We Who Were Slaves

Who were the slaves? … The slave from Africa was denied the right to act out the contents of his mind and memory – and yet he had to do this. How was this contradiction resolved? What were the new forms created in the context of slavery?
—C. L. R. James1

In a 1970 essay, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World,”2 C. L. R. James reasserted an argument that he had made in 1938 when he wrote the Black Jacobins that Atlantic slavery was central to the wealth and the politics which created the “modern world.” Citing the French historian Jaures, James noted that the “fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”3 Marx had made it clear in Poverty of Philosophy that, “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits etc. … Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry … Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.” The relationship between the economic system of industrial capitalism and Atlantic racial slavery has been firmly established. The historian Eric Williams’1944 book Capitalism and Slavery carefully detailed this argument, positing what has become known in historical circles as the “Williams thesis.”4 Therefore it is safe to say that the links between slave labor, wealth, and capitalism have been firmly established and are no longer a real bone of historical contention.5

But what did it mean to be an enslaved person? The Caribbean novelist and writer George Lamming, in writing about slavery in the Caribbean, observes that to be a slave was about a human being existing in a relationship of domination and that in part the various revolts and resistances were about the “slave saying I am not a slave,” in others words an assertion of one’s humanity.6 At the level of historical theory W.E.B. Du Bois has reworked the categories by which we have come to understand the figure of the slave. In Black Reconstruction he calls black enslaved labor “The Black Worker” and then proceeds to create a historical narrative about the role of that labor in the construction of forms of democracy in America.7 What is the point here? It is that racial slavery and the forced labor of the African diaspora population in the Americas has been a central force in the historical economic life of the West. However, to make this historical point is not enough today. Instead I submit we need to return to the question that James posed: “What new forms were created within the context of slavery?”

A great deal of fine historical scholarship has been done about slave communities but perhaps we now need to begin to develop a line of historical/political and theoretical investigation about what did the slaves think about themselves and freedom?8 In other words, can we imagine a political/social/intellectual history of thought of the enslaved?9 Then there is the argument cogently made by Cedric Robinson that racial slavery constructed the grounds for “racial capitalism.” Noting four distinctive moments in the history of European racialism Robinson writes about the “dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formations of industrial labor and labor reserves.”10 Robinson also argues at length about the distinctive features of a black radical tradition where he notes that the tradition emerges “when Black radical thinkers had acquired new habits of thought … their task eventually became the revelation of the older tradition.”11 Robinson’s arguments have become pivotal in a renaming of capitalism as “racial capitalism.”12 However, what is missing from this debate are the ways in which the technologies of rule of liberalism are continuously shaped by the historical practices of racial slavery and colonialism. Here the idea is not that slavery and colonialism are the same in the contemporary moment but rather to think about the ways in which forms of rule adapt and rework themselves in our moment. Additionally, there is this point—what ideas about freedom were posited by the enslaved, the colonial “native,” and the relevance of these ideas to our contemporary freedom struggle? This brief commentary will not spell out in any detail any of above, but I wish to pay attention to some elements that I think may generate conceptual tools that challenge what Stuart Hall has called the “common-sense of neoliberalism.”13

Slavery and Colonialism as Systems of Domination

One does not need to spend time thinking about the drive towards absolute violence of slavery and colonial as ruling regimes of near total domination. In both these forms of domination, might was right and power exercised through the flesh. The enslaved body and the native body were always sites of violence. As Sayida Hartman puts it in discussing slavery and the beating of Frederick Douglass’ Aunt Hester, “By locating this ‘horrible exhibition’ in the first chapter of his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original generative act of the statement “I was born.”14 There is in this violence the creation of a terrain and form of domination in which repeatable violence could be enacted since the slave and the “native” were both non-humans, and lived in the words of Fanon within in zones of non-being.15 That process was what Amie Cesaire called “thingfication. “Writing in the Discourse of Colonialism, Cesaire notes the following:

Between colonizer and colonialized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure in the police taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops … no human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into … a slave driver and the indigenous man into an instrument of production My turn to state an equation: colonization ¼ “thingfication.”16

I submit that this process of “thingfication “is of a different character from our conventional understanding of exploitation. Let me put the matter another way. In the conventional understanding of the process of capitalism radical and critical theory working through Marx identify labor exploitation as central to the production and reproduction of the system. Marx makes the point in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848 that, “through estranged, alienated labor, then the worker produces … a relationship to the capitalist … private property is thus the product.” Marx also notes that the “alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside of him, independently as something alien to him … [and is} objectification.”17 For Marx and conventional radical theory, the conditions of the capitalist labor process create alienation and objectification. This I would argue is a theorization of a specific historical process which elides the history of capitalism and its relationship to racial slavery. It does not take into account that capitalism accommodates many different labor regimes, including forms of unfree labor. The plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South were capitalist enterprises with heavy capital investment required. In many instances, say in the Dutch colony of Suriname, the plantations were created through loans by investment houses and it was the financiers not the planters who made the most profit. The racialized labor regimes of unfree and coerced labor on these enterprises created not just regimes of violence but were constructed so that property and unfree labor were fused into a single black body in a process of double commodification.18 In such a context the enslaved body was not just slave labor itself an object but rather was what the Caribbean historian Elsa Goviea calls “property in the person.” Here both labor and the slave body are objectified in an over-determination process which following Cesaire we will call” thingfication.” What this means is from its earliest appearance capitalism created a practice in which black bodies were simultaneously both lack and excess and therefore disposable.

So today, within the framework of a neoliberalism in which there are winners and losers and where the prevailing common sense is that each is responsible for self, then the structures of inequity create these disposable bodies. Since racial slavery created sediments on which anti-black racial discourses operate then it is the black body and the non-white body which is disposable. So when the current movement for racial justice proclaims, “Black lives matter” it is pushing hard against that current in the configuration of neoliberal capitalism. Thus a theoretical formulation which speaks of “thingfication” and disposability requires us to reformulate our thinking on issues to do with black life in the contemporary world. One of these things is the relationship between reparations and freedom. The formal ending of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s brought to the fore methods of possible constructing of justice for societies with long histories of racial domination. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its conceptual and practical problems, placed on the table the question of reparative and transitional justice. Now twenty years after the fall of de jure apartheid it is clear to all that the ordinary person in South Africa, while having the vote and therefore political equality, does not live in a society in which justice and issues of social equality are at the core of the society’s structure. This is not a critique of the anti-apartheid struggle and the courageous individuals who gave their lives; rather, it is a concern that calls for repair do not address the historical complexities of “thingfication.”

Freedom

So what is at the core of the black radical tradition as it seeks to address this historical process and its current expressions? And how does this relate to the struggle for reparations? In answering this I want to turn to two texts within the black radical tradition from which some notions may be discerned. The first is the remarkable set of lectures delivered by Angela Davis, titled “Unfinished Lectures for Liberation.” Deploying the narrative of Fredrick Douglass, Davis notes that “the master’s notion of freedom, in fact involved this capacity to control the lives of others. … [T]he slave … become conscious of the fact that freedom is not a static quality, a given, but rather is the goal of active process, something to be fought for, something to be gained in and through the process of struggle.”19 The insight being argued here is that freedom is about a process and such a process I would argue has historically involved movements of people. Second, that the freedom envisioned by the enslaved is not a telos but rather is an active process in which struggle shapes both the content and notion of freedom itself. This is of course fundamentally distinct from liberal versions of freedoms and conceptions of what we may call the “possessive self.” The second text is the conclusion of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.20 Calling on us to invent anew and to think about the possibilities of change, Fanon implores his colleagues and comrades in the African Liberation anti-colonial struggle at that moment of decolonization to invent a different human.21 It is a call which I posit is central to the black radical tradition. Colonial and racial power was about creating species of humans—The “Negro” and the “Native.” Contemporary neoliberal capitalism is about creating a normative framework in which there is the creation of a new subjectivity, what has been called, “an accountable and financial subjectivities”22 I would suggest that this process is a contemporary rendition of how colonial power made attempts to create a new subject—the native. Fanon’s call therefore remains a challenge for us. To this I would add that critical to creating any new frame for the human being to live in humane ways requires us grappling with who/what was the slave? I have argued elsewhere that racial slavery was a “historically catastrophic,” and that historic events are not addressed by the conventional liberal politics. What the issue of reparations does is to put back on the table this matter of racial slavery and its legacies.23 In doing so it raises once again the matter of the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and modernity . These are not academic questions; rather, they are about the various elements which shape contemporary black life. One is not saying that life today is similar to the life of the enslaved; instead we are arguing that racial slavery created deposits which fundamentally shaped both capitalism and political modernity and that these sediments were not just slave labor but there were ideas about freedom and the practices of freedom. All these form an integral part of slave knowledges which today are central ingredients in the making of a more humane world. We who were slaves are making our voices heard.