The Ties That Bind

Primitive Acculturation #2: Marx and Robinson, the Stakes of Nation and Race

Flamenco Dancers (2012) by Ibrahim El-Salahi

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But now, when the boat swept under the merchantman’s stern, and officer and oarsmen were noting–some bitterly and others with a grin–the name emblazoned there; just then it was that the new recruit jumped up from the bow where the coxswain had directed him to sit, and waving his hat to his silent shipmates sorrowfully looking over at him from the taffrail, bade the lads a genial good-bye. Then, making a salutation as to the ship herself, “And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.” 

“Down, Sir!” roared the Lieutenant, instantly assuming all the rigour of his rank, though with difficulty repressing a smile.

– Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

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The social force of the State is that form in and through which primitive accumulation is carried out as capital’s continually instantiated and reconstituted pre-history. The originating process of primitive accumulation comprises an anterior moment from which surplus labor-time is the product of a process that instantiates an expanded reproduction of the temporal conditions of production, where surplus-value is derived not as the individual product of every isolated commodity producer, but the generative logic of the totality of commodity producers in their relation of exchange to each other. This is a flexibility afforded only by the entrance of the worker as an exchange-value itself through their existence as the owner of the commodity labor-power. 

Many of my previous engagements on this page have gestured thus far at a developing understanding of the value form in the capitalist mode of production, its appearances as money and the commodity that are the crystallizations and formal conditions of possibility of abstract labor’s social substantialization in and as its adequate appearance, and the question of historical necessity as that which is contingent upon the balance of forces of the class struggle that is the motive force and foundation of the capital relation. This final concern specifically is that which is most closely identified with a theory and critique of the State form that is one aim of this current research project, and which in turn cannot be properly understood absent the dynamic social and historical constitution of value relations. 

We left our encounter between Marx and Cedric J. Robinson at the impasse of merchant and State, the originary moments of a capitalist mode of production’s initial positing within that very socially-constituted unity of the commodity’s production and circulation that the merchant’s concentration of many sales and purchases brings to bear on the immanent possibilities of social production’s scale, operation, and form, both in front of and behind the backs of the producers. Where Marx’s historical material on merchant’s capital presents us with the function of a merchant class in the formation of capital in circulation that anticipates and will come to articulate the partisan necessity that will demand production’s transformation, Robinson brings us an interrogation of the particularistic ethnic and racial compositions of merchant classes despite and even through their role in the formation of a capitalist production process. This concern is the foundation of that historical content from which Robinson can identify and name a fundamental racial capitalism, basing the foundation of his critique of Marx/ism on an engagement with the underdeveloped conceptions of racialism and nationalism, not as mere ideology but as logics informing and arising from the conditions of European feudalism that became essential to the concrete determination of capitalist social relations in the encounters with African and Asiatic peoples from which Europe would found its unitary expression. Yet the unitary conception of Europe in mercantile capitalism’s imperial conquests, exploitation, and domination of the peoples and territories of the African and American continents is a geographic abstraction from which we understand a spatial representation of social, political, and economic power in the material reproduction of social life. 

Both Marx and Robinson share a concern as to the operations of this totality and its conditions of existence. The basis of this encounter between them in primitive accumulation is twofold. On the one hand, the question of capitalist slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade often rests in this contested position of forms of exploitation and relations of production, the plantation often viewed as an intermediary production enterprise that was destined to fail. More recent scholarship, however, has made the significant advances of demonstrating the precise manner in which plantation production in the US South, as well as those of the other Atlantic colonies of European empires, were integral moments in the process of capitalist accumulation and the formation of modern industrialization, in many cases profitable until their end. On the other hand, this aspect of the capitalist mode of production’s formation in and through distinct and uneven combinations of entrepreneurial conquest, the ensuing internalization of colonial exploitation and production by the State, introduces geopolitical considerations into the determination of class forces and struggles in this epoch, and thus too the basis of capitalist social relations of production and the historically concrete forms of their appearance. 

Robinson’s critique of Marx/ism embarks from this point, where the particularistic composition of European merchant classes and the means by which the modern State would be yoked to, and thus fundamentally transform, these antecedent regimes of capital accumulation, produced the social and historical form of the nation. The analysis of the nation, of nationalism and its attendant and constitutive racialism, in this case aims to be a critique and refinement of the role of the State, the “concentrated and organized force of society”,¹ as Marx understood it, in producing a racial capitalism in the formative epoch of this mode of production. The core of Robinson’s concern in this regard is that this complex of the nation cannot be understood as a “social, historical, and economic category”, and thus “not a unit of analysis for the social history of Europe” but rather a “convenient construct” for the categorization and administration of the “particular identities, the particular social movements and societal structures” that led to the formation of Europe’s capitalist dominance. For Robinson, the “truer character of European history resides beneath the phenomenology of nation and state”, although we will see here that his dynamic analysis of nationalisms, both oppressive and emancipatory, complicates just how much is obscured by this phenomenology.²

A conflictual indeterminacy and prominence of the nation-state undergirds Robinson’s account, as the concept of the nation comes to articulate the basis for the dominance of a particular cultural configuration of class rule that is generalized in the form of the State. The importance of this investigation is not merely one of Europe’s historiography, but for that of the anti-colonial revolutions and Pan-Africanism of the twentieth century, as the advent of Third World national liberation movements posed a difficulty for the practical and theoretical articulations of internationalist solidarity from the industrial working classes of capitalist metropoles.³ Robinson’s critique of Marx/ism is one that must be understood as in engagement with this world-historical complication to an orthodoxy that assumed a universalist class interest from the global subsumption and generalization of the capitalist mode of production’s constitutive class antagonism. Particularistic elements derived from pre-capitalist social and cultural influences would produce a more complicated matrix of differentiated and hierarchized exploitation, where racialist ideology was not a residue of capitalist social relations, but directly inform their practical construction. 

We then inherit a tension between the attempts in historical abolitionist and anti-colonial struggles to preserve a culture threatened with or directly facing annihilation and the coterminous transformation of cultures that find their encounter in this struggle. Robinson’s thesis is that the role of “African ontological and cosmological systems; African presumptions of the organization and significance of social structure; African codes embodying historical consciousness and social experience; and African ideological and behavioral constructions for the resolution of the inevitable conflict between the actual and the normative” were more influential to the social constitution of forms of resistance to slavery and colonization than have been previously admitted.⁴ This forms the basis from which the expropriation and transfer of African labor into the American colonies involved a transmutation of African social and cultural ties into the foundation for “a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization.”⁵ An important summation of his project and thesis appears in the text immediately preceding this:

“The makings of an essentially African response, strewn across the physical and temporal terrain of societies conceived in Western civilization, have been too infrequently distinguished. Only over time has the setting for these events been integrated into the tradition. The social cauldron of Black radicalism is Western society. Western society, however, has been its location and its objective condition but not–except in a most perverse fashion–its specific inspiration. Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilization, but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation. It is certain that the evolving tradition of Black radicalism owes its peculiar moment to the historical interdiction of African life by European agents. In this sense, the African experience of the past five centuries is simply one element in the mesh of European history: some of the objective requirements for Europe's industrial development were met by the physical and mental exploitation of Asian, African, and native American peoples. This experience, though, was merely the condition for Black radicalism–its immediate reason for and object of being–but not the foundation for its nature or character. Black radicalism, consequently, cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black.”⁶

What Robinson aims to emphasize here is that there is no doubt that colonization and slavery form the immediate basis for the formation of an African resistance, yet it is not the sole basis for those means by which effective resistances were formed. Thus, a greater attention to the historiography of African struggle, the very construction of the “African”, is required in order to understand the terms of struggle, logic of emancipation, and conception of freedom that was both constituted by and exceeded the terms of those established by a modernity dominated by European capitalists. This politico-cultural synthesis that formed out of the inter-continental encounter of primitive accumulation is emphasized by Robinson in quoting Walter Rodney, stating that the “similarity of African survivals in the New World points not to tribal peculiarities but to the essential oneness of African culture. That culture was the shield which frustrated the efforts of Europeans to dehumanize Africans through servitude. The slave may have appeared in a profit and loss account as an ‘item,’ and ‘thing,’ a piece of ‘property,’ but he faced his new situation as an African, a worker, and a man. At this level of perception, it is quite irrelevant to enquire from which tribe or region a particular African originated.”⁷ Therefore, it is not merely the case that the particular in the formation of these struggles is understated, but that a contrary universalism of African resistance forms from this subjection and exploitation. The direct import of Rodney’s dialectic from within Robinson’s thesis is that we see from within this very struggle for preservation a requisite transformation that reconstitutes its basis for resistance. Emancipatory conceptions of social and political power, the discourses and doctrines of Right and the role of the State in struggle, are put into continuous contention of class struggle as an ongoing limit point of formal equality on these very terms. This has the potential to serve as a basis for a radical critique of the false universalism of capitalist modernity.

It is here that I aim to develop this interrogation into the tension between the particular and the universal through the relation between the concept of the primitive accumulation of capital and the dynamics of the expanded reproduction of capitalist social relations through the ongoing process of accumulation. In this historicization of the capitalist mode of production, the conflict between the coterminous development and integrated reproductions of wage labor and chattel slavery serve as a critical conjuncture for our understanding of the relation between specific forms of exploitation, both in pre-capitalist and capitalist forms, and historical social relations of production within a definite mode of production. In assessing the differences between pre-capitalist forms of slave labor and the role of wage labor within the social form of the commodity and its production, Marx makes an important distinction in the Grundrisse:

“In production based on slavery, as well as in patriarchal agricultural-industrial production, where the greatest part of the population directly satisfies the greatest part of its needs directly by its labour, the sphere of circulation and exchange is still very narrow; and more particularly in the former, the slave does not come into consideration as engaged in exchange at all. But in production based on capital, consumption is mediated at all points by exchange, and labour never has a direct use value for those who are working.”⁸

The wage laborer is an independent center of circulation within the totality of social relations, thus as the bearer of the commodity labor-power that must be sold as the basis of a monetized mediation of subsistence, a member themselves integrated into the social task of capital’s reproduction. The worker appears to the capitalist as consumers and possessors of money, moments of exchange-value. “They are so many centres of circulation with whom the act of exchange begins and by whom the exchange value of capital is maintained.”⁹ This is readily apparent to us as the economic articulation of the individual as a unit of social existence, one that is at once social, yet in the form of the commodity as the cell of capitalist social life, only appears as itself. We may assume the individual by its name and from our immediate perception an intrinsic category of existence, but as Marx states “human beings become individuals only through the process of history”, that is, the separation of this subjective existence from its position within an objectivity is not an inherent condition, but the product of historical moments in its construction.¹⁰ In contrast to the wage laborer, within this relational complex of the commodity form and the individuation of exchange-value, we find in the capitalist subsumption and transformation of slave labor an attendant particularization where the separation of individuation constitutes and is constituted by a social logic of differentiation as a predicate for exploitation. 

Yet on the terms of the primitive accumulation of capital, we have in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and its role in the establishment of a colonial periphery that bolstered the wealth, power, and prospects for capitalist forms of industrialization in European states a suspended proletarianization that accompanies the dispossession necessary for the production of surplus labor-time and the commodity labor-power.¹¹ A conventional understanding of this form of exploitation in its appearance as a component of capitalist social relations of production is that, much like the instrumentum vocale of antiquity, the slave here is considered part of the objective conditions of production, a piece of the plantation or colonial enterprise’s infrastructure of fixed capital that is, in this case, constant capital, as the slave laborer does not operate as a consumer, as this status of being an independent center of circulation is part of the formal equality of free labor from which they are deprived. Of this, Robinson too deploys Marx’s conception of the composition of capital to the application of property to the enslaved African: “African workers had been transmuted by the perverted canons of mercantile capitalism into property. Then, 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.”¹² 

This transmutation into components of the world market is an essential link between the forcible dispossession of primitive accumulation and the production of the commodity labor-power of which this moment of capitalist reproduction is both condition and consequence. It is this totality of social relations that form the necessary historical process for the violence of abstraction that maintains the social substantialization of living labor capacity into its purely subjective form as mere commodity owner. Introducing the “prehistory” of capital, Marx gives us the abstract coordinates of this class polarization that undergirds the hierarchical differentiation of capitalist exploitation:

“In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors. The free workers are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With the polarization of the commodity-market into these two classes, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are present. The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as 'primitive' because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.”¹³

This becomes the development of the analysis of this historical process that is encountered in the Grundrisse. Where Proudhon’s commitment to this exertion of force as the deployment of extra-economic means, Marx sees this as an insufficient indictment and forms the rebuttal that “the extra-economic origin of property means nothing else than the historic origin of the bourgeois economy”, as those categories which are the incriminations of political economy’s dismal science.¹⁴ Thus we find that it “is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.”¹⁵ A complication to traditional understandings of dispossession and capitalist social relations is presented by the manner in which slave labor involved a non-wage laboring workforce, but one that nonetheless could not be described as definitively exempt from proletarianization despite their exemption from the market, as C.L.R. James would go on to demonstrate through the revolutionary Black partisans of the Haitian Revolution.¹⁶ 

This allows us to identify a significant departure between the precise objects of Marx and Robinson’s critiques, from which we may better evaluate the directions in which we follow each. Where Marx presents us with a critique of political economy as that science most adequate to grasping the self-consciousness of the capitalist mode of production, Robinson presents us with a critique of Marx/ism’s conception of the class struggle that animates the mode of production as the constitutive relation of this antagonistic social metabolic order. For Robinson, the investigation into the racialist and nationalist origins of capitalism form the basis for the concrete articulations and bases of class struggle in historical actuality, and the abolitionist and anti-colonial struggle one of a world-historical import that has most significantly countered and reshaped the direction of capital’s modernity, yet has remained understudied by a Marxism that had prioritized the organization and struggles of the industrial working classes of the capitalist metropoles of empire. 

The question of an engagement between these two figures is often whether or not Marxism survives the encounter. It is my contention that it does, and that a critique of political economy worth its salt can incorporate and accept the limitations of its predecessors as that self-critique that an emancipatory universalism requires. One may even find such a commitment to immanent critique in Robinson’s own objectives, as a critical historiography that takes racialism as a conscious self-knowledge of European nation-states’ objectives amidst international competition within and beyond their own continental boundaries, a sphere where the unitary notions of the “European” or “Western civilization” were themselves reaction-formations to the trading supremacy of Eastern Muslim and North African participants in early forms of commercial capitalism.¹⁷ Of this materialization of social practice in his thesis of racialism, he says:

“Racialism, as I have tried to show, ran deep in the bowels of Western culture, negating its varying social relations of production and distorting their inherent contradictions. The comprehension of the particular configuration of racist ideology and Western culture has to be pursued historically through successive eras of violent domination and social extraction that directly involved European peoples during the better part of two millennia. Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences. Western culture, constituting the structure from which European consciousness was appropriated, the structure in which social identities and perceptions were grounded in the past, transmitted a racialism that adapted to the political and material exigencies of the moment. In the medieval and feudal social orders of the European hinterland and the Mediterranean, racialism was substantiated by specific sets of exploitation through which particular caste or classes exploited and expropriated disparate peoples.”¹⁸

Robinson, following Henri Pirenne, sees the reappearance of urban life following the collapse of the Roman empire and the integration of Germanic migrants with other peoples “resulted in a social order of domination from which a racial theory of order emerged; one from which the medieval nobilities would immerse themselves and their power in fictional histories, positing distinct racial origins for rulers and the dominated.”¹⁹ In the moments of struggle and peasant revolt from which this feudal nobility would come to find a class solidarity in rule, and the eventual necessity to subordinate themselves to the growing power of merchants, the germ of the nation as the form of State adequate to the capitalist mode of production, the form through which that mode of production would be successively reproduced, is made apparent. Robinson makes clear the motives for his focus on the form by which the particular violently asserts itself as the universal, from which this universalism finds its characteristic expression: “The dismissal of culture, that is, a transmitted historical consciousness, as an aspect of class consciousness, did not equip the Marxian movement for the political forces that would not only erupt in Europe and the Third World but within the movement itself.”²⁰ 

This reflexive historicization of nationalism as a force and articulation of both conservative and emancipatory movements is an incisive point for not only re-engaging the global wave of decolonization after World War II, emerging as it did within the vacuum of imperial self-destruction and reconstitution, but as well the centuries of Trans-Atlantic abolitionism, the study of which in recent decades has grown to not only trace the role of mercantile commerce in the formation of the capitalist mode of production, but also the overt and radical internationalism of the maritime proletariat that forged a global political force that would come to be the decisive factor in the eventual end of the slave trade over the course of centuries of contestation and struggle. This historical reorientation on the foundations for an emancipatory politics is also found by Robinson in Marx’s own delineation of the precise objectives of his conception of primitive accumulation as it appears in Capital, contrary to the readings of the Russian Narodnik socialists that interpreted this as the “process of industrialization and social development that Russia should assume in order to achieve a social revolution.”²¹ As Marx drafted in a letter that was never sent to the journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski addressing the claims of N.K. Mikahilovsky:

“The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. . . . That is all. But that is too little for my critic. He feels he absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which ensures, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.)”²²

This would too appear to correspond to Marx’s own specification of the aims and limits of his historiographic sketch of England’s path to the formation of the capitalist mode of production within and as the formation of a modern national State form, contrary to the many interpretations of the section on primitive accumulation that would follow and assume England to be not merely the classical form, but the origin of capitalism itself:

“In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.”²³

Primitive accumulation is not an event in a linear history of the capitalist mode of production, but a process of expropriation from which its constitutive class antagonism finds actualization and of which the commodity form of labor-power is fully realized. This conception that Marx provides does not preclude the role of merchants, the compulsions of the world market and the origins of capital and the commodity in the sphere of circulation from origins, but supplements their historical role with that overt force that is an essential economic relation of capital. The political aspects of this process and the role of the State are cast in the relief of this objective, of that violence that is the essential backdrop to the efficacy of the eventual habituation of laboring classes to the “silent compulsion of economic relations”.²⁴ This history is by no means confined to the English example, but it is one where the most vital aspects of the process come into play for Marx, not least of which are the concentration of class domination in the modern, national form of State and the exploitation of a labor market given cohesion by the limit of the nation-state. Yet this too lends credence to Robinson’s thesis of Marx/ism’s historical limits in the inability to properly critique the nation as a fiction from which the State would form an ideological cohesion that acts as a force of social production. The critique of the State form, as both the general site of class domination in the capitalist mode of production and in the particular form as the nation that unifies a people above the antagonism of class, would remain the ongoing terrain of struggle to which, according to Robinson, Marxism would be unprepared.

By way of Fred Moten, we find an articulation of this interrelation of relations of production and State in his interpretation of David Kazanjian’s encounter with Olaudah Equiano’s entrance into the Trans-Atlantic merchant marine trade, his declaration in his narrative to “commence merchant.” Equiano is himself a pivotal figure in Trans-Atlantic abolitionism and class struggle, such a one in history whose individual life’s narrative, his very commitment of his life to narrative, makes clear that individuality is at once social in practice. Equiano was enslaved from West Africa, originally of the Igbo people, in the mid-eighteenth century. He would go on to witness the disciplinary regimes that the production of labor-power entails exacted upon slave and sailor, his memoir The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano consummating his testimony of the experience of his journey through slavery, his pursuit and achievement of manumission, and his commitment to Trans-Atlantic abolitionism. His life and work is an example of that portent of the discourses and doctrines of the Rights of Man in the the revolutionary tumult of the late-eighteenth century that would articulate not merely the intersubjective determinations of the modern State, formed as it was in bourgeois class seizure and consolidation, but so too in that universality that exceeds the anticipations of that very particularistic interests from which its modernity is first declared and demanded.²⁵ 

 For Moten, it is the case that “[t]o 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.”²⁶ This engagement in the form of capitalist social life’s constitutive subjectivity “is in the nature of subjection but it isn’t just answering the inaugurative, interpellative call of the state and its apparatuses; it’s literally trying to be like the state when the state is constituted like an exemplary subject when, in the levying of taxes or the setting of monetary policy, it buys itself, owns itself, comes into its own as itself as force or power.”²⁷ The social and the individual are enfolded as a dual aspect of an objective totality that is of the one as much as it is a violation of this oneness. Thus it is this unity of commodity and State in the one of subjection that the specificity of the aspiration towards the universal is claimed by the State, in a general interest that is mediated through the equivalency of the form of value. Moten’s engagement with Marx produces the notion that “[i]f the construction of a general equivalent, abstract labor, elides differences it is because generality has been yoked to equivalence.”²⁸ Equivalence and differentiation become discerning operations of a sovereignty that is itself composed of this antagonism, a tension that attracts a unity in its very movement of repulsion. 

Moten’s reading of Equiano’s commencing merchant is that of this elision between enslavement and freedom, a moment in an abolitionist life where the passage of the traded into the trader is the subject’s own action that instantiates the totality of social relations in and through their very antinomy. It is in this relation and the appearance of such a contradiction, this unruly apposition, that the abstraction of the commodity is that which is the formal condition and consequence of abstract labor, where the “indeterminacy of fluid activity has been solidified into a determinate and inanimate object.”²⁹ This relational form of social production’s mediation is that very means by which “generality conceals itself—and is at the same time nearest in its concealment—in difference.”³⁰ This is where Moten presents us with an aspect of Marx that captures the capitalist mode of production’s distinct form of historicity in the intersection of primitive accumulation and the State, that the “animation of the object, which is inseparable in slavery from the animation of labor, is a dis/possessive force.”³¹ Engaging with abstract labor and slavery through Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Grundrisse, he says:

“Marx discusses this dis/possessive force in terms of its effect on the worker, on the history of a set of relations of ownership, mediated by the community, between the individual worker and nature (most often figured as the land, the earth, “the natural condition of production,” which is, in turn, related to by the worker as “his own inorganic being; the workshop of his forces, the domain of his will”), the individual worker and the instruments of labor, the individual worker and the necessaries of life. The dissolution of these relations is a necessary precondition of capitalism. But to what is Marx blind? The relationship between the dis/possession of the worker (which is to say the emergence of the capitalist as the one who appropriates the labor power of the laborer) and the dis/possessive force of the worker. But this is, of course, false. Rather, one should say that Marx produces this relation without discovering it; that a certain presence of dis/possessive force is unleashed when ownership is figured as a relation to nature and to instruments. The proprietor is only in his (relation to his) ‘inorganic being’ (his being’s extension, the exterior manifestation of that being that will come to constitute, among other things, an instrument of reflection whether it be nature, wife, or bondsman); the proprietor is only in his (relation to his) instruments, which are, again, always instruments of reflection. This bespeaks the obvious intensity of the relation between the proprietor’s workshop of forces or domain of will and the instruments through which those forces or that will are exercised. Nature and instrument converge in the figure of the slave. This is all to say that capitalism depends on the eclipse, or liquefaction, of proprietorship even as it demands the reemergence or, better yet, the transfer of the very forms that proprietorship takes. Moreover, slavery is all bound up with the construction of abstract labor, thus the construction of general equivalence, thus the construction of the liberal citizen-subject or national unit.”³²

This conception of proprietorship, the relation to and as property in the worker as that dis/possessive force, identifies that quality of its movement (in forms of money, title, etc.) above and beyond the subject imbued it by this force of abstraction. But we must take care to note this language of “construction”, that it is not the very act of the worker’s gesture, but a relational complex to which that gesture is bound, one that is not one but is a one in that series of its signification. Equiano is a conscious agent within this bounded relation, his “evolving conception of freedom, and hence part of his own self-definition” derived from his life amongst and as other sailors and slaves, “from his keen sense of the rights of the accused to his belief in the jury system, from his reference to his ‘fellow creatures’ to his study of the Bible, from his quotations from Milton to his detestation of those ‘infernal invaders of human rights,’ the slavers, impressers, and trepanners.”³³ 

What Robinson draws attention to in the Black Radical Tradition contra Marxism is what is given shape in Equiano’s abolitionism. That is, a conception of human freedom and emancipation that is already present within a struggle within and against forms of exploitation that are not of, but are subsumed in capitalist form. It is that of a historical actuality of struggle where bourgeois consciousness and a properly industrial working class are not in themselves necessary preconditions for a revolutionary consciousness, but are themselves oppositional yet tandem developments within this antagonistic relational complex.³⁴ The knowledge and practice of freedom within its social and historical ideations form that basis of which emancipation is both immanent and anterior to its negation. Determinate negation, the negation of the negation, is not a movement of a linear historical time, but the unity of these moments as the antagonistic whole of the capitalist mode of production’s constitution of social life as a totality of class struggle.³⁵ In that continuity and transformation of feudal and capitalist social relations that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation slavery mediates, as the formation of capital’s own modernity, is the concrete historical appearance of capitalism’s essence, its relations of production and their dynamic, directional movement.

1. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. Pp. 915-16

2. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill; London: University Of North Carolina Press. Pp. 23-24

3. Ibid, p. 68

4. Ibid, p. 122

5. Ibid, p. 73

6. Ibid, pp. 72-73

7.  Ibid, p. 73, cited from Walter Rodney, “Upper Guinea and the Significance of the Origins of Africans Enslaved in the New World,” Journal of Negro History 54, no. 4 (October 1969): 345.

8. 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. 419

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid, p. 496

11. For my interpretation of labor-power, surplus labor-time, and surplus-value in Marx’s Capital, see this earlier post on the subject:

Directing Time

12. Robinson (2000) p. 113

13. Marx (1990) pp. 874-75

14. Marx (1993) p. 489

15. Ibid.

16. C.L.R. James. 1989. The Black Jacobins. New York, N.Y.: Vintage. Pp. 85-86  “The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, 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.”

17. See also: Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2015. How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. A more detailed critical engagement of this text will be a future post on this page.

18. Robinson (2000) p. 66

19. Ibid, pp. 66-67

20. Ibid, p. 62

21. Ibid, p. 59

22. Ibid. Cited from Shlomo Aveneri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, p. 469; see also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Russian Menace on Europe, Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz (eds.), Free Press, Glencoe, 1952, pp. 216-18, 274-75.

23. Marx (1990) p. 876, emphasis mine.

24. Ibid, p. 899

25. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2003. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, Mass. Beacon Press.pp. 243-248

26. Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 79

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid, p. 80

29. Ibid, p. 85

30. Ibid, p. 86

31. Ibid, p. 87

32. Ibid, pp. 87-88

33. Linebaugh and Rediker (2003) p. 245

34. Robinson (2000) pp. 270-278. Robinson argues this in the context of C.L.R. James’ study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, stating:  ‘Capitalism had produced its social and historical negations in both poles of its expropriation: capitalist accumulation gave birth to the proletariat at the manufacturing core; “primitive accumulation” deposited the social base for the revolutionary masses in the peripheries. But what distinguished the formations of these revolutionary classes was the source of their ideological and cultural developments. While the European proletariat had been formed through and by the ideas of the bourgeoisie ("the ruling ideas," Marx and Engels had maintained, "were the ideas of the ruling class"), in Haiti and presumably elsewhere among slave populations, the Africans had constructed their own revolutionary culture [...] This was a complete departure from the way in which Marx and Engels had conceptualized the transformative and rationalizing significance of the bourgeoisie. It implied (and James did not see this) that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of, historical materialism.” I plan on examining this claim more closely in a forthcoming survey of some literature on the Haitian Revolution.

35. Marx (1990) p. 929. “The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.”