The Annihilation of Space By Time

Notes on Race and Class, Valorization and Differentiation, and the Production of Historical Consciousness

Cotton Monument (2002) by Benny Andrews

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In a recent interview,¹ Ruth Wilson Gilmore draws upon Marx’s famous characterization of capital circulation as “the annihilation of space by time” to discuss the broken continuities between slavery and mass incarceration as distinct regimes of racialization. Where the plantation regime relied upon the exploitation of labor, mass incarceration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries sees fewer and fewer prisoners exploited for their labor, the vast majority of them left languishing in carceral space, subject to increasingly longer sentences. Where time once demarcated the boundaries of the working day and the exploitation of surplus labor time within it, the overproduction of surplus labor characteristic of capital accumulation has inaugurated a regime of crisis management reliant upon a domination of time relatively indifferent to the body’s potential capacities for labor, instead seeking to contain and constrain its movement. The incapacitation of “criminal elements” within the social body did not merely produce, but more importantly was produced by, the crisis response of carceral geography; the transformation of social surpluses into containment zones that have becomes ends unto themselves, despite the declining crime rates of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s which preceded the implementation of the largest prison-building program in human history.²

An essential contribution of Gilmore’s work is the manner by which she is able to address the production of a “changing same”³ regarding the pattern for change that traditional reformism has found itself in throughout its attempts to address a history that is one of the “violence of torture and official murder, toward the end of stealing labor, land, and reproductive capacity”.⁴ A key element of this continuity is the relationship between class and race as social categories articulating the production of subjectivity and the objective conditions of social life and its material reproduction. Gilmore rejects the narratives that see in mass incarceration a mere continuity of slavery’s regime of racialization, instead drawing attention to the distinct transformations and particularities of crisis in the political economy of globalization in the late 20th century United States to address the specific qualities of the prison industrial complex, and racialization’s expansion across historically and situationally contingent relations. 

From this study of the initial contingencies of race and its attachment to the production of social categories of differentiation, from “blackness” to “criminal” and the mutual implications created between these articulations, Gilmore’s definition of racism is produced. “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies.”⁵ If, as Stuart Hall famously claims, that race is the modality through which class and, as Gilmore expands the formulation, political-economic globalization, are lived, then the role of the State in group-differentiation and the production of differentiated conditions for life are essential determinants in studying not only the production of class, but the political contours of class struggle in its historical forms of intelligible appearance in racial blocs. 

This definition and its historical application will guide the focus of the present post in its beginning approach to racial capitalism’s historiographies in the black radical tradition and the production and movement of oppositional consciousnesses of race and class generated in and by racism as an internally-constitutive logic of class formation in the capitalist mode of production. Addressing this critical engagement of historiography on the terms of consciousness, however, will be somewhat difficult and opaque. It will necessarily be a pursuit that I will undertake with an eye towards self-criticism throughout, and one where failure must remain a possible result at all times. At the outset, then, let us observe a modest goal, where the methodological demands of a critical Marxist historiography can be laid out, and an initial survey of our literature be conducted. As a point of entry, let us explore the resonances that occur in the situation of this definition of racism, Robinson’s insight of racial capitalism and racialization as the internal logic of class formation in capitalism’s concrete historical actuality, and Marx’s notion of the annihilation of space by time. 

I. Circulating Annihilation

The form of value and the production of surplus value, understood as categories that are only operative in capitalist production at the scale of totality, are abstractions dictating a specific temporal trajectory to which the transformation of space is posited. In turn, the strategies towards their realization are conditioned by the spatial qualities of that social material which must become capable of valorization. In the Grundrisse, Marx first addresses this dynamic of temporal domination as it regards the importance of the development of means of communication and transport as the “physical conditions of exchange”, the material integuments of a development where production continually posits an ever-growing sphere of monetary exchanges and appropriations.⁶ 

These parts of Marx’s notes for Capital initially comprise an investigation into the nature of value-determination between the distinctive spheres of production and circulation. The distinct role of circulation is that of the “transformation of the commodity into money and retransformation of money into the conditions of production”, where this movement is comprised of sections that “are travelled in specific amounts of time”. As it is the case that “spatial distance reduces itself to time”, that the primary objective “is not the market’s distance in space, but the speed–the amount of time–with which it can be reached”, we find in circulation the question of “how often capital can be realized in a given period of time, how often it can reproduce and multiply its value. Thus a moment enters into value-determination which indeed does not come out of the direct relation of labour to capital.”⁷

The direct relation of labor to capital that is the primary determination of the value of a given commodity has to do with the direct exploitation of labor, temporally-articulated as a monetary quantum, i.e. labor-time, in the wage form. The wage form that mediates labor-power’s commodified existence is the constitutive relation of separation between the subject and its capacity to labor on its objective conditions of existence that distinguishes capitalist social relations, and thus the dynamic class antagonism that is the motive force of the capitalist mode of production. The sale and purchase of the commodity labor-power is revealed by Marx in Capital to be the essential precondition to the valorization of money as a form of capital, and thus the objective movement guiding subjectivity that comprises the movement and formation of surplus value. 

Between the formal equality of the relation established between buyer and seller, an equality established by the leveling quality of the money commodity’s mediation, a fundamental inequality of conditions of production and reproduction is concealed by the form of exchange. Marx illustrates how the essence of this relation appears in the totality of the capitalist production process as a synthesis of the processes of labor and valorization, stating 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. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes 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.”⁸

The commodity’s internal differentiation of use and exchange values is the articulation of labor-power’s differentiation in its conditions of reproduction and its exploitation in production. This differentiation immanent to labor-power as commodity is articulated and actualized by the wage form, and in the form of the wage lies the capacity for differentiation between values of labor-power, or values of certain types of labor-power, that dynamically constitute surplus value in the totality of the capitalist mode of production. That is, surplus value not merely as the product of a single instance of a capitalist production process, but surplus value as a product of the capitalist production process that is only made possible by the inter-exchanges and mutual intelligibility of separate sites of commodity production as the form of social production, where its capitalist form pertains as the general form. 

This social differentiation that gives the wage form its flexibility in the formal destination of surplus value is given by a further, internal differentiation of labor-time as the determination of value’s magnitude. Where the law of value amongst commodities is dictated by the socially necessary labor-time required to produce any given commodity under socially-determined conditions of production, the social cohesion of this average masks an internal temporality of labor-power that remains differentiated between the necessary and surplus labor-times of the worker. Thus we see that value is not solely produced by labor, but a specific form of labor in a specific temporal articulation that is mediated by monetary exchange.

Marx addresses this problem of necessary and surplus labor time on the social scale of valorization through the role that the sphere of circulation plays in value-determination. Understanding valorization, thus surplus value, as a unity of production and circulation, circulation, while not directly determining of value, is an essential moment of value’s creation.⁹ Yet it is “not a positive value-creating element”, as circulation time acts as a barrier on the movement of capital to the reproduction of the total process. Where elements of the valorization process lie between their realization in exchange or the transformation of money into that which can valorize it once more, this time of circulation “appears as a natural barrier to the realization of labour time. It is therefore in fact a deduction from surplus labour time, i.e. an increase of necessary labour time.”¹⁰ Thus, the labor of circulation may lie outside of the sphere of the direct, physical production of a commodity object, but it still lies within the relation of labor’s exploitation, essential to the construction and maintenance of the totality. This is what brings Marx to the conclusion that “[c]irculation time thus appears as a barrier to the productivity of labour”, and thus to an important understanding of an antagonistic, self-undermining dynamic between spheres of production and circulation that is internal to the logic of capital’s movement. The singularly destructive qualities of the capitalist mode of production are described in this annihilating movement, where “capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time.”¹¹

This movement takes us beyond the initial antinomy of production and circulation, giving us a scope of capital’s formal movement as a historical phenomenon. This annihilation of space by time comes to reveal a dynamic of crisis internal to capital’s organic relation. Where by crisis we mean the inability of a system to reproduce itself upon the pre-existing system of social relations,¹² we observe here the dual-sidedness of capital’s subordination of labor to the temporal imperatives of valorization. Capital is bound both by that which it aims to produce, that is, the infinite expansion of monetary wealth, and the inhibition upon that aim that is the effect of its production, the immanent possibility of capital’s supersession in the free development of productive forces as those of the species. Marx states the matter as such:

“There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production. Although limited by its very nature, it strives towards the universal development of the forces of production, and thus becomes the presupposition of a new mode of production, which is founded not on the development of the forces of production for the purpose of reproducing or at most expanding a given condition, but where the free, unobstructed, progressive and universal development of the forces of production is itself the presupposition of society and hence of its reproduction; where advance beyond the point of departure is the only presupposition. This tendency – which capital possesses, but which at the same time, since capital is a limited form of production, contradicts it and hence drives it towards dissolution – distinguishes capital from all earlier modes of production, and at the same time contains this element, that capital is posited as a mere point of transition.”¹³

This universalizing tendency should not be mistaken for an automatic progression. Nor should it be mistaken for a crude technological determinism. Indeed, this is the surprising turn that this exposition takes in Marx. From the internal logical antagonism of production and circulation we come to find that capital is but a transitory moment, a mode of production caught between that which made it what it is and that which this may indeed yet become. Capital’s success relative to previous forms of society is in the manner by which it excels at the production of wealth.¹⁴ With the production of this wealth being a product of the higher development of the forces of production comes the “richest development of the individuals”, and as “soon as this point is reached, the further development appears as decay, and the new development begins from a new basis.”¹⁵ But we know that this is, in actuality, a partial flourishing, produced and distributed unevenly. The accumulation of surplus labor time concretizes in the greater free time of some, and the more intensive exploitation of others as this surplus labor time is put to work, i.e. becomes capital-in-motion. What then of this dynamic that Marx identifies in the crisis, and what of the promise of the development of productive forces? We find this in how Marx addresses this problematic in the form of the individual and the role of the community, and how the antagonistic metabolism of social relations is what specifically renders this dynamic as capital’s perpetual transition:

“The purpose of the community, of the individual – as well as the condition of production – [is] the reproduction of these specific conditions of production and of the individuals, both singly and in their social groupings and relations – as living carriers of these conditions. Capital posits the production of wealth itself and hence the universal development of the productive forces, the constant overthrow of its prevailing presuppositions, as the presupposition of its reproduction. Value excludes no use value; i.e. includes no particular kind of consumption etc., of intercourse etc. as absolute condition; and likewise every degree of the development of the social forces of production, of intercourse, of knowledge etc. appears to it only as a barrier which it strives to overpower. Its own presupposition – value – is posited as product, not as a loftier presupposition hovering over production.  The barrier to capital is that this entire development proceeds in a contradictory way, and that the working-out of the productive forces, of general wealth etc., knowledge etc., appears in such a way that the working individual alienates himself; relates to the conditions brought out of him by his labour as those not of his own but of an alien wealth and of his own poverty. But this antithetical form is itself fleeting, and produces the real conditions of its own suspension. The result is: the tendentially and potentially general development of the forces of production – of wealth as such – as a basis; likewise, the universality of intercourse, hence the world market as a basis. The basis as the possibility of the universal development of the individual, and the real development of the individuals from this basis as a constant suspension of its barrier, which is recognized as a barrier, not taken for a sacred limit. Not an ideal or imagined universality of the individual, but the universality of his real and ideal relations. Hence also the grasping of his own history as a process, and the recognition of nature (equally present as practical power over nature) as his real body. The process of development itself posited and known as the presupposition of the same. For this, however, necessary above all that the full development of the forces of production has become the condition of production; and not that specific conditions of production are posited as a limit to the development of the productive forces.”¹⁶

The antagonistic presuppositions and movements of production and circulation are distilled here as the crystallization of capital’s social relations, where labor does not create value in and of itself, but value is created by a specific form of labor’s active self-alienation in and through value’s autonomous existence as the general form of social wealth. This form produces the conditions of its own crisis, but as transition it is rather the case that capital is its own crisis at inception. The trajectory of its development as accumulation, the expansion of the relation itself, reveals the successive structural adjustments of exploitation’s constitutive differentiations to be merely the interminable deferrals of this transition’s proper resolution. This forms the key to what Marx sees as the imputed resolution immanent to this false, or imagined, universality of the individual subject, separated from its objective conditions of existence. The universality of the subject’s “real and ideal relations”, their practical unity in the conscious relation of subject and object, forms the basis for the ability to grasp this unity in separation as the result of a historical process. Where historical consciousness enters into practical activity, capital’s temporality of valorization may be suspended from within its determinations. This, however, continues to depend on the contestation of these conditions of existence given by the relational antagonism of capital’s social metabolic order. We must then turn to the manner in which these abstract laws of motion and the immanent universality to them finds its transcendent moment in concrete historical totality.

II. Preliminary Notes on Historical Being

The role of historical consciousness to political struggle is still an actively contested one in theoretical literature. While a survey of this problem lies outside of our present interest, suffice it to say that Marx’s declaration that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” is too often invoked without a careful attention paid to the precise role of history and time in Marx’s work.¹⁷ Even in the autopsy to France’s contributions to 1848, sealed in the triumph of reaction in 1851, Marx places historical consciousness within the movement of capital’s constitutive relational antagonism. For the bourgeoisie, in its ascension to and seizure of State power through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.” For the proletariat of nineteenth century France, even if it “cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future”, we must remember that this entails a task. “It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.” Even if the content exceeds the phrase, we still owe this excess its due in recognition. Marx, even in addressing the nightmare of history, understood this interpenetration of opposites in the sublationary movement of history as process: “the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”¹⁸

A resonance to this movement in Marx’s thought occurs in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, though his position to the past is more forcefully declared. For Benjamin, where it was the error that “Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations”, it would succumb to the peril of “cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made 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.”¹⁹ Such sacrifice is that reverence cultivated by the recognition of the danger of and to memory that the dead face. Here we find ourselves only apparently bound between an antimony of past and present, the relative emphasis of each critique situated within the necessity of the political struggles of their times. Concealed within these declarations is a process, only hinted at by Marx’s analogy of language and the receding memory of the native tongue.

Cedric J. Robinson’s contributions in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition can be viewed as an attempt to systematize a tradition of struggle and resistance that exceeds the phrase of these antinomies, instead forming a critique that deploys historiography to the ends of a critical revision of the present, and thus a practical reorientation. For Robinson, it is not solely the historiographic texts and readings of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright that can alone make the black radical tradition intelligible as a distinct current, but the forms, aims, and histories of black and African struggle in the modernity of racial capitalism that these historiographies reconstitute in their constitution by this very movement. Thus too the lives of these authors bear an importance in the epistemological foundations of black radical historiography; the burying of the dead by those still experiencing social death as the preservation, transmission, and transmutation of historical and revolutionary consciousness. 

A pivotal moment in Robinson’s text occurs at the moment where his historiography of racial capitalism tracing the “roots of black radicalism” takes its final leap to the synthesis of “The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition”.²⁰ Here, Robinson distills the “character, [...] the ideological, philosophical, and epistemological natures of the Black movement whose dialectical matrix we believe was capitalist slavery and imperialism.”²¹ At stake here is the articulation of a movement, world-historical in its character and scope, that came to bear one of the most forceful refutations of the claims to universality borne by capitalist modernity’s particular notion of freedom. An initial observation from the historical record begins this movement in Robinson’s thought: “the absence of mass violence” that marked the revolts of the enslaved and oppressed in their rejection of the existence forced upon them via terror by those that assumed themselves to be their masters.²² For Robinson, this indicates that “a very different and shared order of things existed among these brutally violated people”, where “[t]here was violence of course, but in this tradition it most often was turned inward: the active against the passive [...] the community against its material aspect”,²³ a violence that resisted the fetishization of social relations in the people that assumed their character-masks:

“This violence was 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. Rather it was their ‘Jonestown,’ our Nongquase: 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. Like those in the 1950s who took to the mountains and forests of Kenya to become the Land and Freedom Army, the material or ‘objective’ power of the enemy was irrelevant to their destinies. His machines, which flung metal missiles, his vessels of smoke, gas, fire, disease, all were of lesser relevance than the integral totality of the people themselves.”²⁴

Here is introduced another, parallel occurrence of the annihilation of space by time, but this is a time contrary to valorization, both introduced as a preceding current of human social life, and unavoidably transformed in these crucibles of valorization. There is a specific substitution that occurs in this passage that I wish to draw out, a convergence in the way that historical consciousness arrives in the formation of subjectivity through the construction of their social objectivity by way of the radical separation from conditions of existence that is the mark of proletarianization. While not traditionally understood as a proletarian class formation, as C.L.R. James’ careful attention to the qualitative transformation of the quasi-peasantry production relations of the slaves on the San Domingo plantations shows, their “working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugarfactories which covered the North Plain” meant that “they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement.”²⁵ The conservative impulse of the ontological totality’s preservation that Robinson discovers is a product of this modernization of racial capitalism, the product of the intensive exploitation aimed at by the differentiating process of racial formation. This substitution of “actual being” for “historical being” is animated by the transmutation of the African into property, into abstract labor, to a value assigned a place on a ledger, the systematization of time that begets the implication of a continuity that is rendered intelligible by, but is not reducible to its abstract representation. Thus Robinson declares this to be “a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism”,²⁶ but as James already asserts, it was also a response, not reaction, to these conditions and relations.

This question of how and where historical consciousness enters into the subjectivity of the processes of racial class formation as a moment of the objective movement of capitalist development is what interests me here, as the pairing of Marx’s grasping of history as a process and Robinson’s renunciation of actual being for historical being both appear as immanent to the movements that they respectively trace. At stake here is also identifying where the particularity of the revolutionary consciousness that Robinson identifies in the black radical tradition can also be understood as not only a moment within, but also an originary element in the production of a proletarian consciousness in the objective movements of the capitalist mode of production, from which the contours of race’s particularity can reveal essential aspects of the supposed universality of class. 

James’ formulation of race and class remains one of the most compelling, though we must note that it merely defines a quasi-hierarchy between the two. “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”²⁷ This highlights an understated aspect of Robinson’s Black Marxism, that the engagement with Marxism by his selected representatives of the historiographic tradition was essential to their critical engagements with the histories of black radicalism and racial capitalism. So too is this a case where it is clear that for James, Marx’s conception of social relations retains primacy over the biologization of race that marked the exact contours of the revolutionary struggle in San Domingo. Robinson’s study of racial capitalism assigns the originating logic of racialism in the practices of European nation-state formation, a reification of the political-economic dynamics of capital accumulation in the ethnic groupings of its competitors. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the global construction of an architecture of surplus value formation integral to the creation of a generalized market society in the metropoles of European empire, and created a firmament in which race as a biological concept would be preserved for centuries. In these struggles and this priority given, we can see that the dynamic is not race’s production of racialism, but the production of race by racism and racialism.

How are we to find race’s undoing, its entwinement and ultimate reliance upon the social relation of class, in the example of Haitian victory where James is able to produce it? It is most apparent in the tragedy that accompanies the struggle for Haitian sovereignty. The failures of Toussaint, that figure that James is so painstaking in enumerating his strengths, comes to represent the limits of bourgeois freedom and the preservation of property that could be accommodated within the imperial foundations of the French Republic’s conception of freedom. This is that failure of Enlightenment that James so famously speaks of, where the darkness of the masses that Toussaint kept at bay, and failed to maintain communication between, led to the collapse of his forces at the pivotal time, and to his capture by the French. This too led to the retribution of Dessalines, the violence of the revolution’s peak that James is so critical of, and that Robinson identifies, through James, as a betrayal of the tradition. History demonstrates its own cunning as the limits to emancipation in this instance asserted themselves.

Du Bois also offers an initial series of formulations tracking the problematics of race and bourgeois consciousness in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. “So long as slavery was a matter of race and color, it made the conscience of the nation uneasy and continually affronted its ideals.”²⁸ Where the abolition of the slave trade appeared to bring the hope of a gradual amelioration of this condition, it instead led to its further economic rationalization under the formal subsumption by capital. “It might be more profitable in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap Africans; but in America without a slave trade, it paid to conserve the slave and let him multiply.”²⁹ The expropriation and genocide of Indigenous peoples left a clearing of land that the plantation could be placed upon as a complete terraforming of capital’s primitive accumulation, incorporating the production of raw material inputs as the engine of labor-power’s differentiation within the circuits of surplus value’s global formation. “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America.”³⁰

It is here where Robinson marks an important element of Du Bois’ contribution, that “it was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance that these Black men, women, and children had for American development. It was as labor.”³¹ It is as this capacity to shape and act intentionally upon their conditions of existence that Du Bois wishes to emphasize in the first chapter, “The Black Worker”, locating both the aim of slavery in forming racial capitalism’s modernity, and too those human capacities brought in through racial capitalism that undermine its own developmental aspirations. On the racial determination of social condition and the slave status, this undoing becomes apparent for Du Bois in the responses of market imperatives and the very biologization of reproduction that racialsm theorized in an absolutist mode throughout the development of scientific racism in the age of mercantile colonialism: “Thus human slavery in the South pointed and led in two singularly contradictory and paradoxical directions–toward the deliberate commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit and toward the intermingling of black and white blood. The slaveholders shrank from acknowledging either set of facts but they were clear and undeniable.”³² This instability of the order of the South’s social system at the heart of its own internal logic of reproduction led Du Bois to one explanation for the dynamic of slave revolts and their failures specific to the US, and a structural consideration still relevant to the contemporary moment:

“The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. This explains the difference between the slave revolts in the West Indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the Southern United States. In the West Indies, the power over the slave was held by the whites and carried out by them and such Negroes as they could trust. In the South, on the other hand, the great planters formed proportionately quite as small a class but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites ; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves. Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own ‘niggers.’ To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white. Even with the late ruin of Haiti before their eyes, the planters, stirred as they were, were nevertheless able to stamp out slave revolt. The dozen revolts of the eighteenth century had dwindled to the plot of Gabriel in 1800, Vesey in 1822, of Nat Turner in 1831 and crews of the Amistad and Creole in 1839 and 1841. Gradually the whole white South became an armed and commissioned camp to keep Negroes in slavery and to kill the black rebel.”³³

As Gilmore makes clear, slavery and mass incarceration are not identical regimes of racialization that can be drawn together in one, unbroken continuity. Such a history would itself be hopeless. But here we can discern an aspect of racialization’s function in group-differentiation and the exploitation of premature death by which racism produces racial lines of class struggle. So too do we see, in the enforcement and supervisory functions of white surplus labor, the circulatory labor required to maintain the physical means of exchange, the movement of capital as the subordinated movement of human labor. Here arrives the formative political determinations of state formation that we see in the juridical transition of slave property in the fugitivity assigned to blackness as a foundational criminalization. This does not translate, however, to a dynamic of racialized incarceration in the antebellum period. Indeed, the plantation order dealt with black fugitivity well enough; incarceration was the lot of unruly poor whites prior to emancipation. But this is still an essential piece of the kinds of class collaboration facilitated by racialism and the production of race that would become an organic strategy of capital’s stability. Du Bois delivers us a portrait of racial capitalism’s social objectivity as one of counterinsurgent formation; racism and racial formation the guarantor of labor’s self-alienation. Neither purely the invention of planter elites to trick the lowly whites, nor a pure expression of an essential difference, but a product of the antagonistic social relations of the capitalist mode of production and the contingencies produced by its internally constitutive class struggle as a motor of development.

I will conclude with a brief remark here regarding Gilmore’s work on racism, and the shifting relation she identifies, through the study of the black radical tradition and struggles against mass incarceration, between a distinction between race and color that is illuminated by the contingency of criminality’s identification with blackness. “The racial in racial capitalism”, Gilmore says, “isn’t epiphenomenal, nor did it originate in color or intercontinental conflict, but rather always group-differentiation to premature death. Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”³⁴ This inequality in differentiation emerges as surplus value’s organic relation to capital, but does not remain tethered to any one skin, though it finds its axis in the historical articulations of blackness as a locus of exploitation and capital’s valorization. In value’s abstraction of labor to the production surplus labor time, this temporality gives way to the exploitation of time as the form of labor’s self-alienation. Thus, Gilmore asks, what does it mean to say that today’s prisons are extractive? “It means prisons enable money to move because of the enforced inactivity of people locked in them. It means people extracted from communities, and people returned to communities but not entitled to be of them, enable the circulation of money on rapid cycles. What’s extracted from the extracted is the resource of life – time.”³⁵ But time’s annihilation of space is a double-edged sword. Sitting uneasily next to this extraction of time through its abstract domination is the introduction of historical consciousness that is brought in by duration, through intergenerational transmission, and the spatial reconstruction that forms through what Gilmore names as abolition geography, and for Robinson is the renunciation of actual being for historical being, the preservation of the ontological totality. A final word, by way of Fred Moten, finds in this reproduction of differentiation by the fiction of race that very potentiality of a common being immanent to racial capitalism:

“It is not just that absolutist formulations of a kind of being-fabricated are here understood themselves to be fabrications; it is also that renunciation will have ultimately become intelligible only as a general disruption of ownership and of the proper when the ontological totality that black people claim and preserve is understood to be given only in this more general giving. The emergence and preservation of blackness, as the ontological totality, the revolutionary consciousness that black people hold and pass, is possible only by way of the renunciation of actual being and the ongoing conferral of historical being–the gift of historicity as claimed, performed, dispossession. Blackness, which is to say black radicalism, is not the property of black people. All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands. This open collective being is blackness–(racial) difference mobilized against the racist determination it calls into existence in every moment of the ongoing endangerment of “actual being,” of subjects who are supposed to know and own.  It makes a claim on us even as it is that upon which we all can make a claim, precisely because it—and its origins—are not originary. That claim, which is not just one among others because it is also just one+more among others, however much it is made under the most extreme modes of duress, in an enabling exhaustion that is, in Stanley Cavell’s word, unowned, takes the form, in Glissant’s word, of consent. Consent not to be a single being, which is the anoriginal, anoriginary constitution of blackness as radical force—as historical, paraontological totality—is for Robinson the existential and logical necessity that turns the history of racial capitalism, which is also to say the Marxist tradition, inside out. What cannot be understood within, or as a function of, the deprivation that is the context of its genesis can only be understood as the ongoing present of a common refusal. This old-new kind of transcendental aesthetic, off and out in its immanence as the scientific productivity such immanence projects, is the unowned, differential, and differentiated thing itself that we hold out to one another, in the bottom, under our skin, for the general kin, at the rendezvous of victory.”³⁶

1. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore W/ Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar: The Dig.” n.d. Thedigradio.com. Accessed June 18, 2022. https://thedigradio.com/podcast/ruth-wilson-gilmore-w-alberto-toscano-and-brenna-bhandar/.

2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University Of California Press. Pp. 5-29

3. A formulation Gilmore deploys that is adopted from Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” Black Music, New York: William Morrow, 1967, 180-211.

4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2021. “Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence.” Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. S.L.: Verso. P. 195.

5. Ibid, “Race and Globalization” p. 107

6. Marx, Karl, and Martin Nicolaus. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London ; New York: Penguin Books In Association With New Left Review. P. 524 “The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.”

7. Ibid, pp. 537-38

8. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. P. 300

9. Marx (1993) p. 538 “Thus, while circulation does not itself produce a moment of value-determination, for that lies exclusively in labour, its speed does determine the speed with which the production process is repeated, values are created – thus, if not values, at least to a certain extent the mass of values. Namely, the values and surplus values posited by the production process, multiplied by the number of repetitions of the production process in a given period of time.”

10. Ibid, p. 539

11. Ibid, pp. 539-40

12. Stuart Hall’s formulation, which is a more than adequate summary.

13. Marx (1993) p. 540

14. Ibid, pp. 540-42 “All previous forms of society – or, what is the same, of the forces of social production – foundered on the development of wealth. Those thinkers of antiquity who were possessed of consciousness therefore directly denounced wealth as the dissolution of the community. The feudal system, for its part, foundered on urban industry, trade, modern agriculture (even as a result of individual inventions like gunpowder and the printing press). With the development of wealth – and hence also new powers and expanded intercourse on the part of individuals – the economic conditions on which the community rested were dissolved, along with the political relations of the various constituents of the community which corresponded to those conditions: religion, in which it was viewed in idealized form (and both [religion and political relations] rested in turn on a given relation to nature, into which all productive force resolves itself); the character, outlook etc. of the individuals.”

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid, emphasis mine.

17. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

18. Ibid, emphasis mine.

19. Benjamin, Walter, Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Wieseltier. 2013. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, , Cop. p. 260.

20. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill; London: University Of North Carolina Press. Chapter 7.

21. Ibid, p. 167

22. Ibid, p. 168

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid, pp. 168-69

25. James, C.L.R. 1989. The Black Jacobins. New York, N.Y.: Vintage. Pp. 85-86

26. Robinson (2000), p. 169

27. James (1989) p. 283

28. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. New York, Ny: The Free Press. P. 4

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid, p. 5

31. Robinson (2000), p. 199

32. Du Bois (1998) p. 11

33. Ibid, p. 12

34. Gilmore (2021) “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence”, pp. 494-95

35. Ibid, p. 474

36. Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham ; London: Duke University Press. Pp. 236-37