N+1 26 August 2013 Reviews Gabriel Winant Slave Capitalism Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard, January 2013.
Johnson approaches this second task in River of Dark Dreams, not by uncovering new sources but by layering new interpretations onto old evidence. His road from cultural history back to a critique of capitalism runs through the work of David Harvey. For Johnson, the classic period of the antebellum South was not just an endless performance of anxious white masculinity; it was also the site of a series of capitalist crises on the Harvey model. The crucial feature in the South’s political economy was the attempt to tidy the physical world of the lower Mississippi, its human and natural ecology, into a form abstract enough that it could make a stable bed for increasingly restless capital. As Harvey has laid out, capital wants to be abstract, the way a river wants to flow downhill. Imagine some investor smells a new market. He sinks his capital into a factory full of machines (or he buys up a bunch of land and slaves). Capital goes from abstract—symbols on a piece of paper, data in a computer—to concrete. For this to occur, actual physical stuff—human bodies, supplies—has to get fitted to capital’s abstract account-sheet needs, to produce X amount of a product in Y time, at Z cost. People become labor-power; human communities are reorganized around the rhythms of the factory; forests and mountains become raw materials. In the ensuing production process, capital cycles through various forms: from resources, through supplies, machinery, workers, into the product. Each of these is a holding cell, a trap for value. Only when the product is finally sold does the invested value (plus surplus) return to the capitalist, again in its more comfortable abstract form—money. This dynamic tension, between concretion and abstraction, liquidity and solidity, lies for Harvey at the heart of the capitalist process and produces capitalism’s propensity for crisis. Crisis is what happens when too much capital chases the leading prospect of investment. As excess capital piles up in solid form, its very solidity turns boom into bust. Capital might overproduce the once-valuable product, glutting the market, or exhaust the resources on which it depended, or give workers a tempting target to strike. One way or another, by becoming physically real, capital becomes vulnerable. Timeless in the abstract, it is forced to live in time and inevitably deteriorates. So capital finds it harder to successfully navigate the transition back to liquid form without taking a loss. The destruction of value results, and capital begins to flee elsewhere—a movement Harvey calls the “spatial fix.” full: http://nplusonemag.com/slave-capitalism _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
