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David McNally, "Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History" (U California Press, 2025)
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Prashanto Dhar
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Prashanto Dhar
Welcome to New Books Network. I am your host, Prushantadhar, and today we will be talking about David McNelly's new book. But let me first introduce the author. David McNelly is the Cullen Distinguished professor of History and Business at the University of Houston, where he also serves as the Director of the center for the Study of Capitalism. Before Joining Houston in 2018, he spent over 30 years teaching political economy at York University, Toronto. David earned his PhD in Social and Political Thought in 1983 and began his academic career at York University. David is author of eight books and will today talk about the most recent book, Slavery and A New Marxist History, published just this month. David has received significant recognition for his contributions, including the Paul Sweezey Award from the American Sociological association for his book Global Sum, which was published in 2011, and then the Deutscher Memorial Award for the Monsters of the Market, which was also published in 2011. David's articles have been featured in numerous journals including Historical Materialism, History of Political Thought, New Politics, and Review of Radical Political Economics. David himself is the Editor in Chief of spectre, a biennial and online journal for Marxist theory, strategy and analysis. He is also a member of the Advisory Editorial Board for Historical Materialism, a journal of Critical Marxist Research. With and beyond this academic work, David is an activist. His extensive history of activism began in high school when he joined Anti Vietnam War movement. He later organized a campus chapter for the Committee to Free Angela Davis during his own time in university and this commitment evolved into a lifelong engagement with global justice, anti racist and socialist movements. David actively supports various organizations including the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Faculty for Palestine, Toronto New Socialists, and the campus Anti Fascist Network. He is currently fostering solidarity connections with social movements in Houston. In his time in Houston, David lives with his partner and their youngest son where he continues to enjoy his interest in jazz, baseball and surrealism. Welcome Professor McNeely to New Brooklyn Network.
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David McNelly
Thank you so much Prashanto for that kind introduction and it's really a pleasure to be with you here today.
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Prashanto Dhar
So David's most recent book, Slavery and a New Marxist History has been published by the University of California Press. This 368 page work presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of antiquity Atlantic Slavery. Drawing on various historical sources to argue that enslaved labor in the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, this book emphasizes the self activity of enslaved people fighting for their freedom, reframing their resistance as labor struggles. David Let us start at the very first sentence of the introduction titled Whisperings of Freedom. You start by saying whoever writes about slavery writes about freedom. I quote this line and in your book freedom means a social I quote again a social conception of freedom in opposition to the liberal individualist one. So this freedom in your book conceptualized as not yet, not yet where freedom Making is an, I quote again, always unfinished collective social project. And you go on to say that much of liberal individualist work on slavery and freedom cannot conceptualize this subaltern freedom making as a collective process. So they end up in a cul de sac. And your book is averting this cul de sac by engaging with the works of W.E.B. dubois, C.L.R. james and Sylvia Winter. Could you please elaborate on this conception of freedom and your engagement with this niche?
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David McNelly
Yes, it's a huge question, but it's such an incredibly important one. So let's start with what I think is a critical point of departure, and that is Orlando Patterson's claim, the great Jamaican sociologist's claim that freedom as an ethical value and principle begins with enslaved people, that the fight for freedom doesn't emerge until people experience unfreedom, until they experience bondage. Now, once we think about enslaved people, it becomes fairly clear that freedom as a goal must be communal and collective. No individual enslaved person can break the structures of slavery is going to require collective action. And so one of the things I'm trying to point out to historians, to political theorists and so on, is that if they want to understand the origins of freedom as an ethical value, if they want to understand it as an aspiration of bonded and oppressed people, they have to leave behind all of the liberal stuff which sees freedom as my personal possession, and recognize that freedom can only be a social value, a collective and communal one, because it requires the undoing of states of oppression, the overturning of unfreedom, and then we're talking about collective goals, communal social practices, and so on. So you're right to point to this notion of a social or collective concept of freedom as really a key informing principle of the analysis that I'm doing in this book.
- [09:31]
Prashanto Dhar
So with this important works, W.E.B. dubois, C.L.R. james and Sylvia Winter, which works specifically, do you engage with and what does your book bring to that niche?
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David McNelly
Yes, well, and one of the things that I'm doing is in a certain sense resuscitating a forgotten critical Marxist tradition, that is to say, a tradition of analysis that certainly in the American academy, but I think more widely, has largely been forgotten. You see, historians in the United States in particular, but beyond that, regularly make the claim that Marxists separate slavery and capitalism. But Marxists think that slavery is ancient and capitalism is modern. Well, there was one self styled Marxist, the US Historian Eugene Genovese, who did write in these terms. He argued, for instance, that the US south under the Confederate form or under slavery was aristocratic and feudal in nature. But that is an exceptional argument. I want to show that in particular, a black Marxist tradition always held to the capitalist nature of New World slavery. And so really there you're right. There are three crucial thinkers in this tradition that I'm drawing on. The first is the great CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist who wrote the classic book the Black Jacobins, the first serious study of the overthrow of slavery in what we now know as Haiti, the Haitian Revolution. And James argues in that book that the workers on the great sugar plantations of Haiti, and he knows they worked in groups of 250, 300, even 400 workers in a collective labor process. He says to us that this group of enslaved sugar cane workers on the plantations was closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in the world at the time, unquote. So CLR James is a very important source of inspiration. Now, he doesn't elaborate and develop the claim. And that's one of the things I'm trying to do. I'm trying to put a lot of flesh on the bones of that claim. Then of course there's W.E.B. du Bois phenomenal analysis of Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States in his book three years later. Remember C.L.R. james book comes out in 1935. Three years later, W.E.B. du Bois publishes Black Reconstruction in America in 1938. And he says to us, the overthrow of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy and the Civil War in the United States was driven by what he calls the general strike of the slaves. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the US south, probably close to half a million, withdrew their labor from the plantation system and they fled to union army lines. In other words, they left the south, they left the plantations. And by the way, about 200,000 of those self emancipated men then joined the union army and Navy. So they not only withdrew their labor power from the south, they threw their labor power onto the side of the union to defeat the Confederacy and to crush slavery forever. But think about it, in calling that correctly, in my view, a general strike of the slaves, Du Bois is taking that incredibly modern notion of the proletarian or working class general strike and applying it to enslaved people. And I'm saying he's right to do so. And what follows from this is that on these commodity producing estates, because that's what they were, these plantations were producing sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, indigo for global markets. They were commodity producing estates. And so they withdrew their labor as commodity producers for capital, planter, capital. And finally, I give a Shout out to Sylvia Winter's still unpublished, enormous manuscript, written over close to a decade, called Black Metamorphosis. And in that manuscript, Sylvia. And by the way, it's inspired all kinds of theorists and writers. But in that manuscript, Sylvia Wynter argues that what she calls the plantation proletariat, this New World enslaved class, was in fact, the most thoroughly modern social class created with the development of the so called New World, or what we're calling the Atlantic World for these purposes. So you're right, although none of them engage with the particular kinds of detailed historical questions that I'm raising in slavery and capitalism, they all provide some guiding concepts and a kind of theoretical and political inspiration for what I'm doing in the book.
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Prashanto Dhar
So should we see this, your book, in a kind of continuation, not a straight lineage, but kind of continuation of that niche?
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David McNelly
Yes, I think that's right. There's a kind of rediscovery involved. Of course, you know, where James and Du Bois are concerned, I've got 85 or 90 years of more historical evidence to build upon. They didn't know, for instance, as much as we know today about how plantation owners were among the most developed using techniques of modern accounting. They were using all of the accounting practices that we associate with the modern capitalist enterprise. Output per head, costs of inputs and outputs. They were, in other words, thoroughly modern capitalist cost accounters. Well, cost, Du Bois and James didn't have those studies available to them. So there's an enormous amount of evidence that I can now bring to bear. But I'm doing that to amplify and extend their fundamental insights.
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Prashanto Dhar
This is great clarification. Thank you. So, one quick question on the terms you have used. There were Atlantic bond people, and then there were exploitations, and there are struggles of the bond people. And throughout the book, you refer to the bond people, enslaved people, bond men, bond women, etc. Instead of bondsmen or bonds women. What does that mean and why is this important?
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David McNelly
Well, I chose bond people, bond women, bond men, as opposed to, say, bondsmen, in part because of the everyday commonsensical meaning of bondsmen in the United States today. Because in the United States today, in just ordinary speech, it refers to someone who provides a bail bond for an incarcerated person. I didn't want that confusion to creep in. And in thinking about this, I had the good luck of discovering some letters by the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass where he also used the term bondman. And I thought, okay, if it was good enough for the great Frederick Douglass.
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Prashanto Dhar
Then it's good on Every.
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David McNelly
And it also avoids any kind of confusion with the modern use message.
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Prashanto Dhar
That's great. Thank you. Now, especially in the introduction and throughout the book, you stress on this necessity of theory, bringing theory to history. To my understanding, your book seeks to break the intellectual impasse in histories of Atlantic slavery that continue to rely on facts only as history. In contrast to that fashion, you propose a dialogue between history and theory. Could you please elaborate on this necessity of theory in history, especially in this context of history of Atlantic slavery?
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David McNelly
Yes. And it's especially important in this moment because one of the things, particularly among American historians, that has happened is that since the 20089 global crisis, American historians have really raised the question of capitalism. When the 20089 global financial crisis hit, most many of them recognized, to their credit, they couldn't even begin to explain it, because the cultural turn within history meant that they didn't do political economy anymore. So they return to the problem of capitalism. But what's exceptional when you read so much of this literature is that they tend to say things like, we're not interested in theoretical definitions of what capitalism is. This is not our issue. We will just proceed empirically. And one of them even says, we'll just begin with a bale of cotton. And I take off from that point at one point, and I say, yes, but what is a bale of cotton? We can only know what it is if we insert it into a broader framework of commodity relationships, productive relationships, the social relations of an emerging global economy. In other words, when we do theory, when Marx, for example, begins with a coat in capital, he brings it immediately into relationship with another commodity. He says, 20 yards of linen equals one coat. Then he says, what does this tell us about the labor between tailoring and weaving? So he's immediately doing theory, because as soon as you introduce a relationship between commodities, you must theorize that relationship. And so I'm really trying to. To say you can't just assume that you can understand capitalism by taking mere brute facts like bales of cotton sitting on a dock waiting to be loaded onto a ship. You have to analyze those commodities in relationship to the social totality, the whole social system of which they are a part. And for that, we need theory. So I'm really pressing American historians in this regard because one of the amazing things about the historical profession in the United States is it's had an allergy to Marxism. It hasn't wanted to engage with historical materialism. And the avoidance of theory is in part because to develop a real theory of capitalism, which is what they say they want to analyze. They're going to have to confront the Marxist analysis. Of course they try to short circle at it. And I'm really saying to them A you can't do that, there's always a necessity of theory. And secondly, B there is an incredibly rich body of theorizing about capitalism and slavery from Marx all the way through to clr, James W B dubois and Sylvia Winter that you could learn an enormous amount from.
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Prashanto Dhar
This is great. And that raises a question. This is kind of my history, rather historiographer self is finding in the 1930s even eh car is saying this. And you are quoting uh Car provingly. And he says that this reliance on facts only. And I think I have the quote here. The liberal 19th century view of history has a close affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez faire. And then he goes on to say that he's talking about 19th century. But what you are describing is 20th century, our time. This was an age of innocence. And historians walked in the Garden of Eden without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the God of history. Since then we have known and experienced a fall. And those historians who today pretend to dispense with the philosophy of history are merely trying vainly and self consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. I mean this is so apt even today.
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David McNelly
Yes. And you see what's happening Prashantho, in those kinds of analyses and why EH Car is so insightful there is that the idea that you can take individual facts and just throw them into a container and see a picture is the same sort of idea as that society just consists of atomized individuals who are thrown together into the market and somehow coherence simply comes from their self seeking activity. And of course what Carr is saying is all of a sudden things like a global depression and a world war hit historians over the head. And you have to recognize these are not merely the result of individual activity. These have to do with great social processes that need a much more holistic analysis. And really that's what I'm saying to the empirical historians who think they can just throw individual facts together. You've got to be able to grasp collective social processes. And that requires a different kind of analysis that doesn't rely on individualism of facts or of people.
- [25:45]
Prashanto Dhar
This is great. I mean great to see that the same project of theorizing history, that the philosophy of history, historiography is still important even though we have passed 1930s depression, 2008 depression. We still need to hearken on going back to theory and rather, as you put it, a dialogue between facts and theory. This is great. On that note, you have theorized Chatel proletariat and you have stated up front that the concept of the shattil proletariat is the pivot point of this book. Could you please tell our listeners a bit more about the concept?
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David McNelly
Yes. See, there's a mythology, and I think it also has its roots in liberalism, according to which the proletariat means free workers, free laborer. And what's remarkable is that when Marx uses this concept in a very satirical way in Capital, his great analysis of the capitalist system, he is regularly mocking the so called freedom of the laborer in capitalism. And as the text proceeds, he starts to put the word free in quotes, starts to say the so called free laborer. Because Marx is showing us that the so called free laborer suffers from economic bondage. They are bonded to capital. They cannot survive without selling body and soul to the capitalist on a regular basis. And what I'm trying to show is that once we think about all workers in capitalist society as being bonded, then it's possible to imagine spectrum of forms of bondage. In other words, some may be acting economically bonded but legally formally free. But others may be economically bonded and legally unfree. Both are being exploited for surplus value. But there is a legal distinction. And so people who were chattel property might also be part of the proletariat. And I try then to show, really this is an extremely important part of the argument and as you say, a pivot point, that when we look at how they acted and behaved. And this, as you know, is an insight that I'm taking from the great historian E. P. Thompson in his book the Making of the English Working Class, where Thompson says to us, let's not get frozen by abstract models. Let's also watch how class happens. And what I'm showing is that contrary to what many people think, enslaved workers on Atlantic plantations regularly use the strike weapon. They regularly withdrew their labor in protest, sometimes to reduce hours of work in the fields, sometimes to get rid of a tyrannical overseer, sometimes to protect a pregnant field worker who ought to be relieved from work in the fields in the last trimester of pregnancy. But they regularly resorted to the withdrawal of their labor. Often, of course, this meant that they would also physically escape into the forests. They were often bargaining and negotiating. And then of course, we come to the great high points of mass strikes. When we look at, for example, the reinvasion of Haiti or Saint Domingue by Napoleon in 1798, Toussaint Louverture, the great leader of the Haitian Revolution of enslaved people, he calls for a strike on the sugar plantations. And he gets it. So a strike is involved there. 18:16, we know Busse's rebellion in Barbados. There's a strike of about 10,000 workers. And then, of course, the enormous case of the 1831 strikes in Jamaica, beginning at Christmas, where 30,000 workers, as they put it down, tools to end slavery. And the British Empire is forced in a matter of months to formally abolish slavery. And then finally, of course, Du Bois, general strike of the slaves. So I'm also saying to my readers, if these people act like a proletariat in collective strike action, if they were, in fact among the foremost innovators in mass strikes of tens of thousands of bonded workers, maybe it's time we recognize them as part of the proletariat. And of course, and my final point on this, once we do that, then we need to rewrite the labor history of the modern world, because they need to be centered in our understanding of labor history in the new World in a way in which they have not been great.
- [31:46]
Prashanto Dhar
So even though this is not according to the classical definition, there is no market there. But capitalism is at work. Proletariat are there, even though this is not market capitalism.
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David McNelly
Yeah. And what I would say is that what's sometimes confused by analysts is the idea that there must be a regular market exchange between the employer and the employee. Because, of course, in many other respects, there is a market. There's a market in bonded labor on which these people were purchased. Of course, all of the commodities that they're producing are going to global markets. The sugar, the cotton, the tobacco, and so on. And we know that, in fact, these people are often being rented out or sold, so they are experiencing market transactions. All that's really missing, as you are hinting at, is that regular weekly or monthly exchange of labor power for wages. So markets are there, and it is a system of market production. It's just that often their labor power is purchased for years at a time, which makes the formal nature of the purchase different.
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Prashanto Dhar
I mean, this is great the way you described the. The vision from Epitans since the Making of English Working Class, how that applies even in this context. But your work also reads little differently from that masterpiece. Of course the context is different, the time is different. But I'm thinking especially of your chapter eight, where this making of the shuttle proletariat also means life making, birthing, procreating, the proletariat, which is not. Which I couldn't find in Epithhansen's analysis. Could you please elaborate for a. Yes.
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David McNelly
And let me say as a preface to that, that I agree very much with the criticism made by E.P. thompson's student, Peter Linebaugh, that Thompson should have called it the making of the working class in England, because as Linebaugh points out, there were loads of Irish workers in that working class. There were many more workers of African and South Asian descent than we often think. So to call it the English working class is misleading. It should have been the multiracial working class in England. But then, yes, on your primary, primary point, I am trying to build on the insights of social reproduction theorists, of Marxist feminists who have said we need also to incorporate all of those labors by which the human laborers are reproduced. And this is the work of life making, as Susan Ferguson has put it, the. The work of reproducing our bodily, psychological and emotional well being day after day, month after month, year after year. We all know from our own life experiences that when we leave work we need to be put back together. We all know this. But of course, that work of putting ourselves back together is also a collective and communal project in which gendered labor, women's work, has figured centrally in cooking, cleaning, child rearing and looking after the sphere of domestic life. And so it was very important to me to get the role because although black women, as enslaved workers, were in the fields, they were producing commodities. They were also going back to the slave quarters and doing life making, reproducing human existence and human life. And so that dimension which as you say, is absent in E.P. thompson's great work, was really important to me that I center those life making processes. And in so doing, the enslaved black woman and the slave family become much more important to my account than we do find, say in some of those classic studies that you're referring to.
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Prashanto Dhar
Right. And I was fascinated by that point. When you are showing etymologically that prolethariat is the birthing of the book.
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David McNelly
Exactly.
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Prashanto Dhar
So in the interest of time, David, I could go learn from you for hours. But for the interest of time, let us skip to the. Your intellectual trajectory. Where does this book belong? Given that you have consistently critiqued market centric economics theories from classical political economy to market socialism, and to build that critique, you have taken an interdisciplinary approach, from political thought to history to philosophy. So where do you Place this work disciplinarily as well as in the trajectory that your works are moving.
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David McNelly
Well, in terms of my interest in market relationships and how those shape our lives, really, as our discussion of the chattel proletariat indicated, I'm trying to show how deeply commodified relationships penetrated into the life of this social group and how their revolts against commodified relations, including being commodified themselves, is a form of modern class struggle. But speaking personally, this book is also one of, and you can see it in some of my earlier works, I was trying to get at some of this in my blood and money. I similarly try to get at some of this in global slump. But this is the one where I think I most centrally confront racial capitalism, because in all of my work I was from the beginning trying to explore the political economy of commodified social life of capitalism. But at the same time in my activist commitments, as you pointed out, going back to when I was 18 years old and forming a chapter of the Committee to Free Angela Davis, anti racist organizing has been central to my work. And I think this is the one work in which I've most consistently drawn those two strains together. The analysis of the political economy of commodification and commodified life with the analysis of racial capitalism. And I feel that those two strands which have been weaving together in my work, people can look back and see some of the intimations of this. I feel it's my most sustained analysis of the historical formation of racial capitalism which continues to shape our world today.
- [39:49]
Prashanto Dhar
This is. I mean, I personally have been waiting for your explanation to see that trajectory clearly. So what is your next project?
- [40:02]
David McNelly
Well, I'm now working on a project on anti colonial Marxism which centrally involves both Frantz Fanon and a lesser known Vietnamese Marxist, Tran Duk Tao.
- [40:17]
Prashanto Dhar
Okay.
- [40:18]
David McNelly
And I'm interested in the particular formation of their thinking in the context of the French left where they were interacting with some of the new critical trends of both existentialist and phenomenological Marxism in France. They were frustrated with the mainstream politics of the left, both socialist and communist, because they were too compromised by colonialism and they were searching for a new kind of anti colonial Marxism. And this brought them into dialogue with some of the newer philosophical and intellectual currents on the French left. So I'm trying to tell this story of a kind of anti colonial radicalism that I think continue to speak to our day and age where we're rediscovering the centrality of anti colonialism to the histories of the left, or we ought to be discovering them. And I'm trying to say let's carefully re examine some of the intellectual and political formative moments for some great thinkers like Tran d' Octau and Frantz Fanon, because there is an unfinished body of work here that could still do an enormous amount to make sense of the struggles against racism, capitalism and colonialism today.
- [41:45]
Prashanto Dhar
Right. This is so fascinating. I'll be personally tracking your every work because this is my goal too. Understanding anti colonialism and anti colonialist movement and the project of the Left in the colonies. What were they doing? What were they not doing? What were they compromising? And that's the history. Great. We should be talking more about the Left, Sam.