No, I don't think so. Certainly I am not denying the capitalist character of the English slave trade and the plantation system in the Americas. Indeed I was taken to task by Barclays Bank and the Quaker Society for doing just that in the letters page of the Guardian newspaper last month.
But just as certain is that further development of industrial capital found the plantation system to be a barrier. It was Marx who characterised the plantation system a mode of production distinctive from the industrial capital of the north, and emphasised that it was incommensurable with it.
More to the point, though, the strategy of propagandising against capitalism by emphasising its most perverse manifestations is a mistake. Excoriating slavery is not a strategy that will lead people to understand what is wrong with capitalism today. On the contrary, they will congratulate themselves on the fact that they rid themselves of this great evil. Furthermore, in treating racism as if it were simply a continuation of slavery will only suggest that it is not intrinsic to capitalism, but merely a hangover from the past.
>As for the problem of formally unfree labor, it is
>indeed intact all over the world.
Which is very interesting indeed, but has no bearing upon slavery as a system. Debt bondage, peonage and other modes of appropriating surplus labour ought to be understood in their own terms. -- Jim heartfield