ABSTRACT
The rise of capitalism required the expansion of slavery. From the 1840s and 1850s until quite recently, many historians presented US slavery as a pre-capitalist institution whose feudal aspects made it more inefficient than wage labor. This chapter sketches how slavery seemed to stabilize but actually intensified capitalism's volatilities, which exposed masculine masks. It considers how Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance", Toni Morrison's Sula and other American texts represent capitalism's self-reinventions and hybridities. The chapter focuses on how capitalism undermines the labor theory of value. Slave labor confirms a central argument in Karl Marx's Capital, that unregulated capitalism exploits workers to maximize profits. The Company Men tries to resuscitate the value of labor by contrasting physical work with dysfunctional corporate masculinities. As the new histories abundantly show, slavery was unregulated capitalism in its most brutalizing form. Yet the value of labor continues to decline as the inequality between top management and labor keeps widening.
