Published By: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. without direct access to land sufficient to provide subsistence) subsistence becomes conditional on the market, and thus on competitive cost‐cutting behavior. Finally, Brenner and Wood revise the structural definition by positing what they call “market dependence,” rather than private ownership or wage labor, as the ultimate foundation of capitalism. What about the evidence on productivity growth? But slave markets were by all accounts highly competitive, probably more so than localized and often isolated postbellum labor and tenancy markets (Naidu and Dittmar 2012). The main link between this structural level (what Brenner and Wood call “social property relations”) and the sociological level (“rules of reproduction”) in the Brenner‐Wood model comes via selection pressure that market competition exerts on producers by virtue of their market dependency. Yet if figure 1 poses a problem for the Smithean and (classical) Weberian accounts, figure 2 represents a similar challenge to the Marxian account. In this way more efficient capitalists are able to out‐compete the less efficient, opening the way to self‐reinforcing spirals of specialization, innovation and rising productivity. I shall argue, however, that with some small modifications it can not only identify the capitalist character of American slavery, but also explain it. This item is part of JSTOR collection Check out using a credit card or bank account with. Moreover, it is not entirely clear what is at stake in this claim. And towards the end of his last published book, Capital, he wrote: “The veiled slavery of the wage‐earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World” (Marx 1971, 803). For more information about the journal, please visit: http://sesjournaluwi.blogspot.com. Richard Follett (2000) presents similar evidence from antebellum Louisiana sugar plantations, citing the introduction of steam‐powered mills, railways for transporting cane, and the vacuum pan. For almost identical formulations see Hahn (1983: 223), Egerton (1996: 212) and Kolchin (1993: 172). Market dependent producers are compelled not only to sell their entire output (as opposed to their surplus, as peasants had done for millennia), but also to produce it at a competitive cost. For Marx, James and Du Bois the normative implication of emphasizing the capitalist character of slavery was that it provided insight into what capitalism is and how and why it should be overthrown (Zimmerman 2016). This has led to some confusion. With direct, non‐market access to land, subsistence is conditional only on the exigencies of nature; without it (i.e. The rapidity of those changes can be gleaned from the fact that they have often been called “revolutions” (agricultural, industrial, bourgeois). Slaves in 1859 consumed only a quarter of the value of the goods they produced, whereas black sharecroppers in 1879 consumed 45%, approximately equal to the wage share in manufacturing at the time. The model I have presented here, based on Brenner and Wood’s approach, begins not with the mentality of the individual slaveowner (e.g. Especially when the answer to that question seems to rest on which of the many possible definitions of capitalism we decide to employ. For the neoclassical measure of exploitation, which falls either to zero (Ransom and Sutch) or becomes negative (DeCanio), the explanation will tend to be sought either in the degree of competition in labor markets, or (if competition is limited) in the relative bargaining power of tenants and landlords. To purchase a slave, on the other hand, is to make a long‐term (i.e. I argue below that the violence of the market‐dependent slave owner provides a more direct transmission of the capitalist survival constraint onto the productive activity of slaves. Genovese was influenced by these writers, and we can see echoes of this conception in his later characterization of slavery as “in but not of capitalism.” However, Genovese attacked Aptheker in his early writing and also opposed this “hybrid” conception (Genovese 1971). Both debates can be traced back to Marx’s own, sometimes ambiguous, discussion of slavery and capitalism, a discussion that was revived by Black Marxists in the 1930s. Several factors appear to have contributed to this development, including the influence of Lenin and Stalin’s writings on slavery, the political exigencies of the “popular front”, and (as I shall argue in the next section) a tendency in both Marx and Marxists to sometimes identify capitalism with free wage labor.1616 On the influence of Lenin’s writings on American agriculture and Stalin’s forays into historical sociology see (Patterson 1977, 411). © 1984 University of the West Indies But I argue below that the Marxian distinction between labor and labor‐power applies equally to the slave as to the wage laborer. None of these writers, it should be noted, had ever set foot in the Caribbean or the US. Thus in this case the competitive mechanism favors the most militarily adept rather than the most efficient producers. The potential profits tended to be higher than those from employing wage labor because slaves could be compelled to work harder at lower subsistence cost.3939 This notion of “potential profit” is homologous to the Marxian concept of surplus value. While no periodization is perfect, and no origin complete, something fundamental changed to human societies over the last 200 years. For they could and did do just that: by selling them to a ready market of buyers and dealers.5353 Slave labor did exhibit some indivisibilities (due to thin rental markets) that made it harder to adjust the firm‐level labor supply over short time horizons, but this is a separate issue, and one unlikely to affect technical choice and investment in the way suggested by Post. Preferable to capitalism as an indeterminate totality see Endnotes ( 2000 ) another figure... 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