Enslavement and exploitation continue today across the globe and the term human trafficking has become a contemporary catch-all phrase to include a variety of abuses. Exploitation under the umbrella of human trafficking is often framed as a new issue in today's discourse, or as an exception to an otherwise innocuous world system of progress, democracy, and global capitalism. However, if we examine the thinking that has undergirded the various phases of slavery and other types of exploitation, we find a diversity of rationalization for the kinds of abuses common in various historical eras and today. This essay explores the writing of key philosophers often associated with the development of democratic society, particularly in Western Europe and North America. The essay connects the thinking that laid the foundation for the global slave trade of the colonial era to the thinking that supports the current systems of neoliberalism and global capitalism. Threads are traced across key philosophical work to illustrate some of the common assumptions made today in western civilization that set the stage for our current predicament of widespread human trafficking. The essay builds upon the argument that the rationalization of the global slave trade in the colonial era are still present, even if latent, in the rationalization of exploitation for global profit-making today.

Broeck addresses the humiliate-ability, the enslave-ability, the rape-ability, the abuse-ability, and the ship-ability of Black people in the discourses and practices that shape European white collective memory as well as the contemporary repertoire of thinking Blackness in the white European mind. These discourses and practices add up to a longue durée of white abjectorship and un-humanization of Black being dating from the early modern period, through Enlightenment modernity into the postmodern moment. The ‘slave’s’ assumed ‘slavishness,’ that enduring topos in which Blackness has been contained in white philosophy from Hegel to de Beauvoir has blatantly disregarded the histories of Haiti, and other local and globally important acts, practices, and Black discourses of Black rebellion, and of Black freedom narratives, and has kept negating all forms of Black life. It persists in contemporary modes of un-humanization of Black being which – like the un-mournability of lost African lives in the Mediterranean – need to be analytically connected to early modern transatlantic trajectories of enslavement.

The paper addresses the gap between two conventional Marxist readings of the relation between capitalism and the enslavement of Africans. The first reading sees slavery as part of the process of primitive accumulation of capital, the ‘original sin’ of dispossession. The second reading sees capitalism as such as exclusively based on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage labour as its general condition. The paper provides a third interpretation that sees enslavement as a racialised mode of exploitation with a division of labour similar to manufacture. This paper reconceptualises Marx’s value theory in an analysis of the enslavement of African Americans as a part of the capitalist mode of production with its own special characteristics. The violent working to death of enslaved Africans on the sugar plantation was a matter of calculation by the slave owner, weighing value produced against the costs of purchase and maintenance. Moreover the cost of slave purchase relied on the supply of Africans seized from their home continent. This approach demonstrates continuities as well as changes from sugar plantation slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean on to cotton slavery in the US South.

please note: this is a draft version, unpublished manuscript, please do not quote without permission. This article argues for the necessity, for white scholars, to turn to the study of what I call enslavism, a term necessary to situate current anti-black practices in the “future that slavery has made” (Hartman), and thus to critique them as the ongoing afterlife of enslavement, instead od addressing slavery as an event in bygone history. Conceptualizing their work with this term, white scholars may labor to contribute to Black Studies by way of “sitting with” (see Sharpe 2016) Black knowledge which can enable us to produce a critical protocol, to paraphrase Hortense Spillers, of enslavism as the ongoing afterlife of social, cultural and political anti-Blackness in the future that transatlantic enslavement has made (Hartman 2007). To produce those critical protocols means to re-read the longue durée of humanism in a way that abolishes the human’s ontological reign of life, and of knowledge, based as it has been on Black non-existence for the human.

This introduction highlights the contribution of the special issue to a radical contex-tualisation of the history of the enslaved. In particular, it suggests that the conditions and circumstances that foster or hamper practices of enslavement need to be studied as part of a broader set of labor relations. And it proposes that shifts in the practices of enslavement are closely related to broader transitions in power relations. This double expansion allows connecting the history of enslavement and the enslaved with broader themes in labor and social history.

Marxism is dead. All ideological illusion to the inevitability of an outside of capitalism has vanished before our very eyes. Today's neoliberal globalization has put an end to the theories of socialism which seek to quarantine a mystical social production above and against the authority of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Everywhere, we are witnessing the rapid acceleration of communication, marked by the bio-political parameters of finance which, seek to subsume all of the value of life under the law of value. The central theme of this discussion is marxism, and hierarchies of power. According to orthodoxy the question of power is expressed most doggedly in the extraction of surplus value. However, whereas the exploitation and alienation of workers is foundational to the system of capitalist accumulation, this is only axiomatic of a set of ecological social political economic and psychological relationships which stand in antagonistic relationship to the putative markers of use and exchange value. Before we get started, some may argue that a focus on psychology is not only inessential but parasitic on a conversation centered on Marxism and ecology. However, to the contrary; the nature of the antagonism displaced under the law of value, renders the nature of the preconditions of intramural exchange opaque. What I am after is an orientation to power which can theorize the utility of reducing the ecosphere to a wildlife reserve, and a slave to fungible flesh. To what extent do Eurocentric notions of the human and his supremacy over nature, factor preeminently into notions of, subordinating and domesticating animals, selling and trading commodities, exploiting and expropriating resources, raping and lynching slaves, killing and exterminating native peoples, and wasting and devastating the environment? What a treacherous entrance into the nature of the debate on human nature. Human nature, for the purposes of this paper will be defined as, a series and set of biological and political conventions deemed essential to the so called nature and development of the human " species. " The usage of the word species is telling. Borrowing from Franz Fanon's, " Black Skin White Masks, " there is a Manichaean, species divide between on one side the diversity and plentitude of human life, and on the underside, the void of humanity the black lateral taxonomy, which ranks humans with animals and slaves with ripped open fungible flesh. The gratuitous nature of this shift is emblematic of an antagonism which is irreconcilable with law of exploitation, but which is nevertheless implicated in its violence. In order, to split hairs in our meditation on power, I will theorize how the slave is not only essential to the themes of power implicit in Marxism, but also how the slave as an object of antagonism is a contradiction and irreducible threat to the maintenance and hegemony of the law of value.