A Review of Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (Vintage Books, 1971).
European history is replete with examples of anti-capitalist sentiment on the political right. Nineteenth-century opponents of the market economy and bourgeois mores in Great Britain and on the Continent squarely blamed the decline of tradition, community, and natural hierarchy on the Industrial Revolution. The reduction of human existence to what Thomas Carlyle called the “cash nexus” or economic utility was particularly repugnant to those remnants or defenders of a feudal order that, in their view, had once restrained or impeded the onset of cold egotistical calculation. Given the fashionable tendency among many scholars on the left and the right to conflate the American identity with Lockean individualism and the natural right to property, the existence of anti-capitalist ideology among traditionalists within the republic’s history has rarely received its due attention. The Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese was that rare scholar who was determined to demonstrate in The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (1971) that America once had a comparable version of anti-capitalist ideology on its soil, one that was far more violently opposed to the dominant industrial system than its counterparts in Europe tended to be. Although he never defends the institution of human bondage that historically coincided with this mentality, he seeks to understand the motivations of a ruling class—namely, the slaveholders of the South—who sincerely believed that capitalism is a fundamentally flawed social system that is not exempt from enslaving effects of its own.
In his first essay, “The American Slave System in World Perspective,” Genovese is naturally sympathetic with the Marxist explanation that slaveowners condemned capitalism simply because it was in their self-interest to oppose a system dedicated to the free movement of labor. Several members of the class that “made their living peddling human flesh” did so “not because they believed slavery to be proper and moral—they made it clear that they did not—but because it paid their bills.” Yet he also faults his fellow Marxists for taking “too narrow an economic view of the societies in question.” Although what Hegel called the “master-slave relationship” was evident in both slavery and bourgeois capitalism, the version of this dynamic under slavery “engendered a special psychology, mores, economic advantages and disadvantages, and social problems.” The task of understanding this “special psychology” is particularly critical to Genovese, since it helps to explain why no equivalent to the War for Southern Independence broke out in the Northern states (before the abolition of slavery there) or the British or the Dutch West Indies. “Why did some slaveholders prostrate themselves before economic forces, whereas others fought to the death?”
In his second essay, “The Logical Outcome of the Slaveholders’ Philosophy,” Genovese more fully displays his reliance on what he calls a “moral-ideological explanation” rather than straightforward economic determinism. In his words, “The questions they (the slaveholders) asked are still with us; the inhumanity (of capitalism) they condemned must still be condemned; and the values for which they fought still have something to offer.” For example, many white Southerners, not just slaveholders, were leery of the class-divided cities that were emerging under Northern capitalism: “The suspicion of things urban, which had its expression among rural folks in all parts of the country, rose to a tenet of quasi-religious faith in the South.” Genovese devotes considerable discussion to the Virginian historian and polemicist George Fitzhugh, who pointed out to slaveholders that there could be no successful co-existence of community and paternalism with capitalism. Yet this inconvenient truth, Fitzhugh believed, also applied to Yankee capitalists who thought that these traditions could endure in the North as well. As Genovese persuasively shows, one need not share the pro-slavery sentiments of the antebellum South to understand that American conservatism has always suffered from the “two contradictory tendencies” of supporting laissez faire and the recovery of an “organic society.” Genovese overstates his case when he warns that conservatives who have misgivings about free market capitalism “have difficulty in not ending as fascists.” Nevertheless, in an age of artificial intelligence, globalism, and identity politics, it is hard to dispute the enduring relevance of his contention that the preservation of traditional mores may require tools and institutions that go beyond mere reliance on capitalism.
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This is a good essay. However, it must be said that Marx never addressed capitalism. He addressed “mercantalism”. Mercantalism, which was facilitated by Statism, became Fascism. It is said that Mussolini was the first fascist, but when you think of Britain, Mercantilism, Hamilton’s American System, Lincolnianism, Radical Republicanism, Abolitionism, Progressivism (Wilsonianism), then we get to Bismark, Mussolini, and Hitler.
The roots of all this is Statist Mercantilism, central banks, public works, and tariffs.
The Lincoln monument has the “fasces” symbols engraved on the arm rests of his throne. “Fasces” comes from Rome. Mussolini was Italian (Roman, if you will, haha), so it is only fitting that he lauded Lincoln, as did Hitler, as did Bismarck. I argue that Lincoln is the father of Fascism, not Mussolini.
So when Genovese says that “those who have ‘misgivings’ of free markets, fall into line with fascists”, well, he’s not wrong. If fascism at its core is government control of nominal private property, then, those that want protection of the State for their enterprise, will naturally oppose free markets and allodial title (private control and real private ownership, not nominal).
In this light, could it be that some European feudalists and Southern slaveholders fought against what was a centralized mercantilism, not really free markets? Let us remember what the Confederate Constitution was: No central bank, no public works, minimum tariffs only for operation of ports, NO Supreme Court. We can hardly say this is fascist. We do not need to move “beyond capitalism”. We need to move beyond mercantilism/fascism/Progressivsm, yes, Lincolnianism, and to as close to allodial title as we can get.