The 1619 Project’s Confusion on Capitalism

By Phillip Magness

Sunday, February 12, 2023

 

A pervasive sense of confusion characterizes Hulu’s new 1619 Project episode on “capitalism,” beginning with the basic definition of its titular term. Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones opens the episode by conceding that “I don’t feel like most of us actually know what capitalism means.” This should have provided her an opportunity for self-reflection on how the embattled project has, over the last three years, trudged its way through the economic dimensions of slavery.

 

The original New York Times version of the project assigned the topic to Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, a novice without any scholarly expertise or methodological training in one of economic history’s most thoroughly scrutinized topics. The resulting essay blended empirical error with a basic misreading of the academic literature to almost comical ends. He casually repeated a thoroughly debunked statistical claim from a “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) scholar Ed Baptist, who erroneously attributes the growth of the antebellum cotton industry’s crop yield to the increased beating of slaves (it was actually due to improved seed technology). At one point, Desmond even asserted a lineal descent from plantation accounting books to Microsoft Excel — the result of misreading a passage in another book that explicitly disavowed this same connection.

 

Desmond is conspicuously absent from the new Hulu episode, although Amazon warehouses do apparently supplant Microsoft as the modern-day iteration of plantation economics — a message repeatedly emphasized as the camera shots flash between historical photographs of slaves working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South and footage of an Amazon distribution center. The cinematic juxtaposition is intended to provoke. Instead, it simply ventures into morally offensive analogy, stripped of any sense of proportion or understanding of slavery’s abject brutality. Though she stops just short of saying as much, Hannah-Jones wishes for her viewers to identify an hourly-wage job with the internet retail giant as a modern “capitalist” continuation of chattel slavery.

 

And thus, we return to the matter of definitions. Seeking a succinct explanation of “capitalism,” Hannah-Jones first consults historian Seth Rockman of Brown University. Rockman is an unusual choice, not only as a fellow traveler of Baptist’s embattled NHC school but for his own definitional confusions about the same term. He wrote a widely referenced 2014 article asserting that the NHC “has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism” while simultaneously insisting that slavery is “integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.” Capitalism cannot even be defined, but it is definitionally wedded to slavery. And so goes Rockman’s answer in the docuseries. After brushing aside a common dictionary’s association of the term with “a system of private property in which the free market coordinates buyers and sellers,” he settles on “it’s not really clear.” Nonetheless, capitalism, in his mind, still clearly encompasses slavery, with no further explanation needed.

 

Hannah-Jones’s semantic exercise shifts as she brings in a new consultant to the 1619 Project, UCLA historian Robin D. G. Kelley. Unlike Rockman’s self-contradictory equivocation, Kelley minces no words: “The reality is that capitalism is based on the exploitation of labor. It’s that simple.” And with that assertion, the 1619 Project episode further stumbles through its investigation of “capitalism” by adopting an unvarnished Marxist conceptualization of the term.

 

Equating capitalism with the exploitation of workers certainly serves the purpose of designating chattel slavery as a capitalistic institution, but it is simply not an accurate — or even functional — definition of the concept. Ancient Roman slavery, medieval feudalism, Soviet-era gulags, and North Korean prison camps today would also qualify as “capitalism” if we reduce the concept to exploitative worker conditions, and indeed that is how Hannah-Jones, under Kelley’s aggressively ideological guidance, proceeds.

 

From this dubious starting point, Hannah-Jones then opens the floodgates for almost every economic fallacy and pejorative denigration imaginable to describe economic development under market-based capitalism. Aided by Rockman, Hannah-Jones begins in palpable circularity by assuming the very premise she purports to demonstrate. American slavery “can never be separated from the history of capitalism,” Rockman tells us, resting this claim on the banal observation that slave-produced goods were bought and sold outside of the slaveholding regions and were used in economic production all over the world. The same reductionist logic could be used to deem the entire modern American economy a simple appendage of the economic system of China, Venezuela, or any other autocratic regime with which we trade or have financial entanglements. Yet the simple presence of trade, exchange, and financial institutions is not exclusive to capitalism. These have been features of almost every society in human history, free and unfree.

 

Seeking to drive home Rockman’s point, Hannah-Jones informs her viewers that slave-produced cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports before the Civil War. The number is accurate for the period after 1820, but the claim lacks perspective. In the antebellum period, total U.S. export volume never exceeded 7 percent of GDP. As economist Gavin Wright notes, “The chief sources of U.S. growth were domestic.” In this same period, Wright shows, the American South was a diminishing market compared to the rest of the country. The share of total income arising from the southern states dropped from 57.4 percent on the eve of the American Revolution in 1774 to just 30.5 percent in 1860 at the outbreak of secessionism. Immigration patterns favored the free states in this era, and the Civil War itself provided a real-time demonstration of the industrialized North’s superior economic position vis-à-vis an underdeveloped South. Business with slave-owners undoubtedly implicated some northern banks and financial institutions in the practice, but did they “create [the] entire financial industry in the nascent United States” as Hannah-Jones purports? Only if one double-counts intermediate transactions to exaggerate the magnitude of slavery’s economic reach until it includes the lion’s share of economic output. In the NHC literature, no relevant adjustments are made to the remainder of the economy outside of the roughly 5–6 percent of antebellum GDP tied up in cotton production.

 

The docuseries episode nonetheless proceeds from the NHC literature’s faulty empirical assumptions, unencumbered by any need to show its math. “If you don’t have slave-grown cotton, you don’t have an American industrial revolution,” Rockman declares. “It’s as simple as that.” And yet economic reality is anything but simple. History provides numerous examples — Canada, Japan, several European states — of economies that underwent massive industrialization in the 19th century without the alleged benefits of slavery. It also offers examples such as Brazil, which maintained a large slave economy for several decades longer than the United States did without industrializing. Indeed, one empirical analysis of U.S. economic growth over time reveals that counties with slavery lagged behind free-labor regions long after slavery’s abolition. The plantation system may have enriched a small, elite group of slave-owners during its existence, but slavery is unambiguously harmful to economic development in the long run.

 

Economists have long rejected the class of monocausal development theories that purport to find the economic engine of an entire epoch in a single good or product, such as oil or railroads in more recent times. Aside from seldom exceeding single-digit shares of economic output, one-industry theories of economic development must contend with the counterfactual presented by the allegedly dominant industry’s closest substitutes. In the case of cotton, alternative sources could be found outside of the American South — and indeed they were during the Civil War, when the blockade induced the textile mills of Europe to turn to Egypt, India, and South America for their raw materials. In this respect, the 1619 Project repeats the same economic error that led the Confederacy to mistakenly proclaim that “cotton is king,” assuming none would dare make war upon its plantation system for risk of amputating the alleged source of their own wealth. In practice, King Cotton was but a garish pretender to an economic throne that did not even exist.

 

Although the 1619 Project’s anti-capitalism arises from ideological roots, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the series’s elementary misrepresentations of American economic history arise from the abject ignorance of its creator and her chosen guests. A revealing moment occurs shortly after their botched foray into economic statistics, with Hannah-Jones declaring that “the education I received has long said that slavery wasn’t profitable.” Rothman appends a conspiratorial twist, asserting that American society “has very aggressively tried to erase those connections.”

 

The unprofitability thesis traces back to the turn-of-the-century writings of historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who depicted slavery as a declining institution on the eve of the Civil War. Phillips’s argument was conclusively debunked back in 1958 by economists Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer, who used plantation records to show that slavery was profitable at the time of its abolition. Hannah-Jones and Rothman, therefore, build their case against an obsolete theory that few academics have taken seriously in over 60 years. Furthermore, Phillips’s position was almost certainly not being taught with any regularity in universities by the 1990s, when each completed their undergraduate studies in history. As with much of the NHC literature, the 1619 Project’s derivative interpretation of slavery emerges from a branch of the academy that has chosen to isolate itself from most modern scholarly works on the economics of slavery, even as it advances an unfounded assertion of its own novelty.

 

The ideological core of the series’s “capitalism” episode, however, is based not on NHC literature but rather on a droning foray into Marxist theorizing. Kelley, the project’s newest contributor, hails from an idiosyncratic branch of the communist philosopher’s followers, as filtered through an explicitly racial lens. Hannah-Jones summarizes his take about halfway through the episode when she states that “capitalism is designed to exploit labor and human beings, but all people are not exploited equally.” Race explains the difference in exploitative severity that each laborer faces. Kelley’s explication on this point is little more than muddled aphorism, with a string of circular declamations simply asserting that “racial capitalism is capitalism — they’re one and the same.” The viewer is left to make the next deduction, namely that capitalism itself is inherently racist and therefore deserving to be jettisoned.

 

Racial exploitation also functions as Kelley’s theoretical fix to a conundrum of the Marxist world. Marx famously predicted that the numerical advantages of the proletariat classes would eventually allow them to rise and seize the means of production from the capitalists. In practice, true proletarian revolutions seldom materialize. Instead, most Marxian socialist regimes get their start from small, violent bands of left-wing ideologues staging coups. Other branches of Marxist theory have retrofitted self-serving explanations into this gap, usually either faulting capitalists for obstructing class-based collective action or appointing themselves as a vanguard to usher in a broader socialist movement.

 

The 1619 Project takes a different route, starting with Desmond’s essay in the book version of the series. The failure of labor to collectively assert itself in the United States, Desmond alleges, is due to the capitalists’ using racial division to segment the working class. “As Northern elites were forging an industrial proletariat of factory workers,” he explains, “Southern elites . . . began creating an agrarian proletariat,” and never the twain shall meet on the revolutionary picket lines. As Kelley elaborates in the Hulu episode, “white workers choose racial solidarity over their own economic interest” and accordingly undermine the organizing mechanism of the proletarian whole, the labor union.

 

At this point the episode thrusts itself into a political crusade to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., bringing the narrative full circle. If Amazon is the modern successor to the slave plantation, and Amazon workers sharply divide during several successive votes to unionize, as happened at the Bessemer facility, then the outcome cannot possibly reflect the triumph of any legitimate argument against unions. It must be “racial capitalism,” parsing the workers from their scientifically discerned collective labor interests and leading some of them into the service of their own capitalist exploiters.

 

Hannah-Jones cannot help but see this batty narrative lurking behind every single setback to the Amazon unionization organizers, whose cause she advances as self-evidently sacrosanct. Indeed, the United States’ relatively low rates of union membership becomes their own evidence that an exploitative “racial capitalism” has thoroughly corrupted our labor market. “For the last 40 years we’ve experienced a kind of onslaught against labor,” Kelley asserts.

 

Hannah-Jones nods in agreement, volunteering her own declarative assessment that unionization and civil rights are synonymous causes. In doing so, she repeats what historian Paul Moreno dubs “one of the hoariest myths in the history of the American labor movement” — the notion that racial animus is externally imposed on the working class to keep it divided and weak. In reality, the long history of unionization in the United States is replete with homegrown racism, as organized labor has sought to increase white workers’ wages by driving African Americans out of the competitive workforce. Many early-20th-century union initiatives, including working-hour restrictions, minimum wages, and collectively codified seniority privileges for existing workers allowed organizers to cartelize white labor against wage competition from African Americans and immigrants. The mostly white union sector benefited from artificially higher pay under these measures, whereas blacks found themselves excluded from employment entirely.

 

Even as some African Americans attempted to unionize separately during this era, with varying degrees of success, many civil-rights leaders recognized organized labor as a bulwark of institutional racism. A 1930s NAACP publication declared that the Wagner Act, a pro-union measure from the New Deal, was “fraught with grave danger to Negro labor” because it “empowers organized labor to exclude from employment in any industry all workers who do not belong to a union.” Since many unions in this era excluded non-white members entirely and others maintained soft discriminatory practices, the “closed shop” provisions of the act would effectively bar black workers from entire companies and industries. Writing almost a century later, Hannah-Jones looks past the overt racism that plagues the history of the American labor movement. To her, “right to work” laws are nefarious tools of racial-economic oppression, in contrast with the 1930s, “when the U.S. had one of the highest unionization rates in the world.” This rosy picture of a unionized golden age is not only in direct conflict with the position of the New Deal–era NAACP, it also contradicts Hannah-Jones’s own statements in a different episode of the Hulu series in which she acknowledges the discriminatory effects of the Wagner Act as part of her case for reparations.

 

Returning to Kelley, we find an answer as to why this historical omission of organized labor’s racism is made in the “capitalism” episode, but not in the others. The Marxist academic is best known for his heterodox history of the “long civil rights movement,” the thesis of which is that the Communist Party during the 1930s was among the most important organizations for the African-American civil-rights cause. Kelley comes from a far-left intellectual tradition that traces its roots to the late-life work of W. E. B. Du Bois, when the famous black intellectual split from the avowedly anti-communist leadership of the NAACP.

 

Du Bois, in turn, spent his final years gallivanting with Mao Zedong and touting the alleged credentials of Joseph Stalin as a leading anti-racist. But there’s an older radical tradition undergirding this line of reasoning and the NHC literature more generally. Desmond’s print version of the “racial capitalism” thesis openly ponders why American industrialization didn’t follow the course that “Karl Marx and a long list of other political theorists predicted,” namely “the formation of a Labor Party or even ushering in a socialist revolution.” This “new” take on capitalism’s history is really the repackaging of a stale thesis. It traces back to the German philosopher Werner Sombart, himself an adherent of a branch of Marxian heterodoxy (and later a collaborator with National Socialism), who observed in 1906 that “the Negro question has directly removed any class character from each of the two [American political] parties.” This split allegedly rendered both unable to serve as a locus of labor organizing. And in Desmond’s telling, the resulting weakening of laboring-class consciousness is the real economic legacy of slavery — a legacy he sees manifest today in every defeat that the far-left incurs at the ballot box.

 

In the 1619 Project’s peculiar political economy, slavery is the root of the American electorate’s resistance to Piketty-style wealth taxes. It’s also the reason we don’t have a fully socialized health-care system, why the IRS doesn’t hire enough auditors, and why the Green New Deal has thus far failed to advance through Congress. The Hulu episode adds one more political grievance to the list. Slavery, we learn, is the also why Amazon warehouses remain insufficiently unionized.

 

The historical evidence behind each of these claims is thin at best; it more often consists of NHC scholars venturing beyond their own competencies while attempting to interpret complex events in economic history. As with the NHC scholars’ hapless rehabilitation of the “King Cotton” theory, the Amazon narrative unintentionally evokes late-antebellum-era defenses of slavery, namely that wage earners were “free but in name — the slaves of endless toil,” to quote the slaver-poet and politician William J. Grayson. But the Hulu series has made it abundantly clear that history is no longer the primary purpose of the 1619 Project, assuming it ever was.

 

The informed viewer cannot help but notice an element of accident in Hannah-Jones’s economic misadventures. Progressive policy aims characterized the 1619 Project from the beginning, to be sure, but its confused economics left the project’s creator adrift in a sea of withering criticism. As she cast about for new sources to salvage her narrative, she eventually landed in the fringes of academic Marxism. But there’s no reason for outrage over the many errors of fact and economic reasoning that result from this witless embrace of anti-capitalist crankery. The incoherent narrative that the 1619 Project builds in its attempt to link modern Amazon warehouses to slavery offers no meaningful insights about the history or economic workings of either institution. But it is sufficiently self-discrediting to dissuade most viewers outside of the already converted.