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For Genovese and more recent proponents of the non-capitalist thesis such as Charles Post, the question of underdevelopment is central. They argue that the South’s inability to fully industrialize and urbanize sets it apart from the capitalist mode of production for the simple reason that they consider capitalism inseparable from industrialization.(6) They document the features of peripheral economies identified by Samir Amin’s Marxist theory of underdevelopment — dependent and “disarticulated” regional or national economies within which capital accumulation fails to instigate a synergistic development of agriculture and industry.(7)
They conclude, based on their a priori definition, that these traits are proof of the non-capitalist character of the slave-plantation economy while attributing underdevelopment solely to slavery.
Johnson’s critique of their approach is brief but highly pertinent. A materialist analysis “begins from the premise that in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capitalism without slavery.”
However else industrial capitalism might have developed in the absence of slave-produced cotton and Southern capital markets, it did not develop that way. Extracting the history of industrial development (whether in Great Britain or the Northern United States) from the historical context of its entanglement with slavery, itemizing its differences from the economic field from which it had been artificially separated, labeling it ‘capitalism’ in pure form, and then turning around and comparing it to the slavery upon which it subsisted in order to judge the latter “precapitalist” or “noncapitalist” — this way of proceeding conscripts historical analysis to the service of ahistorical ideal types. (254)
However important and convincing this is, the medium of the historical manuscript (bereft of any explicit theoretical development) is not the place where such questions can be fully resolved. His rich narrative is highly suggestive and will likely be a reference point for any future attempts to characterize the slave-plantation economy, but Johnson’s own exposition unfortunately falls short of realizing that task. Political economists may find his work wanting for clearer argumentation and for concise elaboration of if or how economic categories such as surplus-value and fixed capital are relevant to the plantation economy.
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