The Tensions of Abolitionism and Racial Capitalism

ABSTRACT: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal abolitionists thought of emancipation as a process of maintaining planters’ landownership and transforming slaves into wage laborers to sustain capitalist plantation production after slavery ended. In contrast, revolutionary abolitionists claimed that abolishing slavery required providing ex-slaves with access to the means of production through commonly held land and collective labor. Attending to the multiple and variegated ways in which abolitionism indexed, reflected, and rejected capitalist social relations, this article analyzes what I call the tensions of abolitionism and racial capitalism. Exploring these tensions, I theorize the entanglements of capitalist extra-economic coercion, racial hierarchization, and abolitionist ideologies and processes.