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(So, the Brennerite analysis of slavery as "precapitalist" predated Brenner and Post.)
There was some mild criticism of the book here and there but the harshest criticism emerged from the left-wing press, which took issue with Du Bois’s renegade Marxism. Writing for the New Republic, Marxist labor historian Abram L. Harris criticized Du Bois’s general strike idea as “fantastic.” Such apostasy was also panned in the Nation and New Masses. For most 1930s Marxists, slavery might have played an important role in pre-capitalist developments—what Marx termed “primitive accumulation”—but capitalism proper was about industrial production. Class was a relation between factory owners and factory workers which positioned the latter as the eventual revolutionary vanguard. In this orthodox Marxist view, slavery was a vestige of feudalism, not part and parcel of capitalism. No matter how unjust their situation—no matter how dehumanizing slavery was—slaves were not revolutionaries. The Civil War and Reconstruction era was not a revolutionary moment but rather a period of capitalist consolidation.
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