Instrumentum Vocale - 2

Notes on Abstract Labor, Slave Labor, Modes of Production, & State

Roman mosaic known as The Triumph of Neptune (2nd-3rd century A.D.), depicting the god of the sea surrounded by the four seasons and scenes of agricultural labor.

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The precise consideration of slave labor requires that we develop a conception of relations of production and forms of exploitation that can grasp the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production, while simultaneously incorporating the temporal specificity of the simple form of capital as a dynamic historical category. As Marx tells us in Capital, “[t]he nature of capital remains the same in its developed as it is in its undeveloped forms.”¹ This insight is developed in the work of Jairus Banaji, where, in his own encounter with and critique of Perry Anderson’s Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, he draws a sharp distinction between the levels of abstraction and operation of the concept of the “mode of production” and that of the specific predominant form in which labor appears. This is prompted by Anderson’s reliance on the notion of the “slave mode of production” as the character of production in the antiquity of the Hellenic and Roman epochs, but to this Banaji issues his articulation: “Not only are modes of production not reducible to forms of exploitation, but the historical forms of exploitation of labour (relations of production in the conventional sense) lie at a completely different level of abstraction from the numerous and specific ways in which labour is or can be deployed.”² 

The specificity of this application of social labor, what Banaji identifies and names as a “logic of deployment” operative in antiquity and across pre-capitalist modes of production, brings forth the urgency of a theory of the mode of production that does not restrict our analysis of concrete historical content to incorrect and imprecise theory. This too means that the precision of our historical location of capital in relation to forms of exploitation that produce it, as well as the relations of production that articulate the mode to which it is immanent, must be refined. As Banaji tells us, “there is not one ostensibly unique configuration of capital but a series of distinct configurations, forms of the accumulation process, implying other combinations.”³ The possible heterogeneity of content of which capital is constituted historically will be a focus in these notes as it pertains to the deployments of slave labor, its role and relations in the social constitution and historical development of both capital and the capitalist mode of production. 

In drawing out these distinctions, of configurations of capital and the characteristics of historical modes of production, the specific dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and the imperatives of its reproduction serve as a historically-reflexive relief from which we determine historical specificity. The dual-character of the commodity form of value as a bearer of expressions of both use-value and exchange-value, from which we also derive the dual-character of labor as abstract and concrete, is for Marx a means of developing this specificity. For it is not that the form of the commodity is transhistorical without distinction, but that the historical basis of its emergence from pre-capitalist modes of production calls for an understanding of the emphasis of these aspects of the commodity’s conditioning and articulation of value relations within its social base as form of product and form of production. As it pertains to the specific qualities of the capitalist mode of production, the law of value’s operation as the imperative of the production of surplus-value, and thus the continually expanding reproduction and accumulation of surplus labor, is key. Echoing his identification of the historical limits of Aristotle’s distillation of the simple form of value in the simple commensuration of articles of need, his inability to recognize their social intelligibility as products of abstract human labor, Marx tells of an emphasis of historical time in the articulation of the commodity:

“It is however clear that in any economic formation of society where the use-value rather than the exchange-value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and that no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise from the character of production itself.”⁴

This “boundless thirst for surplus labour” is the quality of the capitalist mode of production, and further it is qualified here as having to “arise from the character of production itself.” Thus, pre-capitalist modes of production and forms of class society see moments in the accumulation and coercion of surplus labor, yet the question arises of whether or not this is a result of the character of production itself, or sporadic moments following a logic of deployment, still subordinate to concrete limitations including, but not limited to, barriers of the nature’s materiality in geography and ecology, or the particularities of the groups of people and socialities assumed to be the desired labor force. The boundlessness of surplus labor in the capitalist mode of production is a feature of the predominance of abstract labor as the stamp of all practical human activity posited towards the movements of surplus-value. The subordination of need to the imperatives of a valorization process, realized through the monetary appropriation characteristic of exchange-value, is a historical product and not immediately given by the initial historical appearances of the commodity form’s operation.

However, this should not inform an attempt to apply a correction to the character of production such that use-value’s emphasis be reinstated. The distinct separation of utility is a moment of the commodity’s articulation as a product for exchange, and thus use informs and is informed by exchange as aspects of the commodity form of value relations. Even in the context of antiquity, here in Anderson’s as in Banaji’s interpretation, the commodity form is immanent to the operations of the political economy of Hellenic and Roman trade. This is a perspective afforded to us from our own historical vantage point of the commodity’s social and historical realization in the capitalist mode of production, though it does not mean that the categories we apply can establish an identity of these, as elements of the formation of capital in antiquity, with a realized capitalist mode of production. The conditions and articulations of class, in their historical specificity, are essential to the identification of the form of production in preceding modes of production. Thus we must be attentive to the precise manner in which the form of exchange operated, without itself dominating the character of production. 

This can be brought into greater focus through an understanding of the roles of political institutions in economic formation as articulations of the historical ensemble of social relations. If this historiographic problem of pre-capitalist capital extends to our study of the mode of production, then the irreducibility of the concept of the mode of production to any one form of exploitation then requires a broader conceptual understanding of relations of production, as Banaji makes clear in his critical survey of such theoretical problems rife in historical scholarship. We cannot only address the predominant forms of exploitation, but their interrelation to each other and within the totality of their movement amongst institutionalized forms maintaining their reproduction within a determinate social form. Thus the character of the State in Anderson’s work can help us to understand the infrastructure of social mediations guiding the mode of production in Rome, its relative capacity to generate an operative conception of capital in its monetary economy, and the reasons for its inability to realize a properly capitalist class or mode of production. While perhaps loaded with teleology, this is the necessary position from which we must establish our evaluation in order to better draw out these specificities of slave labor prior to its appearance in the capitalist epoch.

According to Anderson, and perhaps following Marx’s critique of Aristotle, in Grecian antiquity “[t]he divorce of material work from the sphere of liberty was so rigorous that the Greeks had no word in their language even to express the concept of labour, either as a social function or as personal conduct. Both agricultural and artisanal work were essentially deemed ‘adaptations’ to nature, not transformations of it; they were forms of service.”⁵ This aspect of ancient Greek society describes a character of the production process that was, while reliant upon human labor, not itself based upon modes of social mediation understood and articulated as human labor, and thus subordinate to concrete determinations of objective conditions of existence from which a production process formed. Of the social determinants of this production process, those of its own self-conception and organization of its internal dynamics, the political organization of the polis appears to be an important factor in the articulation of class sociality as it existed:

“The variations in the composition of the Council and Assembly, and in the election of the magistrates of the State who conducted its administration, defined the relative degree of ‘democracy’ or ‘oligarchy’ within each polis. The Spartan system, dominated by an authoritarian ephorate, was notoriously antipodal to the Athenian, which came to be centred in the full Assembly of citizens. But the essential line of demarcation did not pass within the constituent citizenry of the polis, however it was organized or stratified: it divided the citizenry–whether the 8,000 Spartiates or 45,000 Athenians–from the non-citizens and unfree beneath them. The community of the classical polis, no matter how internally class-divided, was erected above an enslaved work-force which underlay its whole shape and substance.”⁶

The pluralistic features of the Greek city-state system was still undergirded by an inter-relational dynamic where the constitution of the citizen-subject was conditional upon the preservation of slave labor in agricultural production in villages and various labor tasks in the urban cores. “Slaves provided domestic service, field labour–where they typically tilled the home farms of the rich and artisanal work; they were probably outnumbered by free labour in agriculture and perhaps in the crafts, but constituted a much larger group than the total citizenry.”⁷ This formed the basis for a class order that consisted of slaves, free citizens largely concentrated in the polis as urban craftsmen known as “hoplites” and poorer peasants known as “thetes”, and above this an order of wealthier citizens consisting of a patrician elite. “This social structure, with its acknowledged stratification but absence of dramatic crevasses within the citizen body, provided the foundation of Athenian political democracy.”⁸ From this description of the order of Athenian society, Anderson develops a theory of the internally-constitutive limits to its reproduction, from which the self-undermining characteristics of this form of class rule would emerge:

“[T]he democratic nature of the Athenian polis–whose principle was direct participation, not representation–precluded the creation of a bureaucratic machinery that could have held down an extended territorial empire by administrative coercion. There was scarcely any separate or professional State apparatus in the city, whose political structure was essentially defined by its rejection of specialized bodies of officials–civilian or military–apart from the ordinary citizenry: Athenian democracy signified, precisely, the refusal of any such division between ‘state’ and ‘society’.”⁹

Thus, for Anderson, the Athenian example demonstrates a fundamental incapacity of the political form to develop the kind of imperial bureaucracy that would sustain the internal dynamics of its tendency towards arable expansion and colonization, the major factors resistant to this stability being the intra-regional competition of Greek city-states and the “lack of any substantial hinterland” which would come to undermine Athenian military power, and thus limit the expansion of slave labor’s procurement in the face of rivals to terrestrial conquest.¹⁰ Even as slave labor at this time, according to Anderson, existed in the form of “the most drastic urban commercialization of labour conceivable: the reduction of the total person of the labourer to a standard object of sale and purchase, in metropolitan markets of commodity exchange”, the dependence of commerce on forms of absolute terrestrial expansion and the primacy of direct conquest conditioning this form of exchange demonstrate a character of production to which surplus labor was an externality continually pursued, and maintained in a static manner by the social determinations of the polis, understood as relations of production.¹¹ The details of the waning prominence of Classical Greece’s decline from regional prominence, however, are not our primary focus. What is important to us here is that the accumulation of slave labor and its relation to forms of free labor, according to Anderson’s account, do not correspond to a dynamic of expanded reproduction unbounded from barriers both material and social, thus of a social form where subsumption remains limited, as surplus labor does to an absolute expansion of land and labor, bodies and earth.

To further pursue Anderson’s historical material, his account of the Roman republic and empire’s political economy, though still strapped to his erroneous conception of a “slave mode of production”, is also illuminating of these limits to capitalist development while still appearing in forms that would come to be understood as presuppositions of the capitalist mode of production. The class hierarchy of Rome is informative of its dynamics of social production. The prevalence of slave labor must be cast in relation to its constitution of property, and the legal forms which this took in its intermediation with the form of the State. In Anderson’s conception, the dynamics of property relations in Rome correspond to a class struggle of which dispossession was characteristic over the Republic’s longue durée. 

According to Anderson, “no durable or substantial agrarian reform ever occurred in the Republic, despite constant agitation and turbulence over the question in the final epoch of its existence”, giving rise to a tendency by which the assidui, the “Roman equivalent of the hoplite category - men who could equip themselves with armour and weaponry necessary for infantry service in the legions [...] who possessed the necessary property qualification to bear their own arms” were subject to an “increasing monopolization of land by the aristocracy”, and thus a steady decline in the numbers of the assidui and a tendential increase in the numbers of the proletarii class, “propertyless citizens, whose service to the State was merely to rear children (proles).”¹² There is evident from this a relation between the military conquest characteristic of Roman imperial expansion, its colonization of arable land and subsumption of slave labor into its cultivation, and the social constitution of property relations that maintained an economy that was predicated upon such in its own reproduction. At the same time, however, the concentration of political power in the hands of a Roman nobility and their organization in and through the form of the State leveraged property as a means of consolidating administrative control as a tendency towards monopolization, indicating a class struggle immanent to this form, from which these internally-constitutive dynamics would prove to be self-undermining. Of the forms by which this constitutive social antagonism was mediated, Anderson tells us that:

“The structure of the Roman polity in the Republican epoch thus came to diverge sharply from any Greek precedent. For while the countryside became chequered with large noble domains, the city conversely became populated with a proletarianized mass, deprived of land or any other property. Once fully urbanized, this large and desperate underclass lost any will to return to a small-holder condition, and could often be manipulated by aristocratic cliques against projects for agrarian reform backed by the assidui farmers. Its strategic position in the capital of an expanding empire ultimately obliged the Roman ruling class to pacify its immediate material interests with public grain distributions. These were, in effect, a cheap substitute for the land distribution which never occurred: a passive and consumer proletariat was preferable to a recalcitrant and producer peasantry, for the senatorial oligarchy which controlled the Republic.”¹³

The possibility to resort to public grain distribution in order to mediate the antagonisms of the dispossession of the assidui and expansion of the proletarii intrinsic to the dynamics of Roman State constitution as the administration of imperial expansion were made possible by the “ultimately economic” and “decisive innovation of Roman expansion”, which, as Anderson tells us, was the “large-scale slave latifundium”.¹⁴ Whereas in Greece, agricultural slave labor was spread out over a disparate network of farms averaging between 30-60 acres and mediated in and through the polis structure, the possibility of which was conditional upon it, the Roman republic “first united large agrarian property with gang-slavery in the countryside on a major scale [...] systematized by an urban aristocracy which already enjoyed social and economic dominion over the city.”¹⁵ Of the relational constitution of the latifundium plantation form of agricultural production, the military expansions that procured the supply of slave labor, and the dispossession of the assidui that expanded the proletarii while intensifying the consolidated power of the Roman senatorial and landholding nobility, Anderson’s sketch is both dynamic and instructive of the social constitution of the State as social form and relation of production:

“The manpower for the enormous hoIdings which emerged from the late 3rd century onwards was supplied by the spectacular series of campaigns which won Rome its mastery of the Mediterranean world: the Punic, Macedonian, Jugurthine, Mithridatic and Gallic wars, which poured military captives into Italy to the profit of the Roman ruling class. At the same time, successive ferocious struggles fought on the soil of the peninsula itself–the Hannibalic, Social and Civil Wars–delivered into the grasp of the senatorial oligarchy or its victorious factions large territories expropriated from the defeated victims of these conflicts, especially in Southern Italy. Moreover, these same external and internal wars dramatically accentuated the decline of the Roman peasantry, which had once formed the robust small-holder base of the city's social pyramid. Constant warfare involved endless mobilization; the assidui citizenry called to the legions year after year died in thousands under their standards, while those who survived them were unable to maintain their farms at home, which were increasingly absorbed by the nobility. From 200 to 167 B.C., 10 per cent or more of all free Roman adult males were permanently conscripted: this gigantic military effort was only possible because the civilian economy behind it could be manned to such an extent by slave-labour, releasing corresponding manpower reserves for the armies of the Republic. Victorious wars in their turn provided more slave-captives to pump back into the towns and estates of Italy.”¹⁶

This resulted in “the emergence of slave-worked agrarian properties of a hitherto unknown immensity” of which the “predatory militarism of the Roman Republic was its main lever of economic accumulation. War brought lands, tributes and slaves; slaves, tribute and lands supplied the materiél for war.”¹⁷ This large-scale organization of agricultural production by means of enslavement became crucial to the colonization that this form of production required for its reproduction, and the mastery of the Western Mediterranean and Northern-reaching regions of the European continent’s Western frontiers that would become subordinated by Roman imperialism. Anderson tells us of the State’s importance in the development of an inter-regional imperial trade economy, where the growth of commodity exchange founded upon the proliferation and extensive use of slave labor required “juridical reflection in the creation of an unexampled commercial law in the later Republic”, namely, “the concept of ‘absolute property’–dominium ex jure Quiritium.”¹⁸ In this conception of property, the Roman State “emancipated private ownership from any extrinsic qualification or restraints, by developing the novel distinction between mere ‘possession’–factual control of goods, and ‘property’–full legal title to them”, developing the ownership of slaves into “the pristine conceptual distillation of the commercialized production and exchange of commodities within an enlarged State system”.¹⁹

For Anderson, this juridical development in the Roman State’s legalistic constitution of property both strengthened the consolidation of political power in the Roman ruling classes, while also contributing to the dynamics of the empire’s eventual stagnating dynamism and decline, as the reliance on slave labor and its deployment largely by industry and infrastructural projects internal to the State “tended to stunt commercial enterprise”, where the production of necessary subsistence goods and the “one truly large-scale manufacturing sector”, that of military armaments and procurements supply essential to this dynamic of Rome’s expanded reproduction, i.e. accumulation, “was thus to a great extent subtracted from commodity exchange altogether [...] Thus the State could expand, but the urban economy received little benefit from its growth: if anything, its size and weight tended to suffocate private commercial initiative and entrepreneurial activity. There was thus no increase of production in either agriculture or industry within the imperial borders to offset the silent decline in its servile manpower, once external expansion had ceased.”²⁰

However, this theory of Roman political economy and the relation between the form of the State and the development of an expansive network of commodity exchange carries an implicit presupposition of a nascent formation of capital, of which the social form and character of Roman production was unable to realize. A teleological assumption, to be sure, yet it also carries within it the truth of such a teleology, that its constitution as a dynamic of a polarizing class antagonism through which its historical dynamism attributes its success also carried within it the articulations of the limits to its realization. The reliance on slave labor in agricultural production and the manner in which the Roman State’s reproduction required that the State continually posit its own territorial expansion demonstrates a reliance on the expansion of surplus labor, yet fixed within definite concrete boundaries that its social form was unable to indefinitely overcome. 

To this identification of a nascent formation of capital, we can then turn to Jairus Banaji’s more critical and penetrating analysis of Roman political economy, which reveals a much more diverse combination of forms of exploitation than Anderson’s conception of a “slave mode of production.” In his essay “Workers Before Capitalism” from the collection Theory As History, Banaji asserts first that “wage-labour was widespread in the Roman economy [...] and second that wage-contracts entailed a form of servitude” where “wage-labour was a kind of slavery, undermining the distinction between slaves and free persons”.²¹ In the Roman context, “subordination was the essence of wage-labour”,²² and this informs what, in another essay in that same volume, Banaji calls a “logic of deployment”, where, contrary to the assumption that labor in the Roman empire was reliant upon a single form of exploitation that could be generally applied in a historiographic analysis, “Roman employers were more practical [...] and behaved not as Weberians and Marxists expect them to but exactly as employers tend to behave–adapting the use of labour to their requirements and to the conditions of the local labour-market.”²³ 

According to Banaji, even in antiquity these pressures of a labor market exerted an influence on the form of exploitation given priority by Roman “employers”, within the given constraints of what social relations conditioned and articulated the labor-power available to them for purchase, and the mediating forms within which such “purchase” could be possible. The importance of this argument to Banaji is not merely for the sake of a more accurate picture of economic life in antiquity, but that such extant combinations of so-called free and unfree labor have existed in qualitatively distinct historical modes of production, and thus to undermine the problematic teleology of historiographic assumptions, such as “the notion that paid labour succeeds the other–unpaid–forms of labour in a specific sequence arising out of their dissolution.”²⁴ Banaji tells us that “[a]s long as free labour existed, the ways in which landowners organised production were bound to reflect an essential flexibility. Within the limits imposed by the availability of free labour, employers could shift back and forth between different types of deployment.”²⁵ To understand this existence of free labor alongside enslaved labor in the organization of production in antiquity and the logic of deployment that pragmatically corresponded with a decisively economic rationality of class rule and exploitation, Banaji gives us a striking case for the existence of an operative conception of abstract labor immanent to the social relations of Roman production:

“Roman law and society worked with their own conceptual equivalent of abstract labour, expressed by the term opera, pl. operae. The contract of employment was construed in Roman law as a locatio operarum, that is, a hiring (not sale) of units of labour designated by the term ‘operae’, for which it is impossible to find a satisfying translation. Although operae could just mean workers, as in the description of the Emperor Vespasian’s grandfather as manceps operarum, a labour-contractor, referring in this case to seasonal workers who moved from Umbria to the Sabine country on a regular basis, locatio operarum was not a hiring of workers but of labour-power, hence ‘services’ is about the best translation in English, labour in some quantifiable sense.”²⁶

For Banaji, this leads to a conclusion that is quite subtle and extremely important to any consideration of the history of labor-power’s historical formation and appearance as a commodity, that “[l]abour-power can appear on the market as a commodity, indeed did, even when free labourers are scarce or non-existent.”²⁷ In the Roman case, Banaji tells us that “slave-owners often hired out the services [operae] of their slaves. This was paid labour, except that the payment of the worker was appropriated by the master. The distinction between this situation and the hiring out of one’s own services was of no relevance legally. All that mattered was that wages were paid. But, to complicate matters, we should note that a slave could also hire himself out.”²⁸ The importance of these statements then, supported by Banaji’s own close attention to historical content and the operative combination of forms of exploitation prevalent in the modes of production of the societies of antiquity, is that relations of production, as they pertain to a social totality of a mode of production, must be understood within the specific social and historical determinations of the form of which they are constitutive of and in turn constituted by, and thus no mode of production can be reduced to a single or most prevalent form of exploitation, but always consists of a heterogeneity of content within and in tension with a formal subordination. 

The social constitution of surplus labor, then, is also not reliant upon any one form of its exploitation in these contexts, but is subject to constraints social and material from which it must be generated out of the internal dynamics of class struggle. If we are to understand capital, in its initial appearance as a dynamic historical category, as defined as the command of surplus labor and its representation in the expansion of monetary value, this immanent form of abstract labor in Banaji’s logic of deployment of demonstrates its historical appearance as a potentiality of these social relations of production, while Anderson’s account of the Roman political antagonisms of State and juridical constructions of property informs our understandings of the kinds of limits that pertained and would prove resistant to a production process subsumed into an abstract process of valorization. This very limitation can be understood by the relation between the commodity form of labor-power (likewise labor-power’s autonomous and self-alienating objectification), surplus labor, and its temporal determination as surplus labor-time in the relational complex of surplus-value as guided by the law of value, the rhythms of production as dictated by the socially necessary labor-time that emerges from within the expansion of the form of commodity production. For Marx, a key distinction here historically is not just wage-labor as a transhistorical category, but the wage-form of the capitalist sale and purchase of labor-power and its particular obfuscation and reification of the relational constitution of surplus-value:

“The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid labour and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. Under the corvée system it is different. There the labour of the serf for himself, and his compulsory labour for the lord of the land, are demarcated very clearly both in space and time. In slave labour, even the part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of subsistence, in which he therefore actually works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All his labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. In the one case, the property-relation conceals the slave's labour for himself; in the other case the money-relation conceals the uncompensated labour of the wage-labourer.”²⁹

In articulating and refining this form of surplus labor and the wage-form mediating its domination and exploitation, Marx necessarily places it in the context of a historical temporality from which its specificity can be discerned. The appearance of relations as they are is here the key to the mediation specific to the form of exploitation, but here does not preclude their combination. For, as Banaji identifies, there is a possible flexibility in the forms of the purchase of labor-power in a given social and historical context, so too is there a specific relation to the commodification of labor-power in Marx’s account of the capitalist mode of production that accommodates the uneven combination of forms of exploitation. In his conceptualization of the labor process and the valorization process, and the particular quality of capitalist production as the labor process subsumed under and identical to the valorization process, despite being distinct moments in abstraction, Marx locates specific differentiations in the determinations of the values of the commodity labor-power and the commodity product. Where it is the case that “the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things”, it is likewise that “the value of labourpower, and the value which that labour-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power.”³⁰

This relates to the above distinction that Marx draws between historical modes of production and the appearance of the commodity, as to the matter of whether or not the boundless thirst for surplus labor arises from the character of production itself. In the accounts given by both Anderson and Banaji, and as confirmed by Marx, we can observe a dialectical relation of social and material limitations to surplus labor’s boundlessness. However, it is the particular temporal compression and expansion in surplus labor as surplus labor-time, a social substantialization of that living material for exploitation and thus the production of surplus-value, that is made possible by the continual and necessary exchanges of the laborer’s daily sale of labor-power, and the autonomous appearance of value in its monetary form. This practice that is specific to the capitalist mode of production, and its generalization is indeed the very specificity of the capitalist mode of production, is that bounded form from which the fetishistic illusion of boundless growth originates. 

And so it is the case that we can see the limits of slave labor and the sociopolitical means necessary to ensure its reproduction as limiting to the proper synthesis of an initial, simple form of capital with the character of the production process, however we can also see that the uneven combination of so-called free and unfree labor is not antithetical to the capitalist mode of production, or indeed to any particular form of exploitation. As relations of production, a distinct level of abstraction from the form of exploitation, the practical mediations of the labor process must be placed in consideration with the totality of the social relations of which they are constitutive of and constituted by as a mode of production. In his critique of the antithesis of free and unfree labor, Banaji critiques the legal fiction of free labor in order to develop the methodology of uneven and combined development:

“An uncritical deployment of the free/unfree labour antithesis valorises one of the most powerful fictions of possessive individualism, namely, the notion that the ‘freedoms of circulation inherent in contract’ are an expression of individual freedom and that free labourers have some measure of control over their working lives because they can choose who to work for. This contrasts sharply with Marx’s conception of the wage-contract as a legal fiction that both mediated and masked the domination of labour by capital. Brass deploys a discourse of freedom and unfreedom as if these terms had an obvious meaning. He identifies free labour with the free circulation of labour, and this is clearly also how Marx understood the expression. The crucial difference, however, is that that is all free labour meant for Marx–he did not view the worker as a free agent–whereas, for Brass, free labour resonates with its opposition to unfree labour, evoking subliminal images of freedom from bondage, oppression, and coercion, as if free labour was exempt from violence, much less from subtler forms of bondage and coercion. In short, the fiction of the free labour-contract is renaturalised in an uncritical antinomy of free and unfree labour. Secondly, I have argued that, while the organisation of labour under capital-accumulation implicates forms of exploitation beyond the presumptively normative free labour-contract (notably, slavery and the centralised field labour of slaves), the wage-contract itself can be organised in different ways (under different labour systems), for example, as sharecropping, labour tenancy, or various forms of bondage, once we extend the notion of wages to include payments in land, housing, etc. Finally, free labour is a construct of liberal ideology, the lived experience of oppression under capitalism mystified as an ‘outcome of ordinary principles of freedom of contract’, and the only real freedom workers possess under capitalism or any system of domination is their power of resistance, that is, the capacity they have as individuals to act on the world, both individually and through the common action of groups.”³¹

If we are to properly understand the role of slave labor in the formation of the capitalist mode of production, and thus the constitutive antagonisms and specific appearances of class struggle in the course of modernity, our understanding of this legal fiction of free labor, and furthermore its importance to class-partisan conceptions of freedom (i.e. bourgeois freedom), must be further developed. The means by which I aim to do so will be to further take this understanding of the potentiality of coterminous and co-constitutive determinations of free and unfree labor, as a false opposition that conceals the absences of exclusion constitutive of capitalist modernity’s false universalism, will be through a further engagement of Banaji’s historiographic work on capitalist slavery and Cedric J. Robinson’s critical contributions to historical method in Black Marxism. What I find precisely important in Robinson’s work is the attention to the constitutive particularisms of European feudalism’s contributions to capitalist development, specifically in Robinson’s opening claim:

“The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange. Feudal society is the key. More particularly, the antagonistic commitments, structures, and ambitions that feudal society encompassed are better conceptualized as those of a developing civilization than as elements of a unified tradition.”³²

Robinson’s work rejects a historical analysis of capitalism that can only understand the role of racialized slave labor as either an antediluvian remnant or a deviation from an already pre-conceived and abstract notion of capitalism’s dynamics of class struggle, to which these historical struggles of the enslaved and to which the colonized must subordinate themselves. What Robinson offers here is an understanding that “[n]o class was its own creation. Indeed, capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relations”, from which we can in turn see that very preservation, from which the global subordination of other cultures to such particularities established them as a qualitatively distinct mode of production, a determinate negation which allows our present to be rendered intelligible to the continuity of the constitutive antagonisms and limits of racism and nationalism to which Robinson draws attention.³³ There is within this project, that Robinson names as the Black radical tradition which he seeks to reveal as prior to but revealed from within this capitalist modernity, a potential for a more pronounced theory of the State as a unity of racialized class struggle, apart from the false opposition of the political and the economic, as Fred Moten articulates in the formulation:

“To be a citizen you have to own yourself, buy yourself (everyday), sell yourself, equate yourself with money, figure yourself as/in relation to the commodity.”³⁴

1. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. P. 400.

2. Banaji, Jairus. 2011. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Pp. 5-6

3.  Ibid, p. 9

4. ‌Marx (1990) p. 345

5. Anderson, Perry. 1975. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso. P. 27.

6. Ibid, p. 37

7. Ibid, p. 38

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, p. 43

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid, p. 25

12. Ibid, p. 56

13. Ibid, p. 57

14. Ibid, p. 59

15. Ibid, p. 60

16. Ibid, pp. 60-1

17. Ibid, pp. 61-2

18. Ibid, p. 66

19. Ibid, pp. 66-7

20. Ibid, pp. 81-2

21. Banaji (2011) p. 117

22. Ibid, p. 118

23. Ibid, p. 106

24. Ibid, p. 107

25. Ibid, p. 106, emphasis Banaji’s.

26.  Ibid, p. 118

27. Ibid, p. 128

28. Ibid, p. 119

29. Marx (1990) p. 680

30. Ibid, pp. 300-02

31. Banaji (2011) pp. 153-4. Emphasis Banaji’s.

32. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill; London: University Of North Carolina Press. P. 9

33. Ibid, p. 10

34. Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press. P. 79.