Debates on Slavery, Capitalism and Race: Old and New

Robin Blackburn discusses the role of slavery and emancipation, race and capitalism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western world. He argues that the enslaving and racializing dynamic of capitalism was located in civil society while abolitionism sought to challenge the expansion of the “Slave Power.” However, it was the actuality or threat of revolutionary ruptures at the level of the state, and slave resistance that gave abolition the chance to suppress slavery. But the emancipatory project was fatally weakened by the success of armed white vigilantes in terrorizing blacks and denying them political rights. Authors discussed include David Brion Davis, Thomas Haskell, Eric Williams, W. E. B. Dubois, Nancy Fraser, Michael Dawson and Frank Wilderson.