Benjamin, Slavery, and Revolution

5/6/24 Benjamin, Slavery, and Revolution Introduction and the Importance of Atlantic History (Du Bois, Cedric Robinson) It is no coincidence that one of the first American critiques of orthodox Marxism was produced simultaneously with the birth of black historiography. In a parallel to the emergence of heretical and anti-Bolshevik Marxism on the European continent, W.E.B Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction articulated a critique of the Communist Party that grew out of his study of slavery and the Reconstruction, reaching remarkably similar conclusions as Walter Benjamin in his “On the Concept of History.” Du Bois, like Benjamin, exploded the notion of a progressive history leading inexorably towards liberation, although his historical reference wasn’t the betrayal of the German Social Democrats or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, rather it was the racism of the American labor movement and the missed opportunity of Reconstruction. Benjamin spoke of the failure of the SPD when he wrote, “nothing has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving with the current.”1 The “moment of danger” in which a critique of progressive history emerged for Benjamin was the rise of Fascism and the Nazi Party, and the corresponding ineptitude of the communist movement. Du Bois made a similar remark in a lecture delivered July 1933, contending that “the matter of greatest import is that instead of our facing today a stable world moving at a uniform rate of progress toward well-defined goals, we are facing revolution.”2 Du Bois’ crisis, his moment of danger, was the massive migration of Black workers to the industrial north and their exploitation and suffering during the Great Depression. It revealed to him the fundamental contradiction in American society, namely black chattel slavery and the exploitation of black labor, as well as the inability of the Communist party to speak to this form of racial oppression. Rather than describing US 1 2 Fire Alarm, 71. Quoted from Black Marxism, Page 198 history as a stagist movement from slavery, to industrial capitalism, and finally to the classless society, Black Reconstruction argues that the exploitation of black labor was foundational in the antebellum as well as the postbellum US, and that revolution would interrupt this continuous white supremacist domination. For Du Bois, as well, revolution is in no way a given, rather it requires an active effort on the part of the workers to create a truly antiracist movement. The above is meant to give us a sense of the affinity between a Benjaminian theory of history and the historiography of the black atlantic, as well as the potential that both have to help us rethink revolution. In the following pages I’ll explore some problems in the contemporary historiography of slavery and how historians might revisit them with “On the Concept of History” in mind. First I’ll discuss the potential that a close reading of slavery’s sources might reveal “a secret index by which [the past] is referred to redemption.”3 Second I’ll describe Walter Johnson’s challenge to historians to narrate the multiple times of slavery and how this relates to an idea of full and heterogenous time in Benjamin. And finally I’ll conclude with some remarks on the burgeoning field of slavery and finance. The Messianic Structure of History and the Real State of Emergency In “Now: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” Werner Hamacher explains Benjamin’s assertion that “history is structured messianically.” This is to say that history happens when we recognize in the present a missed opportunity in the past that might now be realized. The messianic structure of history is perhaps most clearly expressed in Thesis II when Benjamin remarks on the “secret index by which [the past] is referred to redemption,” and the “weak messianic power” that each generation is endowed with.4 3 4 Fire Alarm, 30. Fire Alarm, 30. Historians of Atlantic slavery are currently grappling with this problem, struggling to articulate a “secret index” behind the chattel principle, or the commodification of black people. For example, in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson differentiates his historiographical approach to the domestic slave trade from the steady accumulation of sales that can be represented in graphs and maps. Johnson describes the intervention of Soul by Soul, saying, “the systemic brutality apparent from the perspective of the demographic map needs to be punctuated by the episodes of resistance that occurred on dusty roads; the counting up and parsing out of sales must be complicated with an account of the intricate bargaining that preceded the final deal; the central symbol of a property regime that treated people as possessions must be fleshed out with the power, desire, and dissimulation that gave it daily shape.”5 Johnson is describing the central tension facing the historian who approaches slavery as fundamentally characterized by the chattel principle. Writing along the archival grain of the slave trade is bound to lead the historian to quantitatively accumulate completed transactions, mirroring the enslavers business ledger itself. But the nature of antebellum social relations have produced archives which are continuous with the trade, sources that present each sale as inevitable rather than contested and contingent. Johnson is after this contingency, this class struggle, which Benjamin remarks in Thesis IV is “always in evidence.” The struggle between trader, planter, and slave behind every singular transaction, and the defeats represented by completed sales, is the “secret index that refers to redemption.” The historiographical question then is how to make contact with these hidden struggles given archives which, on their face, only record domination. Johnson uses three archives: fugitive slave narratives, court cases of contested sales, and planters letters and account books. Each of these hide the moment of struggle in their own way unless read against the grain. 5 Johnson, 8. Slave narratives were produced by people who had escaped slavery and disrupted their own commodification, making it necessary to read symbolically and carefully to uncover the stories of those who did not escape. Johnson emphasizes that these are our best sources for understanding slavery, but he also uses them creatively, paying close attention, for example, to ephemeral meetings in the slave pens that recorded lives other than the protagonist’s. He reads court cases for enslaved resistance, seeing in slaveholders’ buyers remorse attempts by the enslaved to shape the terms of their own sales. This reveals every slave sale as a contingent and active struggle, a struggle that still might be redeemed by another contemporary uprising against the police and a society founded on black death. Jennifer Morgan similarly portrays the commodification of people as the result of a class struggle in her most recent work, Reckoning with Slavery. Here, she uses African sources as well as accounts of the Middle Passage produced by white crew members to describe Africans' understandings of their own commodification. Again the sources are limited, and nowhere is there direct evidence of enslaved people consciously contesting their commodification, but an oppositional approach to the archives reveals what’s hidden. Moments of suicide and infanticide are interpreted as attempts at interrupting transformation into human property, and this reading is supported by an examination of commodity relations on the African continent. The apprehension of the centrality of commodification in the slave economy creates a historical constellation with the contemporary movement affirming black life. The struggle and failure to disrupt the transformation of black people into things that could be bought and sold corresponds to a weak contemporary messianic power, and an imperative to defeat the forces that destroy black life in the present. Affect and the Production of Time (Walter Johnson) The importance of affect for a theory of history is described in Thesis II where Benjamin describes the centrality of happiness and envy in the apprehension of the past. This feeling is what makes it possible for contemporaries to recognize, in a moment of danger, a revolutionary chance capable of redeeming the past. This is also what’s meant in thesis XIV when Benjamin writes, “history is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time.”6 The historical materialist becomes aware of a monad when they feel the danger of a crisis, with all of the anxieties and possibilities that entails. In his own examination of time and the slave trade, “Possible Pasts” Walter Johnson argues that “ lived history… is not the product of time, as the developmental and unilinear teleologies hidden within terms like 'chattel slavery' and 'empire’ suggest, but of temporality: of situated acts of imagining time and responding accordingly.”7 This means that time is always contested and that it is always produced by specific historical acts. Time is not an empty space where a series of events accumulate, instead it’s replete with conflicting and contradictory meanings. Johnson goes on to describe Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising in Virginia in terms that are practically Benjaminian. He claims that “rather than tracing out points along a foreordained path of historical development, [Nat Turner’s rebels] were investing their everyday lives with temporal purpose- cracking moments open and giving them the shape of imperatives.”8 Johnson here is referring to the way that Nat Turner interpreted everyday occurrences, such as a birthmark on a woman he met or an approaching thunderstorm, as messianic calls to arms. (Denmark Vessey, German Coast Uprising) As Johnson suggests, historians have too often treated slave rebellions as inevitable, and they’ve ignored the often messianic epistemologies that created the will to rebel in the first place. Slave insurgents created their own notions of time, and Fire Alarm, 86. Johnson, time, 486. 8 Johnson, time, 497. 6 7 these were nonlinear and filled to the point of bursting with past slave uprisings blasted out of the time-continuum. Finance, Slavery, Historiography The study of the connection between slavery and finance is relatively new and the literature is relatively sparse. Much of what’s been written has reproduced rather than challenged dominant historiographical conventions, for example Larry Schweikart’s Banking in the American South almost completely writes slavery out of the history of antebellum finance. More recent work from Sharon Ann Murphy has centered slavery in the development of antebellum banking, but even Murphy largely presents a narrative without class struggle, especially the struggle of enslaved people against their use as financial assets. The accommodation of antebellum financial institutions to the needs of the planter class is treated as inevitable and natural, as for example when Louisiana banks rewrote their charters to allow for long term loans backed by mortgages on slaves. This means that we are still unable to weave together the missed revolutionary chances of the enslaved, and we are stuck writing a history that explains the uninterrupted growth of capitalism’s financial institutions. One thing that must be said of the historiography of finance and slavery is that it consciously reveals the foundations of capitalism in chattel slavery. Much of what we think of as belonging to industrial capitalism, life insurance for example, originated in the United States within the social relations of slave society. This blows open a stagist conception of history whereby slavery was displaced to make room for capitalism, and it challenges the notion that history is progressively moving towards the good. What’s missing from all of this is the resistance of the enslaved themselves. As I noted earlier, historians over the past twenty years have attempted to write about the chattel principle in terms of slave resistance, but the same cannot be said for slavery and finance. There’s an urgent need to uncover the ways that slaves conceived of their speculative and abstract financial value, and how they might have attempted to destroy or augment that value. One place to look, following Walter Johnson, may be in the court records of contested mortgage contracts, where there’s evidence of enslaved people negotiating their master’s financial transactions through dissimulation and escape attempts. Ian Baucom has made careful use of Benjamin’s philosophy of history in his account of the 1781 Zong Massacre, where a ship's captain threw an entire load of human cargo overboard in order to collect on their insurance. In Spectres of the Atlantic, Baucom follows Benjamin’s exploration in the Arcades Project of the apotheosis of the commodity-form in the 19th century. For Baucom, there is a historical constellation between the 18th century birth of transatlantic finance and our contemporary moment of securitization and speculation. The absolute separation of value from use value that was seeded in the 18th century has been detonated in the twilight of our long 20th century. While Baucom echoes Benjamin’s interest in the dialectical and literary movement of capitalism, he does not seek to uncover the hidden record of slave resistance to financialization. This task will require future historiographical efforts. Conclusion (Even the Dead Aren’t Safe) Let’s end with a closing remark on the danger of losing contact with revolutionary and insurgent Atlantic history. In Thesis VI Benjamin remarks that both the past and its inheritors are in “danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.”9 He goes on to say that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”10 There are two versions of a progressive black history, wielded by the ruling class, that threaten to hand the history of the oppressed over to conformism. First is the treatment of black history as a rising up from slavery to “freedom.” And 9 Fire Alarm, 42. Fire Alarm, 42. 10 second is a narrative that tells black history as progressively becoming Jamaican, Haitian, Bahamian, African American etc… Both of these stories miss the continuity of the exploitation and killability of black people and they homogenize history in the service of state-building and capital accumulation. Here is a Caribbean example. The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s essay “The Three Faces of Sans Souci,” reveals how the history of the Haitian Revolution has been smoothed-over in order to serve Haitian nationalism. Trouillot describes the “war within the war” fought between June 1802 and the middle of 1803, a three way contest between French expeditionary forces, Creoles, and African former slaves. After the French were once again expelled from Saint Domingue, Creoles and Africans fought each other for control of the island, a contest colored by the Creole leaders’ capitulation to Napoleon’s forces and their seemingly loose commitment to true freedom. These African holdouts against men like Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Desallines are often left out of histories of the Haitian Revolution, perhaps because they point towards class differences among black people that are inconvenient for nationalist narratives. Jean Baptiste Sans Souci was one such African rebel leader, first serving under Henri Christophe and then becoming his most threatening rival. Christophe eventually killed San Souci in 1803, luring the military general to attend a negotiation where he was ambushed and shot. Christophe proclaimed himself King and ruled northern Haiti for over a decade from his plantation and palace in Milot, a palace which he named Sans Souci. This royal residence, which is still a tourist attraction in Haiti, has become much better known than the man it’s named after, and the connection between the two was not even remarked upon until Trouillot wrote his essay. Trouillot argues that “[Christophe] was engaged in a transformative ritual to absorb his old enemy.”11 In this act of negating the memory of Sans Souci the man, Christophe was furthering the process of consolidating power in the hands of the new Republic’s elites, turning his recalcitrant foe into a tool in the hands of the ruling classes. Nationalist historians have followed suit, removing the defeated African-born rebels from their narrative of the Haitian Revolution. In the Arcades Project Benjamin says that “to write history means giving dates their physiognomy.” If Trouillot is to be believed, it perhaps means doing the same for buildings as well. His reinsertion of Jean Baptiste San Souci in the story of the Haitian Revolution is an example of the historian’s attempt to save tradition from conformism, to wrest control of history from the pacifying efforts of the ruling class. Trouillot has made a historiographical intervention that forges a dialectical relation between “what-has-been [and] the now,” since it contains a contemporary ethical imperative filled by past struggles. It is this kind of Benjaminian theory of history, trained on the study of slavery and resistance to slavery, that holds out the chance that the past might find redemption in the present. 11 Trouillot, 65.