantation accounting systems, productivity metrics, and coercive labour management as precursors to modern corporate practice.

Williams showed that British humanitarianism closely tracked changing economic interests, while the 1619 Project argues that American ideals of freedom and democracy rested on the material foundation of racial slavery. In both accounts, morality follows interest, not the reverse. Williams grounds his analysis in trade statistics, shipping records, and economic logic; his critics argue that he underplays enslaved resistance and political mobilization (Drescher 2010). The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds culture, ideology, politics, memory, identity, and national mythmaking.

Williams writes from the Caribbean, analysing Britain’s imperial economy. The 1619 Project writes from within the United States, confronting the legacy of slavery in American institutions. Williams dismantles imperial self‑congratulation; the 1619 Project dismantles nationalist self‑congratulation.

Williams wrote during the age of anti-colonial nationalism, providing intellectual support for independence movements (JSTOR summary). The 1619 Project intervenes in a moment of racial reckoning, political polarization, and debate over structural racism in the United States. Their strongest point of convergence — and where Williams offers the sharper materialist insight — is abolition. For Williams, abolition was not capitalism’s moral triumph but its transition from one mode of exploitation to another: mature industrial capitalism required wage labour rather than chattel labour, free trade rather than protected monopolies, and flexible labour markets rather than fixed human property.

Williams underplays enslaved resistance — revolts, sabotage, flight, and the Haitian Revolution — as material forces that shaped slavery’s profitability. The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds enslaved people as historical agents whose struggles helped shape American democracy. In this respect, it corrects a genuine limitation in Williams’ account. It also examines slavery’s ideological afterlife, showing how racial capitalism persists in policing, housing, healthcare, and labour markets — dimensions Williams did not address.

Despite their differences, Williams and the 1619 Project share a central claim: slavery was not an external stain on capitalism but one of its formative structures. Williams demonstrates this through economic history; the 1619 Project does so through national memory and institutional analysis. Both challenge liberal narratives that portray slavery as a regrettable departure from Western progress, insisting instead that capitalism’s history cannot be told without placing slavery at its centre.

The Enslaved as Historical Agents: The Material Force Williams Underplayed

Critics often argue that Williams underplays the agency of the enslaved (Drescher 2010). This criticism is valid, but often misdirected. The problem is not that Williams failed to “give voice” to enslaved people; it is that he understated their role as material actors who shaped the profitability of slavery itself. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was decisive.

The Haitian Revolution showed that enslaved labour was not passive raw material but a revolutionary force capable of destroying the plantation system itself. After Haiti, the costs of maintaining slavery rose sharply; fear of revolt became a constant factor in economic calculation; and the British state faced the prospect of repeated military intervention to defend planter property. Enslaved resistance — through revolts, slowdowns, sabotage, and flight — was not merely a moral drama, but a material pressure that made slavery increasingly untenable. Later Marxist scholarship has developed the analysis Williams left implicit (Blackburn 1988; James 1938).

Williams has been criticised for moving too quickly from economic crisis to political outcome, but this misreads the relation between economics and politics under capitalism. Mass petitions, abolitionist agitation, parliamentary debates, and enslaved uprisings were not moral forces set against economic ones; they were the forms through which economic necessity became political action.

Capital does not act on its own. It moves through parties, movements, ideologies, and crises. The political history missing from Williams is therefore not an alternative to economic explanation, but the mechanism by which economic imperatives became policy.

Williams wrote in the 1930s and 1940s as a colonial subject, before the global Marxist revival and before the full publication of Marx’s economic manuscripts. Capitalism and Slavery was an anti-colonial intervention aimed at exposing British hypocrisy, not a systematic Marxist theory of capitalist development. What Williams could not fully state — but what a Marxist reading must — is that the same British capital that abandoned chattel slavery in the 1830s was, within a generation, extracting surplus value from wage labour under conditions Engels described as “social murder” (Engels 1845, 109). Abolition was not the victory of conscience, but the victory of industrial capital.

Why Williams Still Matters: The Ideology of Humanitarianism Today

Williams’ method remains indispensable because it exposes the material interests beneath contemporary ideology: “humanitarian intervention” conceals geopolitical strategy; “anti-corruption reform” advances market liberalization; and “corporate diversity” can mask labour discipline and brand management. The pattern remains the same: morality follows interest, not the other way round. Williams’ central lesson — that ruling-class morality discovers itself in line with ruling-class interest — has lost none of its force.

Williams’ book remains indispensable precisely because it refuses the liberal fantasy of moral progress and insists that the history of abolition, like the history of capitalism itself, can only be understood through the logic of material interests.

Bibliography

Primary Works

  • Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
  • James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
  • Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Secondary Works

  • Beckles, Hilary McD. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2013.
  • Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso, 1988.
  • Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Ragatz, Lowell J. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833. New York: Century, 1928.

Dishonest Alan Sked

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“His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterances obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.”

Frederick Douglas

“one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.”

Karl Marx

“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”

― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours:

In the January 2020 issue of The Critic, the politician, historian and writer  Alan Sked wrote an article entitled Dishonest Abe. To eternal shame and damnation, Sked was given a space in the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) recent letters page to again attack Abraham Lincoln. Sked is a right-winger. He was a founding member of UKIP in 1993. He was formerly a member of the Anti-Federalist League and the “Brugge Group”, which regarded the decision of Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as a betrayal of her legacy. Sked is still a Conservative member.

Sked’s first paragraph in the Critic article sets the tone for the diatribe. He writes:

“Today, Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most popular president, and historians devote enormous efforts to ensuring that his reputation survives unscathed. Yet during his presidency, he was hated by millions, and in 1865, he was assassinated. Even before the Civil War, he was loathed by perhaps a majority of his fellow countrymen, and in the presidential election of 1860, 61 per cent of the electorate voted against him.”[1]

From its tone, it would appear that Sked would like to assassinate Lincoln again. Regardless of how many people voted for or liked him, Lincoln was hell-bent on saving the Union. Whether He wanted war or not Lincoln was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. As Niles Niemuth writes, “During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[2]

Sked further writes, “Rather than accept him as president, the South seceded from the Union. The Founding Fathers had indicated that secession was entirely legal. Lincoln should have taken the advice of the Supreme Court, but rather than that, he manipulated an attack on Fort Sumter to give him an excuse for war. Lincoln vetoed an attempted constitutional compromise and got his way by illegally organising a military invasion of Virginia. There, his troops were humiliated.”

This paragraph shows not only Sked’s revisionist credentials but is a fabrication of historical events. When the Union commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky, refused to turn the fort over to the Confederacy, the South laid siege to the small federal detachment, refusing to allow supplies. According to Tom Mackaman:

“That Fort Sumter should have been the trigger event for all of this was itself the outcome of an unpredicted chain of events. Located next to Charleston, the citadel of fire-eating, pro-slavery secessionism, Sumter was part of a constellation of lightly guarded federal bases and arsenals scattered across the South and the border states that had become the focal point of preparations for war. In the period before the war, secessionists concentrated on taking, by hook or crook, federal positions. This was the great hope of the South. Its cash crop agriculture was bound to the “workshop of the world,” British industrial capitalism. It did little manufacturing and could produce little of its war material.[3]

Towards the end of his article, and I could be wrong Sked makes the point that I believe no other historian has ever said. Aside from saying that Lincoln had no liking for blacks, he writes :

“The Civil War was fought between two deeply racist societies who differed only over the fate of slavery. After 12 years of Reconstruction following his death, the North and South agreed on a racist political system for the South, which by the end of the century became the Solid South governed by Jim Crow laws. Blacks only began to experience equality after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lincoln’s role in their long journey to emancipation must be treated with great caution.[4]

It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the fabrication of history. Leon Trotsky once pointed out that lies about history are meant to conceal real social contradictions.

Sked’s lies are indirectly refuted by Niemuth, who points out, “ While not an open abolitionist, Lincoln’s political record before the Civil War was outstanding, and he had come to be seen years before 1860 as the leading spokesman of the antislavery forces in the United States. The southern slavocracy certainly understood what it meant when he won the presidency, responding to his rise to the White House with secession. To the extent that any individual in history can be credited with playing a decisive role in destroying slavery, it is undoubtedly Lincoln.

Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great Frederick Douglas, who said of Lincoln:

“Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war. But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.[5]

Note

In the past I would have sent a copy of this article to the TLS as a form of reply to Sked’s letter in the recent TLS. But as the TLS has never printed a letter or had an article from an orthodox Marxist I do not see the point.

[1] thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/dishonest-abe/

[2] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln

[3] 160 years since the attack on Fort Sumter: The beginning of the American Civil War- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/13/pers-a13.html

[4] thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/dishonest-abe/

[5] Delivered at the Unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.  April 14, 1876