Abstract
A structural imperative of capital is to expand commodity exchange. To realize surplus value, capitalists not only have to exploit workers in the production process, but also make workers buy what they produce. This paper examines how this imperative of capital shaped race relations from the end of slavery through the Jim Crow era. The racism that sustained black slavery was highly exclusionary––a fixed racism that undermined this imperative of capital to expand commodity exchange. A more flexible racism would resolve this contradiction. Reconstruction was a move to erase all vestiges of the fixed racism that sustained slavery from relations of commodity exchange. Jim Crow countered with a more flexible racism that maintained the racial status quo but was less of a barrier to blacks participating in commodity exchange in the consumption process.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baker, R. S. (1964). Following the color line: American Negro citizenship in the progressive era. New York: Harper and Row.
Baugh, W. H. (1949). Capital formation and entrepreneurship in the south. Southern Economic Journal, 16, 161–169.
Bond, H. (1969). Negro education in Alabama: A study in cotton and steel. New York: Octagon Books.
Clark, T., & Kirwan, A. (1967). The south since appomattox. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, L. (2003). A consumer republic: The politics of mass consumption in postwar America. New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Dollard, J. (1957). Caste and class in a southern town. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Douglass, F. (1962 [1881]). Life and times of frederick douglass: His early life as a slave, his escape from bondage, and the complete history. New York: The Macmillian Company.
Edwards, P. K. (1932). The southern urban negro As a consumer. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Gaston, P. M. (1970). The new south creed: A study in southern mythmaking. New York: Knopf.
Goldman, R. (1992). Reading ads socially. London: Routledge.
Hale, G. E. (2000). “For Colored” and “For White”: Segregating consumption in the south. In J. Dailey, et al. (Eds.), Jumpin’ jim crow: Southern politics from civil war to civil rights (pp. 162–182). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hogan, L. L. (1984). Principles of black political economy. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kayatekin, S. A. (1996). Sharecropping and class: A preliminary analysis. Rethinking Marxism, 9, 28–57.
Livingston, J. (1994). Pragmatism and the political economy of cultural revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Mann, G. (2007). Our daily bread: Wages workers, & the political economy of the American west. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Margolies, D. S. (2006). Henry Watterson and the new south: The politics of empire free trade, and globalization. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Marx, K. (1964). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Introduction to the critique of political economy. New York: Vintage Book.
Marx, K. (1977 [1867]). Capital: A critique of political economy, vol 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books.
McIntyre, R., & Hillard, M. (2007). De-centering wage labor in contemporary capitalism. Rethinking Marxism, 19, 536–548.
Miller, D. (1987). Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mullins, P. R. (1999a). Race and affluence: An archaeology of African America and consumer culture. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Mullins, P. R. (1999b). A bold and gorgeous front. In M. P. Leone & P. B. Potter Jr. (Eds.), Historical archaeologies of capitalism. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Olegario, R. (2006). A culture of credit: Embedding trust and transparency in American business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ownby, T. (1999). American dreams in mississippi: Consumers, poverty and culture, 1830–1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ownby, T. (2006). Three agrarianisms and the idea of a south without poverty. In R. Godden & M. Crawford (Eds.), Reading southern poverty between the wars, 1918–1939 (pp. 1–21). Athens: The University of Georgia Press.
Plessy v. Ferguson. (1896). 163 U.S. 537.
Quadagno, J. S. (1994). The color of welfare: How racism undermined the war on poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.
Radin, M. J. (1996). Contested commodities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ransom, R. L., & Sutch, R. (1977). One kind of freedom: The economic consequences of emancipation. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.
Resnick, S., & Wolff, R. (2003). Exploitation, consumption, and the uniqueness of US capitalism. Historical Materialism, 11(4), 209–226.
Rio, C. M. (2000). This job has no end: African American domestic workers and class becoming. In J. K. Gibson-Graham, et al. (Eds.), Class and its other. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.
Schweninger, L. (1990). Black property owners in the south (pp. 1790–1915). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Simmel, G. (1978). The philosophy of money. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Singer, J. W. (1996). No right to exclude: Public accommodations and private property. Northwestern University Law Review, 90, 1286–1477.
Smith, M. M. (2006). How race is made: Slavery segregation, and the senses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tyner, J. (2006). The geography of malcolm X: black radicalism and the remaking of American space. New York: Routledge.
Veblen, T. (1970[1899]). The theory of the leisure class. London: Allen and Unwin.
Walker, J. E. K. (1998). The history of black business in America: Capitalism race, entrepreneurship. New York: Twayne.
Woodman, H. (1990). King cotton and his retainers: Financing and marketing the cotton crop of the South (pp. 1800–1925). Columbia: University of South Carolina.
Woodward, C. V. (1951). Origins of the new south (pp. 1871–1913). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Woodward, C. V. (1974). The strange career of jim crow. London: Oxford University Press.
Zelizer, V. A. (1994). The social meaning of money. New York: Basic Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilson, B.M. Postbellum race relations in commodity exchange. GeoJournal 75, 273–281 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9306-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9306-5