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

August 29, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

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 Viewed through a Marxist perspective, Jacobs’s work exposes the fact that American slavery was not an outdated feudal leftover but a modern, capitalist system—whose brutality was deeply linked to the economic goals of the ruling class.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

July 31, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ 1 Comment

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

March 15, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“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