The question of capitalism and slavery may be addressed in a number of ways.
1) One may develop the notion of a racial formation, that is not reducible to
capitalism, but yet is interwoven with it, so that the Enslavement was just one
historical incarnation in the development of capitalism and white supremacy, but
we would not call white supremacy a "mode of production" and we would not make
such a big deal about the difference before and after Abolition. If Atlantic
slavery was a "mode of production" did that mode entirely dissolve with the
Emancipation Proclamation? And what was sharecropping, another mode of
production again or still the "slave mode"?
2) One may derive at the very highest level of abstraction, and employing all of
Marx's categories including the labor theory of value, but also the reserve army
of labor, fierce intra-class competition in which competition among
non-capitalist classes is rooted in competition among capitals. Fortunately, I
don't have to do all this work from scratch, as we have Semmler's _Competition,
Monopoly, and Differential Profit Rates_ that lays out the groundwork and then
Botwinick's _Persistent Inequalities_ that extends the analysis to include the
industrial reserve army, etc., and we can easily see how a history of capitalist
development could analyze the Enslavement as part of the way in which these laws
of motion played out in history at certain early stages of capitalist
development.
3) One can take off from Oliver Cromwell Cox's seminal thesis about racism as
the ideological support for capitalist Enslavement, and analyze the dialectical
origins and development of capitalism, racism, capitalist patriarchy, and modern
western science, without any need to consider "slavery" as some "other" mode of
production. It really seems like the real burden would be on anyone who wants
to argue that, with all the obvious ways in which the Enslavement Industry and
Trade were intimately linked to the capitalist system, this was some "island" of
"pre-capitalist" activity in the sea of capitalism. Maybe it's just me.
4) One can identify all the backward and forward intersectoral linkages and all
the resources and profits that would not have been absent the Enslavement
Industry, and propose that original accumulation would not have been sufficient
or that one cannot be assured beyond a doubt that capitalism would have
developed in the same direction.
etc.
