THE CAPITALIST market took off for global conquest by first propagating and
then repudiating slavery. Enslaving some ten million Africans, racist mercantile
capital extorted by shackle and whip the New World riches that prepared it for
industrial wage-labor exploitation. "Slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today
as much as machinery, credit, etc.," Karl Marx observed in the 1840s. "Without
slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry." But
because industry also required free labor and juridical equality, he understood,
"liberty and slavery constitute an antagonism." ¹

Consequently market revolution made slavery the great contradiction of the
liberal American republic. Northern liberal capital turned against the anachronis-
tic planter capital impeding its political economy, and the antinomian doubts
impeding its cultural hegemony were quelled by vanguard abolitionism. Yet only
by enlisting free-soil Negrophobia would the northern bourgeoisie finally sanctify
in fratricidal blood a racist bourgeois republic.

Capitalism inflicted ancient slavery's "social death" on unprecedented num-
bers with unprecedented severity. The freedom of slaves was most totally denied
when capitalist liberalism absolutized masters' freedom of property and labor
exploitation. Moreover, as Marx understood, slave production "for a world mar-
ket dominated by the capitalist mode of production" was "conducted by capital-
ists" and rigorized by capitalist competition. Even though "the labor of Negroes
precludes free wage labor," he maintained, "the capitalist mode of production
exists," and "the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric hor-
rors of slavery" by "the competition between capitals." ²

The rigors of capitalist slavery were most fully rationalized when the American
cottonocracy utilized history's fullest freedoms of property and labor exploitation
in harnessing human property to the industrial revolution's most dynamic sector.
By dehumanizing black chattels most systematically as market commodities, a

-396-