Abolition Historiography
Historiographic Practice on Race, Class, Alienated Labor, & the Alienation of History
Many Sins (1964) by Benny Andrews
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
I. Two Laboring Classes
“In our organization we make no discrimination as to nationality, sex, or color. Any labor movement based upon such discrimination and embracing a small part of the great working masses of the country, while repelling others because of its partial and sectional character, will prove to be of very little value. Indeed, such a movement, narrow and divisional, will be suicidal, for it arrays against the classes represented by it all other laboring classes which ought to be rather allied in the closest union, and avoid these dissensions and divisions which in the past have given wealth the advantage over labor.” – excerpt of an Address Adopted by the Negro National Labor Union, published in The New Era, January 13, 18701
This address, published in the inaugural issue of The New Era, is the opening paragraph of a statement adopted by the more than two hundred delegates in attendance at the founding convention of the Negro National Labor Union (also known as the Colored National Labor Union). While the entrance of the free black worker into the struggle of organized labor in the US was declared in these terms of universal solidarity, the Union itself was a product of the white National Labor Union’s resistance to racial integration within its own ranks.2 At the founding convention of the National Labor Union in Baltimore in 1866, the new terrain of free labor brought about by the advent of Emancipation merited a discussion on the need to either organize black labor, or to guard against the threat of its status as a competitor to white labor. Over the course of its annual conventions between 1866 and 1869, the National Labor Union at times debated, at other points entirely ignored, plans for a course of action regarding what would come to be known as “the Negro Problem.” At the 1869 convention in Philadelphia, the presence of nine black representatives of separate unions and organizations of black workers presented the opportunity to establish a separate Negro National Labor Union, and “contrary to all labor philosophy, they would divide labor by racial and social lines and yet continue to talk of one labor movement.”3 Over solidarity, American organized labor chose a strategy based in the fear of competition between the races. The perceived threat cut in both directions, as during Reconstruction, and throughout the decades to follow, organized labor saw the use of black and white workers as scabs and strikebreakers deployed against each other in numerous struggles, according to the needs of the representatives of capital at any particular juncture.
In addition to this competition and conflict in the market for labor power, the division was doubly exacerbated by the dynamics of organized labor’s relationship to the State. While it was the party of the plantocracy in the antebellum period, the Democratic Party had developed a base of support in the Northern states amongst European immigrant workers for its laissez-faire toleration of religious and cultural differences, as well as its heritage of Jacksonian populism that extended the suffrage to white males of lesser property holdings and appealed to smallholder agrarian aspirations of capital accumulation. The Republican Party, though it possessed its own base of support amongst Northern labor in its Free Labor and Free Soil policies, had developed an earned reputation as the party of Northern industrial capital. The party’s policy on the struggle for Abolitionism was a terrain of struggle between forces with divergent ends, some with a sincerely idealist concern for the revolutionary character and justice of emancipation, others with an eye towards the economic expansion and political opportunities that the destruction of Southern plantation capital would afford.4 As black labor in the South had few allies aside from the continued federal support for Radical Reconstruction5 granted by the Republicans as the party of Emancipation, Republican policies of industrial expansion heightened the antagonism with white immigrant labor in the North. W.E.B. Du Bois would write of the labor movement’s failure to realize its universal condition that:
“The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”6
The racial segregation of the labor movement proved to be the fatal blow to the emancipatory movement of Reconstruction’s abolition-democracy. This is the position that W.E.B. Du Bois takes in his study of the post-Civil War state of organized labor, as white labor in the industrializing North came to confront the newly recognized freedom of black labor in the South. This simpler reduction of the unevenness between Northern and Southern political economies in the United States constitutes a narrative selection, one which, while apparently true in the broad sense, nevertheless still fails to strike at the heart of the labor movement’s resistance to the recognition of the black worker. Rather than merely a regional antagonism of divergent political economies and strategies of accumulation, Du Bois makes clear that the failure is one of the inability of labor to realize the implicitly universal character of its struggle, as the balance of forces in the South over land reform, suffrage, and the control of Reconstruction state governments meant that “abolition-democracy was pushed towards the conception of a dictatorship of labor, although few of its advocates wholly grasped the fact that this necessarily involved dictatorship by labor over capital and industry.”7
The failure of American labor’s integration of the newly-freed black worker lies at the heart of Du Bois’ argument of Reconstruction’s world-historical significance, and his own informed declaration of the global significance of The Color Line. White labor in the US remained focused on the primarily economic concerns of trade unionism, a demand for shorter hours and higher wages that preserved the hope of the “American Assumption,” the notion of free wage labor’s competition to accumulate capital and thus advance socially as the limit horizon of a just social freedom. Black labor in the South, however, saw firsthand the necessity of political power in the struggle over the machinery of the State, as Reconstruction was only made possible by the military power of the United States, and defeated in the end by the violent resistance and combined powers of former planters and the poor whites of the South against it.
What became apparent to some, though certainly not all, witnesses of this moment was that the establishment of a substantive equality of conditions for black citizens required a total transformation and revolutionization of social relations. The character of the social antagonism that emerged, according to Du Bois, constituted a rivalry of “two classes of labor,” where, following the eventual defeat of Radical Reconstruction through the violent assaults on black governance and the withdrawal of Federal troops, the political power of the South once again asserted itself through the disenfranchisement of black labor, as it had in the antebellum period, and thus “took its place to reinforce the capitalistic dictatorship of the United States, which became the most powerful in the world, and which backed the new industrial imperialism and degraded colored labor the world over.”8
II. Expropriating Death
This account that Du Bois provides articulates a primary concern of mine in this blog, that of the Marxist claim of class struggle’s universal character of the capitalist mode of production’s constitutive social relations, and the historical dynamic of this class struggle’s appearance in the form of racial antagonisms.9 This ongoing study has led me to adopt a position that aims to examine a dialectical relationship between the historical constitution of the categories of class and race, as influenced by contemporary studies on racial capitalism, a term most known for its conceptual development in the work of Cedric J. Robinson. In my last post, I proposed and began an exploration on one hypothetical formulation for articulating the exact dynamic of the dialectical relation: class and race are categories taken from social reality as forms of being [Daseinsformen in Marx]. Class denotes a functional role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, given by the socially and historically objective character of the capitalist mode of production as the universalization of class struggle, and race denotes a constitutive limit within the fulfillment of this class role, a limit that has a socially objective character and is at times contested, at times reproduced, by the subjectivity of labor in the balance of forces of the class struggle.
This formulation and its abstraction emerges from the necessity of the overcoming of racial antagonism to reside as an immanent possibility within the universal emancipatory struggle of the proletariat. If race is but a false consciousness introduced from an external source to labor, and is not produced as a contradiction to the universal interest of the class from within that class’ articulation of its interests in struggle, then there is nothing that the self-activity of the proletariat can do about racial antagonism. Put another way, if race is merely a divisive tool used by the representatives of capital to keep workers from uniting together, as they naturally would, why has labor not acted accordingly in the past? What errors of the past can the proletariat account for on its own terms? This informs the evergreen necessity of self-criticism, that labor of the negative. Furthermore, a crucial question arises regarding the historical relevance of race and racialism. Is racialized exploitation and oppression an anachronism to capitalist modernity, less relevant today than it was in the past, or is race a consistent and constitutive moment in the determination of capitalist social relations historically, developing into the present, reproducing and reasserting itself in new ways?
In my own work to develop and address these questions, I have largely been engaging with literature on the question of “New World” colonial slavery and the historical transition to the capitalist mode of production, engaging contributions to that literature, both Marxist and non-Marxist alike, and subjecting them to critical revisitations of Marx’s critique of political economy. The engagement with the history of the enslavement of African labor and the ensuing contributions of colonial plantation production to the world-historical constitution of the capitalist mode of production do not aim to assert any fundamental character of black labor to the form of exploitation of slavery, nor the reduction of race to skin color or geographic origin, but seeks to address these essential moments in the historical construction of these categories as forms of being, and in turn through this concrete analysis of concrete events produce a notion of the dialectic of race and class. Within this historical dynamic too is the problem of the practical and theoretical reconciliation of Marxism and Black radicalism in the US, currents that have coincided in various moments, and been at odds in others. Within my work is an overall concern of a synthesis of the longue durées of the Black liberation struggle and the promises of Marx’s proletarian universalism as essential expressions of a universal history of emancipation.10
Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition develops an argument that is famous not only for its influence, but for its frequent misrepresentation. Rather than the common (and unstudied) notion that Robinson argues an intrinsic relation between the conception of racialism and the European imperial entrances into the various slave trades on the African continent, he argues that racialism is a relation internal to the social relations of European feudalism and continues to evolve within the exploitation of enslaved African labor, that:
The encounter between African and European had been abrupt, not so much in historical terms as in philosophical ones. The Western civilization that burst forth from its medieval quarantine prosecuted its racial sense of social order, its feudal habits of domination, with a vengeance. By the ending of the Middle Ages, racialism was a routine manifestation, finding expression even in the more exotic mental recesses of the maniac and hysterical. For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital. Blacks were extracted from their social formations through mechanisms that, by design and historical coincidence, minimized the disruption of the production of labor. While vast reserves of labor were amassed in the Poor Houses and slums of Europe's cities and manufacturing towns and villages, in the African hinterland some semblance of traditional life continued to reproduce itself, sharing its social product–human beings–with the Atlantic slave system. For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the recreation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured. And in each instance of resistance, the social and psychological dynamics that are shared by human communities in long-term crises resolved for the rebels the particular moment, the collective and personal chemistries that congealed into social movement. But it was the materials constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realized and the ideology of struggle formed.11
In his account of the seminal thinkers of the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson traces distinct epistemic currents to the respective developments of Marxism and Black radicalism. The critique of Marxism constitutes one of an insufficient account of the distinctive character of European or Western conceptions of social life, where the proto-nationalisms of feudalism inform the process of the proletarianization of European peoples within a developing logic of racialization internal to this movement of class formation as social differentiation. The nationalism of the modern State form creates an antagonism within the domestic labor market with forms of foreign or migrant labor, a constant feature of these societies well before the capitalist mode of production. For Robinson, the introduction of African cultures into this global process is the acculturation of African labor that creates the notion of a distinct identity in the “Negro,” as well as the very conception of Africa as a unitary notion, out of the plurality and diversity of social life and its organization populating the continent. Within this process, the Black Radical Tradition that informs the thinkers and writers examined in the last third of the book emerges as a resistance alien and antagonistic to the Europeanness of capitalist modernity, assuming forms “incomprehensible” to the powers of European capital, that the epistemic tradition of Black radicalism labors to render intelligible to the present through its critical historiographic practice.12
Yet, this charge of the incomprehensibility of this resistance to European colonial powers appears at odds to the dynamics of cultural integration and production that emerged through the revolutionary character that Black radicalism assumed at critical moments, the difference of social and psychological positions and consciousnesses of partisans transforming in the struggle over their conditions of existence. This mutual intelligibility, achieved in and through the antagonism of struggle, crystallizes in Marxist thought at various times as well, as Robinson himself acknowledges that Marx understood the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation” and “an economic category of the highest importance.” In a Marxian formulation, Robinson himself notes that “African labor power as slave labor was integrated into the organic composition of nineteenth-century manufacturing and industrial capitalism, thus sustaining the emergence of an extra-European world market within which the accumulation of capital was garnered for the further development of industrial production.”13 Furthermore, the historical reconstructions of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright all involve encounters with Marxism. The point here is not a reactive defense of Marx or Marxist thought, but a question of the nature of the intelligibility of Marxist thought and Black radicalism, and within these, the historical recovery of abolitionism’s importance to the emancipatory promise of the worker’s movement, and the recovery of labor’s emancipatory cause in the self-abolition of the proletariat.
That is to say, the mutual intelligibility of the historical antagonism of race, despite its forms of appearance in separate distinctions of laboring classes, still makes apparent a common basis in and through this struggle of recognition. To address the historical dynamic of this problem, to seek out a common basis of struggle within a racial division of labor that appears internally constitutive of capital’s process of class formation, I wish to trace a synchronicity across some readings. We can refer above to the address adopted by the Negro National Labor Union in 1870, where the fate of a labor movement that chooses discrimination and separation of its ranks over the solidarity of all workers condemns itself, that “such a movement, narrow and divisional, will be suicidal.” At least one segment of the labor movement readily understood the impossibility of a future absent the overcoming of racial hatred. This invocation of “suicide” is the recognition of a death internal to a movement’s own failures. Let us briefly compare its conceptual and literal appearance across readings and history.
The racial division of labor between black and white exploitations can trace its origins to the encounter of the European proletariat with the proletarianization of Africans within the slave trade. While many slave ship crews were manned by Europeans forced into seafaring labor, pulled from the streets and jails by press gangs, the antagonism of captains or their officers and the laboring rabble that prevailed on the outward voyage gave way to a new discipline as they procured their cargo, and “a new social cement of fear bonded the entire crew” as the unity of their whiteness became the precondition of their safety in the Middle Passage, alongside the persistence of the class antagonism that began their journey. As the sailors learned to assert their own interests, they would strike for a better wage deal within the slave trade, rather than against the trade itself. More than a century before the Negro National Labor Union’s declaration, an anecdote aboard a slaver’s ship demonstrates a particularly acute manifestation of the suicidal mania of labor’s racial division, as this contradictory position saw one sailor in 1763 “being in Liquor, stript off his Cloaths, and divided them among the Slaves; then taking up a Negro Boy in his Arms, said, He would have a Servant of his own; and leaping with him into the River, they were both drowned.”14
On the nature of the historical Black Radical Tradition, Robinson notes something peculiar about the character of violence in the struggle of enslaved African labor, now become “Black” or “Negro” in its transmutation into capital’s organic composition. “The absence of mass violence” characterizes much of these struggles, and the fact that “in this tradition [violence] most often was turned inward: the active against the passive.” It was a violence “not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as a part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations,” but the “renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair.” This is a tradition that, as Robinson tells us, “more easily sustained suicide than assault.” This was a tradition of struggle that fought implacably on its own terms, taking life into its own hands, and, if necessary, its death as well. Robinson tells us that by the twentieth century, “when Black radical thinkers had acquired new habits of thought in keeping, some of them supposed, with the new conditions of their people, their task eventually became the revelation of the older tradition,” and this necessitated a recovery of Black historical experience against the current of the European claim to its own historical truth.15
Huey P. Newton’s 1973 autobiography Revolutionary Suicide proposes a practical reconciliation of the preservation of life and the recognition of death within this historical struggle. In differentiating reactionary and revolutionary suicide, Newton declares the former the mere response to social conditions that overwhelm an individual and drives them to their death. Connected to this, though distinct for Newton, is the “spiritual death” of Black Americans, a death that, facing the enormity of their oppression and institutional resistance to their liberation, inhibits those who suffer from it from pursuing a course of action to change their conditions of existence. His conception of revolutionary suicide arises from an ethical maxim of how one facing this must confront it:
“Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all–Black and white alike–ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect. Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.”16
Newton explains this commitment as that of one who must confront the inability to predict their own survival, yet nevertheless believes in the inevitability of a future alien to them. “In this,” Newton says, “we are different from white radicals. They are not faced with genocide.”17 Through this, he reveals an aspect of his thought that is not apparent in the initial connotation of “suicide.” It is not the concession to the death that will be visited upon the revolutionary, but an ethics that informs how the subject, while confronting enormous odds against them, may yet die on their own terms, and thus live on through this commitment to a collective struggle, the full realization of which they may not see, but to which their contributions remain essential, known, exemplary. It is not to fight on with the aim of dying, but to live according to the demands of the struggle, and to rob oppressing forces of the power they aim to secure for themselves by meting out death.
These notions of suicide, its appearance across centuries through these direct manifestations of racial class antagonism, the questions of the necessary character of resistance and practical questions of struggle they conjure, are overwhelming at first glance. Yet we may perceive here a consistency in the forms of being of racial capitalism that call forth such a reappropriation of death: an expropriation of the terms of life from the expropriators of the living. In the revolutionary or radical conception of suicide, the notion of the subject’s mastery of their fate is also a reappropriation of the capacities of the living within and against its negations. As we observe this condition emerging from within these examples of the history of the Black Radical Tradition, we also observe it as a consequence of the deformation of labor’s assumed universality in proletarian class solidarity. The inability to actualize this finds in the racial division of labor a critical barrier to the actualization of the universal class and its interests. Is there a condition logically prior to this uneven and combined division of labor that renders its universal basis intelligible to partisans, and thus makes its global coherence possible? Against the separation of past and future that is made apparent in the obstruction of suicide, a reconciliation in the making of life and death must be sought in historical reconstruction. I believe that we may be able to begin an attempt in continuing to critically develop Marx’s theory of the social form of labor within this history of its concrete appearances. My account here will be unconventional, but I hope that its circuitous and unfamiliar path will be a generative engagement for the reader.
III. Social Metabolism and Organic Conflict
The living capacity to consciously determine conditions of existence is the primary concern in Marx’s conception of the transformative potential of human labor, and the revolutionary character of a historical epoch that universalizes the form of its exploitation. Marx’s critique of political economy takes as its ontological basis the human capacity to labor, and in this, the immediate notion of being is mediated in its finitude as a definite existence through labor’s activity in production. Thus, the conditions of existence that appear contested historically are conditions of production, of the terms of making human social life through the labor it requires. While Marx adopts the concept of labor from political economy as the science of bourgeois society, he further abstracts the notion of labor from its appearance in political economy as a natural substance of monetary value. For in the concept of labor, Marx finds something specific to human life:
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power. We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. An immense interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity from the situation when human labour had not yet cast off its first instinctive form. We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.”18
The notion of labor is abstracted to the purposive activity through which the human being mediates its own reproduction, as an intercourse with nature that constitutes a metabolism. The conscious, ideational character of that work is what distinguishes the human species-being from those other architects of the animal world. This self-conscious relation to our own activity that is mediated through the concept of labor is at the core of our ability to transform our conditions of existence as we are in turn transformed by them in that very process. The physiological notion of an organic metabolism becomes, in our consciousness of self and the conditions of that self, the concept of a social metabolism. This initially expresses itself in that subordination of the agent’s will to the determinants of their mode of activity. At first, we appear on the scene constrained by nature, then as we develop our relation with it, we appear constrained by our own activity. Within this process of our self-movement follows the conditions of our potential for self-determination.
Following this broad notion of a social metabolism, I wish to invoke Martin Hägglund’s distinction between natural and spiritual freedoms. As Marx demonstrates the identity between different forms of purposive activity between human and animal life, we also find relative to each being here a relative capacity of self-movement and self-determination. Of the relevant distinctions, Hägglund says:
“These forms of purposive activity can become much more advanced in highly developed animals, but they are all forms of what I call natural freedom. Natural freedom provides a freedom of self-movement, but only in light of imperatives that are treated as given and ends that cannot be called into question by the agent itself. As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requires the ability to ask which imperatives to follow in light of our ends, as well as the ability to call into question, challenge, and transform our ends themselves.”19
According to natural freedom, an animal can either succeed or fail to act according to a norm, something that it ought to do given the natural imperatives of its actions, but it cannot call into question the imperative itself. The spiritual freedom of humans contains this ought in a double structure, as we are answerable to our actions as well as the normative principles of our own actions. “There are not only demands concerning what I ought to do; there is also the question if I ought to do what I supposedly ought to do.”20
The form of consciousness specific to human life that is contained in the concept of human labor entails this critical relation to our purposive activity. We engage in an evaluative manner with our conditions of life, where past activity is subject to revision upon the encounter with its present iteration, and we conceive of its future viability. This temporal dimension of our practical activity is how we situate ourselves within this process as one of a life. Between the opposition of life and death, we perceive the mediation of a life in its finitude, but as the abstract, thus universal, expression life, its finitude in death informs and is informed by the passage of other lives, and the intercourse of many such lives.
While making an objective claim here, however, I have remained in a conception that is still abstract and subjective. How do we relate this process of our social metabolism, and the self-consciousness relationship brought about by our reflection, with the historical dialectic of race and class? To understand this, we must take Marx’s conception of labor in its transhistorical sense as mediation between humans and nature and proceed to the way in which he grounds this activity in history with the distinction of the form of labor. Rather than stating his conclusion as a simple answer, a formula to be regurgitated dogmatically, let us proceed to this concept through an example of our spiritual freedom in the realm of historiographic practice, wherein that “double ought” through which we may question the normative content of our social history occurs.
Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made begins with an articulation of its most controversial assertion: “Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other.”21 This introduces the conception of paternalism that Genovese develops throughout the work, the constitution of the antebellum American South as an organic society that was based on “reciprocal obligations.”22 Yet reciprocity entails a mutual benefit, one which would appear to be damaged by his own conception of American slavery as a “system of class rule, in which some people lived off the labor of others” and “subordinated one race to another.” The simultaneity of the race and class dimensions of American slavery are articulated by Genovese as independent of each other, following the reason that “slavery as a system of class rule predated racism and racial subordination in world history” and that “racial subordination [...] need not rest on slavery.” Thus the history of American slavery is one “essentially determined by particular relationships of class power in racial form.” Southern paternalism “grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation,” and the accompanying “racial distinction between master and slave heightened the tension inherent in an unjust social order.”23 Yet Genovese goes on to claim that
“A paternalism accepted by both masters and slaves–but with radically different interpretations–afforded a fragile bridge across the intolerable contradictions inherent in a society based on racism, slavery, and class exploitation that had to depend on the willing reproduction and productivity of its victims. For the slaveholders paternalism represented an attempt to overcome the fundamental contradiction in slavery: the impossibility of the slaves’ ever becoming the things they were supposed to be. Paternalism defined the involuntary labor of the slaves as a legitimate return to their masters for protection and direction. But, the masters’ need to see their slaves as acquiescent human beings constituted a moral victory for the slaves themselves. Paternalism’s insistence upon mutual obligations–duties, responsibilities, and ultimately even rights–implicitly recognized the slaves’ humanity.”24
The question of this interpretation is one of the conditions of recognition. Was the humanity of the enslaved only implicitly in the form of moral justification crafted by the dominant racial class? Likewise, if the racial doctrine of supremacy developed in this interpretation is a mere additive onto an already given class relation, we do not have a sufficient account of the rule of class formation that appears to already inform the racialized selection in class belonging given by the relations of production in this instance.
In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, Saidiya Hartman critiques Genovese’s concept of the organic relationship produced by Southern paternalism by interrogating the narrative register it occupies. In engaging the paradoxical concept of “slave agency” to examine the social roles of the enslaved, Hartman argues that “the representation of the performative” is “inscribed in a framework of consensual and voluntarist agency that reinforces and romanticizes social hierarchy” of which “the pastoral has been the dominant mode of this discourse.” In the pastoral register, “master and slave are seen as peacefully coexisting” and “the regime of production becomes naturalized,” as “the ruthless use of bonded labor and the extraction of profit are imagined as the consensual and rational exchange between owner and slave.” The pastoral, as a mode of historical representation, depicts slave agency in such a manner as to have “intensified the effects of subjection and dispossession in the guise of will and denied the abject and ambivalent personhood of the captive in the facile and spurious attempt to incorporate the slave into the ethereal realms of the normative subject through demonstrations of his consent and/or autonomy,” however, under scrutiny “by emphasizing complementarity, reciprocity, and shared values, this hegemonic or consensual model of slave relations neutralizes the dilemma of the object status and pained subject constitution of the enslaved and obscures the violence of slavery.”25
In this critical engagement of the problematic of not only Genovese’s historiography, but the predominant modes of historical representation such that slavery induces accepted terms by the enslaved, Hartman is interrogating the traditional historical interpretations of the practices of the enslaved within and against their social condition. Within the complex of race and a specific racial history, this is a matter of adequately accounting for the conditions of reparation. This is introduced through the concept of redress:
“If redress does not or cannot restore or remedy loss, redeem the unceremoniously buried, or bridge the transatlantic divide, then what possibilities for relief or restitution does it provide? First, redress is a re-membering of the social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and articulation of devastation, captivity, and enslavement. The re-membering of the violated body must be considered in relation to the dis-membered body of the slave–that is, its segmentation and organization of the captive body for purposes of work, reproduction, and punishment, This re-membering takes the form of attending to the body as a site of pleasure, eros, sociality, and articulating its violated condition. Second, redress is a limited form of action aimed at relieving the pained body through alternative configurations of the self or self-abandonment, and the redemption of the body as human flesh. Third, redress concerns the articulation of needs and desires and the endeavor to meet them. It is a way of making and doing directed toward the release of the captive, the reconstitution of severed natality, and the remembrance of breach. It Is intended to minimize the violence of historical dislocation and dissolution–the history that hurts. Redressive action encompasses a heightened attention to the events that have culminated in the crisis and the transfiguration of the body in shared ceremony, making it a vessel of communication, flesh to be loved, and a bridge between the living and the dead. The event of captivity and enslavement initiates the necessity of redress, the inevitability of its failure, and the constancy of repetition yielded by this failure."26
The historiographic operation and performance of redress “is itself an articulation of loss and a longing for remedy and reparation,” and in this Hartman makes it clear that “it is impossible to repair this violated condition or undo the catastrophe without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions–the abolition of property, the destruction of the racist order, recompense for stolen life and land, the transvaluation of the given.”27 The revolutionary character of these demands is further emphasized through Hartman’s concept of the “non-event of Emancipation,” where the failure of Reconstruction and the actualization of substantive freedom in its wake becomes the basis for a claim that “freedom and slavery presuppose one another, not only as modes of production and discipline, but through contiguous forms of subjection.”28 However, what becomes apparent within this argument is the limit of Hartman’s discursive reconstruction of history. The ultimate demands implicit in the desire of redress are not themselves intrinsic developments from the premises of the constraints of slave agency, but abstract negations of the object of critique.
We may then counter to the Emancipation’s non-event, the re-entrenchment of conditions of servitude, Du Bois’s adoption of class struggle as historiographic method, for it is the very conflict of Reconstruction’s disruption of the racial order that is the object of the violent attempts to subjugate once more the Black South. In his invocation of “The Black Worker” and “The General Strike,”29 Du Bois is making a claim as to the conditions for practical agency, through a historical reconstruction that develops its claim beyond the discursive restraints of its material. From irredeemably racist sources, Du Bois crafts a redemption of history, through the development of the basis of agency in human labor as purposive activity, and the self-making of history by the Black Worker through their reappropriation of this capacity.
In developing this notion, to further interrogate this form of labor and its relation to historiographic method, I wish to take Hartman’s and Genovese’s oppositional characterizations of the “organic relationship.” Where for Genovese it is a relationship of reciprocal rights and obligations that reproduce the social order, for Hartman it is a narrative fantasy that serves a specific relation of power in the remembrance of history. Within both of these accounts, we can say that there is a conflict of the internal movement of liberation. If Genovese is correct, his own accounts of movements of the enslaved towards freedom do not have an objective content, and cannot be except as a contradiction of his own notion of paternalism. With Hartman, the rejection of Genovese’s conception does not move beyond a disagreement of historical representation, and the lack of definite historicization produces an abstract critique of freedom and slavery’s mutual presupposition. Is this a character of freedom as a concept in itself, or illustrative of the limits of a specific social and historical form of freedom?
As divergent as the methodologies are in all these accounts, there is a common basis in the objections raised to enslavement and racial oppression. Where we see divergences occur, however, is in the question of the basis social and historical intelligibility of human activity. How do we address the continuity of racial categories’ reproduction while also maintaining a historical practice that opens the present as one in which a discontinuity in oppression is always at hand? Where do we locate in history the conditions for a spiritual freedom at hand? Put another way, what is required of us to construct a historiographic practice that makes the past and the future a conscious product of our collective activity in the present?
IV. The Critique of Political Economy and Alienated Labor
Between the above exchange between Genovese and Hartman over the terms of the “organic relation,” there is a common basis in the antagonistic character of the relations under consideration. Against the mere acceptance of an organic relation as one of reciprocity based on an ill-defined “rights and obligations” as Genovese does, and contra the reduction of organicity to a mode of historical representation that can be disarticulated from its object of contemplation, as we find in Hartman, there is a basis for the common register of these conceptions. I want to offer here a further development of Marx’s concept of social metabolism through the organic relation of capital as its constitutive antagonism in the class struggle of capital and labor, how this is developed through a critique of the social form of labor, and what the implications are for this and the practice of radical historiography.
In following the above account of Marx’s ontological notion of human labor and the natural and spiritual distinctions of freedom, I will in turn suggest that Marx’s ontology of labor is of the human as a historical being. Marx’s social metabolism of labor involves a historical form of labor’s social validity, and in the case of the capitalist mode of production’s form of value, that is, as the separable commodity of labor-power. The production of this constitutes another invocation of the notion of the organic, a conception of life’s social metabolism in a specific, historical form. In the organic composition of capital, we have a notion of capital’s objective, tendential movement in the course of its reproduction as the expanded accumulation of capital. It is here that Capital reaches a climax in the operation of capital’s logic on the scale of social totality, the general law of capitalist accumulation. We learn that the organic composition of capital is not merely a ratio of constant to variable capital of means of production and labor power. It is a relation of these two concepts in a dynamic movement of their abstract and concrete forms of appearance. Means of production and labor power form the technical composition of capital in their respective masses deployed, and these categories as functions as constant and variable capital form their value composition. Capital’s organic composition is that movement of “the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter.”30
This movement, the dynamic trajectory of capital in its organic logic, is that which produces accumulation as the multiplication of the proletariat, the accumulation of social wealth in the form of capital as identical with the accumulation of social misery. In the specific relation of determination between the technical and value compositions, we can see that this is the result of the factors of social production in so far as they retain their formal characters as commodities in the process of their reproduction. We know from Marx that their existence as commodities are not natural to them, but the product of history. This essential maneuver of denaturalization occurs in Marx’s thought through the distinction of form, the specific laws of evaluative criteria that assert themselves in human activity as definite social relations.
The social form of value is the law that determines this organic composition. For value to appear in the form of monetary wealth, and commodities to be universally exchangeable regardless of definite characteristics, what Marx discovers in his critique of political economy is that the labor theory of value of political economists is of a specific form of labor, that is, abstract labor. Money, as the adequate form of appearance of value, is the representation of abstract labor in a crystallized moment, where any distinct number of concrete labor tasks or processes are rendered equally commensurable. For this to be possible, Marx argues that there must be a historical process by which labor is separated from its means of realization in production, such that these come to form two distinct categories that can be combined as factors in a process of capital’s production. The reproduction of capital is the reproduction of this separation.
Marx begins the critique of political economy with the investigation of the form of commodity because that is the basic, constitutive category of capital in its immediate form of appearance. It is from this that we can follow the logical development of the commodity to the concept of its value, and to that the form of labor that creates value. From abstract labor we proceed to money, and from money to the objective of capitalist production, the form of surplus value, and it is at this point of arrival that Marx develops the notion of the commodity labor-power, the specific form in which abstract labor operates as variable capital. Labor power is a commodity unlike any other, for it is the commodity that can produce more value in the production process than it costs to purchase. Non-human means of production are constant capital, for they are purchased and expended until they are fully consumed, expire, or need to be replaced. Labor power’s value, on the other hand, is transformed in the very process of production, and this, in its totality, is the moment where human activity dictates the terms of its social metabolism. This is the basis of the methodological commitment to class struggle.
The process by which class struggle becomes the determinant character of social relations comprises an immense social history. It is a history that is not immediately apparent to those engaged in its present reproduction. Nor was it necessarily apparent in the epochs prior to the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s mature work and theory in Capital is the result of the persistent critical investigation of the social relations of a historical epoch where the objectivity of the class struggle and its determinant substance in the human capacity to labor become universally apparent. The opening declaration of the Communist Manifesto, that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,”31 is a statement of historical reconstruction, made necessary by virtue of the knowledge of all hitherto known history’s culminating point of arrival. As we see this insight to have developed into the historicological argument of Capital, we may also compare the logical starting point of the commodity to the personal historical starting point of Marx’s critique of political economy and the form of labor in the concept of alienated labor.
Marx’s first encounters with political economy in the 1844 Manuscripts engage first the science’s premises, accepting its language and laws, presupposing “private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land–likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc.” and from this it becomes clear to Marx that in political economy’s own words “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production.” According to the logical development of these practical premises, the resultant dynamic of competition and accumulation that proceeds from them, it becomes clear that “the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes–the property-owners and the propertyless workers.” But this level of recognition of the class antagonism of capitalist relations of production is not foreign to political economy, for the distinction on the basis of property here still presupposes its concepts from the movement of private property, while private property is yet unexplained. In the 1844 Manuscripts as in the final part of Capital on so-called primitive accumulation, Marx resists the impulse to revert to a notion of “a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does,” for this merely “assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce–namely, the necessary relationship between two things.”32
Proceeding from the economic fact that “the worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces [...] the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates [...] with the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men,” we learn that “labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.” While at this point, Marx has not developed his critique of the form of the commodity, its identity with the form of labor, produces an insight into the ontology of human life activity. The fact of labor’s being a commodity (in this instance not yet labor-power as the commodity form of labor) means that labor confronts the object that it produces as “something alien, as a power independent of the producer.”33 As Hegel tells us, “the aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home in it: which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the notion,– to our innermost self.”34 Thus Marx takes this relation of labor to its object as constitutive of an essential condition, that “labor’s realization is its objectification,” yet in political economy this relation “appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”35
The question then becomes the quality of this distinction between labor’s objectification, a condition of its realization, and its identity-in-difference with its estrangement, or alienation, from and within this very constitutive process. Marx considers that “the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world,” as that precondition that “provides labor with the means of life” in both the sense of its requiring objects upon which to act and means for physical subsistence. Thus we arrive at the contradictory movement of alienated labor, that the more that labor “appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life,”36 and this leads to an early formulation of Marx’s concept of the relation to production:
“Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things–but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces–but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines–but for some workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labor, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence–but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. The direct relationship of labor to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production.”37
Thus “the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being” means that labor is “therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it,” that it “does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.” The worker therefore “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but its animal functions [...] and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”38 The scientific development of political economy, as the science of bourgeois society’s own laws, is the subjugation of the human species to its social imperatives with the apparent force of natural necessity.
The aspects of alienation considered by Marx regarding the relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising its power, and the relation of labor to the act of production as alien activity not of its own leads to the notion of the human as species-being, an ontological category actualized in that which is negated in its present form, and that form’s universalization in practice, made visible and capable of contemplation as an objective fact by the historical actualization of capital’s constitutive class struggle. Marx tells us that nature is the “inorganic body” of human species-being, that as “direct means of life” and “the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity” human species-being requires that it “lives on nature,” that “nature is his body,” that “man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”39
This leads to four logical consequences that follow in the practical condition of labor’s alienated form. First, that man is alienated from nature, and thus secondly from himself, from “his own active functions, his life-activity,” turning “for him the life of the species into the a means of individual life.” Thus the human is also alienated from its own species-being, as “a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence.” This estrangement from the human species-being as “spiritual essence,” as that of the worker’s specifically “human being” leads to the realization of “the estrangement of man from man,” the conception of the individual as this radical negation of species-being’s realization in its interdependent conditions of existence, and the laborer as commodity-owner but an atomistic competitor with all of its own kind; social metabolism as war of all against all.40
These are objective alienations constitutive of the alienation of labor, and not a linear historical progression. Yet this negative movement of critique that Marx develops upon the temporal object of history, casting into relief the ultimate transience of political economy’s laws as it in turn makes apparent the social necessity of their actualization. In this sense, we thus find in private property the reflection of the social necessity of this confrontation between capital and labor, and the revelation in political economy’s labor theory of value of an ontological necessity of human species-being. But this can only be realized in the determinate negation of these laws, not in the positive adjustment of their operation. Thus Marx realizes from the economic fact of labor’s alienated form a political fact of determinate negation, that “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation–and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.”41
There is a complex maneuver of historical dialectic that Marx strikes here that must be examined. It is a tension that is also apparent in Capital. The emancipation of labor as the precondition of universal human emancipation arrives as a product of the critique of political economy as a scientific engagement with the social totality of the capitalist mode of production. Yet the capitalist mode of production is a product of history, and the apparent claim of universal human emancipation reaching back in time across every relation of servitude finds us raising concerns about the loss of specificity in examining capitalist relations of production. What is occurring here is a dialectic of the historical and the transhistorical, where the conditions of the scientific realization of social relations in the present become, as products of history, the basis for their own critique. That we can render history intelligible to us as a continuity of our species thus can identify what is specific to the social formation of contemporary conditions of material production, and the discontinuity of specific relations of production reveal the objective, historically necessary conditions of human spiritual freedom.
The theory of commodity fetishism brings forth this unity of the practical existence of human species-being and its forms of consciousness through the critique of political economy’s categories as forms of being. For whereas the categories of commodity, labor, money, etc. are “forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production,” it is also such that “the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.”42 The universal condition of human labor as purposive life-activity, constitutive of an interdependent social metabolism in the collective intercourse of its being with nature as the inorganic condition of its organic social being, is made apparent in the relief cast upon all of history by the capitalist mode of production’s universalized form of class struggle in the opposition of labor and capital. Thus the form of value is the form of the telos of this social necessity as historical product, thus itself subject to a determinate negation in a social process of its transformation. The human species-being’s forms of consciousness, its categories of being given in capitalist modernity, arise from its articulations of this antagonism between labor and capital, as labor’s self-activity in the conflict of its social interdependence and private form of appropriation, a historical product of the struggle of humanity’s attempts to master itself and its confrontations with natural and social necessity. The fetishism of the commodity is the conflict with this consciousness in the social necessity of the form of production through the social form of labor that is reproduced by it and that it in turn reproduces, and the form of self-recognition it engenders through this ongoing practice.
V. Tikkun Olam
In exploring the historical dialectic of race and class, I have essentially aimed to dispel historiographic labor of the notion that racial struggles in modern history are to be held in a regard as either false appearances of the history of class struggle or even totally alien to its logic, thus a blind alley to be navigated around denying their social objectivity. The positive maneuver of proletarian universality in merely affirming a general class interest fails to address the conflict within the self-activity of the proletariat historically to overcome racial division. In exploring Marx’s theory of alienated labor, I wish to argue for the negative movement of critique as the proper mode of universalization, by discovering immanent to the historical laws of an epoch itself the necessary preconditions of its transformation. In this sense we find that the form of labor as one that reproduces itself through its self-alienation to be a directly practical problem of proletarian self-activity.
Rather than racial class formation’s origins in a geographical division of labor, we can uncover prior to this the alienation of labor that directs and gives shape to this actualization of surplus value’s formation in uneven and combined development; for example, the European proletarians of the slave ships reproduced their conditions of existence through the proletarianization of African labor, itself made available to the global slave labor market through a prior assumed alienation of labor. The reproduction of this form of social production embedded new “social hieroglyphics”43 into the constitution of value’s social objectivity, marking the class struggle necessarily in racial articulations. The economic fact of labor’s alienation remains prior to racialism as constitutive, but the full historical integration of this dynamic into the process of class formation also transforms racialism itself into a lever of economic power. Of this dynamic, Walter Rodney says:
“It would be much too sweeping a statement to say that all racial and color prejudice in Europe derived from the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation of non-white peoples in the early centuries of international trade. There was also anti-Semitism at an even earlier date inside Europe and there is always an element of suspicion and incomprehension when peoples of different cultures come together. However, it can be affirmed without reservations that the white racism which came to pervade the world was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production. Nor was it merely a question of how the individual white person treated a black person. The racism of Europe was a set of generalizations and assumptions, which had no scientific basis, but were rationalized in every sphere from theology to biology. Occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open up the New World and to use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons.”44
The contemporary revival of the debates on slavery and capitalism are indicative of the speculative reason within the logic of historical reconstruction, though they are at times either not directly conscious, or at least not explicit in their engagement, of this as the process of social self-recognition in which they are engaged. The historiographic intervention that Cedric J. Robinson crafts in Black Marxism, the composition of a Black Radical Tradition, is an example of the reappropriation of alienated labor’s totality as alienated history, and the notion of racial capitalism a direct product of the methodological commitment to class struggle. The de-alienation of history is the accompanying process of labor’s reappropriation of its purposive life activity, a recovery of its conditions of the present in the self-knowledge of itself in the full process of historical actualization. As class constitutes a universal basis for social activity, the confrontation with racialism is a necessary moment in the recognition of that universal activity. It is in this sense that the capitalist mode of production is also a realization of all history in a fetishized veil; what confronts us in the abstract notion of the material world is a human history, one that is alive through the people of this planet upon which we are interdependent for the continuation of our life-activity. Just as the world of the commodity has a history, its identity is in the collective history of the commodity’s self-making, and the knowledge that it is a history we rationally reconstruct as a means of practically engaging its struggle in the present.
Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History takes this redemptive task as the essential quality of historical materialism. The historical materialist “cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in time which stands still and has come to a stop.” It is in this way that the historical materialist “grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Historical reconstruction is a practice of living on within the struggle that in turn seeks to make the present a time in which this redemptive task can occur at any moment, so long as we recognize the truth of its prior necessity. For it was, according to Benjamin, the failure of Social Democracy in the inter-war period, that notorious failure that led to the victory of fascism in Europe, to “assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations,” making the working class “forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”45
Yet at the same time, the redemption of the past is conditional upon a present orientation towards a future that remains open, the present continuity of living activity that marks in its practice the discontinuity with the past oppressions in its determinate negation of its remnants in the present. As the present is a product of history, history becomes the self-conscious product of human labor. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the necessity of the confrontation with the fetishized veil of social existence, its relationship to our social forms of valuation, and the manner in which this came into conflict with our interdependent conditions of existence. “The stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”46
Dr. King’s non-violence was never an appeal against confrontation, but an expression of this revolution of values in practice, one that maintained the necessity of “organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy,” for “without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert. We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance forced upon us. If we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our struggle, we will create it as we managed to create underground railroads, protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our refuge, our source of hope and our source of action.”47 This militant non-violence was based upon a determinate negation of racial hatred through the conception of the reappropriation of life activity as a problem of social power, informed by the practical commitment to an ethical dialectic of love and justice:
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the ‘will to power,’ to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the ‘will to power’ in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”48
As the historical force of necessity makes itself felt upon the tactics of the present, the ethical commitment may still be adhered to, its question not one of exact duplication, but whether or not the balance of forces in the present act upon the virtue of love in the abolition of hatred. This in turn necessitates a historical knowledge and recognition of the justness of hatred incurred, but as contained within the self-development of love through the negation of that prior negation, creating a positive vision of justice actualizing itself in the present through its struggle. This abstract conception is but a basis for these models in the practice of historiography, but one which must guide its engagement in historical reconstruction through the historical lineage of struggles in the present.
To all those not with us now that live on through our actions, A song for the Little Turtle.
Cited in Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: Vol. 2, from the Reconstruction to the Founding of the N.A.A.C.P. 1992. New York: Citadel Press. pp. 632-633
The full account of this, primarily through W.E.B. Du Bois’ work in Black Reconstruction in America, has been written about in this blog before, see
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: [1860-1880]. New York, NY: The Free Press. p. 356
Davis, Mike. 2018. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. London ; New York: Verso. pp. 19-29; Foner, Eric. 1971. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. London; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 301-317
Radical Reconstruction is the name given to the Congressional plan for Reconstruction where Confederate secessionists were disenfranchised of the suffrage until an oath of loyalty was given and the new constitutions of the seceded states were subject to a process of Congressional approval, where the extension of suffrage to freedmen was largely demanded as a requirement. This is in contrast to Presidential Reconstruction, where Andrew Johnson by and large sought a conciliatory policy towards the Southern plantocracy, and fought bitterly with the radicals in Congress over the terms of post-war development.
Du Bois (1998) p. 353
Ibid, p. 185
Ibid, p. 630
This research program was initially inspired by a critical encounter with John Clegg and Adaner Usmani’s piece “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration,” published in the journal Catalyst in 2019, which argues that mass incarceration developed in the late twentieth century as a response to real concerns of middle class voters to surges in violent crime, and the only available response afforded to municipal governments due to the underdevelopment of social democracy in the US. Undergirding this whole argument is an effort to undermine the emphasis on racial disparity amongst contemporary accounts of mass incarceration. While I have not yet developed my historical inquiry to this point in the literature, the initial methodological basis in an analytical disaggregation of race and class in the Clegg and Usmani article, and further its separation of racial prejudice from a basis in the social power of relations of racial supremacy and inferiority, disturbed me such that I have since sought to explore this assumed separation between these categories, and the problems of Marxism in addressing this. See my account of the debate on this article in
. Adaner Usmani has since gone on to co-author a paper, rife with methodological errors in statistics calculation, that there is an “injustice of under-policing” in the US, advocating for a hiring program of 500,000 new officers nationwide as a possible solution to problems of police brutality. A strong critique of the article’s argument and factual basis, as well as a link to the original, is made by Alec Karakatsanis and can be found here:
While I have largely focused on Black liberation struggles and Marxism, I also find it essential to seek such reconciliation as well in global struggles of Indigenous sovereignty, as well as many others that seem to be unfairly viewed as expressing only a particularist interest. My lack of addressing these here at present is solely due to a lack of sufficient research and synthesis at present on my part.
Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill; London: University Of North Carolina Press. pp. 308-309
Ibid, p. 309
Ibid, p. 112
Marcus Rediker. 2008. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 260-262. Emphasis in original.
Robinson (2000) pp. 168-171
Newton, Huey P. 2009. Revolutionary Suicide. Penguin. p. 5
Ibid, p. 6
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. pp. 283-284
Hägglund, Martin. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 175
Ibid, p. 179
Genovese, Eugene D. 1976. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books. p. 3
Ibid, p. 122
Ibid, pp. 3-5
Ibid, p. 5
Hartman, Saidiya. 2022. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. pp. 87-88
Ibid, pp. 129-130
Ibid, pp. 130-131
Ibid, p. 230
Chapters I and IV of Du Bois (1998), respectively
Marx (1990) p. 762
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1988. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus. pp. 69-70
Ibid, pp. 70-71
Hegel, G.W.F. and William Wallace. 1904. The Logic of Hegel: Translated from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. London: Oxford. p. 335
Marx, Engels (1988) p. 71
Ibid, pp. 72-73
Ibid, p. 73
Ibid, p. 74
Ibid, p. 76
Ibid, pp. 76-78
Ibid, p. 82
Marx (1990) p. 169
Ibid, p. 167
Rodney, Walter. (1972) 2018. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London; New York: Verso. p. 103
Benjamin, Walter, Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Wieseltier. 2013. Illuminations: [Essays and Reflections]. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 260-263
King Jr., Martin Luther. 2010. Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 196-197
Ibid, pp. 169-170
Ibid, pp. 169-170