Social Text

On Race, Violence, and

So-­Called Primitive Accumulation

Nikhil Pal Singh

Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going

on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they
would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as
alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would
soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be
thrown out of employment. . . . My fellow apprentices very soon began
to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs,
and talk about the “niggers taking the country,” saying we all ought to
be killed.
—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life (1845)

When we look at social relations which create an undeveloped system

of exchange, of exchange values and of money, or which correspond to
an undeveloped degree of these, then it is clear from the outset that the
individuals in such a society, although their relations appear to be more
personal, enter into connection with one another only as individuals
imprisoned within a certain definition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord
and serf etc. or as members of a caste etc. or as members of an estate etc. In
the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this
semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, the
distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up; . . .
and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at
bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference). . . .
The defined-­ness of individuals, which in the former case appears
as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in the
latter case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual
by relations independent of him and sufficient unto themselves. . . . A
closer examination of these external relations shows, however, . . . [that]

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these external relations are very far from being an abolition of “relations
of dependence”; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the
general foundation of the relations of personal dependence . . . in such a
way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions. . . . The abstraction,
or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those
material relations which are their lord and master.
—Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857) (italics added)

The fifth day after my arrival I put on the clothes of a common laborer
and went upon the wharves in search of work. . . . I saw a large pile of
coal . . . and asked the privilege of bringing in and putting away this coal. . . .
I was not long in accomplishing the job, when the dear lady put into my
hand two silver half dollars. To understand the emotion which swelled my
heart as I clasped this money, realizing I had no master who could take it
from me, that it was mine — t hat my hands were my own, and could earn
more of the precious coin — one must have been himself in some sense a slave.
—Frederick Douglass, Notebooks (1881) (italics added)

In this essay I offer provisional thoughts about the links between human
bondage and capitalist abstraction and the subsequent constitution of
racial differentiation within capitalism. My concern is to complicate a
tendency in radical thought influenced by Marx, but more specifically by
the strand of Marxist theorizing sometimes defined under the heading
of political Marxism. This tendency insists on a definition of capitalism
premised on the structural separation of a productive regime of supe-
rior efficiency based on economic exploitation of wage labor from forms
of extraeconomic coercion in support of modes of accumulation whose
line­ages are frequently ascribed to noncapitalist or precapitalist histories.
This view, which despite its historicist bent can unfortunately converge
with a modernization paradigm, is based on a strict single-­country origin
story of capitalist “takeoff,” defined by the establishment of a specific set
of class and property relationships internal to the English countryside in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — relationships that inaugurated a
radical market dependency that in turn motored a qualitative shift toward
radically self-­augmenting productivity and capital accumulation.1
What is gained in analytical and historical precision by this impor-
tant body of scholarly thinking is lost in theoretical scope and political
capaciousness, as it tends toward a significant bracketing or relegation
of contemporaneous modes of economic expansion, particularly slavery
and the slave trade, whose links to the rise of industrial capitalism may be
acknowledged as a component of the origin story but whose contribution
to what we might call the form of capitalism remains radically under-
specified. 2 More problematic, it supports a tendency in Marxist thought
to think of slavery as capitalism’s antecedent — a historical stage, which

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glosses over a startling fact affirmed in much recent historiography that

the chattel slave was a new kind of laboring being and new species of prop-
erty born with capitalism. 3 Slavery, as Sven Beckert writes, especially on
North America’s “cotton frontier,” was not only a labor regime but also
a means to allocate capital that was “tightly linked to the intensity and
profits of industrial capitalism” that gradually eschewed direct coercion
of producers.4 Marx’s oeuvre, which frequently compares the contempo-
raneous forms of work conducted by workers and slaves during this time,
exemplifies the problem we face, both offering support for what W. E. B.
Du Bois once called “slavery character” of capitalism, particularly in its
Anglo-­A merican ascendancy, and yet contributing to a problematic con-
ceptual relegation of African slavery within capitalism’s history that has
haunted radical politics ever since.
The outstanding trace of that haunting is a political imagination
that separates race, sex, and gender domination from capitalist exploita-
tion both conceptually and in terms of strategic priorities of working-­class
unification and struggle. Ironically, this way of understanding anticapi-
talist struggle not only presents an impediment to the kind of solidarity
required in a world characterized by “intimate and plural relationships
to capital.”5 It also forfeits a powerful analytic discernible within Marx’s
oeuvre that conceives capitalism as a machine whose productive expan-
sion also rests upon expanding fields of appropriation and dispossession.6
Marx not only describes capitalism as “veiled slavery”; he also takes “slave
management in slave-­t rade countries” as a reference point and baseline for
thinking about capitalism’s seizure of vital life processes, including what
he describes as the wageworker’s “premature death.” 7 As subsequent anti-­
Marxist critics have pointed out, however, slavery in this register is para-
doxically both indispensable for thinking capitalism and “unthinkable”
as such: sometimes it seems “closer to capitalism’s primal desire . . . than
wage [labor],” while at other times it represents what has been superseded
by an order of oppression whose stealth (or veiled) power rests upon an
supposed ability to dispense with violent dominion. 8
Strictly counterpoising or making categorical a distinction between
the worker’s exploitation and slave’s social death — a common move within
an important strand of contemporary black critical theorizing often
defined under the heading Afro-­pessimism — offers no better answers
to this conundrum, merely a kind of inversion in which slavery and the
antiblackness that proceeds from it is the excluded ground of politics as
such. This approach further alienates an understanding of slavery tied to
the development of capitalism and with it any impulse to overcome the
problematic severing of racial domination and class subordination. To
the end of bridging this analytical and political divide, we might instead
begin by recognizing how the production of racial stigma that arises in

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support of chattel slavery makes a specific and enduring contribution to

developing what might be termed the material, ideological, and affective
infrastructures of appropriation and dispossession that are indispensable
to capitalism as a set of distinctive productive relationships.
The differential ethicopolitical valuation of human subjects in slav-
ery derives from how slave status was explicitly raced, gendered, and
sexed within a household ontology of rule via privatized violence for-
mally backed by state power, even as wage labor (and even indentured
servitude) was increasingly becoming nationalized and linked to a realm
of public, social standing, and state protection. As historian Jennifer L.
Morgan has recently observed, the main legal innovation of chattel slavery
in seventeenth-­century North America was to assign to it a hereditary
force through the reproductive capacity of captive African women who
could thereby only ever give birth to future slaves.9 Subtending the unpaid
labor of slaves (like workers) was another layer of unpaid work: social and
biological reproduction, conducted by women. The process of concep-
tion and reproduction under slavery, however, was violently coerced and
attached to the creation of a new species of human capital, “sustained,”
in the words of Frederick Douglass, “by the auctioneer’s block.”10 This
biocapitalist innovation was in turn married to a concomitant elabora-
tion of what might be termed a necrocapitalist prerogative, expanding the
ambit and varieties of corporeal violence that could be visited upon the
bodies of slaves without or with minimal legal sanction, up to and includ-
ing homicide.11
The rise of the commodity form, as Marx tells us, helped advance
ideas of universal exchangeability, formal equality, general abstraction, and
a human subject without particular properties. The legal-­governmental
procedures and material processes that produced these effects, however,
operated in a context of human beings who were themselves commodi-
ties (as well as instruments of credit and capital investment), and on the
grounds of communally articulated differences and divisions that were in
turn regrounded, reposited, and ultimately regrouped under separate bod-
ies of abstract thinking, most notably racial science, whose lineage con-
taminated the development of the human sciences more generally. In this
view, racial subordination might be thought of as something that material-
ized with the production/governance of normative class differentiation — 
a kind of superordinate class inequality structured into (certain vari-
ants of) capitalist social formation through an association of whiteness
with property, citizenship, wages, and credit, along with the renewal
of surplus and/or superexploited subjectivities and collectivities at the
openly coercive, lawless/law-­defining edge of capitalist accumulation by
dispossession.12
This is not a definitive assertion about the capitalist origins of race

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and racism but a claim that racial differentiation is intrinsic to productive

processes of capitalist value creation and financial speculation, changing
an idealized game of merit and chance into a stacked deck, as racially
disparate fates manifest as devalued land, degraded labor, permanent
indebtedness, and disposability. In short, in no period has racial domina-
tion not been woven into the management of capitalist society, and yet
with important exceptions this issue has received little sustained, sympa-
thetic attention from within the Marxist tradition. Exploitation and the
constitution of an objective order of market dependency, not direct racial
violence and domination, are thought to be continuously reproductive of
capitalist relations of production. But if land, labor, and money are ficti-
tious commodities that comprise foundations of capitalism,13 they also
constitute what Patrick Wolfe has called the “elementary structures” of
race.14 This insight complicates common tendencies within both liberal
and Marxist intellectual traditions to think race in terms of ascriptive
fixity and thus align racial differentiation with static notions of precapital-
ist particularity.15 Instead, it highlights the modern, uniquely fabricated
quality of racial distinctions as a domain for the elaboration of a reserve
of institutionalized coercion and related capacities for surplus extraction
that persistently shadow normative processes of value formation within
certain varieties of capitalist society.16
Specialization in violence was integral to capitalism’s origins. Beck-
ert names this “war capitalism”: a form of capitalist privateering backed
and unimpeded by sovereign power and most fully realized in slavery, set-
tler colonialism, and imperialism. Following Cedric Robinson, we might
rename war capitalism racial capitalism, recognizing with Beckert that
while it precedes industrialization it is also retained as an integral part of
capitalism’s ongoing expansion. Returning to Marx, we can observe how
the understanding of racial differentiation as a directly violent, and yet
also typically flexible and fungible mode of ascription, at first might be
said to retain important affinities with the conscription, criminalization,
and disposability of poor, idle, and/or surplus labor: the historical process
of forcibly divorcing “the producers from the means of production” that
Marx posits as the precondition for the emergence of capitalism. In its
overt violence, the creation of a pool of free, wage laborers that derives
from a process of “bloody legislation against the expropriated,” turning
feudal peasants into beggars and vagabonds “whipped, branded, [and]
tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the
wage system,” might be said to closely parallel slavery in foregrounding
direct coercion of producers of value. “The starting point of the develop-
ment that gave rise both to the wage-­laborer and the capitalist,” Marx
writes, “was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted
in a change in the form of . . . servitude.”17

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Yet, as capitalism becomes what Marx calls “a never-­ending circle,”

the dynamic changes. Capital now requires that labor both appear and
disappear. What Marx calls the “tendency of capital to simultaneously
increase the laboring population as well as to reduce constantly its neces-
sary part (constantly to posit a part of it as reserve)” comes to possess a
more or less automatic, even natural character.18 “The disposable indus-
trial reserve army,” he writes in another veiled reference to chattel slavery,
“belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own
costs.” While the initial “barrier [to forming a pool of wage labor] could
only be swept away by violent means,” the mechanism for creating labor
surplus going forward develops into what Marx terms an “economic law,”
one that divides labor into “overwork” and “enforced idleness” as “a means
of enriching individual capitalists.” This process internalizes competi-
tion and precarity among workers themselves, and in doing so “completes
the despotism of capital.” Marx then details various forms taken by the
“relative surplus population . . . the floating, the latent and the stagnant,”
or lowest strata comprised of “vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes . . .
the actual lumpenproletariat . . . who succumb to their incapacity for
adaptation.”19 In these passages, Marx recognizes capitalism’s active pro-
duction of the working class as contingent and heterogeneous. He also
reserves some of his most scornful writing for these degraded, unwaged
laborers — who are even more categorically marked for premature death
and yet who nevertheless remain to haunt dialectical pretensions toward
class simplification or unitary proletarian consciousness. 20
As Marx writes, mature capitalism exists when “the silent compul-
sion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist
over the worker.” At this point, “direct force, extra-­economic force is still
of course used, but only in exceptional cases.”21 In this moment, proxim-
ity of wage labor to the violent conditions that produced its dependency
gives way to a split image of a working class divided into a group whose
productive capacities have been harnessed by the industrial machine and
those whom Marx describes as “sharply differentiated from the indus-
trial proletariat . . . a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all
kinds.”22 This image of intra-­working-­class differentiation cuts against
the grain of Marx’s radical recuperation of the abject term proletarian — as
those left without reserves — as a figure of collective struggle. Yet, it also
coincides with his periodic recourse to a version of progressive historicism
wedded to capitalism’s civilizing potential that in turn sacrifices a proper
understanding of the constitutive heterogeneity of forms of labor and its
political meaning that he simultaneously uncovers. The direct application
of state-­sanctioned force and violence once required to create wage labor,
moreover, does not disappear but is retained in hierarchy and competition
between workers, in social requirements of policing unwaged labor that

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has migrated to poverty and the informal economy, and in imperial and
nationalist interpellations of the metropolitan working class.
The inattention to these political effects that frame but appear to
no longer define relations of production has led to confusions between
forms of domination and stages of development in which the unevenness
of unpaid, disposable, and surplus labor is opposed to the orderly fluctua-
tions of waged and reserved labor on a developmental axis defined by what
Marx tellingly calls “the normal European level.” The exceptional cases
in which direct force is used precisely include colonial spaces where slav-
ery and other forms of coerced labor took root and where, Marx writes,
“artificial means” including “police methods” are required “to set on
the right road that law of supply and demand which works automatically
everywhere else.”23 Marx’s fragmentary considerations on colonialism and
slavery as matrices of “primitive accumulation” here highlight the value
and limitation of his oeuvre for thinking about the ongoing development
of racial categories — more precisely, the social reproduction of race as
an ascriptive relationship anchored in ongoing violence, dominion, and
dependency. Marx skewers the bourgeois fairy tale of a virtuous phase
of so-­called original accumulation achieved via the thrift and ingenuity
of a “frugal elite” that condemned the unfortunate majority to a situa-
tion in which they would be forced (in Marx’s words) “to sell . . . their
own skins.” In oft-­quoted lines from Capital, volume 1, Marx emphasizes
murderous origins of capitalism’s prehistory in a determinate history of
Europe’s armed commercial expansion, colonialism, racial slavery, and
genocide:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement

and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent,
the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion
of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-­skins, are all
things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These
idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. 24

An enduring historical and theoretical challenge posed by this sketch

revolves around how to interpret the temporal and conceptual cleavage
between what is often viewed as a singular and inceptive moment — “the
dawn of the era of capitalist production” — reliant upon force and violence
and the era of capitalist accumulation proper that enshrines as its logic
the “silent compulsion” of market discipline that dispenses with extra­
economic coercion as a requirement. In this New World iteration, primi-
tive accumulation is not yet capitalism for Marx; it is plunder. The rela-
tionship that it bears to the more fundamental process of divorcing the
producer from the means of production remains unclear. Marx’s analy-
sis in some ways blurs the distinction, for example, in his parallel refer-

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ences to commerce in “skins.” Yet, New World primitive accumulation is

an indictment of capitalism, not an explanation of its dynamics. Moreover,
much like the nineteenth-­century workers who spoke of wage slavery to dis-
tinguish themselves from, rather than align themselves with, racial slaves,
Marx (who knew better than to do this) further suggests that a focus on
the direct coercion of the producers not only misreads the source of capital
accumulation but also deflects from the central challenge of anticapitalist
politics by reinforcing the illusion of independence and freedom proffered
by capitalism’s more “developed system of exchange” — t hat semblance of
freedom, he writes, that “seduces the democrats.”25
This passage affirms Marx’s tendency to characterize political inclu-
sion as an illusion. Ironically, however, Marx’s effort to undermine what
he calls the “rule of abstractions” depends upon the opposition between
ascribed status and abstract labor. In the second epigraph to this essay,
from the Grundrisse, Marx presents ascribed status as a kind of immo-
bility or imprisonment, in contrast to wage labor, in which “individu-
als seem independent.” The specific terms of ascription — feudal, caste,
estate, blood, and we might add slave — recapitulate oppositions that ani-
mate liberal, social contract theory more generally, counterposing plu-
ral forms of arbitrary power and forms of hierarchical, nonvoluntarist,
nonvolitional social ordering with the universalization of an ostensibly
modern, mobile, and dynamic social order based on contract and free
exchange. Where most liberal thinkers retained education as an engine
of meritocratic distinction and class mobility, Marx’s analysis moves in
the opposite direction, emphasizing capitalism’s leveling indifference to
any prior social condition, status, or standing. He does so, however, in
an effort to unmask this “seeming” or “apparent” freedom from direct
coercion, manifest hierarchy, and civic privation, as the grounds of a more
extensive, increasingly universal domination under the terms of capitalist
abstraction, which, he writes, comprises the “general form” and “theoreti-
cal expression of those material relations which are lord and master.”26
Yet, Marx’s analysis, insofar as it adopts the standpoint of developed
capitalism in England, can lead to an inattention, even indifference to
how capital establishes new lines of social and historical genesis in which
the ongoing differentiation between free labor and less than free labor,
and the manifestation of that differentiation in racial, ethnic, and gender
hierarchies within laboring populations, is retained as an instrument of
labor discipline, surplus appropriation, and even a measure of capitalism’s
progressivism, in that it purports to render such distinctions anachronis-
tic over the long run. It is significant in this regard that Marx contrasts
not only the free worker and the slave but also the different relationships
that the English yeomanry and former slaves have to capitalism. For the
emancipated slave, Marx writes, “the capitalist relationship appears to be

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an improvement in one’s position on the social scale. . . . It is otherwise

when the independent peasant or artisan becomes a wage-­laborer. What a
gulf there is between the proud yeomanry of England . . . and the English
agricultural laborer!” Ironically, although the yeomanry may have fallen
further, they can recuperate pride in a different form. “The consciousness
(or better: the idea) of free self-­determination, of liberty, makes a much
better worker of the [free worker] than the [slave], as does, the related
feeling (sense) of responsibility.” “He learns to control himself, in contrast to
the slave, who needs a master.”27 This explains, as Marx notes elsewhere,
why emancipated slaves reverted to self-­provisioning, regarding “loafing
(indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good. . . . Wealth confronts
direct forced labor not as capital, but rather as a relation of domination . . .
which can never create general industriousness.”28
The differentiation between slavery and capitalism here effectively
widens the gulf between slaves and workers. As Marx writes in an impor-
tant statement, “Capital ceases to be capital without wage labor . . . as its
general creative basis.”29 In this view, slavery’s inefficiencies, including
inhibiting the possibility of increasing labor productivity through con-
tinuous reductions of socially necessary labor time, actively impeded the
development of capitalism.30 What is curious is that Marx, who persis-
tently theorizes capitalism in comparison with slavery to undermine what
he calls “a liberalism, so full of consideration for ‘capital,’ ”31 seems to yield
to his opponents’ intellectual tendencies in which capitalist social relations
are framed through “a seductive dichotomy of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labor, as
if these categories were really opposites.”32 His remarks on affect, cogni-
tion, and habit formation of free workers and freed slaves reinforce dis-
tinctions between them, even problematically linking them to prior condi-
tions of servitude. While the English workers’ loss of customary rights and
subsequent proximity to the engines of value creation and to the disposi-
tions formed therein places them in the vanguard of class struggle, both
slave and ex-­slave remain passive figures (indelibly linked together) and
unable to connect to history’s forward movement. 33
Marx of course notes: “In the United States of America, every inde-
pendent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured
a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself,
where in the black it is branded.”34 Yet, slave emancipation for Marx is
but a prelude for a unified working-­class struggle toward the eight-­hour
day. It is difficult to imagine Marx having any insight into ongoing social
dynamics and movements that proceed directly from slavery. C. L. R.
James observed of the Haitian slaves that “they were closer to a modern
proletariat than any other group of workers in existence at that time” and
capable of enacting a “thoroughly prepared and organized mass move-
ment.”35 At the same time, thinking about the other side, Eric Williams, in

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an argument that was heavily indebted to his mentor James, warned that
the “outworn interests [of slavery] whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in
historical perspective, exercise an obstructionist and disruptive effect”
into the future, based upon the “powerful services it had previously ren-
dered and the entrenchment previously gained.”36
In part the limitation derives from the fact that Marx remains — even
in his critical stance toward it — indebted to a conception of freedom
defined as political opposition to arbitrary power, one that fails to fully
interrogate what the grounding of freedom in chattel slavery and its violent
modalities of household rule mean for the development of capitalist free-
dom going forward. Marx holds onto an ultimately problematic distinc-
tion between antediluvian slavery, which has what he terms a “patriarchal
character,” and historical slavery “drawn into the world market dominated
by the capitalist mode of production.”37 However, when he formulates an
opposition between (an illusory) political freedom and (a metaphorical)
economic slavery, Marx is thinking of the former, not the latter. In this
way, the Marx-­inspired critique of capitalism, like popular nineteenth-­
century critiques of wage slavery, can unwittingly become what Mary
Nyquist terms “an important conductor of racialization . . . that severs
or weakens the ‘free’ citizen’s affective ties with enslaved Africans [and
others imagined to be lodged within dependent, privative, ascribed iden-
tities].”38 Put differently, although Marx wants to overturn the idea that
capitalism does away with servitude, when he adopts a Eurocentric his-
toricism he participates in a broader discourse in which slavery comes to
be discussed less in terms of its material relationship to capitalism and
more as a kind of negative politicization, a form of insult and humiliation,
a lack of political standing and social honor. Capitalist indifference and
Marxist indifference in this sense collude ideologically in consolidating a
nexus of work and citizenship as a technique of governance based upon
distinct domains of political identity and hierarchies of concern: a divi-
sion between the capitalist power and despotic power, the former a type
of public power that deepens dependency (for the worker), and the latter,
a mode of privation not afforded public standing.
Marx describes both direct private violence and organized state vio-
lence as the “midwife” of a capitalist mode of production, whose develop-
ment, maturity, and superior productivity are predicated on an ability to
dispense with cruder means. Capitalism is still a violent system, but its
violence is immanent within a developmentally superior labor relation that
no longer requires direct applications of coercive force. Indeed, direct
coercion not only is a fetter on productivity gains — t he representation of
the absence of direct coercion, in both legal and ideological terms, is also
one of the main ideological bulwarks of capitalist domination.39 Given the
sexual and gendered cut of slavery and colonization, the metaphor of the

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midwife as someone whose reproductive labor is essential but historically

dispensable retains a certain resonance for framing the relationship of
slavery and capitalism. The Marxist view of capitalism as a progressive
historical force and a superior mode of production and social reproduction
tends to either remove or freeze our vision of the gendered racial violence
indispensable to its birth as something that is essentially static, nonhistori-
cal, and nonreproductive — a historical event that ended in time and whose
remains or traces in the present are vestigial, marginal, or anachronistic.
Capitalism may “come into the world dripping from head to toe in blood,”
as Marx writes, but it manages to clean itself up, at least in certain spaces
and places. The true novelty of its forward march, particularly when con-
ceived on the narrow terrain of the free labor contract, depends upon an
abstract, autonomous, and immanent reproductive capacity.
It would be a mistake to end the analysis here, however. Marx as
already observed is decidedly hesitant, even ambivalent, on this issue. The
English economist Malachy Postlethwayt, whom Marx read, was perhaps
the first to describe the “African trade” as a “prop and support” of British
free trade. Marx takes up this figure in various forms, for example, when
he writes that “the veiled slavery of the wageworkers in Europe needed,
for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”40 Elsewhere
Marx recognizes without illusions that the “business of slavery is con-
ducted by capitalists,” that slavery only “appears as an anomaly opposite
the bourgeois system itself,” and that under the spur of the cotton trade
“the civilized horrors of overwork [have been] grafted onto the barbaric
horrors of slavery and serfdom.”41 Indeed, one of his clearest statements
on the issue was penned two decades before Capital and evinces what
might be considered a more clear-­sighted abolitionism that sets its sights
on capitalism and slavery together as they were conjoined within a single,
global space:

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery,

credits, etc. Without slavery you have not cotton; without cotton you have
not modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it
is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the
pre-­condition of large-­scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category
of the greatest importance.42

By these lights we might begin by rewriting Marx’s axiomatic statement,

“Capital ceases to be capital without wage labor,” in the following way:
Capital ceases to be capital without the ongoing differentiation of free labor and
slavery, waged labor and unpaid labor. This differentiation provides the
indispensable material and ideological support, prop, or pedestal on which
capitalism’s development depended and on which it continues to depend.
The categorical separation of freedom and slavery operates in the interests

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of capital. It is only by retaining an understanding of their imbrication and

coconstitution that we attain a critical perspective adequate to oppose it.
These moments — a nd they are only moments, since Marx never
delivers an analysis of slavery as an “economic category of the greatest
importance” — a re well worth holding on to. Here Marx evinces a refusal
of the historicist separation between capitalism and slavery, one that
sharpens the argument that capitalist development represents a more gen-
eral and generalizing form of domination and pulls our thinking toward
rather than away from the legacy of slave capitalism and capitalist slavery,
and toward enduring articulations of race and capital, the problematic
that Robinson has termed “racial capitalism.”43 Temporal cleavage gives
way to simultaneity, a rejection of “logical formula” that would separate
coexisting, mutually supportive elements into sequential time.44 Only later
does Marx characterize this in terms that open themselves up to teleologi-
cal interpretation, describing “the incompleteness” of the “development of
capitalist production” that joins to “modern evils,” “inherited evils, aris-
ing from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of produc-
tion with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political
relations.”45 But the marking of certain relations as passive or anachronis-
tic remains problematic. What if this incompleteness is a permanent fea-
ture of capitalism? Moreover, what happens when those supposedly pas-
sive or archaic modalities most closely linked to direct coercion not only
are retained within the labor process but also shape the form of the state?
North American slavery was also a mode of social reproduction with
an immanent logic: it was capable of birthing itself. The vitality of this
system required it to outgrow the externalities of the Atlantic slave trade
and derived from its own directly reproductive capacity built upon violent
control over the wombs of slave women, along with expanding settlement
and murderous depopulation of indigenous land. Nor did slavery simply
wither away; it required a war of cataclysmic proportions and mass death
on an unimaginable scale to bring it formally to an end. What followed for
the majority of freed blacks was an era no less marked by direct violence
and coercion of labor under varieties of penal enforcement. Freeing slaves
enlarged both the instrumental and popular political ambit of racism as
a tool of labor discipline (divide and rule), a means of introducing new
forms of labor coercion (so-­called coolie labor), and a weapon of class
struggle (the wages of whiteness) and, of course, empire. It also inaugu-
rated an era of state and private violence that directly seized upon black
household formation, sexuality, and embodiment as a means to preserve
and reproduce a racial-­capitalist political economy with far-­reaching,
global implications. As Du Bois memorably wrote in his magisterial Black
Reconstruction in America, which adopted a Marxist idiom, the “echo of
that philanthropy which had abolished the slave trade, was beginning a

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new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa
and Asia.”46
Indeed, if the system built upon racialized chattel slavery is under-
stood as a “variant of capitalism,” might we not make the stronger claim
that the configuration of capitalism that develops from it develops racism
as a dimension of its general form? Insofar as (this variety of) capitalism
reproduces, as part of its logic, divisions between (re)productive human-
ity and disposable humanity, might we not further recognize how this
very division is mediated by the shifting productions of race as a logic
of depreciation linked to (a) proletarianization as a condition of “wage-
less life” — t he norm of capitalism insofar as it produces radical market
dependency and surplus labor — a nd (b) the regular application of force
and violence within those parts of the social that subsequently have no
part?47 Finally, to the extent to which direct compulsion and organized
violence are retained within capitalist social formations, might its con-
ceptual import lie not as much in its direct relationship/nonrelationship
to the exploitation of labor and the extraction of surplus value (let alone
its alleged anachronistic qualities) as in its indispensability and contribu-
tion to the development of cutting-­edge technique within the governance
of capitalist social relations — not only the defense of private property but
also the active management of spatiotemporal zones of insecurity and
existential threat that negate the idea that the value form successfully
encompasses an entire way of life?
Within the Marxist tradition, Rosa Luxemburg comes closest to this
view when she notes that “the accumulation of capital, seen as a historical
process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but
further down to the present day.” It is precisely the failure of capitalism’s
universalization, particularly when viewed at a global scale, and its ongo-
ing dependence upon “non-­capitalist strata and social organization . . .
existing side by side,” she writes, that produce “peculiar combinations
between the modern wage system and primitive authority” and enable
“far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capi-
talist social conditions,” citing “the first genuinely capitalist branch of
production, the English cotton industry.”48 What still needs jettisoning
is the lingering reference to a pure capitalism and primitive authority
that reinstall the very oppositions that she otherwise challenges. Echoing
Marx’s comment that “war developed earlier than peace . . . in the interior
of bourgeois society,” and anticipating Michel Foucault: “A battlefront
runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently,”49 Lux-
emburg points to the institutionalization of coercion within capitalism,
specifically militarization, not only in the retention of the option of primi-
tive accumulation but also as the guarantor of capitalist discipline and
disposability at the shifting borders of its circulatory movement.

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Civil society, as both Foucault and Marx in different ways argue, is

the exemplary conceptual object of capitalism as a realm of (economic)
freedom that fundamentally modifies the terms of (political) authority.
If Marx is concerned to demystify this process by suggesting the actual
subordination of new forms of sovereign political status to a more pro-
found and encompassing economic tyranny, Foucault at times emphasizes
the real limitation market freedom introduces into the political life of the
state. “The condition of governing well,” he writes, “is that freedom, or
certain forms of freedom are really respected.”50 The idea of a totalizing
police power gives way to a form of police focused upon the prevention
of disorders and disasters and the management of their probabilities. At
the same time, Marx and even Foucault in some sense turn away from
and exceptionalize the phenomenon that at different points preoccupies
both of them: the bloody, annihilationist violence that haunts the modern
episteme. In an echo of Marx’s account of the diminution of overt force,
Foucault, for example, aligns Nazi genocide with the retention of an other-
wise atavistic sovereign right to kill as an “eruption of racism” within a
governmental field normatively defined by imperatives of population man-
agement and biopolitical growth. But like Marx, he fails to account for the
retention of this always waning, quasi-­hallucinatory genocidal force that
never entirely vanishes.51
It is not, moreover, only spectacular violence but also the repeti-
tive, incremental, often slow or concealed violence of appropriation that
needs to be considered here. If socially necessary labor time constitutes
the meaning of value for capital, as Jason W. Moore writes, such value
is embedded in a web of life that capital insistently appropriates as the
necessary prop, wedge, or pedestal for the exploitation of formally free
wage labor. Marxist theory that assigns the primary novelty of capital-
ism to economic exploitation and the production of surplus value that
structurally separates economic compulsion from direct domination fails
to recognize what may be an even greater novelty of capitalism: the con-
sistent extraeconomic processes of appropriation by which capital is able
to “identify, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity
system into the circuit of capital.” As Marxist feminists have long noted,
“the appropriation of accumulated unpaid work in human form,” includ-
ing the labors of biological and social reproduction delivered the world
over by women, provides the real historical conditions for “socially neces-
sary labour-­t ime.”52 A narrow sphere of productive relations, in this view,
depends upon a more expansive sphere of appropriation in which cheap
human and extrahuman nature are taken up by commodity production.
Embodied in the figures of the slave, the migrant worker, the house-
hold worker, the chronically unemployed, and the like, appropriation
encompasses zones of both privatized and publicly sanctioned coercion and

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ethicopolitical devaluation that are inseparable from capitalist processes of

valorization. Thus, rather than opposing notions of absolute sovereignty
and its power of life over death with a biopolitically, productive material-
ist history, we might instead recognize how the two have been perdurably
braided together (at least in part) through the conquest/commodification
of black bodies (as well as in the conquest/commodification of indigenous
lands) that for Marx comprises the moment of so-­called primitive accumu-
lation, extending this to the ongoing unpaid work of women the world over,
accumulated unpaid work represented by labor migration, and war capital-
ism’s differentiation between the internally ordered, rule-­bound spaces of
production and market exchange and exceptional zones of armed appropri-
ation. The latter are domains not only for enacting plunder, that is, primi-
tive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession), but also for develop-
ing cutting-­edge procedures, logics of calculation, circulation, abstraction,
and infrastructure — t he slaver’s management of human cargo, the camp,
the prison, the forward military base — innovations that can proceed insofar
as they are unfettered by legally protected human beings advancing new
prejudices, built upon the old.53
With respect to slavery, we might recognize how the supposed dimi-
nution of extraeconomic coercion that defines the emergence of the eco-
nomic and the political as analytically distinct domains has as its coun-
terpart the retention and elaboration of logics of racialization, defined
first via war slavery doctrine (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and others) and
later in terms of ideas of race war, at the site of capitalism’s recurrent cri-
ses and (never completed) universalization. Actual slavery, which Locke
describes as the continuation of a precivil state of war that develops into a
relationship between a lawful conqueror and captive, is retained for think-
ing the conquest of freedom as the end of political slavery and arbitrary
rule within Euro-­ A merican colonial contexts. Here, the slaveholder’s
power over life and death is retained by the sovereign political subject.
Meanwhile, racialization as a normative logic “generates heritable liber-
ties along with heritable slavery,” as servility and incapacity (conceived as
either inherent or derived from the condition of enslavement) are reserved
and elaborated as explanations for subjects whose very existence counts
not only as an aggression against freedom but also against life itself and
who therefore can be permanently sequestered, governed without rights,
or killed with impunity.54
As a final illustration (and by way of conclusion), I turn briefly to
the archives of black radicalism, via consideration of the passages from
Frederick Douglass quoted at the outset. In the first passage, published
three years before the Communist Manifesto, Douglass marks what I would
suggest is a new production of race at the moment of a transition from one
labor regime to another — slavery to wage labor — i n which black entry into

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an order of abstract equivalence defined by the wage relation is under-

stood by whites as a threat to their own wage-­earning capacity, one that
is in turn narrated as a loss of country — or sovereign capacity — which in
turn calls forth the fantasy of a war of extermination against the offending
party. This moment in Douglass’s text is interesting for the ways in which
it illuminates race making as a social, political, and affective process that
in the final instance is conceived as an irreducibly warlike relationship.
Yes, black and white, slave and free already exist as distinctions. But, at
first Douglass tells us, the presence of the “free colored” poses no special
problem. What initiates the shift “all at once”?
On first glance we might read the passage as confirming conven-
tional wisdom of theorists of racially segmented labor markets. However,
emphasizing that “things seemed to be going very well,” and noting white
fears of potential black monopolization of the trade as mere “allegation,”
Douglass is in fact doing more than making a claim about antiblack racism
as a historically given condition. What is it about the mere presence of a
“black carpenter” that means total loss of livelihood? Why is the sense of
threat so readily amplified and transferred to the thresholds of political
identity and national subjectivity (“niggers taking the country”)? Finally,
how does the affect (fear, anger) get translated into a genocidal impulse
(“we all ought to be killed”)? Put simply, how does the race-­labor con-
junction become a race-­war conjunction? My suspicion is that the figure
of race war, far from being an afterthought, in fact controls and mediates
the entire sequence that Douglass describes. Indeed, one of the most strik-
ing aspects of Douglass’s Narrative is the ways in which he consistently
describes slavery as something other than the theft of black labor, empha-
sizing instead its violent, totalizing claims on black life as a thoroughly
militarized and policed social relation.
In explaining this sequence of events, Douglass intentionally high-
lights the double threat of wagelessness and political degradation that the
considered presence of the “black carpenter” evokes. In turn, he depicts
the production of race (in this case, whiteness) as a process of binding
juridical status and despotic power — ( keeping the) “country,” “putting
on airs,” and arrogating expansive, extracivil rights to kill. He defines
all of this, moreover, in terms of an instance of transition from slavery
to capitalism. The development of race as a form of generic whiteness in
this view is revealed as a specific relationship to blackness in its relation-
ship to capital — one that is based upon a deferral of the haunting specter
of wageless life evoked by the prior association of blacks with slavery, as
well as by actual, ongoing conditions of market dependency. Indeed, it is
worth recalling in this context Du Bois’s famous description of whiteness
in Black Reconstruction in America as “a public and psychological wage.”
The association of whiteness with wages through the monopolization of

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fields of employment has been widely discussed. Less fully examined is

how the transfer of whiteness to the threshold of nationality actively links
freedom with the management of public authority, specific mechanisms
of violence, and an operational notion of (racial) nemesis.
The passage from Douglass’s Notebooks quoted above offers final
amplification of my (admittedly provisional) efforts here to think the rela-
tionship between race and capital again. It is tempting on initial reading
to interpret Douglass’s lines against the claims developed here. After all,
taking on the garb of the common laborer, Douglass seems precisely to
affirm as directly emancipatory the movement from household slavery to
wage labor. On closer inspection, however, Douglass is actually making
a more specific claim about what the capitalist wage relation looks and
feels like from the standpoint of slavery. The feeling of joy (“the emo-
tion which swelled my heart”) produced by recognition of self-­possession
(“my hands were my own”) and the possibility of accumulating “more
of the precious coin” are in this view entirely contingent upon the condi-
tion of enslavement (“one must have been in some sense a slave”). Here,
we might wonder about the ways in which Douglass and Marx converge,
for in both the critical sense of the deep violence of proletarianization
and market dependency (within the ongoing transitions to capitalism) is
audibly retained most directly in reference to slavery (and for Douglass
within black life that emerges from it). Indeed, the fact that it was Anna
Murray, a free black woman, whose savings from domestic labor paid for
the disguise that Douglass used when he escaped slavery deepens further
the webs of dependency upon which any so-­called freedom depends. As
Du Bois would go on to argue, the “real modern labor problem” lies closer
to the condition of racial dispossession than to the prospects of norma-
tive, wage-­earning stability. Capitalist freedoms and their enjoyment (life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) in turn require us continuously to
“put on airs” and to cultivate a generous rage against the prospects of a
bare life.
Atlantic slavery emerged as the cornerstone of capitalism’s articula-
tion of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession during the long six-
teenth century, but it also bequeathed something that lasted — a n endur-
ing cheapness of black life. The production of race as a form of devalued
collectivity has depended upon managing valuations and devaluations of
black social and biological reproduction in the interests of capital accu-
mulation and its social reproduction. Medical experimentation, crime sta-
tistics, debt peonage, labor market manipulation, rent harvesting, infra-
structural exclusion, and financial speculation — t he racial differentiation
thought extrinsic to capitalism’s postslavery itinerary has been both
directly productive of value and integral to the technical development of
capitalism on its alleged frontiers, where new specializations in violence

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can be field-­tested free from ethical judgment, setting off new rounds in
which peoples separated from land and resources can be consumed within
the web of capital.
Marx recognizes that capital is built not on its contradiction with
exploited labor but in a contradictory relationship to life itself. Capital
accumulation spurs population increase and also voraciously uses up and
depletes living labor. The crisis that must be constantly managed by capi-
talism at a societal level is the ongoing violent dislocation of these two
processes. Racial marking is a response to a crisis of and resistance to the
value form that takes the form of police and military solutions, that is,
directly coercive interventions. It spurs the fabrication of moral, temporal,
and spatial sequestration that become part of the ideological and insti-
tutional framework of crisis management through which the production
of growth and death can be viewed less as a contradiction in the pres-
ent than as a necessary dimension of historical progress itself.55 Racism’s
toxicity, in this view, is a product of capitalist abstraction and a material
event. It is as much our inheritance as is the environmental degradation
that has developed from capitalism’s appropriation of cheap nature and
that now widens the bandwidth of morbidity for everyone and everything
in its path. The relationship of capitalism and slavery is in this way far-­
reaching. By exposing the proximity of violence and economy and the
heterogeneity of historical time, it also reveals “the broken time of politics
and strategy.”56 Rather than a disorientation, it is a starting point for any
reconstruction.

Notes
Anupama Rao encouraged me to write the original version of this essay. I thank her
and the participants in the Caste and Race Workshop at Columbia University in
October 2013 for their engagement with this work. I especially want to thank Harry
Harootunian, Tavia Nyong’o, Neferti Tadiar, and Jennifer L. Morgan for their criti-
cal and generative comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. For an original and exemplary statement of this viewpoint, see Brenner,
“Agrarian Structure and Economic Development.” Brenner sharpens the polemi-
cal stakes of this argument, taking on various modes of “dependency” and “world-­
systems theory,” faulted for “displac[ing] class relations from the center of economic
development” and for failing to recognize “the productivity of labor as the essence
and key of [capitalist] economic development.” See Brenner, “Origins of Capitalist
Development,” 91.
2. Following Brenner, Ellen Meiskins Wood writes: “The wealth amassed from
[slavery and] colonial exploitation may have contributed substantially to further devel-
opment, even if it was not the necessary precondition for the origin of capitalism. . . .
If wealth from the colonies and the slave trade contributed to Britain’s industrial
revolution, it was because the British economy had already for a long time been struc-
tured by capitalist property relations” (Origin of Capitalism, 149).

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3. As much as any other contemporary thinker, Stephanie Smallwood strives

to link logics of slavery as social death and as a novel form of commodification:
“The Atlantic market for slaves changed what it meant to be a socially, politically or
economically marginalized person. . . . Captivity . . . was not a temporary status . . .
not [a situation] of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of absolute
exclusion from any community” and the fashioning of “bodies animated only by
others’ calculated investment in their physical capacity” (Saltwater Slavery, 30, 35).
4. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 92, 114. Also see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
Important contributors to the contemporary resurgence of this argument include,
among many others, Smallwood, Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, and Julia Ott.
The key progenitor of this line of inquiry was Eric Williams, who argued that slavery
profits were central to industrial capitalist takeoff. This controversial thesis (which
bears the traces of stagist thinking) was subject to death by a thousand historio-
graphical cuts in the decades following the publication of Williams’s book. What
was arguably most disturbing about Williams’s argument was his more fundamental
challenge to those who emphasized slavery’s vestigial character in order to moralize
and legitimate subsequent capitalist development — i n effect, to free capitalism from
a debt to slavery. Writing in a period in which US-­led international capitalism sought
to disencumber itself from the racial and imperial matrix in which it had developed,
Williams provided an unsettling dose of skepticism: “This does not invalidate the . . .
arguments for democracy, for freedom now or for freedom after the war. But muta-
tis mutandis, the arguments have a familiar ring,” and “we have to guard not only
against the old prejudices but also against the new which are being constantly cre-
ated” (Capitalism and Slavery, 210, 212). Frank Tannenbaum exemplified the kind
of orthodoxy that Williams unsettled during the period of his writing. “The Negro
race has been given an additional large share of the face of the globe for its own. It
received this territory as a kind of unplanned gift,” Tannenbaum writes. “It is in
its own nature, no different than the process which has occurred as a result of the
allurement which led millions of Americans to labor in American mines, fields, and
factories. . . . The result has been moral. It has proved a good thing for the Negroes
in the long run. They have achieved a status both spiritually and materially, in the
new home to which they were brought as chattels” (“Note,” 248 – 49).
5. Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 653.
6. For a powerful contemporary theory that develops this view, see Moore,
Capitalism in the Web of Life.
7. Marx, Capital, 925, 381, 225. Here are the respective quotations in full:
“Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-­slavery into England in the United
States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patri-
archal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of
the wage laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New world as its
pedestal” (925). “Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of
the life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about
the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-­work,
is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our profit (pleasure)?” (381). “If
labor-­power can be supplied from foreign preserves . . . the duration of [the worker’s]
life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts. . . . It is
accordingly a maxim of slave management in slave importing countries, that the most
effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space
of time the utmost of exertion that it is capable of putting forth” (225).
8. Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 230. For a related argument more in

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keeping with the spirit of my approach in this essay, see Johnson, “Pedestal and the
Veil.”
9. Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism.” Also see Morgan,
“Partus Sequitur Ventrem.”
10. Douglass, “Reception Speech at Finsbury Chapel,” 308. “We have in the
United States slave-­breeding states . . . where men, women and children are reared for
the market, just as horses, sheep and swine are raised for the market. Slave-­rearing is
there looked upon as a legitimate trade; the law sanctions it, public opinion upholds
it, the church does not condemn it. It goes on it all its bloody horrors, sustained by
the auctioneers block.”
11. What Frank Wilderson has termed gratuitous violence retained an instru-
mental value as exemplary violence in the face of much feared resistance and revolt.
More recently, Edward Baptist has also made a compelling case for the relationship
between bodily torture and surplus extraction under slavery (The Half That Has
Never Been Told).
12. The notion of accumulation by dispossession is a contemporary reframing
of Marx’s so-­called primitive accumulation. See Hart, “Denaturalizing Disposses-
sion.” Also see Perleman, Invention of Capitalism.
13. By describing land, labor, and money as “fictitious commodities,” Karl
Polanyi emphasizes the imposition of the logic of the self-­regulating market and
universal commodification as the defining features of capitalism. Further, he empha-
sizes how processes of commodification broadly encompass not only the domain of
labor and its social and biological reproduction but also the ecological matrix of life
itself, as well as the mediums and modes of exchange that constitute social horizons.
The subjection of all three domains to the market mechanism threatens the very
conditions of social existence, stripping human beings of “the protective covering of
cultural institutions,” “defiling neighborhoods and landscapes,” and subjecting pur-
chasing power to disastrous “shortages and surfeits of money” (Great Transformation,
76). This formulation challenges both liberal and Marxist tendencies to construct the
economy as an analytically autonomous domain. At its best, the notion of fictitious
commodification draws our attention to the ongoing, state-­enforced, noncontractual,
and dominative bases of capital accumulation, as well as to dynamics of social pro-
tection or resistance that often draw on nonmarket norms of land, labor, and money
(including potentially reactionary ones). “Laissez-­faire was planned, planning was
not,” Polanyi writes, and “the stark utopia” of the free market found an answer to
its deepening crisis, the fascist response. See also Block, “Karl Polanyi”; and Fraser,
“Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down?”
14. Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference.”
15. Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick.
16. The literature on varieties of capitalism not only emphasizes contingent,
differing institutional arrangements compatible with actually existing capitalism but
also more strongly argues that there is no capitalist mode of production as such, only
“configurations” or “forms of capitalism” “compatible with a variety of forms of
labor- ­exploitation” (Banaji, Theory as History, 11).
17. Marx, Capital, 875.
18. Marx, Grundrisse, 400.
19. Marx, Capital, 784, 789, 793, 797.
20. There may be a way that the slave and lumpenproletariat resemble each
other by, as it were, absolutely falling outside a relationship of capitalist exploitation.
This insight is of course a spur to thinkers like Frantz Fanon and George Jackson,

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though this line of inquiry is not pursued here. I am indebted to Tavia Nyong’o for
this insight. Also see Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity,” 81.
21. Marx, Capital, 940, 899 (emphasis added).
22. Marx and Engels, Class Struggles in France, 62, quoted in Stallybrass,
“Marx and Heterogeneity,” 84.
23. Marx, Capital, 937. Marx writes: “In the old civilized countries the worker,
although free, is by a law of nature dependent on the capitalist; in the colonies this
dependence must be created by artificial means” (937). (He is not referring to slavery
here, but he could be.) The problem of the colonies is that there is too much freedom
for workers to opt out and to become “independent landowners, if not competitors
with their former masters in the labour market” (936). Marx then adds: “We are not
concerned here with the condition of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is
the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World”
(940).
24. Ibid., 873, 915.
25. Marx, Grundrisse, 164.
26. Ibid.
27. Marx, Capital, 1031, 1033.
28. Marx, Grundrisse, 326.
29. Ibid., 270.
30. See Post, American Road to Capitalism, for a contemporary exponent of
this view.
31. Marx, Capital, 391.
32. Banaji, Theory as History, 13.
33. Marx, Capital, 382. Just as the worker’s idea and feeling of freedom have
important material effects, so does the transformation of freedom into a kind of
status distinction. “Capital . . . takes no account of the health and length of the life
of the worker,” Marx writes, “unless society forces it to do so.” This is of course a
reference to the English class struggle, mostly one-­sided in Marx’s view, in which
the worker may achieve a normal working day but is “compelled by social conditions
to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labor in return for the price
of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.”
34. Ibid., 414.
35. James, Black Jacobins, 86.
36. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 211.
37. Marx, Capital, 345.
38. Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 366.
39. Gerstenberger, “Political Economy of Capitalist Labor.”
40. Marx, Capital, 925. Postlethwayt is quoted in Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Con-
stitution, 27.
41. Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick, 21; Marx, Grundrisse, 464.
42. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 125. Gopal Balakrishnan describes the (early)
Marx of this period as an “abolitionist” in a set of brilliant essays (“Abolitionist — I,”
“Abolitionist — I I”). As he writes, “Only later would Marx come to see a contradic-
tion between free wage labor and slavery. Now he assumed that American slavery
was an integral part of the world system of bourgeois society. . . . The Marx of this
period was a ruthless abolitionist” (“Abolitionist — II,” 92).
43. Robinson, Black Marxism.
44. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 124.
45. Marx, Capital, 91.

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46. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 632 – 34.

47. It is important to note that the term proletariat in Marx literally means
“those without reserves.” As Michael Denning writes, it is not a synonym for wage
labor “but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market”
(“Wageless Life,” 81).
48. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 372.
49. Marx, Grundrisse, 109; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 51.
50. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 353.
51. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 260. While Foucault develops an idea
of race war as integral to modern statecraft, his account is idiosyncratic and equivo-
cating. When it comes to examining Nazi violence, he appears to validate an excep-
tionalism marked by temporal relegation. “A society which generalized biopower
in an absolute sense . . . has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two
mechanisms — the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life
and death over its citizens, and the new mechanism organized around discipline and
regulation . . . of biopower — coincide exactly. . . . We can therefore say this: The Nazi
state makes the field of life it manages, protects, guarantees and cultivates in biologi-
cal terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not
only other people, but also its own people.” Discussing the “final solution,” Fou-
cault writes, “Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the
mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in
the workings of all states. In all modern states, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not.”
52. Moore, “Endless Accumulation, Endless (Unpaid) Work.”
53. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 70, 224. Also see Smallwood, Salt-
water Slavery, 35.
54. This discussion is heavily indebted to Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, esp. chap.
10 and epilogue.
55. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 60.
56. Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, 23.

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