The Triumph of the Plantation

​The American Confederacy lost the war but won the peace.
The plantation system in the American South was perhaps the pinnacle of the capitalist system. Developed and refined throughout the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th century, the American plantation system was a masterful integration of medieval feudalism with emergent industrial revolution capitalism. As economist Kari Polanyi Levitt put it, “the plantation is the most effective form of social and economic organization.”
In 1934, Charles Johnson, in his book Shadow of the Plantation, noted the similarity to the English manor, which was an outgrowth of the medieval feudal lord system. Johnson called the grim routine of forced labor an “imperative of the economic system.” The rigidity of roles, labor, and routine would soon be mirrored by the industrial factory system.
Capitalism acts like a virus that adapting to changing circumstances and environments and is intent on continually extending its reach into every element of life. This means that everything, including human labor, can be monetized and bought and sold like a commodity. The Chicago School of Economics, as exemplified by Milton Friedman, preached that the only obligation of the capitalist is to make money without regard to human or environmental impacts.
Thus the basic elements of capitalism are simple and straightforward: the maximum generation of capital—i.e., wealth—by relentlessly driving down the cost of production, especially labor, and driving up prices of products and services through the control and monopolization of markets. The plantation system was based on the absolute lowest cost of labor and absolute control over that labor.
Plantations offered the ultimate implementation of this strategy. Through the use of slavery, labor costs were as close to zero as possible, which allowed plantations to scale up, improve efficiency, and control products and markets. Plantations were tremendously effective in increasing profit margins and thereby creating enormous wealth for their owners. The string of slave estates along the Mississippi River in Southern Louisiana was referred to as Millionaires’ Row. It was home to more millionaires than the rest of North America combined. The increasing size of plantations and their spread westward was made possible by the continuing expansion of the institution of slavery.
The military defeat in the Civil War resulted in a roughly 20-year disruption of slavery and the plantation system. After their defeat, the South launched a masterful three-pronged strategy to recoup control of the political and economic system based on free or nearly free Black labor. One critical component was a propaganda campaign to convince the nation, particularly the North, that the Civil War was not about slavery but rather the so-called “Lost Cause” of states’ rights and federal overreach. A second element was a successful effort to convince people that under Reconstruction the South was being controlled by carpetbaggers and scalawags, manipulating a Black population supposedly too ignorant to participate in civil affairs, let alone government. The third leg of this strategy used terrorism – widespread murder and intimidation of Black citizens to keep them from voting, participating in government, or being allowed in jobs inconsistent with the plantation system.
The success of this strategy allowed the imposition of a new form of plantation work utilizing sharecropping, tenant farming, and the widespread use of free labor via peonage. Taken together, these efforts resulted in the re-implementation of the plantation system throughout the South and increasingly in other parts of the country.
Under the Black Codes and Jim Crow, Black workers could only get a job if they had a written certificate from their previous white employer. This gave employers absolute power over their Black employees. We now see echoes of this in the current practice of non-disclosure agreements and non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
Slavery was the key economic engine of much of the South both before and after the Civil War. For example, when the war began, in the state of Alabama, 70% of the state’s income was generated from slave labor. Twenty years later, post Civil War, 73% of the state’s revenue came from unpaid Black labor despite supposed emancipation. This was the result of the use of peonage, instituted after emancipation, in which former slaves were sentenced to prison for mostly fabricated crimes and then leased out to companies as free labor.
Driving the capitalist and plantation system was greed. Greed takes two basic forms: money and power. Money and power have a symbiotic relationship, reinforcing and supporting each other. In the case of the Southern states, they saw the rise of the North and the limiting of slavery in the new Western territories as potentially diminishing their power at the federal level, where they had long enjoyed dominance. Ten of the first twelve US presidents were Southerners, as was a majority of Congress. This was facilitated by the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution, which gave Southern states a significant electoral advantage. Secession was the attempt by the plantation oligarchy to solidify their power and wealth through the perpetuation of the slave system and negate the growing power of the industrial North.
With the success of the post–Civil War campaign to regain control, the key elements of the plantation system spread to factories and industry more broadly. This spread included a number of innovative strategies. To reduce labor costs, labor unions were not just opposed but systematically destroyed. By gaining control of state and federal governments, the legal system and state and federal troops were used against workers organizing in mines, textile mills, and railroads in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), because of their organizing success and willingness to include all workers - White, Black, Asian; male and female - were targeted and successfully destroyed. Corporations used the “Red Scare” campaigns to similarly intimidate workers and purge “radicals” who supported labor rights. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan echoed this approach when he destroyed the air traffic controllers’ union.
The former Confederate states extended these efforts with “right-to-work” laws and other anti-union actions, leading to a rush of factories moving to these anti-worker states to reduce labor costs—only to see them move out of the country when they found a better deal.
With the advent of social programs under the New Deal and Great Society, employers quickly realized they did not need to pay a living wage and could let taxpayers subsidize their workers with food stamps (now SNAP), unemployment benefits, medical care, and child care. In effect government was now subsidizing “the plantation.”
Where once Henry Ford opined that he needed to pay his workers enough that they could buy his cars, today capitalists realize they can make more money from payday loans, exorbitant interest rates on credit cards and predatory bank fees without the need to sell products to low wage workers.
The political element of the plantation system is an essential component of its success. The plantation system is inherently anti-democratic. Note that it, and capitalism more broadly, are not just undemocratic. Anti-democratic suggests that the controllers of the system actively oppose democratic processes and norms. Plantations are by nature and choice authoritarian systems, as are corporations. Plantations and corporations do not have self-correcting mechanisms as democracies do—the right to petition the government, to organize, to vote, to run for office. Plantations and corporations are authoritarian systems, and when they gain control of governments, those governments become authoritarian as well. The increasing wealth and power of the very rich - the oligarchs - has driven the US to become an authoritarian nation.
There is more to come. The final incarnation may be the age of AI and robots, where workers are unnecessary. Elon Musk has said of AI that no one will need to work; what he means was that no one will be able to work, because the plantation will no longer need humans, no matter how little they are paid.