First Published: Theoretical Review Vol. 1, No. 1, September-October 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Ken Lawrence, Marx on American Slavery. (Sojourner Truth Organization, 1976).
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Marx on American Slavery is a short pamphlet written by Ken Lawrence and supported by the Sojourner Truth Organization, a small Marxist organization based in Chicago. The basic thesis of Lawrence is that the slave system of the ante-bellum South was actually capitalist. The southern social formation was capitalist because the “slave owners are capitalist, the slaves are proletarians,” and because, according to Lawrence, the capitalist mode of production always “consumes and dominates and transforms various other modes of production, including slavery, through its mode of circulation.” (Our emphasis) Although the viewpoint presented in this pamphlet is only that of a small organization, it is generally accepted by other communist groups and by certain Marxist historians who have attempted to apply this analysis to parts of the “Third World” such as Latin America.
Lawrence’s analysis of Southern slavery suffers from two fundamental flaws. First, he assembles quotations from different works of Marx in an unsystematic and uncritical way; and second, there is a complete lack of a historical materialist analysis of the development of the southern social formation.
Concerning his assemblage of quotations from Marx, he is unable to prove his position since there is no critical reading of those passages quoted and there is no systematic integration of the writings of Marx on the subject into a scientific understanding of what determines the character of a social formation, or of a mode of production, either slave or capitalist.
For example, in order to show that “slaves are proletarians” he must quote from the Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a work written before Marx’s scientific study of capitalism which he published in Capital. In the Poverty of Philosophy Marx writes “feudalism had its proletariat – serfdom.” From this single imprecise statement the conclusion is drawn that slaves too are “proletarians” since, according to Lawrence, “it does not matter which period we are discussing.” This is the exact opposite of a conclusion which a Marxist would draw since the proletariat is not just the oppressed class of any mode of production, but the oppressed and exploited class which is specific to capitalism. He also misreads other quotations from Marx such as the one from Theories of Surplus Value, where Marx clearly states that the South was capitalist “only in the formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labor, which is the basis of capitalist production.”
The second flaw of Lawrence’s approach is that he does not develop a historical materialist analysis of the Southern social formation; but rather in a typically dogmatist style, he states his proposition (in this case, the capitalist nature of the South) with only the necessary quotations from the “classics” as support for his thesis. Of course his excuse is that this pamphlet is on Marx on American slavery, not on the South. But this use, or rather misuse, of Marx certainly does no justice to Marx himself nor to Marxist science–historical materialism.
Lawrence does not even attempt to analyze the modes of production, relations of production, level of development of the productive forces, social relations, political relations or ideological structures of the ante-bellum South. He fails completely to grasp the complexity of the Southern social formation in which there co-existed both slave and capitalist modes of production, under the domination of the slave mode of production. The existence of these two modes of production in the same social formation accounts for the development of contradictory relations, and capitalist forms of production and distribution.
Lawrence tries to establish that, since the commodities produced by the slave system were sold on the international capitalist market, this external exchange relationship somehow transformed the slave mode of production into a capitalist one. What he fails to understand is that, although the slave-produced commodities may have sold on the international capitalist market, this exchange relationship did not alter the nature of production relationships in the South. The domination of slave relations of production meant the domination of the slave mode of production.
The basis of that mode is that the slaves themselves were bought and sold as commodities by the slave owners. Their labor-power was not the commodity, as was the case of the wage-laborers in the capitalist North. The slave mode of production had its own relations of production, an underdeveloped level of productive forces, and specific political and ogical structures. The contradiction between the totality of these relations and that of the capitalist North in the end led to the Civil War. Marx clearly recognized this development since he characterized the Civil War as a “struggle between two social systems, between the system of slavery and the system of free labor” [capitalism].[1]
Although there exists a need for Marxists to study the development of pre-capitalist modes of production and societies in general and their historical forms in the USA in particular, this pamphlet by Lawrence and the STO does not begin to fill the gap in this area nor does it provide the correct approach to reading Marx’s work on these subjects.
[1] Karl Marx, On America and the Civil War, (McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 93.