Haitian Revolution

The ideas and political commitments of the revolutionary abolitionist and Spencean Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835) represent a compelling example of a form of universality, articulated in the midst of the Age of Revolution, which defied European colonialism and plantation slavery. An engagement with Wedderburn’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare and his proposal of a Spencean communist programme will clarify ongoing debates about Enlightenment, empire, slavery and universality and might inform a re-engagement with the idea of universal emancipation in the political present.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

On 10 August 1819, a British government informant wrote a letter to the Home Office about a political meeting he had attended in Soho, London the night before. The purpose of the meeting was a debate on ‘whether it be right for the People of England to assassinate their Rulers’:

I had some difficulty to discover the place for it is apparently a ruinous loft which you ascend by a step-ladder...both Orators and Audience were with a few exceptions, persons of the very lowest description.

The Doctrines were certainly of the most dreadful nature...violently seditious andtreasonable – One of those men who appeared to be the principal in their concern is a Mulatto and announced himself as the Descendant of an African Slave – After noticing the Insurrections of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands he said they fought in some instances for twenty years for 'Liberty' – and then appealed to Britons who boasted such superior feeling and principles, whether they were ready to fight but for a short time for their Liberties – He stated his name to be Wedderburn and said he was author of a production entitled 'The Axe Laid to the Root'...[1]

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835) and his 1817 journal, The Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica, were products of an Age of Revolution which encompassed not only decades of upheaval in the European core, but slave revolt,marronage, and wars of independence in the colonial periphery. The journal was structured as a correspondence between Wedderburn and himself as editor, imitating a popular style for radical periodicals of the time. These letters contained reports and histories of slave revolts, polemics and denunciations aimed at his peers in the British workers’ movement, and perspectives for transnational revolution. Wedderburn calls himself a ‘Spencean Philanthropist’ in the opening letter of the first issue, and signed off with the following line: ‘I am a West Indian, a lover of liberty, and would dishonour human nature if I did not shew myself a friend to the liberty of others’.[2] Wedderburn’s self-description provides three themes which help us to understand his thought and practise, as developed in the revolutionary conjuncture which created the modern world, and which intrude upon contemporary debates over empire, Enlightenment, racialisation, abolition, decolonisation, and universal emancipation.

The first theme to consider is Wedderburn’s reference to his‘West Indian’ background. This expresses his race and status as a colonial subject, his direct experience of plantation slavery and his commitment to its abolition, and his interest in the history and lessons of the Haitian Revolution. The second is his identification as a ‘Spencean Philanthropist’ ’, indicating his  role as a leading member of a London-based proto-communist tendency active in the workers’ movements of the early nineteenth century, and their vision and programme for a society without private property, with land owned in common by parishes.. The final theme, ‘a friend to the liberty of others’, describes Wedderburn’s recognition of a ‘Universal War’ between the rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed[3], his attempts to win workers in the metropolis to the cause of the slaves and colonised peoples of the periphery, and his conception of universal freedom that was not one of imposing a Eurocentric definition of Enlightenment onto the rest of the world, but one defined through fierce struggles for self-emancipation.

A reconstruction of Wedderburn’s political programme provides a corrective to those theories which take an uncritical view of the European origins and conceptions of liberty in this period, particularly when they cannot suitably account for its conditions and contradictions. As  Buck-Morss posed starkly,  ‘Freedom … as the highest and universal political value … began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery … came to underwrite the entire economic system of the west’.[4] Thus my interpretation of Wedderburn accepts and reiteratesthat the universality of European Enlightenment  thought was an inherently contradictory one, which could simultaneously be invoked both for and against conquest, colonialism and slavery.[5] Going further, it also acknowledges that these contradictions are in some part constitutive of Enlightenment universalism and therefore cannot be straightforwardly resolved through ‘the completion of the Enlightenment project’. As Gilroy noted in his rebuke of Habermas, even such qualified defences of European Enlightenment ‘remain substantially unaffected by the histories of barbarity … Locke’s colonial interests and the effects of the conquest of the Americas on Descartes and Rousseau are simply non-issues’.[6]

At the other limit, this reading is also oriented against theoretical schools or modes which reject universalism entirely, preferring what Amin denounced as ‘the culturalist praise of provincialisms’.[7] The few times that postcolonial scholars have engaged with the history of the Haitian Revolution, they have treated it as doomed from its inception due to its relationship to modernity. Thus Babha argued that because Touissant Louverture believed in ‘the signs of modernity … liberty, equality, fraternity’, he inevitably learned ‘the tragic lesson that the moral, modern dispostion of mankind, enshrined in the sign of the Revolution, only fuels the archaic racial factor in the society of slavery’.[8] Similarly, Scott reads Louverture as an almost naïve victim, a ‘tragic subject of colonial modernity’ who ‘must seek his freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations in which modernity’s rationality has sought his enslavement.’[9] In both of these readings revolution is not a universal process, but a particular symbol or technology inheirted from colonial modernity, which therefore cannot be used by the colonised against this same modernity.

More recently, with more specificity and perhaps further alongthe anti-universal continuum, Afro-pessimist scholarship has described Blackness , as expressed by Frank Wilderson, a ‘position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions’. Per this reading, there is no analogy to be made or universality possible, whether theoretical or practical, between the ‘social death’ of Blackness, and other dynamics of exploitation or oppression. The slave is ontologically beyond the arcs of narrative redemption thrown up by modernity: that of liberty for humans, decolonisation for natives, or communism for the proletarian.[10] No historical process of restitution is realisable for those ascribed the ontological status of Black. The actual history of New World slave revolts, not least of all the Haitian Revolution and its formation of a sovereign Black state, does not shake Jared Sexton’s conviction that ‘abolition is beyond (the restoration of) sovereignty, Beyond the restoration of a lost commons through radical redistribution’.[11]

Wedderburn’s works reveal how far the Afro-pessimist reading falls short when applied to real histories of slavery and emancipation. Greg Thomas has recently observed the ‘glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary intellectual history’ in the Afro-pessimism school, which is ‘casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm’.[12] Wedderburn’s reflections on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare, and  proposal of a Spencean  proto-communist programme for the colonial periphery demonstrate that though Wedderburn criticised the hypocrisies and inherent limits of European Enlightenment universalism,  he was an ardent and articulate proponent of an alternate, redemptive mode or vision of universality. As an actually-existing revolutionary abolitionist, Wedderburn saw the slave as the central subject of multiple narratives of redemption: freedom, decolonisation and the Spencean commons.

Universalisms: insurgent, strategic, from below

Interest in the notion of the universal in emancipation struggles is undergoing a slow but significant revival, after decades of ambient doubt. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s comments, in the midst of the black-led insurrections of summer 2020, capture this moment of transition and the renunciation of doubt well: ‘I for one would like very much, I endorse completely, reinvigorating the notion of universal; I don't know what to call it, if the word universal is the problem that people stumble over.’[13] But universalism seems to have returned in a very different form, having sublated the abstract, colonial and Eurocentric modes of old. It is simultanoeously more qualified and more total, in that by rejecting the prima facie assumptions of a flattening European universality, it is able to encompass non-European experience as well. When we turn to Wedderburn’s thought and practise, we shall see that a similair dynamic is at work in how he cast the universal in the midst of that revolutionary age.

Asad Haider’s recent critique of identity and racialisation concludes with a similar invocation, the achievement of a ‘universal position’, which ‘does not exist in the abstract, as a prescriptive principle which is mechanically applied to indifferent circumstances. It is created and recreated in the act of insurgency’.[14] Two of the sources, and their associated formulations of universality, which Haider marshals for these conclusions are particularly relevant in understanding where Wedderburn’s contribution fits in.

The first is Massimiliano Tomba’s ‘insurgent universality’, a formulation arrived at from a comparative reading of the two great documents of the French Revolution; the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and the Constitution of 1793. For Tomba, the Declaration of 1789 represents the origins of a ‘juridical universalism’ of subjects as abstract individuals having rights imposed on them. By contrast, the ‘insurgent universality’ of the Jacobin constitution of 1793 is an expression of  its ‘background in the insurgencies of women, the poor, and slaves’.[15] Thomas Spence, for his part, used the constitution of 1793 as his starting point for his own proto-communist constitution in 1803.[16] Sophie Wahnich has gone further, arguing that in both of the French Revolution’s Declarations, there is the presence of a concrete universality, for most articles were intended as both pronouncements and tools of struggle.[17]

The second of those sources is the formulation provided by Paul Gilroy; a ‘strategic universalism’ distinguished from the ‘innocent, unreflexive universalisms—liberal, religious, and ethnocentric’ precisely because it acknowledges ‘the complicity of rationality and barbarity’.[18] Indeed Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic is explicitly an alternative origin and interpretation of Enlightenment universality, a ‘counterculture of modernity’. Figures from the Age of Revolution play a key role in this drama, including the black Cato Street conspirator William Davidson and of course Robert Wedderburn.[19]

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s history of the revolutionary Atlantic is partly but crucially an expansion of this Black Atlantic. They identify the presence of a ‘“universalism” from below’ at the the crest of this history, as typified by a handful of cosmopolitan revolutionary moments, to list but a few: the French Revolution, the Irish Rebellion, the Despard Plot, Spenceanism and, perhaps most importantly, the Haitian Revolution.[20] Indeed the revolution occupies one of the most symbolic and explanatory moments in alternative accounts of the origins of universality, since CLR James was the first to rightly induct it as ‘one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle’.[21] James’ recognition of anti-colonial universalism as a theme of the revolution is best captured in the vignette of Leclerc’s army faltering in the face of the Haitians singing Marseillaise and Ça Ira from their fortifications, thus wondering if their ‘barbarous enemies’ have justice on their side.[22] Nick Nesbitt’s study of Haiti’s relationship to the radical Enlightenment identifies this articulation of a concept of ‘universal emancipation’ as the Haitian Revolution’s ‘unique contribution to humanity’. It went further than both the American and the French Revolutions as the ‘culminating, most progressive event of the Age of Enlightenment’ precisely because it was able to further radicalise and manifest ‘an Enlightenment that refused to address Africans as full subjects of human rights’.[23]

As we shall see, slave revolt in the Caribbean colonies, particularly the experience and symbolism of events at Saint-Domingue, were a fundamental concern and influence for Wedderburn’s politics. This was both because they offered an expanded discourse of emancipation that challenged colonial slavery and promised to make men of those denied that status, but also because they demonstrated that revolutionary struggle was a viable route for recreating society upon new social and economic principles, which for him was Spenceanism.

The fate of Saint-Domingue

The European plantation colonies and the United States saw near-constant waves of slave revolt during the Age of Revolution.[24] Wedderburn’s abolitionism was informed by an engagement with these revolts and he held fast to the hope of an imminent general revolt. In stark contrast, most moderate British abolitionists feared insurgency and called for abolition precisely to shore-up the colonial system. This is best exemplified in Henry Brougham’s warning that if left to unfold ‘the Abolition of the Slave Trade will have been effected by the utter destruction of the Colonial System’.[25] Wedderburn's hopes, and Brougham’s fears, were not remote. The spectre of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) haunted both Europe and the New World, inspiring a whole phase of conspiracies and revolts – to list but a few: the Second Maroon War (1795-6) in Jamaica, the Second Carib War (1795-7) in Saint Vincent, Fédon's rebellion (1795-6) in Grenada, the Coro rebellion (1795) in Venezuela, Bussa’s rebellion (1816) in Barbados, the Demerara rebellion (1823) in British Guyana, and finally the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt (1831-1832). Though Haiti stands alone as the only victorious revolt, the other moments were not without consequence. Within Wedderburn’s lifetime the British Empire conceded the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, with complete emancipation to follow in 1838.

Wedderburn’s animosity towards the colonial slave system came from his direct experience of it during his early years in Jamaica. He was born to an African-born woman named Rosanna, and a wealthy Scottish planter and slave owner, James Wedderburn, who possessed Rosanna. One of Wedderburn’s earliest memories was the flogging of his pregnant mother, indeed James Wedderburn ‘insulted, abused and abandoned’ her, later selling her on. Wedderburn proudly recalled his mother’s ‘violent and rebellious temper … I have not the least doubt … that I have inherited the same disposition – the same desire to see justice overtake the oppressors of my countrymen’.[26]

Wedderburn eventually departed Jamaica by enlisting with the Royal Navy as a youth, making his way to London in 1778. In those early years he operated, near modern-day Holborn, in a multiracial gang called the St. Giles Blackbirds whose ranks included runaway slaves, Asian lascars, Jews and Irishmen.[27]

In the following years he would re-enlist at least once, likely out of difficulty of finding other work in the metropolis. There is evidence that he was involved in the mutiny at the Nore in 1797 when sailors wrested control of a Royal Navy fleet, declared themselves a ‘floating republic’, and attempted to defect to revolutionary France.[28] In the decades that followed Wedderburn fell in with the post-Jacobin radical underground of London, eventually coming to join and then lead the Spencean tendency.

Wedderburn studied and reflected on the symbolic and strategic lessons of the Haitian Revolution and the history of Jamaican maroon warfare. Haiti is mentioned in the very first issue of The Axe Laid to the Root, where Wedderburn claims to have received a report of rumours from contacts in Jamaica intimating that ‘Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years’. The revolution in Haiti (Saint-Domingue) was invoked as a heroic parallel and precedent:

Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you … Recollect the fermentation will be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks; their store of provision is every were in abundance; you know they can live upon sugar canes, and a vast variety of herbs and fruits,—yeah, even upon the buds of trees. You cannot cut off their supplies. They will be victorious in their fight, slaying all before them; they want no turnpike roads; they will not stand to engage organized troops, like the silly Irish rebels. Their method of fighting is to be found in the scriptures, which they are now learning to read.[29]

Perhaps drawing on reports from Haiti, Wedderburn recasts the bill-hook tool – or the machete as it was known in Spanish – of the enslaved plantation labourer as the weapon of rebellion. He also references the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, where the United Irishmen suffered an utter rout after confronting the British Army in direct combat. He rejects these tactics for the imminent Jamaican revolt, instead celebrating the efficacy of assymetrical warfare.

Further reflections on the Haitian Revolution take place in the sixth issue, through a purported correspondence between Wedderburn and his half-sister, a free Jamaican woman of mixed-descent named Miss Campbell. Though she is described as a plantation overseer, she is won over to abolitionism and Spenceanism and grants her slaves manumission and land accordingly. Most historians agree that though Campbell may have existed, the letters were definitely an invention of Wedderburn’s. Nevertheless the correspondence is extremely valuable for what it tells us of Wedderburn’s understanding of history and strategy in the Caribbean, if not hers.[30]

A letter in that same issue claims that some of the men that Campbell freed were spreading ideas in favour of ‘liberty and possession of the soil’, and though the House of Assembly passed laws to hang slaves ‘preaching, teaching or exhorting’, conversations were still taking place: ‘They have been talking about it this month past to the country negroes on the market days … The news is gone to Old Arbore and St. Anns, to the Blue Mountains, to North Side, and the plantain boats have carried the news to Port Morant, and Morant Bay’. Thus the governor’s secretary calls Campbell in for questioning about her part in spreading these ideas, revealing his fear that ‘there will be more white blood spilt in Jamaica than was in St. Domingo’. The letter goes on to substantiate these fears:

the free Malattoes are...talking about St. Domingo: a great many of the Spaniards fled here, you must know, and brought their favourite slaves with them from St. Domingo, and the young men of Jamaica go amongst them, so they know the causes of their masters’ coming to Jamaica. The slaves begin to talk … the planters’ look frightened the slaves know what it is about.[31]

The history of Jamaican maroon rebellions and communities, provided, to Wedderburn, a tradition of liberty and basic humanity that not only wasn’t derived from Europe, but historically was actively ranged against it.

Marronage was the ever present shadow of plantation slavery and the eternal fear of the masters. Leslie Manigat, in his study of the marronage and the roots of the Haitian Revolution, defines the maroon as a ‘fugitive slave who has broken with the social order of the plantation to live, actually free...where he could escape the control of the colonial power and the plantocratic establishment. In the case of grand marronage, ‘he joins with his fellow maroons to constitute or strengthen the band and to adopt a hit-and-run tactic in a guerilla war against the plantation order’.[32] Wedderburn was evidently aware of the use and efficacy of such tactics, as seen in his prediction, quoted above, that in the course of their rebellion, slaves  will live in the wilds, eating ‘sugar canes’, ‘herbs and fruits’ and ‘the buds of trees’ if they have to.

Maroon communities were highly heterogeneous and, in many cases, were composed of social and kinship alliances between indigenous people and escaped African slaves: ‘most maroons became effective guerillas because they blended Amerindian with West African military methods’. In cases where indigenous populations were wiped out in the early phase of colonialism, such as in Jamaica, they still held a symbolic importance to later maroon communities.[33]

In the fourth issue of Axe Laid to the Root, Wedderburn references Campbell’s maroon ancestry, those rebels ‘who fell for freedom’s cause’, and provides a summary of the maroon struggle against the English colonists, who seized Jamaica following the flight of the Spanish in the 1650s. He specifically references the fact that it was Cromwell’s Protectorate which, despite its anti-tyrannical origins and  bourgeois-republican precedence, attempted to reimpose slavery on the maroons:

You who were slaves to the cruel Spaniards stolen from your country, and brought here, but Cromwell, the great, who humbled kings at his feet, and brought one to the scaffold, sent a fleet out, whose admiral dared not return without performing something to please his master, came here and drove the Spaniards out; the slaves, my people, then fled to the woods for refuge, the invaders called to them to return to bondage, they refused; they contended for twenty years, and upwards; bondage was more terrific than death.

In their struggle against the Spanish and then the English, Wedderburn emphasises both the maroons’ desire for liberty, as against colonial slavery, and their basic humanity, as against the brutality of the English: ‘not barbarous, nor voracious … the Maroons were human beings, and ought not to be hunted down by Britons acting the blood-hound’s part’.

Wedderburn summarises his reflections by directly addressing the descendants of the maroons with an anti-colonial provocation: ‘yes, the English, in the days of Cromwell, while they were asserting the rights of man at home, were destroying your ancestors then fighting for their liberty’.[34] Therefore he condemns English liberty, despite its presumed pedigree (as much in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as now) as reserved for the homeland.[35] Meanwhile, for Wedderburn, it is the maroons’ struggle for freedom that is representative of a kind of true universality.

He expressed this same contradiction between European ‘freedom’ and colonial reality to a crowd of radicals assembled at his Hopkins Street loft in August 1819. A spy report to the Home Office tells that Wedderburn castigated Britain for sending:

Men in arms to West Indies or Africa which produced commotion. They would empl[o]y blacks to go and steal females—they would put them in sacks and would be murdered if they made an alarm Vessels would be in readiness and they would fly off with them This was done by Parliament—who done it for gain—the same as they employed them in their Cotton factories to make Slaves of them … [36]

These reflections on the strategy and symbolism of slave and maroon struggle against colonial slavery provide him with one of the sources out of which he synthesises a radical perspective and programme for the Caribbean. The other is the theory and programme of Spenceanism.

Deluded Spenceans?

Spenceanism was a proto-communist political tendency that represented the revolutionary wing of the early nineteenth-century London underground. Originally devised by the radical pamphleteer Thomas Spence (1750-1814), the programme, or ‘Spence’s Plan’ as it was often called, was distinguished from the rest of the post-Jacobin milieu because it sought ‘to destroy not only personal and hereditary lordship, but the cause of them, which is private property in land’. Property would instead be held in common by parishes, and the revenue generated would be ‘deemed the equal property of man, woman, and child, whether old or young, rich or poor, legitimate or illegitimate’. Spence pinned the hope of realising his Plan on the successes of those insurrections unfolding ‘abroad and at home, in America, France, and in our own fleets’.[37]

After Spence’s death in 1814 a group of his friends and comrades formed the Society of Spencean Philanthropists to propagate his programme. The Spencean Philanthropists played a key role in the underground and mass politics of that decade. In the winter of 1816 they organised mass workers’ meetings for reform at Spa Fields, London, which escalated into rioting and looting of arms. The leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, a failed attempt at assassinating the Prime Minister and his cabinet, were veteran Spenceans.[38] Wedderburn had known Spence for nine months before the old radical’s passing, and soon became ‘an attentive and active member of the Spencean society’; by 1817 he was one of its de facto leaders.[39]

When the Seditious Meetings Bill, designed to disband radical political organising, was heard in parliament in February 1817, the Spenceans were described in the following terms: ‘They were all on the same agrarian principle—the equal division of property—the simultaneous rising of the parishes—, the hunting down of the landholder’.[40] Spenceanism reached the Caribbean in 1817,[41] when the Jamaican Royal Gazette reprinted theAddress of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists to All Mankind (1816), a pamphlet which served as the Spenceans’ manifesto addressed ‘to the Governments and people of the world’. TheGazette prefaced the reprint with the warning that ‘this document is as extraordinary an instance of the perversion of first principles and the delusion of the human mind, as has been devised to perplex and mislead the world since the commencement of the French Revolution’.[42] The newspaper reprinted another article referencing the Spenceans in September of the same year: an essay by Robert Southey, the romantic poet turned reactionary, which denounces the Spenceans as ‘some weak men, some mistaken or insane ones, and other very wicked ones’.[43]

It seems to be in direct response to these anti-Spencean commentaries, this ‘paper war’, that Wedderburn, addressing ‘his countrymen and relatives’, mounted a defence of Spenceanism:

It is natural to expect you will enquire what is meant by a deluded Spencean; I must inform you it is a title given by ignorant or self-interested men, to the followers of one Thomas Spence, who knew that the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust; and that any person calling a piece of land his own private property was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud, this old truth, newly discovered, has completely terrified the landholders in England.

He declared that he was ‘proud to wear the name of a madman … [and] traitor’.[44] For, in his words, the Spenceans demanded what Wedderburn described as:

a radical adjustment of the social system on the broad basis of universal justice, and the securing to every member of the community his indefeasible right to an equal share of the profit of the land and its appurtenances.[45]

Spence’s programme was applicable ‘at all times, and in all countries’, and it is here where the Spencean programme begins to inhabit a space of synonymy with the politics of slave resistance and abolitionism. In defence of the transnational scope of his ideas, Spence himself had declared that ‘I have no such narrow views as an eye to one Country only. My politics are for the World at large’, once identifying the agents of his politics as ‘the slaves and landless men’.[46]Wedderburn similarly identified a state of affairs where a few landholders were arrayed against ‘the great majority in every nation that are dispossessed of their right to the soil throughout the world’.[47] At an underground political meeting hosted on 13^th October 1819, Wedderburn led a debate on the question ‘Which of the two Parties were likely to be victorious, the Rich or the Poor in the event of Universal War’. He made the case that though the world was given to all people ‘as their Inheritance...they had been fleeced out of it—But now was the time to possess themselves of it’.[48] Thus ‘Wedderburn the deluded Spencean’ wishedoffered up the programme as one of redemption not simply to the workers of the metropolis, but to his people: ‘Oh ye Africans and relatives now in bondage to the Christians … receive this the only tribute the offspring of an African can give’.[49]

Was Wedderburn indeed deluded, perhaps naive or even Eurocentric, in assuming the applicability of Spenceanism to the Caribbean?   Wedderburn’s experience and interest in historical and extant forms of slave and maroon resistance allowed him to root the universality of the Spencean programme in the specificity of the Caribbean context. Thus as we now consider his political proposals we may note this habit of linking Spencean interpretations of liberty and common land to the existing conditions of the colony.

The second issue of Axe Laid to the Root opens a discussion on proposals for a post-revolutionary black society with a preface: ‘you might expect, that I should point out a form of government for you; this I leave to your judgement’.[50] Nevertheless Wedderburn submits some foundational principles based both on an appraisal of the European experience of revolution (notably its failures!) and, as McCalman has pointed out, communal-democratic forms of social organisation adapted from Maroon societies.[51]

Wedderburn proposes that they organise a society ‘without a king, without lords, dukes, earls, or the like’ and assures them not to follow European examples of government since ‘with all the proud boasting of Europeans they are yet ignorant of what political liberty is’. He recommends that ‘everything should be settled by votes’ through delegates rotated annually, with the caveat that they shall ‘have no white delegate in your assembly’ and also to ‘never have a man worth more than five hundred a year’. [52]

To preserve the post-revolutionary society, he recommends an armed and militantly organised population, proposing that ‘every individual learn the art of war’, that ‘every male and female be provided with instruments of war at the age of 18’. He cites the colonial threats looming against Haiti to express the importance of defending a new revolutionary society: ‘you will have need of all your strength to defend yourself against those men, who are now scheming in Europe against the blacks of St. Domingo’. To ensure that future generations maintain this vigilance against European colonialism, he recommends children be taught to read and write and be educated in ‘remembrance of your former sufferings, which will show you what you may expect from the hands of European Christians’. He denounces capital punishment, prisons and barracks and exhorts to ‘have no lawyers amongst you’, instead suggesting village assemblies of twenty-four elders as a better mode of settling disputes, and judges delegated to deal with cases of greater magnitude.[53]

Wedderburn explicitly connects the Spencean demand for the socialisation of landwith pre-existing modes of communal land ownership among Jamaican slaves and smallholders, warning the post-revolutionary society to ‘mind and keep possession of the land you now possess as slaves; for without that, freedom is not worth possessing’, and reminds them of the importance of maintaining the relation of communal property: ‘never give it up to your oppressors, you are not told to hold it as private property, but as tenants at will to the sovereignty of the people.[54]

The land Wedderburn is referring to was called provision grounds; a key element of the social settlement between slave and planter. Over the span of the period of slavery in Jamaicamore communally cultivated lands were conceded, allowing slaves to develop a social independence and what Mary Turner calls ‘the survival and development of precisely those intellectual capacities which the slave system inteded to destroy’.[55] Wedderburn even highlights a communitarian society familiar to him in Jamaica, from the parish of his birth, the Shariers of St. Mary Parish ‘who have all things common’.[56]

This understanding of the politics of land and liberty was borne out in subsequent generations of Caribbean slave and peasant movements. In 1857, twenty-four years after Wedderburn’s death and the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, a report to the Jamaica Royal Commission described black freeholders occupying the lands of a white English plantation owner, who beat the owner and a collector when asked to pay rent, in the following way: ‘… a coloured man of the name of Ripley Edie told the people that the Queen had given them the lands when she gave them freedom … and freedom would be of no use if they had not their lands and houses’. In other words, that emancipation inherently meant the redistribution of productive property from planters to freedmen. The commission asked: ‘do you know whether the people connect the idea of liberty of person with liberty of the land?’, to which he replied, ‘in all properties I have had to do with they have put that forth’.[57]

Official land policy in post-emancipation Haiti diverged considerably from this. The new state preserved a system of cash crop production on the basis of plantation agriculture and forms of unfree labour. This was imposed not only by the necessities of funding a military apparatus capable of defending the newly-freed state from re-invasion but also because the revolutionary elite saw it as ‘the country’s greatest potential source of riches’. Jean-Jacques Dessalines for his part decreed the confiscation and nationalisation of all white-owned property and large estates in general, with opposition from private planters to this land policy feeding into his eventual overthrow.[58] However, in the course of the revolutionary process the Haitian people themselves began to practise more communal forms of land usage, encroaching on plantations to expand their provision grounds, partaking in the products of uncultivated lands, building houses on abandoned estates and effectively taking over plantations.[59] This popular process continued in the post-revolutionary state, with Haitian peasants moving towards subsistence land use, collective property and various forms of maroon settlement and village organisation which Casimir has designated ‘the counter-plantation system’.[60]

The ideological and cultural precedents for such a conception of land and liberty derived from multiple sources: the forms of autonomous land-holding carved out during the period of slavery, the social foment of the initial phase of revolution and, as Fick speculates, a potential restoration of West African landholding practises in a New World context.[61] Overall, despite the significant hardships inherent to a poor peasant economy, post-revolutionary Haiti was distinguished from its Caribbean neighbours in having a positive growth rate, better labour and living conditions, freer movement and rich cultural expression.[62]

It is not at all clear whether Wedderburn was aware at all of the failure to enact land reform and the tensions between the plantation system and marronage in post-revolutionary Haiti. It was not this that aspect of the Haitian example that influenced his proposals for a post-revolutionary, anti-colonial state but the extent to which it represented a distinct break with European political forms and that it opened up space for new and experimental modes of property relations. Indeed Spence himself symbolically offered up the last definitive work of his life, his ‘Constitution of Spensonia’, to the new Haitian state which was in the process of drafting a constitution. The epilogue reads:

         And though my book’s in queer lingo,

         I will it send to st. Domingo:

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilization’ attained by black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualizing the relationship between Marxism and black liberation.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

The last several years have been especially good for Marx scholarship seeking to retrieve a more ‘inclusive’ Marx, who was concerned not only with European or ‘white’ labour but also colonial and non-white workers. One thinks especially of Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins andAndrew Zimmerman’s new edition of Marx and Engels’ writings on the US Civil War.^[i][ii] There is still work to be done, however. Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilisation’ attained by black slaves.^[iii] The most recent incarnation of this interpretation is the scholar of communism Erik van Ree’s piece ‘Marx and Engels’s Theory of History: Making Sense of the Race Factor’, which, given its wide availability online, has even been picked up by the likes of conservative IR magazine The National Interest to help make thecase that ‘Karl Marx Was a Total Racist’.^[iv] It has also been cited on the Left by the sociologist of racism Wulf D. Hund, who employs it to help make sense of Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian revolution.^[v] I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. Marxists should face these epithets head-on and never seek to whitewash history, but they also shouldn’t allow these epithets to cloud their judgment and impair their perception of Marx’s actual political positions on the substantive issues. In the words of Kevin B. Anderson, we have to learn to recognise when Marx is ‘using what today would be considered a very racist phrase to make an equally strong anti-racist point.’^[vi] Or, as August Nimtz has put it: Marx and Engels’ ‘comments in personal correspondence that were unambiguously racist, sexist or anti-Semitic must be seen in context and in relation to their entire corpus of writings and actions … [We] should be cautious and not rush to judgement based on the vapid criteria of “political correctness.”’^[vii]

In the course of demonstrating the falsity of this interpretation, we will be led into an exploration of Marx and Engels’ comments on free black workers, those of Jamaica in particular and of the Americas and the Caribbean in general. To my knowledge, this specific topic has virtually never been discussed in Marx scholarship.^[viii] We will thus also give the lie to some of the claims of J. Lorand Matory in his recent book, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make, where among other things he asserts that ‘Black “wage slaves”’ – i.e. free black wage-labourers – is ‘a category Marx fails even to acknowledge.’^[ix] What might to some seem a trivial exercise in Marxology has in fact profound symbolic importance. It is no coincidence that both Carlos Moore – the black Marxist turned anti-communist Pan-Africanist – and Charles Mills – the late black Marxist turned ‘black radical liberal’ – each marked their departure from the Marxist tradition with an essay seeking to show that Marx and Engels were anti-black racists. As Moore recounts in his recent memoir Pichón:

My definitive break with communism in all its forms took place at the end of the 1960s when I drafted an essay on the Marxist position on race, Were Marx and Engels Racists? It appeared in 1972 to general condemnation from the left. I was confirmed by many as an unrepentant stooge of American imperialism. However, severing my last tenuous links to world communism was an act of personal liberation.^[x]

And for Mills, writing ‘in what was to be my last paper explicitly within the Marxist tradition’,^[xi]

Marx and Engels’ colorless, raceless workers are actually white … we must ask whether their contemptuous attitude toward people of color does not raise the question of whether they … should not be indicted for racism and the consignment of nonwhites, particularly blacks, to a different theoretical category.^[xii] …

So, I would support that the subsumption of the experience of    the colonized and the racially subordinated under orthodox Marxist         historical materialist categories is doubly problematic. These raceless categories do not capture and register the specificities of the      experience of people of color; and though they are now deployed          race-neutrally, they were arguably not intended by the founders to      extend without qualification to this population in the first place.^[xiii]

As Manning Marable put it in his explanation of ‘Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists’, ‘Part of the rationale for some black nationalists’ fears that Marxism is a form of “left-wing racism” must be attributed to the writings of Marx himself.’ Citing the 1853 passage I will examine in this paper, henotes that such ‘blatantly racist statements by the early proponents of socialism must give pause to many contemporary would-be black leftists.’^[xiv] Thus, the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and black liberation.

‘Freshly imported barbarians’

Let us begin by looking at the 1853 passage in question and the responses it has provoked. Marx is reporting to Engels his assessment of a new book published that year by the American economist Henry Carey, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished. Marx first explains that ‘here ‘SLAVERY’ covers all forms of servitude, WAGE-SLAVERY, etc.’ Marx had been critical of Carey in the past as a ‘harmoniser,’ i.e., one aiming to show that the interests of capital and labour are in harmony rather than antagonistic as Marx believes. He explains to Engels in a mocking tone that Carey had formerly preached ‘free trade’ but had now arrived at ‘protectionism’ as the solution to all of America’s economic ills. Then comes the crucial passage (the original letter is in German; words written in English are capitalised; the italics are Marx’s):

The only thing of definite interest in the book is the comparison   between Negro slavery as formerly practised by the English in Jamaica and elsewhere, and Negro slavery in the United States. He demonstrates how the main STOCK of Negroes in Jamaica always consisted of freshly imported BARBARIANS, since their treatment by the English meant not only that the Negro population was not   maintained, but also that 2/3 of the yearly imports always went to waste, whereas the present generation of Negroes in America is a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and hence capable of being emancipated.^[xv]

What has the aforementioned tradition of interpretation made of this passage? Of its representatives, some are critical interpreters of Marx and Engels’ views on race while others are generally sympathetic defenders of Marx and Marxism. They nonetheless all come to the same conclusion. Diane Paul notes that ‘Marx’s and Engels’ public writings on the American Civil War are certainly sympathetic to the cause of the ‘Negroes,’’ but then adds in a footnote alongside the offending passage: ‘However, abolition for Marx presumably depended upon a certain level of civilization.’^[xvi] Manning Marable says something similar:

Marx’s famous and pithy quotation, ‘labour with a white skin cannot     emancipate itself where labour with a black skin is branded,’ characterizes the generally anti-racist and egalitarian orientation of   his entire work. But there were also lapses. … In Marx’s correspondence with Engels in June, 1853, he compares Jamaicans        and Afro-American slaves, arguing that the former ‘always consisted of newly imported barbarians,’ whereas Black Americans were   ‘becoming a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and therefore fit for emancipation.^[xvii]

Andrew Zimmerman, whose whole editorial apparatus for his new edition of Marx and Engels’ writings on the Civil War is geared to basically vindicating their views – ‘Marx and Engels opposed racism at every turn,’ he first declares – nonetheless then feels compelled to do an about-face and appease those who will balk at the language of the passage in question:

When Marx remarked, in 1853, that US blacks who were born into slavery were not “freshly imported barbarians” from Africa but rather “a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and hence capable of being emancipated”, he did not only denigrate African cultures; he also blinded himself to the many African and    African American political traditions that contributed to the defeat of slavery in the Americas.^[xviii]

Finally, Erik van Ree essentially echoes Paul, whose article he relies on heavily for his whole orientation to the question of Marx and Engels on race:

Both men strongly supported abolitionism. Then again, the question of race remained an issue for them: whether the ‘negroes’ were capable of emancipation at all did represent a real question. In a 14 June 1853 letter to Engels, Marx indicated that, in the past, Jamaica had been importing new negro slaves all the time, making for a population mostly consisting of ‘newly imported barbarians’. On the contrary, the ‘present negro generation in America [represents] an indigenous product, more or less turned into Yankees, English speaking etc. and therefore becomes capable of emancipation’.^[xix]

What all of these interpretations seem to agree on is that Marx thinks support for the emancipation of black slaves should be conditional on their being more ‘civilised’ than ‘freshly imported barbarians’ from Africa. There is of course also justified condemnation of the use of the insulting term ‘barbarians’ as applied to Africans. However, these interpretations are wrong. Marx is giving conditional support neither for slavery noremancipation. Both Marx’s condemnation of slavery and his support for emancipation are unconditional.

Henry Carey and the bourgeois viability of emancipation

Remember, firstly, that Marx is telling Engels what he thinks is most interesting about Carey’s book. Why does Marx find this argument of Carey’s interesting? The answer becomes obvious once we get past the antiquated and offensive language of ‘barbarians’, a term used by Carey in his own discussion, and one used by Marx and Engels in a variety of contexts in a variety of ways. Carey was a prominent – if not the most prominent – economist ofnineteenth century America, now ‘often called the founder of the American school of economics.’^[xx] According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1911, his 1837-1840 work Principles of Political Economy, ‘which was translatedinto Italian and Swedish, soon became the standard representative in the United States of the school of economic thought which, with some interruptions, has since [i.e., up to 1911] dominated the tariff system of that country.’^[xxi] And he became ‘the trusted adviser of both [President] Lincoln and [Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.] Chase.’^[xxii] Thus, what Marx found interesting was that this prominent economist, spokesperson of American industrial capitalism in the North, who would go on to become Lincoln’s economic adviser, was arguing that American slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’, i.e., their emancipation can be justified from an economic standpoint – it is economically viable. Just three years prior Marx and Engels themselves had predicted that the forces of American industrialcapitalism would act to emancipate the slaves as soon as it became profitable for them do so, i.e., as soon as the slaves became more valuable as free workers than as slaves:

American cotton production is based on slavery. As soon as industry has developed to the point when the cotton monopoly of the United States has become intolerable to it, cotton will be successfully produced in vast quantities in other countries, which almost everywhere can now only be done through free workers. But as soon as the free labour of other countries provides industry with its cotton supplies in sufficient quantity and more cheaply than the slave labour of the United States, American slavery will have been broken at the   same time as the American cotton monopoly, and the slaves will be emancipated because as slaves they will have become unusable.^[xxiii]

This is why Marx italicises capable of being emancipated, so as toemphasise the striking confirmation of their own view in Carey’s conclusion. Note that there is no mention here of the black slaves’ readiness for emancipation depending on their level of ‘civilisation’. Lest one think that this analysis is an instance of ‘economic reductionism’ and thus somehow insensitive to black agency, it should be borne in mind that exactly the same analysis was made a few years laterby Martin Delany, the ‘father’ of black nationalism.

Delany hoped to establish a cotton-producing settlement overseen by African Americans on land purchased from the ruler of Abeokuta. Such a settlement, he believed, would help to make Africa into an economic power by inspiring cotton production throughout the continent. And if that were to happen, he maintained, the South’s cotton monopoly would be broken and slavery would soon come to an end.^[xxiv]

But what about Carey’s comparison between the black slavery practiced in Jamaica and the other British plantation colonies, and black slavery in the United States? What does his talk of ‘barbarians’ amount to and what relevance does it have for determining whether American slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’? The British abolished slavery throughout their colonies in the 1830s, but by the 1850s ‘increasing numbers of prominent Britons [had come] to view ‘the mighty experiment’ [of emancipation] as a dismal failure.’^[xxv] Carey concurred, and traced the economic failure of immediate emancipation in England’s colonies to the conditions of its slaves prior to emancipation, which he contrasted with the conditions of slaves in America.

In the islands [of the British West Indies] it was held to be cheaper to buy slaves than to raise them, and the sexes were out of all proportion to each other. Here [i.e., in the US], importation was small, and almost the whole increase, large as it has been, has resulted from the excess of births over deaths. In the islands, the slave was generally a barbarian, speaking an unknown tongue, and working with men like himself, in gangs, with scarcely a chance for improvement. Here, he was generally a being born on the soil, speaking the same language with his owner; and often working in the field with him, with many advantages for the development of his faculties. In the islands, the land-owners clung to slavery as the sheet-anchor of their hopes. Here, on the contrary, slavery had gradually been abolished in all the States north of Mason & Dixon’s line, and Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky were all, at the date of emancipation in the islands, preparing for the early adoption of measures looking to its entire abolition.^[xxvi] ....TheProspective Review, (Nov. 1852,) seeing what has happened in the British colonies, and speaking of the possibility of a similar course of action on this side of the Atlantic, says— 

-----"We have had experience enough in our own colonies, not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale. …we have no reason to suppose that the whole tragi-comedy would not be re-  enacted in the Slave States of America, if slavery were summarily abolished by act of Congress to-morrow. Property among the plantations consists only of land and negroes: emancipate the negroes—and the planters have no longer any capital for the cultivation of the land…It is allowed on all hands that the negroes as a race will not work longer than is necessary to supply the simplest comforts of life. It would be wonderful were it otherwise. A people have been degraded and ground down for a century and a half: systematically kept in ignorance for five generations of any needs and enjoyments beyond those of the savage: and then it is made matter of complaint that they will not apply themselves to labour for their higher comforts and more refined luxuries, of which they cannot know the value!"----

The systematic degradation here referred to is probably quite true as regards the British Islands, where 660,000 were all that remained of almost two millions that had been imported [i.e., the 2/3 mortality rate Marx refers to – Author]; but it is quite a mistake to suppose it so in regard to this country [i.e., the US], in which there are now found ten persons for every one ever imported, and all advancing by gradual steps toward civilization and freedom.^[xxvii]

In other words, while emancipation had been an economic failure in Jamaica et al, where most of the slaves who were emancipated were Africans who wanted nothing more than to abandon the plantations and work their own land, it would not necessarily fail in the US, where slaves were almost completely ‘Americanised’ and therefore more amenable to integrating into American society as free wage-labourers post-emancipation. Carey’s ultimate prescription, as Marx points out in his letter to Engels, is protectionism rather than immediate emancipation. Marx has no special sympathy for protectionism as against free trade,^[xxviii] and is certainly no ‘harmoniser’ like Carey, who is actually quite defensive in the book of American slaveholders, whom he views as victims of British free-trade policies. Indeed, in 1869 Marx writes sneeringly to Engels apropos Carey’s 1858-60 Principles of Social Science, that ‘Mr. Carey, as a harmoniser,defended [the slave-owners] in all his previous works.’^[xxix] But what interests Marx about Carey’s work is that it is nonetheless arguing that America’s slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’, contrary to the protestations of naysayers – like the English Prospective Review whichCarey quotes – that emancipation was a disaster in the British colonies and so will be a disaster in the US.

Thus, we can see that the aforementioned interpreters seem to have gotten things backwards. Understandably put off by the word ‘barbarians’ and the phrase ‘capable of being emancipated’, they conclude that Marx must be claiming that the African slaves of Jamaica et al are incapable ofbeing – i.e., should not be – emancipated. Such a conclusion would be remarkable indeed, for it would signal a complete reversal in 1853 of Marx’s position up to that point. But none of these commentators look into Carey’s book itself, and most fail to even note the discussion of Carey’s book as the context that elicits Marx’s comments.

Marx on Jamaica

Nonetheless, for the sake of argument let us entertain the view that Marx’s support for the emancipation of black slaves is conditional on their level of ‘civilisation.’ One way to test this view would be to examine Marx’s other writings on Jamaica. If the critical commentators are correct, then we should expect to find Marx claiming that the former slaves should not have been emancipated, or that they should be re-enslaved. However, we find just the opposite.

Just four years after the ‘barbarians’ passage, Marx was composing a draft of Capital, part of which would later be published as theGrundrisse. Inhis ‘Chapter on Capital’, in order to elucidate the nature of capital and wage-labour as transitory socio-historical relations as opposed to eternal or necessary ones, he drew on the example of the situation of the formerly enslaved blacks and their descendants in Jamaica, about whom an anonymous author (‘Expertus’) had recently wrote to the editor of The Times of London (of which Marx was an avid reader). The author’s argument is that England should cease supporting the costly suppression of the slave-trade and the citizenship of Jamaican blacks, unless it finds a way to provide the colonies with labourers who will restore value to its plantations. In language reminiscent of Carey’s discussion, but far more virulently racist, ‘Expertus’ begins by describing the adverse consequences and economic ruin he sees as having followed from emancipation:

The freed West-India negro slave will not till the soil for wages; the free son of the ex-slave is as obstinate as his sire. He will cultivate lands which he has not bought for his own yams, mangoes, and potatoes. These satisfy his wants: he does not care for yours. Cotton, and sugar, and coffee, and tobacco, he cares little enough for them. And what matters it to him that the Englishman has sunk his thousands and tens of thousands on mills, machinery, and plant, which now totter, on the languishing estate, that for years has only returned begary and debts? He eats his yams, and sniggers at ‘Buckra.’

Twenty millions of gold [i.e. the compensation paid to the slaveholders upon emancipation – Author] have been distilled from the brains and muscles of the free English labourer of every degree to fashion the West-Indian negro into a ‘free and independent’ labourer. ‘Free and independent’ enough he has become, God knows, but labourer he is not; and, so far as I can see, never will be under the present system of things. He will sing hymns; he will quote texts; but honest, steady industry he not only detests, but despises.

Exasperated, he asks, ‘Is there no way of filling some of our islands with an adequate population—a population which will feel the stimulus of competition sufficiently to be urged to work? Is there no mode of inundating that proud and lazy Quashee who cumbers our lands with an influx of men who will give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages?’ (One can see from this use of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages’ how effortlessly it can be made into an apologia for the subordination of the working population, something Marx and Engels were no doubt aware of.) The anonymous author then suggests that in order to provide this labouring population England could perhaps import ‘Coolies from India’ or even buy African slaves, ‘free’ them, and then employ them as indentured labourers for a fixed contract according to strict labour demands. He repeats the now-familiar line that emancipation will not be tried by other nations after England’s failure to demonstrate its viability. In breathtakingly racist tones, ‘Expertus’ then concludes defiantly:

But if we are not to try this experiment, for God’s sake do not sacrifice English pith, toil, and money to Quashee. If Quashee won’t raise cotton, sugar, and coffee, don’t pamper his idleness by reducing other tropical colonies to the state of our own. Do not enter on a crusade to forbid the nigger from working. Cruelty to the African may be a bad thing; but, in my opinion, cruelty to our own kith, kin, and countrymen is much worse. And our present system involves both kinds of cruelty.^[xxx]

So, given the hypothesis that Marx thinks black slaves should not be emancipated unless they are adequately ‘civilised’, we might expect him to agree with ‘Expertus’ that these Caribbean blacks are undeserving offreedom and that means should be found and employed for making them or their substitutes ‘give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.’

Let us test this hypothesis. Here is the lesson Marx draws from the above screed (aside from reproducing the author’s English epithets like ‘Quashee’ and the n-word, Marx does not quote ‘Expertus’ at all):

The Times of November [21,] 1857 contains a most endearing scream of rage from a West Indian planter. With great moral indignation this advocate—by way of plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery—explains how the Quashees (the free NIGGERS of Jamaica^[xxxi]) content themselves to produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and apart from this “use value”, regard loafing itself (INDULGENCE and IDLENESS) as the real luxury article; how they don’t give a damn about sugar and the fixed capital invested in the PLANTATIONS, but rather react with malicious pleasure and sardonic smiles when a planter goes to ruin, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as a cover for this sardonic mood and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, not in order to become wage workers, but SELF-SUSTAINING PEASANTS, working for their own meagre consumption. Capital as capital does not exist for them, because wealth made independent in general exists only either throughdirect forced labour, slavery, or throughmediated forced labour,wage labour.^[xxxii]

It should be clear enough which side Marx is on. Marx immediately detects the class and race prejudice of the ‘West India Planter’ behind the pen of ‘Expertus’, and delights in the irony of an argument for slavery whichemploys moral indignation at the workers’ idleness. ‘Expertus’ had in fact spun his argument not as a ‘plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery’, but as the only sure method of convincing Spain and America of the viability of free black labour, and even as the only guarantee that they would not reimpose slavery on the British colonies themselves! But Marx, unlike what we might imagine to be the response of one sympathetic to the ‘emancipate only if civilised’ view, is not taken in by this ploy and sees clearly that this is a ‘plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery.’ He is clearly sympathetic to the black workers who ‘don’t give a damn’ about capital and who mock the ruined planters. They are, as Marx puts it, peasants concerned only with use values and their own enjoyment of the good life. Because of the natural wealth provided by abundant unowned land and good weather, the free blacks of Jamaica are not compelled by circumstances to work for wages to survive. (‘Expertus’ had claimed that Barbados did not have this problem, for ‘the pressure there has been that of people on subsistence, not of redundance on the people; the labourers have been looking for masters, not the masters for men.’^[xxxiii]) This all proves Marx’s point that capital is a transitory socio-historical relation dependent on the forced labour – whether ‘direct’ or ‘mediated’ – of the worker. 

Eight years later in October of 1865, when poor black workers erupted in protest at the colonial government in Jamaica, prompting brutal reprisals directed by the colonial governor Eyre, Marx and Engels followed the events closely in the British press. In response to what became known as the Morant Bay Rebellion, Eyre imposed martial law and upwards of 400 Jamaicans were killed, ‘many of them hanged in reprisals after the fighting had finished.’^[xxxiv] If the hypothesis that Marx believed black slaves in Jamaica incapable or undeserving of emancipation were true, we would again expect him to be less than sympathetic to these rebelling poor black workers. After all, according to this hypothesis, for Marx they were either former slaves or descendants of slaves who had been emancipated ‘before their time.’ It is thus extremely interesting to find that, despite Engels’ use of the n-word, both he and Marx are patently on the side of the black rebels and are appalled (but not surprised) by the mass of extra-judicial killings committed by the English.

The Daily Telegraph of November 17^th, 1865, had relayed the newsof the rebellion by first playing up the alleged unprovoked atrocities committed by the rebels and then celebrating the devastating British military response.^[xxxv] Nonetheless, Engels from the first takes the side of the rebels and is aghast by the behavior of the British, writing to Marx the same day of the Telegraph piece: ‘What do you say to the NIGGER-rebellion in Jamaica and the atrocities perpetrated by the English? The Telegraph says today: ‘We should be very sorry if the right was taken away from any British officer to shootor hang all and every British subject found in arms against the British Crown!’’^[xxxvi]

Three days later TheTimes of London published a brazenly racistapology for British behaviour, protesting that ‘It were useless to follow the special pleadings of those who in the atrocities committed on their countryman refuse to see aught but the grievances of negroes and thewickedness of the white race.’ Seeking to ‘refute the platitudes of rhetorical sentimentality’, the paper claimed that ‘the negro had no grievances – no grievances, at least, but what he had a legal mode of redressing’, and that as a peasant he had it better than any peasant in England, Scotland, France, or Belgium. Continued the Times: ‘He had Anglo-Saxon institutionsand a constitutional form of Government. Within two generations of African savagery he acquired what the English people won after six centuries of civilised despotism. If he had wrongs, he had the legal means of obtaining redress.’ The Times then proffered a ‘racial’ (and very racist) explanation ofwhy the rebellion occurred, given the supposed bliss of black life in Jamaica:

Why, then, did he not avail himself of these? Why did he plot foul treasons and murders? The answer is not far to seek. The wonderful influence of race has operated as strongly on the negro as on the Sclave, the Magyar, and the Celt. The negro views with jealousy and hatred – we speak, of course, generally and subject to exceptions – the contiguity of another race numerically inferior, but which he feels to be morally superior, to his own. He dreams of the glorious island in which he lives being owned in perpetuity by himself and his posterity.^[xxxvii]

The paper then invokes the boogeyman of Haiti and its ‘barbaric independence’, claiming that the Jamaican blacks were inspired by the neighboring country which flattered the black man’s ‘pride, his vanity, his indolence.’ The paper ends its column by hoping that the British response will halt the ‘treasonous infection’ from spreading to other Caribbean islands, and by praising the loyalty of the Maroons who helped put down the rebellion. 

Marx, reading this, writes to Engels the same day:

The Jamaican business is typical of the utter turpitude of the ‘TRUE ENGLISHMAN’. These fellows are as bad as the Russians in every respect. But, says the good old Times, these DAMNED ROGUES ENJOYED ‘ALL THE LIBERTIES OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CONSTITUTION’. I.e. they ENJOYED THE LIBERTY, amongst others, of having their hides taxed to raise money for the PLANTERS to import COOLIES and thus depress their own labour market below the minimum. … The Irish affair and the Jamaica BUTCHERIES were all that was needed after the American war to complete the unmasking of English hypocrisy!^[xxxviii]

Whereas The Times had dismissed the blacks’ grievances, blamed theirrebellion on racial envy and Haiti, and defended the actions of the British military, Marx does just the opposite. He points out the rebels’ legitimate economic grievances, born of the class struggle waged by the planters – the British government having since taken ‘Expertus’’ advice and set about importing to Jamaica indentured labourers from India^[xxxix] – and condemns in the strongest terms the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of British pretensions to moral supremacy.

A few weeks later Engels is increasingly aghast as more details emerge about British behavior in crushing the rebellion: ‘Every post brings news of worse atrocities in Jamaica. The letters from the English officers about their heroic deeds against unarmed NIGGERS are beyond words. Here the spirit of the English army is at last expressing itself quite uninhibitedly. ‘THE SOLDIERS ENJOY IT.’ Even The Manchester Guardian has had to come out against the authorities in Jamaica this time.’^[xl] Then when a Parliamentary Commission condemned the actions of the British and The Times was forced to eat its words and side with outragedpublic opinion, Engels wrote to Marx in March 1866: ‘Fine revelations from Jamaica. And what an embarrassment they are to The Times…The paper is going DOWN very rapidly.’^[xli]

With the massacre of poor black workers and the economic factors that had prompted the rebellion in Jamaica fresh in his mind, Marx warned German workers not to become the tools of British capitalists who were trying to roll back concessions won by the nascent tailors’ union in London. On May 4, 1866, writing in the German press on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, he wrote: ‘The purpose of this importation [of German tailors to Edinburgh] is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLIES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery.’^[xlii]

In a letter to Engels two months later, Marx commented on the recent mass meeting organised by the Reform League to agitate for manhood suffrage. ‘Tens of thousands of workers, some of them armed’^[xliii] met in Hyde Park, London, nearly leading to violent clashes with the police and military. After opining that the British working class ‘will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power’, he criticised the conciliating measures taken by some of the League’s leaders so as to avoid a violent confrontation while, in the meantime, ‘that cur Knox, the police magistrate of Marylebone, is sending people down in a summary fashion, which shows what would happen if London were Jamaica.’^[xliv] For Marx, the black workers’ uprising had become a symbol of both workers’ rebellion and ruling class retribution.

That this is so can be further seen from the fact that two years later in 1868, in a history of the International Workingmen’s Association attributed to Wilhelm Eichhoff but written with Marx’s ‘active assistance’^[xlv] and on the basis of his extensive notes, documents, and advice, Eichhoff and Marx again invoked the rebellion in Jamaica. Speaking of the widespread strikes that had just taken place in Belgium, where ‘Hunger and misery drove the wretches to rebellion and pillage’ and in response ‘the capitalists let the government and military forces intervene and most deliberately provoked bloody conflicts in which many workers were killed, wounded or thrown behind bars’, Eichhoff and Marx state: ‘In modern history only the scenes of carnage and bloodshed during the Negro uprising in Jamaica can compare with these atrocities. Here, as in Jamaica, the capitalists celebrated bloody orgies. Here, as in Jamaica, they hoped to break what was left of the workers’ spirit of resistance and self-esteem by acts of extreme brutality.’^[xlvi]

Finally, Marx again invoked the ruthless crushing of the Jamaican rebellion the following year in 1869. Writing on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association ‘To the Workmen of Europe and the United States’ about ‘The Belgian Massacres’, he opposedhis own explanation of the clashes, based in class struggle, to the view that the Belgian authorities, under French Imperial influence, were looking for a pretext to justify French intervention:

Other politicians, on the contrary, suspect the Belgian ministers to be sold to the Tuileries, and to periodically enact these horrible scenes of a mock civil war, with the deliberate aim of affording Louis Bonaparte a pretext for saving society in Belgium as he has saved it in France. But was Ex-Governor Eyre ever accused of having organized the Negro massacre at Jamaica in order to wrest that island from England and place it into the hands of the United States? No doubt the Belgian ministers are excellent patriots of the Eyre pattern. As he was the unscrupulous tool of the West-Indian planter, they are the unscrupulous tools of the Belgian capitalist.^[xlvii]

How mistaken was Carlos Moore, then, when he averred in the 1970s that ‘to Marx and Engels,’ the struggles of black workers in Jamaica and elsewhere

were, above all, only “nigger” events. This is seen in Engels’ short reference to the Jamaican insurrection of 1865, led by Paul Bogle. In a letter to Marx, dated December 1, 1865, Engels expressed no more than an amused “sympathy” for the “pitiful” struggle against British bayonets and rifles on the part of these “unarmed Niggers."^[xlviii]

We have seen that there was far more to their commentary on events in Jamaica than Moore was and is ready to admit. For doing so would seriously jeopardise his mission to paint Marx and Engels as ‘Aryan’-style white supremacists. Wulf Hund, who thinks Moore treats the issue of Marx’s anti-black racism ‘denunciatively’ from a ‘distortive perspective’^[xlix], nonetheless himself argues that Marx ignores the Haitian revolution because for Marx, ‘On the eve of revolution, the black slaves there were predominantly not a “native product” (as in the United States) but “freshly imported barbarians” (as in Jamaica)’^[l]. Thus Hund employs precisely the same reasoning as Moore: Marx ignored the Haitian revolution, as he ignored all the other uprisings of black workers, including in Jamaica, because these were mere ‘n-word’ or ‘barbarian’ events. But if, as I have tried to show, this argument fails in the case of Jamaica and the Morant Bay Rebellion, why should it succeed in the case of Haiti and its revolution? Although Marx had little to say about the Haitian Revolution, he clearly sided with ‘the insurgent Negroes of Haiti’^[li] in their struggle to free themselves, recognised Haiti as a ‘Negro Republic’^[lii], and noted the pivotal role played by Haiti and its president Alexandre Pétion in ‘the South American revolution’ – by providing Simón Bolívar with arms in exchange for Bolívar’s promise to emancipate black slaves^[liii] (an event Anténor Firmin later adduced as evidence of Haiti’s world-historical significance in his Equality of the Human Races^[liv]). So, while Hund’s query about Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian Revolution remains an important one, his contention that it stemmed from Marx’s anti-black racism – specifically the belief that Haitian blacks were ‘barbarians’ incapable of making history – is firmly refuted by the textual evidence.

The free black worker in Capital

Recently the distinguished cultural anthropologist and scholar of African religions, J. Lorand Matory, has followed Moore and Mills in attempting to make the case that the Eurocentric Marx’s free workers were all implicitly or explicitly white. Matory claims that ‘Marx’s greatest feat of theoretical abstraction and distortion’ can be found in the brief concluding chapter of Capital vol. 1 on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, where

Marx celebrates – as counterexamples of the metaphorical “enslavement” of the free (white) worker and as examples of his proper condition – those parts of the US and Australian settler colonies where almost all of the (white) workers have land of their own, where they can thereby resist the capitalist’s coercive demand for their labor, and where they therefore enjoy a high standard of living and culture.^[lv]

In his reading of Marx’s account of the struggle between capital and labour in the colonies of the Americas, Matory thus imagines that Marx means to refer only to white workers as the representatives of labour. According to Matory, ‘Black “wage slaves”’ – i.e., free black workers or wage-labourers – is ‘a category Marx fails even to acknowledge.’^[lvi] The text, however, does not support such a reading.

We might have wondered how reliable a reader of Marx Matory is by attending to his very next sentence, where he seeks to admit that ‘At moments, Marx does lament the fact that similar land in another settler colony, South Africa, was stolen from its indigenous African inhabitants ([1867] 1990: 48).’^[lvii] The passage Matory cites in fact refers not to anything written by Marx but to a discussion of South Africa from Ernest Mandel’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Capital vol. 1.When we do attend closely to the text in question, namely the final chapter of Capital vol. 1 on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, we findnot only that Matory is mistaken but that it is precisely here where Marxincorporated his earlier thoughts on the Jamaican class struggle into the fabric of Capital. For in Marx’s footnote to thetitle of this chapter, he tellsthe reader explicitly that he is dealing with both (white) European immigrant workers and formerly enslaved (black) workers: ‘We are dealing here with true colonies, i.e. virgin soil colonized by free immigrants. The United States is, economically speaking, still a colony of Europe. Apart from this, old plantations where the abolition of slavery has completely revolutionized earlier relationships belong here.’^[lviii]

Recall that Capital vol. 1 waspublished in 1867, within two years of both the abolition of slavery in the US and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Hence Marx is including both the newly freed African American workers and the other free black workers of the colonies in his discussion of the colonial class struggle. Later in the chapter Marx explicitly discusses the class struggle between (black) workers and capitalists in the Caribbean (i.e., the West Indies) by way of a take-down of ‘that mild, free-trading, vulgar economist [Gustave de] Molinari’, in a manner reminiscent of his earlier criticisms of ‘Expertus’ and The Times. Marx first quotes Molinari and then adds someacerbic commentary:

‘In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labour being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has occurred the opposite of what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar a sufficient price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable number of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them. . . It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be destroyed than that generations of men should perish’ (how generous of M. Molinari) ‘but would it not be better if both survived?’ (Molinari, op. cit., pp. 51-2). M. Molinari, M. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the Prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the‘entrepreneur’ can cut down the worker’s ‘legitimate share’ and in the West Indies the workers can cut down theentrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this ‘legitimate share’, which, according to your own admission, the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies, where the workers are so ‘simple’ as to ‘exploit’ the capitalist, M. Molinari feels a powerful itch to use police methods to set on the right road that law of supply and demand which works automatically everywhere else.^[lix]

Molinari’s lament for the ruin of sugar planters unable to employ profit-creating cheap wage-labour is exactly the complaint ‘Expertus’ had made, while his ‘itch to use police methods’ to discipline recalcitrant labour recalls the bloody and repressive aftermath of the Jamaican rebellion.

Marx: against black slavery and for black labour

So, to return to the claim for which these passages furnish essential evidence, it is exceedingly unlikely that Marx held the ‘emancipate only if civilised’ view attributed to him by the scholars whose interpretation we explored above. Marx did not think that the Jamaican blacks who had been emancipated by the British in the 1830s, though majority African-born, were undeserving or incapable of emancipation. On the contrary, he recognised them as workers – peasants and wage-labourers – who rightly fought attempts by the planter class and British government to reestablish conditions akin to slavery on the island. Far from believing that slaves must first be ‘civilised’ before they can or ought to be freed, in Capital v. 1 Marxeven criticised the British Emancipation Act of 1833 – which ‘forced the “freed” slaves to undergo a period of uncompensated “apprenticeship”’^[lx] – for having ‘administered freedom drop by drop’.^[lxi]

What all of this shows – quite clearly, I think – is that Marx viewed defenses of black slavery (and of slavery in general) as self-evidently absurd from the standpoint of justice. For Marx, if one’s argument involved a moral justification or apology for slavery then this was an immediate reductio of one’s position. He never abandoned the principles he articulated in some of his first work as a radical journalist: that ‘slavery, can never become lawful [i.e., just], even if it exists a thousand times over as a law’;^[lxii] and that ‘man [as opposed to any idol or deity – Author]is the highest being for man’, that there is a ‘categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicablebeing.’^[lxiii]

Even more than this, though, what our exploration of Marx’s neglected writings on free black labour shows is just how misguided it is to attempt to drive a wedge between Marxism and black liberation. The representatives of the ‘Marx as anti-black racist’ interpretation have got it wrong – in their rush to subject Marx to a race-first reading and uncover what they feel must be his inevitable racism, they have neglected to look past the epithets and at what he actually said.

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[i] This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

[ii] See Anderson 2016 and Zimmerman 2016.

[iii] The first appearance in English of the passage in question seems to have been Avineri 1968, p. 430.

[iv] See van Ree 2019 and Stepman 2020.

[v] See Hund 2021. Hund’s question of why Marx did not say more on the Haitian revolution is an interesting one. However, Hund’s explanation – which partially rests on an appeal to the ‘freshly imported barbarians’ line discussed here – is put in doubt to the extent that the line fails to provide such support, as I show below.

[vi] Anderson 2016, p. 98.

[vii] Nimtz 2003, p. 132, n. 35.

[viii] Apart from a few sentences here and there. See Anderson 2016, p. 160; Nimtz 2003, p. 188, n. 6; Cohen 2001, p. 321, n. 3.

[ix] Matory 2018, p. 72.

[x] Moore 2008, pp. 287-288. See also Moore 1972, and 1974–75.

[xi] Mills 2003, p. 122.

[xii] Mills 2003, p. 151.

[xiii] Mills 2003, p. 153.

[xiv] Marable 1996, pp. 236–7, n. 2.

[xv] Marx 1983a, p. 346.

[xvi] Paul 1981, p. 127.

[xvii] Marable 1987, p. 32.

[xviii] Zimmerman 2016, p. xxvi.

[xix] Van Ree 2019, p. 65.

[xx]Encyclopedia Britannica 2021.

[xxi]Encyclopedia Britannica 1911.

[xxii] Levermore 1890, p. 571.

[xxiii] Marx and Engels 1978, p. 501–2.

[xxiv] See Levine 2003, p. 11.

[xxv] Davis 2006, p. 238.

[xxvi] Carey 1853, pp. 19–20.

[xxvii] Carey 1853, p. 32–3.

[xxviii]‘Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.

One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.

Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade.’ See Marx 1992, p. 154.

[xxix] Marx 1988, p. 384.

[xxx]

 Expertus 1857.

[xxxi]Both the Collected Works and the Nicolaus translation of theGrundrisse give ‘blacks’ instead of ‘niggers,’ but in the original German text the phrase used is ‘die freien niggers von Jamaica.’ See Marx 1983b, p. 245.

[xxxii] Marx 1986, p. 251. Cf. Marx 1973, p. 325-6.

[xxxiii] Expertus 1857.

[xxxiv] Huzzey 2015.

[xxxv] Hobbs et al 1865.

[xxxvi] Engels 1987a, p. 197.

[xxxvii]Times 1865.

[xxxviii] Marx 1987a, p. 199. For historical evidence proving black workers themselves complained in the lead-up to the rebellion that the importation of indentured labourers – funded through burdensome taxation – hurt their wages and employment prospects, and in general strong support for Marx’s analysis of the causes of the conflict, see Heuman 1991.

[xxxix] Erickson 1934, p. 144.

[xl] Engels 1987b, p. 205

[xli] Engels 1987c, p. 236.

[xlii] Marx 1985a, p. 162.

[xliii] Sazonov 1987, p. 640, n. 366.

[xliv] Marx 1987b, p. 300.

[xlv] Vasin 1985, p. 517, n. 394.

[xlvi] Eichhoff 1985, p. 359.

[xlvii] Marx 1985b, p. 49.

[xlviii] Moore 1974, p. 140.

[xlix] Hund 2021, pp. 77, 91, n. 7.

[l] Hund 2021, p. 87.

[li] Marx 1976, p. 309.

[lii] Marx 1984, p. 229.

[liii] Marx 1982, p. 224.

[liv] Firmin 2002, p. 396.

[lv] Matory 2018, p. 71.

[lvi] Matory 2018, p. 72.

[lvii] Matory 2018, p. 71.

[lviii] Marx 1976, p. 931. My emphasis.

[lix] Marx 1976, p. 937.

[lx] Davis 2006, p. 238.

[lxi] Marx 1976, p. 392.

[lxii] Marx 1975a, p. 162.

[lxiii] Marx 1975b, p. 182.