Reconceptualising the Factory as Plantation

Abstract In the late 1960s, Chrysler’s auto factories in Detroit were among the most regimented, fast-paced, and gruelling industrial workplaces of the United States. Their production lines employed a majority of Black workers who toiled under a racialised form of labour control, safety hazards and no leverage in the local union. In these circumstances, Black radicals mobilised support by crafting a discourse that drew on notions linked to slavery and in fact reconceptualised industrial labour as slave labour, the plant as plantation, floor supervisors as overseers, and strikers as ‘field negroes’. The notion of the Black factory worker as a slave drew on, and in turn influenced, a new historiography on slavery that emphasised agency. It was influenced also by a tradition of radical Marxism that celebrated slaves’ ‘self-activity’. Radicals blended Black Power and Marxism in the attempt to gain political control of the plants and of the city administration.