race

A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present.  The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities.  The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ — indeed, into labour and nothing but labour — which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract,’ and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism.  The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general,’ depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race.  The term ‘Black,’ which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour.  Blackness names that limit.  Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism.  Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure.  If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour's subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognize the tendency forall labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection.  Consequently, the labour theory of value — which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour — must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour.  Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation,’ however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon forall labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/ postcolonial sociopolitical order.

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 proposition in this essay of a racial theory of labour inevitably seeks to situate labour under capitalism in the broad historical context that would permit for a theory of labour capacious enough to encompass the legacies of enslaved labour in the era of colonial capitalism as inextricable from the contemporary postcolonial regime of global capital accumulation, for which migration – human mobility on a global scale – is a crucial and indispensable feature. While modern slavery and other forms of coerced labour under colonialism were indisputably predicated upon the mass capture and immobilisation of labour in what were, in effect, de facto prison labour camps, such as slave plantations, it is nonetheless also indisputable that such enterprises required the unprecedented mobilisation of human labour on a global scale. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is perhaps the most obvious instantiation of this world historic phenomenon, but colonisation itself similarly entailed a variety of mass-scale human mobilities across the planet, including indentured labour, the transportation of convict labour, settler colonialism, as well as the more heterogeneous dynamics of installing and enforcing colonial rule, administratively and militarily. The present task is not, however, an exercise in historiography, but rather an exercise in theory. Thus, the empirical demonstration or validation of this exercise must, of necessity, be considered beyond the scope of what is feasible within the remit of this short essay. Instead, in the interests of a rethinking of some of the elementary features of Marx’s theorisation of labour under capitalism, this essay will rely upon a method that is principally exegetical. In short, a re-reading of Marx is undertaken here in order to reveal and highlight some of the key components for understanding the racial underpinnings of capitalism that have always been hiding, so to speak, in plain sight.  

From the outset, let it be clear that what is at stake here is a reconsideration of Marx’s theory of labour. When Marx famously initiates his greater project in Volume One of Capital with the proposition that Political Economy ‘has never once asked the question … why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magniutude of the value of the product,’[i] his solution to that puzzle is – tellingly, if perhaps counter-intuitively for some readers – that capitalism is ‘a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man.’[ii] That is to say, his purpose is not merely a technical (economistic) investigation into the calculation of economic value, as expressed in wages and the prices of commodities. His emphasis on mastery is emphatically and explicitly political. Building on this crucial but much-neglected (or commonly mis-read) formulation, Diane Elson proposes the concept of ‘a value theory of labour.’ In other words, Elson contends, the labour theory of value has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour. This reversal of terms serves to underscore that what really mattered for Marx was indeed to producea theory of labour – a theory adequate to the specific ways in which labour is systematically understood and represented under capitalism, as if it were simply a matter of calculating and commensurating quantitatively different but qualitatively homogeneous and interchangeable exercises of labour (in the abstract). Elson explains: ‘My argument is that theobject of Marx’s theory of value was labour. It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour. But rather of seeking an understanding of why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political consequences are.’^[iii]

Marx was interested in why the substance of labour assumes the particular form that it does under capitalism – a form in which what is predominant is its abstraction as something reducible toquantity. His contention was that this socially and historically specific predominance of abstract labour under capitalism signaled a particular sociopolitical organisation of themastery of human life by production (as its own end), whereby the productive power and creative capacities of human life (refigured and perverted by capital as ‘labour’) is subordinated to a regime of production ‘for the sake of production.’[iv] The crucial role of abstract labour in Marx’s analysis has inadvertently but very regrettably contributed to misreadings that (re-)fetishise and (re-)reify labour as an abstraction, lending apparent credence to reductive notions of the analytical and political primacy of ‘class’ that have frequently been presumed to be fundamentally opposed and inimical to race, relegating race and gender and all other sociopolitical differences to the secondary or derivative status of epiphenomena. The tragedy of such misreadings is that they uncritically recapitulate one of the most egregious and defining premises of capitalist social relations, taking recourse to a notion of labour that is fundamentally abstract, denuded, and disembodied.

Therefore, I will argue in this essay, in a manner that is analogous to Marx’s formulation, that if the mastery of human life – and labour – under capitalism has pervasively assumed the particular form of racial domination, we must similarly demand to understand why. With Marx, we must ask: Why has this content assumed that particular form? And what are the political consequences? This is a matter of deepening our comprehension of the Marxian theory of labour, a theory for which labour is its epistemic object, and sharpening our appreciation of its political ramifications. Such a theory must be adequate to the specific ways in which labour is systematically understood and represented under capitalism as something homogeneous and abstract, yet which in the materiality of lived practice is always embodied, and therefore gendered – and, indeed, racialised. Hence, the necessity ofa racial theory of labour.

Global Capitalism, Racial Capitalism

An elementary predicate of Marx’s analysis of the regime of capital accumulation is its global scope and scale. Indeed, Marx establishes repeatedly that one must understand capital to have been effectively globalfrom its inception. In one of the most forceful articulations of this perspective, in his discussion of ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ in Volume One ofCapital, Marx declares with a flourish:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which hasthe globe as its battlefield.^[v]

Importantly, Marx’s critique identifies slavery, colonialism, genocide, and warfare as veritable preconditions for the very possibility of capital accumulation. Arguably, this historical analysis, so integral as it truly is for Marx’s understanding of capitalism as such, lends force to the contention that the Marxian critique of capitalism inherently, and of necessity, requires an appreciation that capitalism was always, from the outset, not only global but also racial.

Such a perspective, readily corroborated by Marx’s own analysis, could be taken to command the recognition that what we have come to know as the global regime of capital accumulation is inextricable from a (post)colonial sociopolitical order of white supremacy. Here, then, there is some justifiable grounds for retroactively discerning in the very foundations of the classic Marxian critique of capitalism an incipient conception (albeit insufficiently articulated) of what Cedric Robinson famously designated to be racial capitalism. As Robinson formulates his central argument inBlack Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition:

Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilisation it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organisation, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.^[vi]

For Robinson, the intrinsically racial character of capitalism in fact derived from a constitutive and already racialised feature of social inequality and hierarchy in the composition and organisation of European social formations themselves. This was plainly not Marx’s perspective. Such historical inquiries and any ensuing disputes notwithstanding, however, it is plain that for Robinson the entrenchment of capitalist social relations on a global scale could only ever be ‘permeated’ by ‘racialism.’ Without allowing ourselves to get detoured by historiographic quibbles over origin stories, capitalist civilisation was inseparable from what Robinson memorably calls ‘the terrible culture of race’:  ‘Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power.’^[vii] But could one realistically expect or reasonably conclude otherwise from Marx’s own depiction of ‘the dawn of the era of capitalist production’ as one ‘chiefly’ distinguished by such systemic phenomena as the mass ‘extirpation, enslavement and entombment’ and ‘conquest and plunder’ of indigenous peoples, worldwide, and the notorious ‘commercial hunting of blackskins’? Capitalism, for Marx, was indeed saturated from its inception, not merely ideologically but also materially and practically, with racialism (in Robinson’s phrase):  capitalism has never been other than racial capitalism. 

In light of this historical perspective, what has been insufficiently comprehended, furthermore, is that we are long overdue for a robust renovation of Marxist theory and radical anti-capitalist political practice in light of a more thoroughgoing and comprehensive reevaluation of the central and defining concepts and theoretical categories of Marxian analysis through the critical lens of race. As a contribution to such an endeavor, this essay proposes a reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery, especially with respect to advancing a rigorous analysis of labour — and hence, of labour subordination — within the larger configuration of capitalist social relations.  Not simply reducible to a scholastic exercise in the historiography of what Marx characterised as ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ of capital, and therefore not merely a contribution to a more precise and more supple appreciation of the past, such an endeavor provides a vital source of Marxian critique for apprehending the mobility of labour (and its subordination as ‘migrant’ labour, in particular) within our global postcolonial present, and thus, for formulating any plausible politics that might aspire to a postcapitalist future.

Slavery, Labour, and Blackness

With specific reference to the disfigurement of the nascent struggles by the white working class in the United States because of the coeval existence of slavery, Marx famously proclaimed, ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’^[viii] This classic racial watchword of anti-capitalist struggle is no less pertinent today than in Marx’s era. ‘Labour in a white skin cannever emancipate itself,’ Marx notably insisted — never! — wherever whiteness is predicated upon the systemic denigration of Blackness. And where, or when, we may rightly demand, has whiteness evernot been so predicated?

For this, indeed, is the precise historical meaning of whiteness, its significance and salience.^[ix] Rather than an immutable, transhistorical, pre-political ‘biological’ essence, racial whiteness is truly ‘a very modern thing,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois memorably put it.^[x] Indeed, whiteness is an invention of colonial/racial capitalism, originating in the brutal sociopolitical processes that have come to be known as primitive accumulation.^[xi] Referring to this global history of conquest as a material necessity for jump-starting and sustaining the processes of capital accumulation, Marx contends, ‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.’^[xii] ‘In fact,’ Marx concludes poignantly, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.’^[xiii] This formulation’s meaning is unequivocal:  with the phrase ‘needed … as its pedestal,’ Marx plainly contends that slavery was necessary as the base or foundation that materially supported wage labour.[xiv]

Here, it is perhaps helpful to briefly address the substantive historical relationship between slavery and wage labour. To try to address the empirical question of the relative importance of slave labour and wage labour, or their comparative proportions in the production of surplus value during the early history of capitalism, is, in a strict sense, plainly unanswerable. Apart from the sheer paucity of any comprehensive body of data that might plausibly support such an econometric comparison, there is the more fundamental dilemma of truly apprehending capitalism as an effectively global socioeconomic formation, for which any recourse to the fiction of a ‘national’ economy is inherently fallacious and misleading.  ‘The political economy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic,’ Walter Johnson argues cogently, ‘[was] a single space, its dimensions defined by flows of people, money, and goods, its nested temporalities set by interlocking (though clearly distinct) labour regimes, cyclical rhythms of cultivation and foreign exchange, and shared standards of calculability and measurement,’[xv] in which slave labour and wage labour were ‘two poles of [a] single Atlantic economy’ characterised by ‘dynamic simultaneity.’[xvi] Similarly advancing a ‘broad conception of totality,’ Dale Tomich argues, slave labour was ‘part of the organisation of social labour on the world scale … a specific form of commodity production that [was] related to other such forms through the world market and international division of labour,’ while it was precisely the world market and division of labour that supplied and sustained the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of slave labour.[xvii] ‘A materialist and historical analysis,’ Johnson clarifies, ‘begins from the premise that in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capitalism without slavery. However else industrial capitalism might have developed in the absence of slave-produced cotton and Southern capital markets, it did not develop that way.’[xviii]

Cotton was indeed ‘the Industrial Revolution’s most essential commodity,’[xix] and cotton produced by enslaved labour in the southern United States became ‘the most widely traded commodity in the world.’[xx] As the world’s primary producer of cotton, the United States occupied ‘a distinctive position in the global economy.’[xxi] In 1860, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, fully three-quarters of U.S. cotton was being produced for export, providing British industry in particular (the global epicenter of wage labour) no less than 70 percent of this vital raw material.[xxii] Consequently, slavery must be recognised to have been ‘indispensable to the economic development of the United States’ as evidenced by ‘some basic facts:  that slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads and factories, that foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands …that the highest concentration of steam power in the United States was to be found along the Mississippi [River],’ the waterway traversing the heartland of the expanded slave economy, rather than any site in the northeastern region where economic development was driven by industrial capitalism.[xxiii]Exceeding the total number of free migrants who moved to the United States between the time of the Revolution and 1850, and despite British and U.S. abolitions of the slave trade in1808, the fifty years that preceded the Civil War saw more than four million enslaved people forcibly imported into New World slavery’s most intensive zones of production and profit-making, with ‘the total number of enslaved people in the New World [increasing] dramatically, from about five million to about seven million.’[xxiv]  Comparatively, the population engaged in wage labour in the United States during this period remained quite small, especially in agriculture. ‘The wage labour market in the US was perennially plagued by labour shortages.… as late as 1860 there was only one wage labourer for every two farms in the North.’[xxv]Moreover, slavery was indispensable for the dramatic advances in industrial capitalism in Britain, and thus for the very creation of its wage-labour proletariat.[xxvi] ‘Neither Britain nor any other country that followed it down the path of textile-based industrialisation could have accomplished an economic transformation without the millions of acres of cotton fields of the expanding American South.’[xxvii] To substitute the cotton that British industry imported from U.S. slave labour camps with a comparable amount of wool, for instance, ‘Britain in 1830 would have had to devote 23 million acres to sheep pasture—more than the sum total of the island’s agricultural land.’[xxviii] Likewise, as Edward Baptist demonstrates, ‘The total gain in productivity per [enslaved] picker from 1800 to 1860 was almost 400 percent – precisely the same as ‘the increase in the efficiency of [wage] workers who tended spinning machines in Manchester cotton mills’ between 1819 and 1860, when the same figure for workers in weaving mills ‘improved by 600 to 1,000 percent.’ Therefore, Baptist argues, ‘even as textile factories harnessed increasingly complex machinery to more powerful non-human energy sources …[enslaved] cotton pickers produced gains in productivity similar to those of [wage labour in] cotton factories.’[xxix] Driving all of this world historic capitalist expansion, in a fundamental sense, was the feverish ever-rising productivity of slave labour, which was derived from what Baptist depicts as ‘a dynamically evolving technology’ predicated on measurement, forced innovation, and torture[xxx]:  ‘Whips rose and fell. And cotton-picking rates rose inexorably….  The whip made cotton.’[xxxi] ‘The scientific principle of every cotton labour camp [was] a metaphorical whipping-machine:  a technology for controlling and exploiting human beings, calibrating increments of torture to extract both efficient production of pounds of cotton and endless, dynamic improvements to that efficiency.’[xxxii] These continuous increases in the efficiency of slave labour meant ever-lower real prices for cotton, which then increased the surplus value that was reinvested as capital in still more efficient factory machinery, as well as bolstering the astounding profits of both industrial capitalists and slave owners, revenues for governments, and higher wages for the new industrial working class.[xxxiii]

In Marx’s invocation of slavery as the proverbial pedestal for the exploitation of wage labour, he identifies a particular condition for the actual historical genesis of capital, but provides no extended elaboration of the interrelation of slavery and wage labour. Instead, because Marx’s principal aim is to theoretically clarify the capital-wage labour relation, he prioritises the logical development of its form in a manner that, in effect, treats slavery as a kind of externality.[xxxiv] Nonetheless, contemporary historiography abundantly verifies what  Marx already plainly knew:  ‘historically, slavery was a key means of expanding commodity production, creating a world market, and providing the substantive conditions for the development of the capital-wage labour form.’[xxxv]However, as Dale Tomich notes, ‘the historical hierarchy among forms of labour is not, and cannot be, the same as the theoretical hierarchy.’[xxxvi] This conceptual autonomy of slavery and ‘capitalism’ has regrettably led many would-be Marxists astray, treating both terms as ahistorical, static, abstract categories presumed to be fundamentally inimical, and in this way recapitulating some of the elementary conceits of classical bourgeois political economy regarding the presumptively greater productivity and efficiency of wage labour over slave labour, and thus upholding the notion of their irreconcilability.[xxxvii] As James Oakes remarks tellingly, ‘Nowadays, the bourgeois critique of slavery is kept alive primarily by Marxist historians.’[xxxviii] Indeed, whereas for much of history wage labour was ‘perceived as something akin to slavery,’[xxxix] it was precisely one of the paramount ideological achievements of the advancing bourgeois ethos of industrial capitalist society during the early to mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the form of what is known as labour republicanism in the United States, that wage labour came to be pervasively coded as ‘free labour.’ The racialisation of ‘free’ labour as the proper station and comparatively virtuous status of white workers, in contradistinction with African American enslavement as well as the ‘slavish’ condition of myriad other categories of people of color, was utterly crucial and decisive.[xl]

Marx relies extensively on the heuristic utility of contrasts between slave labour and wage labour, precisely to underscore the affinities between the two. Furthermore, he does not shun depictions of ostensibly ‘free’ (waged) labour as a reconstructed form of servitude: ‘The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker.’[xli] The characterisation of wage labour as a ‘veiled’ form of slavery, notably, speaks directly to Marx’s preoccupation with why labour (and its mastery) systematically appears under capitalism in this particular form:  ‘the value and price of labour-power’ come to be expressed in the form of wages, and thus ‘makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation,’ thereby supplying the basis for ‘all the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist … all capitalism’s illusions of freedom.’[xlii]  Nonetheless, Marx also discerned in the ‘unqualified slavery’ of colonial capitalism the production of commodities for the world market whereby ‘the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery.’[xliii] Hence, New World slavery was not only a material and practical prerequisite for that illusory freedom attributed to wage labour, but also a kind of exemplar of the raw unveiled truth of labour under capitalism. Thus, Marx’s analysis would seem to command a deeper interrogation of labour as such by way of a more frank encounter with labour in its proverbial Black ‘skin.’

The ‘trade in men’ (and women, and children), in Du Bois’s account, ‘came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a new industrial system.’^[xliv] As a result, the ‘doctrine of race’ arising from this primitive accumulation to justify and legitimate the subjugation of indigenous, colonised, and enslaved peoples thereafter had to be ‘frantically rationalised in every possible direction.’^[xlv] That racial whiteness has, since its inception, been an equivocal and treacherous fabrication, therefore, ought to be fairly evident. Nevertheless, the semblance of objectivity and purity customarily attributed to whiteness — its precisely un-natural yet terrifyingly naturalised social reality — has been forged and exalted only through a bloody history and a system of rule predicated on racial hierarchy in which whiteness has systematically been exclusively guarded as the most privileged status — which is to say, in short, white supremacy. As Du Bois memorably remarked, ‘there was but one unanimity’ among the various rivals for imperial prerogative – ‘the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.’^[xlvi] Du Bois eloquently if acerbically exposed what he called the ‘religion of whiteness,’^[xlvii] for which ‘whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’^[xlviii]

White supremacy is a social and political order of domination and subordination that systemically generates and upholds inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige by privileging racialised whiteness over and above all other categories of ‘racial’ identity. Foundational racialised distinctions and meanings, such as ‘white’ or ‘Black,’ were literally invented, imposed, and enforced through various iterations of the global regime of European/colonial supremacy, retroactively. They appear as the transparent and self-evident (‘natural’) names for differences that only came to have significance and gravity because the particular forms of exploitation and domination that created them required and relied upon their naturalisation. Whiteness, like Blackness, is however no mere fact of nature; it is fact of white supremacy.

To adequately adapt Marx’s critique of the racial coordinates of capitalism and the perplexities of labour in one or another racial ‘skin,’ we must conceive of Blackness as more capacious than a mere synonym for African origin or ancestry alone. We need recourse to a conception of Blackness that corresponds to the full range of racialised categories that white supremacy has orchestrated under the sign of negation. In other words, I refer here not to any supposedly ‘objective’ or ‘natural’ sort of (phenotypic, quasi-’biological’) racial Blackness that might be more conventionally attributed to people of African origin or descent in particular, but rather to the pronouncedly heterogeneous spectrum of all those categories of humanity that European settler colonialism and imperialism unrelentingly produced as colonised and enslaved ‘natives,’ and thus as expressly not-’white.’ Indeed, this was never merely a matter of racial ideology alone, but also of the material and practical transfer of plantation management personnel and ‘expertise’ across the colonial world, within and between empires, whereby the practices of racialised labour subordination were inextricable from the racial subjugation and denigration of subject peoples.[xlix] Hence, in the annals of colonial white supremacy, the compendium of heterogeneous terms and epithets devoted to racial Blackness has often been deployed rather promiscuously to name or denigrate a quite variegated array of phenotypically diverse colonised subjects. What has always been paramount, however, is their relegation to a subordinated status denied and expelled from whiteness.

Moreover, we may instructively apprehend ‘Blackness’ not primarily (or not exclusively) as a literal attribute of the ‘skin’ per se, but rather as the preeminent figure of racialised subordination within a global regime of white supremacy. The people of Africa — who were hunted, captured, kidnapped, commodified, trafficked, shackled, deported, tortured, raped, mutilated, and killed, all in order to subject them to a permanent regime of brutally coerced labour — were the only category of humanity in the modern world order, as Achille Mbembe argues, ‘whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise — the living crypt of capital.’^[l] Indeed, if the Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African persons into ‘human-objects, human-commodities, human-money,’^[li] the term ‘Black’ that was devised to brand their particular flesh nonetheless ‘was invented to signify exclusion, brutalisation, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred.’^[lii] Consequently, and above all else, Blackness names that limit.

Inasmuch as the objectification of human productive power and creative capacity is precisely what is at stake in Marx’s critique of the capital-labour relation, predicated as it is upon the commodification of the capacity for work (labour-power), the reduction of human beings into ‘human-objects, human-commodities, human-money’ — indeed, ‘human capital’ — which was the very essence of modern slavery, requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour itself under capitalism.[liii] This, after all, is precisely what Marx describes in his analysis of the struggle over the working day.  From the standpoint of capital, Marx clarifies, even for ostensibly ‘free’ (waged) labour:

The working-day contains the full 24 hours.… Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorisation of capital, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital…. But in its blind measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical limits of the working-day…. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which determines the limits of the working-day here, but rather the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be, which determines the limits of the workers’ period of rest. Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power….^[liv]

Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure.[lv] Insofar as Blackness is inextricable from the historical experience of modern slavery as a kind of name, indeed a racialised branding, for that historically specific limit of human objectification and commodification, we may begin to recognise that all labour under capitalism may itself be understood to be at leasttendentially encompassed under this racialised sign as the antithesis of capital. This, indeed, is what ensures that labour ‘in a white skin’ – labour identified with racial whiteness, and thus invested in the treacherous material and practical benefits of white supremacy – cannever emancipate itself. Such an investment in whiteness obfuscates what Marx decried as ‘the enslavement of the worker’ to capital, and very reliably renders ‘white’ workers as labour-for-capital. This, furthermore, is why capitalism requires white supremacy and will always sustain the advantages that accrue to those who have come to be racialised as white, which Du Bois famously recognised to be the symbolic and psychological ‘wages’ of whiteness.[lvi] Marx underscores the centuries-long incubation and development of capitalist social relations ‘required before the ‘free’ worker … makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.’[lvii] This same historical process was substantially concurrent with the genesis of a global (colonial capitalist) regime of white supremacy, which similarly compelled those putatively ‘free’ workers racialised as white to trade their human birthright for the disfigurement of whiteness, and to accommodate themselves to capitals’ mastery over them in exchange for the paltry benefits of their sociopolitical alignment with the master race – a mess of racial pottage.  

If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. This may be taken to be a corollary to the proposition that enslavement is the limit figure for all labour under capitalism, and that there is a tendency to press all labour toward that limit. Inasmuch as this dynamic is relational and tendential, and thus signals the larger workings of a system, we have an analytic that can encompass the full range of sociopolitical differences and contradictions (racialised or otherwise) along an unstable and contingent continuum of relative freedom/unfreedom.

While never denying or disregarding the historical specificity of African experiences of white supremacy and the particularity for Africans and all people of African ancestry of being racialised as Black,^[lviii] we nonetheless require a more expansive and capacious understanding of Blackness as a sociopolitical category that, likewise, tendentially encompasses the whole spectrum of racialised social identities produced as non-white within our global postcolonial regime of white supremacy. Here, we may recall that in his landmark text,The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois proposes aglobal conceptual framework for apprehending his subject: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line –– the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.’^[lix] In the aftermath of the era of decolonisation that defined the latter half of the twentieth century, the problem of the color line has become widely synonymous with borders. Contemporary postcolonial migration and refugee movements may therefore be recognised as providing crucial sites for what Mbembe has tellingly depicted as ‘the Becoming Black of the world,’^[lx] whereby ‘the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity,’^[lxi] in which ‘the term ‘Black’ has been generalised,’^[lxii] and there is a ‘tendency to universalize the Black condition.’^[lxiii]

Race, Difference, and the Abstraction of Labour

If I am emphasizing race (and specifically, Blackness) as a decisive analytical tool for ultimately unpacking the global question of labour within our postcolonial condition, generally (and for the question of migrant labour, in particular) it is because Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. When he proclaimed, ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,’ Marx chose his words well. By evoking thebranding of the flesh of enslaved African/American labour, Marx tersely but precisely named the visceral corporeality and sheer cruelty of slavery’s dehumanizing violence, while yet naming a more diffuse process of racialisation whereby Blackness itself could be inferred to be both the result of a kind of sociopolitical branding as well as that very physical process of branding itself. In other words, the production of racial distinctions in the modern capitalist world has itself been a continuous and ever unfinished process of branding. Blackness (and race, more generally) has been an elemental and foundational figure for theoretically interrogating the sociopolitical production ofdifference within our capitalist modernity.

The theoretical stakes of this intervention revolve around what is necessarily a mutually constitutive engagement in my scholarly work with both race and migration; they are not reducible, however, to any ostensibly delimited question of ‘identity.’ In other words, the stakes here are emphatically not to apprehend ‘difference’ as if it were merely an unfortunate or cumbersome, pre-political (quasi-natural) pretext for various properly political tactics of labour subordination and strategies of divide-and-rule, serving to undermine the unity of a presumptively unitary ‘working class.’ Rather, I am proposing that we cannot adequately comprehend Marx’s theory of labour under capitalism, as such, without further pursuing this inquiry into the puzzle of ‘labour in a white skin’ and, concomitantly, labour branded as Black.

Capital can never extract from labour the abstract (eminently social) substance that is ‘value’ except with recourse to the abstraction of labour-power, which however can only be derived from the palpable vital energies of living labour. As an operative, indeed decisive, category of capital accumulation, labour-power (abstract labour) never ceases to pertain to real flesh-and-blood (embodied, and hence, racialised) working people (concrete labour). As Marx explains:

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.… There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power.… As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values — commodity values.^[lxiv]

Marx affiliated concrete (variegated) labour with the use-value of the distinct products of that labour, and therefore with the whole heterogeneous panoply of positive, determinate, qualitative specificities — in short, with difference as such, and therefore with the historically specific and socially distinctive aspects of human life. In contrast, it was the systemic requirement for abstract labour as a generic form that served to elucidate the historically specific but global character of alienation, exploitation, and fetishism under capitalism.

Notably, Marx discerned these global capitalist socioeconomic processes to be uneven in their development, and therefore, to be most abundantly evidenced in the United States.

Indifference toward specific labours conforms to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference…. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society — in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour,’ ‘labour as such,’ labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.^[lxv]

Remarkably, what for Marx was the epitome of ‘the most modern society,’ or more precisely, ‘the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society’ (as a virtually ‘pure’ form of capitalist society) — the United States — was, we may recall, precisely a social formation that had been materially and practically built upon large-scale plantation slavery, and a sociopolitical order of white supremacy. And it was here, where the branding of labour in the racialised ‘skin’ of Blackness was likewise exceedingly advanced, that there emerged the most pure form of the abstraction of ‘labour’ as such, of labour ‘in general.’

In his account of the formation of capital, Marx establishes an analytical opposition 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 valorise 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.’^[lxvi] In this regard, there is an emphatic heuristic contrast drawn between the figures of ‘free workers’ (or ‘free labour’) and ‘slaves.’ It is precisely this figure of ‘free’ labour that serves to underscore the historically specific character of the emergence of labour-power as the commodified objectification of the human capacity to work (labour in the abstract), which distinguishes the ostensibly contractual and purely voluntary transaction that is understood to transpire in the capitalist labour market between owners of the means of production and wage labourers – as if they were the mere sellers of just another commodity like any other. Nonetheless, these putatively ‘free’ workers are scathingly depicted by Marx as those ‘who have nothing to sell except their own skins.’^[lxvii] Moreover, Marx explains, referring specifically to the historical dissolution of feudalism, ‘these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.’^[lxviii] This indeed is one of the premier formulations by which we understand the concept of (‘the so-called’) primitive accumulation: ‘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.’^[lxix] Nevertheless, these processes of expropriation and dispossession, we know, just as Marx knew, were — and continue to be — coterminous with the generalisation of the wage-labour relation. Their character as ‘prior’ to capitalism proper is strictly apparent and is presented in this manner by Marx for analytical purposes. In fact, they were not only constitutive, historically, of capital and indeed necessary preconditions for the formation of a regime of capital accumulation, but they have co-existed with the more pure ideal type of capitalist (wage-)labour relations throughout the ongoing history of ‘actually existing’ capitalism, which has never ceased to be written in blood and fire.^[lxx] In this respect, centuries of New World slavery cannot be reduced to a mere residual of some putative pre-history of ‘true’ capitalist relations.

The racial branding of labour that Marx identifies in the context of New World slavery was a necessary and truly definitive feature of the brutality required for the subjugation of enslaved African/American labour but also for the elaborate sociopolitical and sociolegal machinations devised to produce the global/colonial fact of Blackness. Importantly, I contend, it was likewise this same branding, this same production of racialised difference, that served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract.’ Labour in the abstract — a figure of labour literally shorn of its humanity and stripped of all qualitative specificities — was possible historically only through the real stripping and degradation of the actual human life of the enslaved and colonised into a form of life that could be classed as virtually sub-human.  And after all, as Gargi Bhattacharyya notes, ‘capitalism cannot function if we all are allowed to become fully human.’^[lxxi]

To be rendered as labour in the abstract is to be reduced to labour and nothing but labour. This was the precise project of modern slavery. This of course is not to suggest that such a project was ever successfully fulfilled or completed. Enslaved people were never reduced to a condition so abject as to be shorn of their distinctly human subtlety and suppleness. On the contrary, the irrepressibly human creative powers and potentialities of enslaved African/Americans were not only a veritable font of continuous insubordination and rebellion, but also a foundational source for the very notion of freedom and the unfinished work of emancipation in our modern world.^[lxxii] Nor is it to suggest, on the other hand, that enslaved people were the ostensible owners and sellers of that distinctly capitalist commodity that Marx designated as labour-power. However, there never could have emerged this social fiction of labour-power —whereby the capacity to work could be rendered as if it were simply one more commodity for sale in the market — without a pre-history in which the myriad forms of concrete labour became reduced and generalised (that is to say, abstracted) into a figure of labour in the abstract, labour ‘in general.’ For the historically specific emergence and consolidation of this peculiarly modern form of generic ‘labour,’ slavery was constitutive. There was simply no more perfect approximation of the elusive figure of labour in the abstract than the social condition inflicted on enslaved people by modern slavery — that distinctly capitalist sociopolitical regime that worked assiduously and unrelentingly to reduce a whole category of human life to labour and nothing but labour.

The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general,’ furthermore, depended upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, for which acts of physical, corporeal branding were merely a cruel punctuation to the more general branding of race. Once again, I hasten to clarify that this is in no sense an essentialist proposition about ‘race’ as any kind of ‘real’ (pseudo-natural, phenotypic, quasi-biological) category of difference among distinct varieties of human being, but rather an insistence on the eminently social and political reality of race as a defining and organizing principle for the historical production of difference, inequality, and hierarchy within the global labour regime of capitalism.

The homogenised abstraction of labour-power could be generated only under the aegis of the social production of real heterogeneity and inequality, such as that which Du Bois famously called ‘the problem of the color line,’^[lxxiii] or analogously, what Partha Chatterjee has designated as ‘the rule of colonial difference.’^[lxxiv] In other words, the capital-labour relation — which appears to be merely a matter of narrowly ‘economic’ relations — must always be understood in terms of its actual politics, which is to say, the power struggles at stake in the disputes over the historically specific social production of difference.^[lxxv] As Bhattacharyya incisively puts the question, alongside an ‘overarching instrumentalisation of human life, how are some deemed (even) less?’^[lxxvi] Capital’s apparent (economic) indifference to, or disregard for, the specificities of the terms of conditions for extracting the maximum surplus value has only ever been sustained in practice through the actual (political) struggles that differentiate living labour toward the very instrumental end of maximizing its subordination and exploitation. Such a politics of difference at work within the genesis of abstract labour has always been inextricable from the real history of racial subjugation, for which slavery remains a primal scene.

Labour Mobility, Migrant ‘Illegality,’ and Branding

In the remainder of this essay, I will re-purpose this ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of colonial capitalism toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour within the contemporary postcolonial condition.^[lxxvii] My endeavor is not to identify and denounce the contemporary existence of diverse forms of ‘virtual’ or ‘new slavery,’ nor to subsume a discussion of migrant labour within a comparable exposé of the vicious and coercive features of human trafficking. While there is surely no shortage of truly horrific exploitation and oppression in the world today, including a whole sordid spectrum of forms of outright enslavement, I am reluctant to contribute to the sensationalisation of such spectacles of victimisation, both because they often serve, however inadvertently or unwittingly, to re-stabilise ‘normal’ exploitation as effectively legitimate and proper, and because they tend to conceal or suppress the subjective dimensions, however constrained and contradictory, of those who are thus objectified and subjugated by the cruelty of their exploiters.^[lxxviii] Rather, having extrapolated key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, I am concerned with the ways that slavery as a specific system of (colonial capitalist) labour subordination supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/ postcolonial sociopolitical order.  A comprehensive Marxian theory of migration commands a critical attention to theorizing questions of the state, law, nationalism, borders, and citizenship, as well as race (among other social formations of ‘difference’). My focus here will continue to highlight questions of race and labour.

Migration provides a key site for contemplating the mobility of labour ‘as such’ — labour ‘in general,’ or labour in the abstract. Simply put, there could be ‘no capitalism without migration.’^[lxxix] Simultaneously, the global mobility of labour is in fact inexorably embroiled in the production of difference, particularly the spatialised difference that is produced by (‘national’) state borders.^[lxxx] Indeed, in a world social order that delegates the expressly political tasks of labour’s subordination and coercion to localised (territorially delimited) formations of more or less organised violence (customarily, ‘national’ state formations),^[lxxxi] borders and their enforcement become critical sites of labour subordination, mediating the global relation of capital and labour through various interventions that differentiate the mobility of labour according to the juridical categories that govern migration. Thus, if there were no borders, there would be no ‘migration’ as such – only mobility.[lxxxii]

As the veritable source of all value, it is not unreasonable to say that labour-power is the premier commodity in the global circuitry of capitalist exchange. Capital has made and relentlessly re-made the world in its own image, and according to its chaotic requirements — bursting asunder every apparent barrier in the creation of an ever more unobstructed global arena for profit-making and the continuous re-consolidation of a global division of labour.[lxxxiii] Likewise, necessarily and inevitably, there has also been a concomitant escalation in the mobility of labour-power – arguably, above and beyond that of any other commodity (except money capital itself). Whereas other commodities are generally transported in order to be exchanged and consumed, once and for all, capital’s continuous and unrelenting appetite for labour-power requires that living labour must be constantly replenished in order that it may be repeatedly ‘consumed’ anew.^[lxxxiv] Thus, the global movement of homogenised, abstract labour is finally embodied in the restless life and death of labour in a rather more ‘concrete’ form -- which is to say, actual migrant working men and women. While Marx restricted his use of the concept of ‘concrete labour’ to refer to the heterogenous variety of specific forms of work that produced distinct products or contributions to the larger labour process, I adapt this distinction between abstract and concrete labour here to insist on the ways in which labour in the abstract is never separable from its embodiment in living labour, replete with all the qualitative differences that may otherwise be assembled under the heading of ‘concrete’ labour. The accelerated mobility of labour-power is similarly inseparable, then, from the migration of actual (corporeal) human beings and all the concomitant differences that accrue to them through the mediation of border regimes and immigration law.

In the mass exodus of the Irish fleeing the potato famine of 1846, for instance, Marx notably recognised what he characterised as ‘a systematic process.’^[lxxxv] The Irish exodus entailed ‘a new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery.’^[lxxxvi] It also served, in effect, as ‘one of the most lucrative branches of [Ireland’s] export trade.’^[lxxxvii] By exporting the labour-power of its surplus population while also mobilizing the migrants themselves as a source of remittances, Marx noted, the exodus not only subsidised those left behind but further fueled migration by financing the travel costs of subsequent generations of migrants. From the opposite vantage point of the United States, Marx discerned with respect to Irish labour migration a parallel process of importation — ‘the importation of paupers.’^[lxxxviii] As Michael Burawoy classically demonstrated, migrant labour likewise entails a systematic separation of the exploitation of labour-power from the sites (and costs) of its reproduction.^[lxxxix] As with the mobility of capital itself, which exudes a pronounced indifference toward the particular forms of the labour process where it invests in favor of a maximisation of surplus value, and is in this sense exceedingly versatile, so also with the human mobility of labour. Migrant labour mobility is a supreme instance of flexibility, commonly compelled to regard the particular content of one or another type of work with relative indifference, and to render up its labour-power wherever and however it may be required.

The inclination that Marx discerned with regard to the mobility of capital to surmount any ‘legal [or other] extra-economic impediments to its freedom of movement’ is yet another aspect of this versatility of migrant labour.^[xc] Nevertheless, depicting Ireland’s precisely colonial condition in terms of ‘a government … maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege sometimes open and sometimes disguised,’^[xci] Marx also discerned how the ‘forced immigration of poor Irishmen’ into the industrial cities of England had enabled the capitalist class to cultivate ‘two hostile camps’ defined by the ‘profound antagonism between the Irish proletariat and the English proletariat,’ whereby ‘the average English worker hates the Irish worker … [and] regards him somewhat like thepoor whites of the Southern States of North America regard their black slaves.’^[xcii]  The ‘tendency to universalize the Black condition,’^[xciii] so provocatively articulated by Mbembe for the contemporary postcolonial subaltern condition on a global scale, was plainly evident already for Marx.  This is so, I am insisting, because slavery was already the inexorable limit figure for all forms of labour under capitalism, and consequently, Blackness always already supplied the racialised cipher for signaling the most extreme manifestations of modern exploitation.

For present purposes, it is likewise crucial to recall that even for those who come to be racialised as Black, we must guard against naturalizing what has always and everywhere been an historically specific sociopolitical process of producing them as ‘Black.’ In this regard, Stuart Hall’s reflections on his experience as a Black migrant are quite poignant: ‘I’d never called myself black ever in my life.... So it was a discovery for me, a rediscovery [in Britain] of the Caribbean in new terms ... and a rediscovery of the black subject.... I didn’t choose that. I had no alternative.’^[xciv] In other words, although the centuries-old racialisation of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the New World was indisputably a defining crucible for the global/colonial racial formation of Blackness, it was nonetheless the postcolonial migrant encounter with Europe that was, in Hall’s experience, tantamount to a migration into Blackness, a re-racialisation, a subordination and subjection that was inextricable from the ongoing and unfinished business of (re-)producing racial distinctions and meanings. His migration, and moreover, his migrant condition, required that he be socially and politically inscribed, and thus racially branded — as Black.

The ‘Blackness’ of racially subjugated migrants is therefore always something fundamentally new, to be continuously ‘discovered’ by migrants as they endure and confront the larger social forces working to produce them as racial objects and thereby also as (re-)racialised subjects, and thus compelling them to ‘re-discover’ themselves racially. It is necessary, then, that we recognize the fundamentally racial character of migration within and throughout the world capitalist system,[xcv] while also underscoring the contemporary salience of the figures of migration and refugee movements for destabilizing, de-naturalizing, and de-essentializing yet again the pernicious persistence of encrusted and ossified racial nomenclatures. The persistently racial salience of migration is as indisputable as is the pivotal importance of migration in demonstrating the profoundly unstable and historically mutable character of race as an eminently social construction, implicated always in unresolved sociopolitical struggles over its meanings and lived consequentiality.[xcvi] Thus, it is productive once more to insist on a conception of Blackness that exceeds the constrictions of the more rigid and conventional racial codifications that have been generated and sedimented historically.

The historical production of Blackness (and thereby, also of whiteness) required the literal branding of the flesh of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the Americas.  Furthermore, racialisation itself has operated as a kind of sociopolitical branding. Such sociopolitical processes of branding have always required multifarious and reiterative operations, including of course those of the law, to truly accomplish the task of allocating and resolutely attaching sociopolitical categories of difference to diverse varieties of human persons, and thus searing their racialised designations onto their bodies and identities. Analogously, we may begin to comprehend how other (ostensibly non-racial or race-neutral) forms of sociopolitical categorisation and regimentation, such as ostensibly ‘national’ differences come to operate as effectively racial categories of difference, and how generic figures of ‘foreignness,’ or indeed the durable designation of particular categories of migrants as ‘illegal,’ also bear a compelling resemblance to branding. Without effacing the irreducible historical specificity of Marx’s discussion of modern slavery, it has indeed become increasingly common today, given our global postcolonial condition, that labour ‘in a black skin’ presents itself also in a ‘foreign’ costume.

The putative ‘illegality’ of migrants or so-called ‘asylum-seekers’ (itself a derisive term predicated on suspicion) has become the single most prominent ‘problem’ for immigration and asylum law and policy on a global scale during recent decades. Seldom does public debate consider precisely where and how this ‘illegality’ came into being, however. Nonetheless, migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ always has a history within each particular juridical and border enforcement context. One of the central hypotheses of a critical analysis of what I call the legal production of migrant ‘illegality’^[xcvii] has been to recognize that a spectacle of border policing in fact systematically distracts us from discerning how migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ is truly generated elsewhere, through law and policy formulated and promulgated at a great remove from the actual physical/territorial borders of states.^[xcviii] Indeed, it is the law that brands particular migrations and categories of migrants as ‘illegal.’ Migrant illegalisation is a process of sociopolitical branding.

Furthermore, the ethnographic study of present-day border policing and immigration enforcement practices confirms that such histories (much like the histories of racialisation) are never finished. Rather than faits accomplis, established once and for all time, these diverse and historically specific productions of migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ must continue to be (re-) produced through border struggles and ongoing practices of (re-)bordering. The concepts of deportability^[xcix] and a global deportation regime,^[c] furthermore, help to elucidate how illegalised migrants’ and refugees’ susceptibility to deportation — the prospect of deportation, beyond the actual fact of deportation — contributes decisively to the production of migrant precarity in everyday life. In short, it is precisely deportability that plays a distinctly disciplinary role in the production of the conditions of possibility for migrant labour-power to serve as a highly desirable commodity for employers, often converting what Marx called the disposable ‘reserve army’[ci] of labour into an enthusiastically recruited (deportable) labour force of choice.

Capital requires a surplus population to both absorb displaced workers, but also to serve as a pool of potential workers when production expands.^[cii] The operation of the reserve army of labour serves to discipline labour at the same time that it meets the requirements of capital accumulation on an expanding scale. ‘The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital.’^[ciii] The sociopolitical and legal branding of migrant labour as ‘foreign’ and especially as ‘illegal’ supplies a crucial disciplinary mechanism for managing all labour through a multiplication of the categories of difference that serve to decompose and fragment labour into competing rival factions riven by racialised and other essentialised antagonisms that are naturalised as ‘unpassable boundaries’ and ‘fictions of embodied otherness.’^[civ] Alternating mass deportations with a more or less permanent mass importation of illegalised and deportable labour has long ensured that the state’s mediation of migration through diverse tactics of border policing and immigration law enforcement provides capital with an exquisitely flexible, eminently disposable ‘reserve army’ of labour.^[cv]

Furthermore, the border-making and border-enforcing activities of immigration enforcement have been increasingly and pervasively relocated to sites within the ‘interior’ of migrant-receiving states, such that illegalised migrants and refugees are made, in effect, to carry borders on their very bodies^[cvi] as border enforcement and the prospect of deportation come to permeate the full spectrum of racialised everyday life activities and spaces. The global class politics of human mobility, which routinely transposes a transnational relation of capital and labour into the ostensibly insular ‘national’ politics of ‘immigration’ and border policing, continuously reinvigorates ‘unpassable boundaries’ and thus reinvents and reanimates racialised distinctions. Thus, the global class politics of human mobility (the mobility of labour) ever increasingly instigates the consolidation of what Étienne Balibar (among others) has depicted as ‘a world apartheid,’ which institutes a ‘color bar’ that now no longer merely separates the so-called ‘center’ from ‘periphery,’ or North from South, but effectively runs through all ‘national’ state formations.^[cvii] Thus, the branding processes of migrant illegalisation generate open-ended sites not only for border struggles and immigration and refugee politics, taken more narrowly, but also for unforeseen and expansive disputes over race, citizenship, and labour, more generally. As with the racial branding of Blackness that was a constitutive feature of the historical production of enslaved labour, so also does migrant ‘illegality’ today entail a sociolegal branding that is crucial for the creation and maintenance of migration as a reliable, eminently mobile, flexible, and ultimately disposable source of racially subjugated labour-power.

Finally, let us recall once more Marx’s poignant insight: ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’^[cviii] Hence, we may begin to recognise how the sociopolitical production of difference, and the branding of diverse categories of labouring humanity into racialised ‘skins,’ has operated as an absolutely central and constitutive feature of labour’s subordination to the requirements and mandates of capital accumulation, and thus the continuous (re-)production of labour-for-capital. Analogously, the sociopolitical and legal mediations of human mobility on a global scale — and thereby, the bordering of labour mobility as ‘migration’ — thus becomes apprehensible as a comparable production of difference that brands various particular categories of labour as ‘foreign,’ if not indeed as ‘illegal.’^[cix] If, as Marx and Engels famously proclaim in the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto, the working people ‘of all countries’ have ‘a world to win,’^[cx] it may be all the more vital and more relevant than ever to recall another decisive and conceptually more ambitious proposition that precedes that resounding battle cry, and which migration serves continuously to verify:  the working people of the world ‘have no country.’^[cxi] Hence, a contemporary corollary to Marx’s axiom would seem to be: Labour in the prison inmate’s uniform of citizenship can never emancipate itself where labour in the migrant’s garb of ‘foreignness’ is branded as ‘illegal.’

Acknowledgements

Some of the ideas developed in this essay initially began to take shape in the course of an extended dialogue with Nahum Chandler, to whom I owe a debt of deep gratitude and appreciation. I am also grateful for the enduring inspiration and encouragement of Dave Roediger and Howie Winant. Thanks are also due to Hannah Schling, whose questions pushed me to clarify various points. An earlier version of portions of this essay appeared in my essay “Migration and the Mobility of Labor” in Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. New York and London: Oxford University Press (published online: December 2018).

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De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. [1903]1982. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet/ Penguin.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1915. The Negro. New York: Holt; Project Gutenberg EBook available at:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15359/15359-h/15359-h.htm

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1920]1971 ‘The Souls of White Folk.’ Pp. 29-52 in Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. New York: AMS Press. Reprinted in Roediger, ed. 1998, pp. 184-99.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1935. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1939]2014. Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Oxford University Press.

Elson, Diane. 1979. ‘The Value Theory of Labour.’ Pp. 115-80 in Diane Elson (ed.), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books.

Federici, Silvia. 2003. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Genovese, Eugene D. 1965. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hall, Stuart & Les Back. 2009. ‘At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back.’ Cultural Studies 2(4):658-687.

Harris, Cheryl. 1993. ‘Whiteness as Property.’ Harvard Law Review 106(8):1707-91.

Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Holloway, John. 1994. ‘Global Capital and the National State.’ Capital and Class 52: 23-49.

Johnson, Walter. 2003. ‘Commentary on James Oakes, ‘The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery’.’ Pp. 48-55 in in Winthrop Jordan, ed. Slavery and the American South. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Johnson, Walter. 2004. ‘The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/ Slavery Question.’ Journal of the Early Republic 24(2): 299-308.

Johnson, Walter. 2013.River of Dark Dreams : Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Khosravi, Shahram. 2010.‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marx, Karl. [1845] 1920. The Poverty of Philosophy. Chicago: Charles Kerr.

Marx, Karl. [1858] 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage/ Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. New York: Vintage/ Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1870] 1971. ‘From Confidential Communication.’ Pp. 252-55 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels [1848] 1967. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pluto Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. ‘The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles.’ Pp. 121-42 in Vicki Squire, ed. The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. London and New York: Routledge.

Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011b. ‘The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation.’ Rethinking Marxism 23(3): 302-321.

Midnight Notes Collective. 1990. ‘The New Enclosures.’ Midnight Notes No. 10; available at:www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html.

Ngai, Sianne. 2015. ‘Visceral Abstractions.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(1):33-63.

Oakes, James. 2003. ‘The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery.’ Pp. 29-48 in Winthrop Jordan, ed. Slavery and the American South. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986/2015. Racial Formation in the United States. Third Edition. New York: Routledge.

Robinson, Cedric. 1983/2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso.

Roediger, David R., ed. 1998. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken Books.

Roediger, David R. and Elizabeth D. Esch. 2012. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labour in U.S. History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rosenthal, Caitlin. 2018. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

Saxton, Alexander. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso.

Sharma, Nandita. 2003. ‘Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-trafficking Campaigns’.’ Refuge 21: 53–65.

Sharma, Nandita. 2020. Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tomich, Dale W. 2004. Through the Prism of Slavery:Labour, Capital, and World Economy. New York: Rowman & Liittlefield.

Turner, Terence. 2008. ‘Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.’ Anthropological Theory 8(1):43-56.

van der Linden, Marcel. 2010. ‘Re-Constructing the Origins of Modern Labour Management.’ Labour History 51(4): 509-522.

[i] Marx 1867/1976, p.173.

[ii] Marx 1867/1976, p.174.

^[iii] Elson 1979, p. 123; see also Turner 2008.

[iv] Marx 1867/1976, p.1038.

^[v] Marx 1867/1976, p. 915; emphases added.

^[vi] Robinson 1983/2000, p. 2.

^[vii] Robinson 1983/2000, p. xxxi.

^[viii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 414.

^[ix] Du Bois 1920/1971. See also:  Allen 1994, and 1997; Cox 1959; Du Bois 1915; Harris 1993; Roediger 1991; Roediger, ed. 1998; Saxton 1990.

^[x] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 30.

^[xi] Notably, the term ‘primitive accumulation’ — a phrase that originated in the works of bourgeois political economists, which Marx referenced with derision for its euphemistic and misleading character and depicted more precisely as ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’— has over time reverted to widespread (unproblematised) usage, and has come to serve as a shorthand in Marxist scholarship for the violent processes that Marx exposes in his critique; see Marx 1867/1976, pp. 873-74.

^[xii] Marx 1867/ 1976, p.918.

^[xiii] Marx 1867/ 1976, p. 925. For an extended reflection on this passage, see Johnson, 2004; while my reading of Marx’s discussion of this juxtaposition of slave labour and wage labour would reject Johnson’s contention (p.301) that Marx ‘evaded’ the question of slavery and purposefully provincialised the analysis of capitalism in a manner that was ‘Anglo-centric in its spatial parameters and teleological in its temporal framing’ (p.302), I concur with his argument against the methodological nationalism or Eurocentrism of many customary Marxist accounts, dedicated to simply and dogmatically upholding the tautological notion that ‘slavery was, like feudalism, ‘pre-capitalist,’ ‘archaic,’ and a ‘conservative’ residuum’ (p.303), and consequently inclined to interpret the pedestal metaphor as a temporal/ historical one rather than as ‘structural (or spatial)’ (p.305).   

[xiv] Less elegantly, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx notably proclaimed: ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’ (Marx, 1845/ 1920, p.121.

[xv] Johnson, 2004, p.304.

[xvi] Johnson, 2004, p.305.

[xvii] Tomich, 2004, p.30.

[xviii] Johnson, 2013, p.254; see also Baptist, 2014, pp.128.

[xix] Baptist, 2016, p.33; see also Beckert, 2014.

[xx] Baptist, 2016, p.53.

[xxi] Beckert and Rockman, 2016, p.5.

[xxii] Ashworth, 1995, p.89.

[xxiii] Beckert and Rockman, 2016, p.1

[xxiv] Baptist, 2016, pp.53-54.

[xxv] Ashworth, 1995, p.84.

[xxvi] Beckert, 2014, p.32, p.198.

[xxvii] Baptist, 2014, pp.128-129.

[xxviii] Baptist, 2014, p. 129.

[xxix] Baptist, 2014, p. 129. There wear analogously dramatic and persistent increases in the productivity of slave plantations for Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee; Baptist, 2016, p.54-55.

[xxx] Baptist, 2016, p.57.

[xxxi] Baptist, 2016, p.52.

[xxxii] Baptist, 2016, p.57.

[xxxiii] Baptist, 2014, p. 129; see also Beckert, 2014, p.334; pp.621-622.

[xxxiv] Tomich, 2004, p.23.

[xxxv] Tomich, 2004, p.23.

[xxxvi] Tomich, 2004, p.31.

[xxxvii] For a classic example, see Genovese, 1965; see also Ashworth, 1995, for whom the ‘principal thesis’ is that it was ‘increasing difficult, and finally impossible, for slavery and capitalism to coexist’ (p.115). For relevant critiques, see Baptist, 2014; Beckert, 2014; Johnson, 2013, pp. 252-254; Oakes, 2003; Tomich, 2004, pp. 9-13.

[xxxviii] Oakes, 2003, p.47.

[xxxix] Ashworth, 1995, p.114.

[xl] Roediger, 1991.

[xli] Marx 1867/1976, p.875.

[xlii] Marx 1867/1976, p.680.

[xliii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 345.

^[xliv] Du Bois 1915, Chapter IX; see also Du Bois 1939/ 2014, p. 97.

^[xlv] Du Bois 1939/ 2014, p. 91.

^[xlvi] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 48.

^[xlvii] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 31.

^[xlviii] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 30.

[xlix] Beckert, 2014; van der Linden, 2010; see also Roediger and Esch, 2012; Rosenthal 2018.

^[l] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[li] Mbembe 2017, p. 2.

^[lii] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

[liii] John Clegg makes a similar point: ‘There is something pristinely capitalist about the total commodification of labour under slavery. Slaves are doubly alienated, for they lack property in both the means of production and in themselves.’ Clegg, 2015, p.302.

^[liv] Marx 1867/1976, pp. 375-76.

[lv] Referring to a French slave code, Marx declares:  ‘This subject one must study in detail to see what the bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker when he can model the world according to his own image without any interference.’ Marx, 1867/1976, p.916 n.4.

[lvi] Du Bois 1935; see also Roediger 1991.

[lvii] Marx 1867/1976, p.382.

^[lviii] Cf. Chandler 2013, and 2014; Gilroy 1993; Mbembe 2017.

^[lix] Du Bois 1903/1982, p.15; see also Chandler 2006, and 2010.

^[lx] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[lxi] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[lxii] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[lxiii] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[lxiv] Marx 1867/1976, p. 128.

^[lxv] Marx 1858/1973, pp. 104-05.

^[lxvi] Marx 1867/1976, p. 874.

^[lxvii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 873.

^[lxviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 875.

^[lxix] Marx 1867/1976, pp. 874-75.

^[lxx] There has been a robust Marxian debate around the contemporaneity of such violent processes of dispossession; see, e.g. Bonefeld 2001; De Angelis 2001; Federici 2003; Harvey 2003; Mezzadra 2011b; Midnight Notes Collective 1990.

^[lxxi] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. x.

^[lxxii] Du Bois famously depicted the general aims of the strivings of ‘the American Negro’ in a manner that anticipated that another world was possible: ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to … use his best powers and his latent genius.’ Du Bois 1903/1982, p. 9; see also Chandler 2006, 2010, and 2013.

^[lxxiii] Du Bois 1903/1982, pp. 3, 15.

^[lxxiv] Chatterjee 1993.

^[lxxv] Roediger and Esch 2012.

^[lxxvi] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. xi.

^[lxxvii] See also De Genova 2012, 2016a, and 2016b.

^[lxxviii] Cf. Andrijasevic 2010; Aradau 2008; Chapkis 2003; Sharma 2003; see also De Genova 2013.

^[lxxix] Mezzadra  2011a, p. 125.

^[lxxx] De Genova 2016a; Ngai, 2015; Sharma 2020.

^[lxxxi] Holloway 1994.

[lxxxii] De Genova 2016a.

[lxxxiii] Marx1858/1973, p.524.

^[lxxxiv] De Genova 2010, 2012, and 2016b.

^[lxxxv] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxvi] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxvii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 939.

^[lxxxix] Burawoy 1976.

^[xc] Marx 1867/1976, p. 1013.

^[xci] Marx 1867/1976, p. 863.

^[xcii] Marx 1870/ 1971, p. 254; emphases in original.

^[xciii] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[xciv] Hall and Back 2009, p. 662.

[xcv] De Genova 2018.

[xcvi] Omi and Winant 1986/2015.

^[xcvii] De Genova 2002, 2004, and 2005.

^[xcviii] De Genova 2002, 2005, and 2013.

^[xcix] De Genova 2002, 2005, 2010, and 2013.

^[c] De Genova and Peutz 2010.

[ci] Marx 1867/1976, p.784.

^[cii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 784.

^[ciii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 789.

^[civ] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 2.

^[cv] De Genova 2016a.

^[cvi] Khosravi 2010, pp. 97-120.

^[cvii] Balibar 1993/2002, p. 82; see also Besteman 2020.

^[cviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 414.

^[cix] De Genova 2013, and 2018; Sharma 2020.

^[cx] Marx and Engels 1848/2008, p. 84.

^[cxi] Marx and Engels 1848/2008, p. 61.

This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reformation was broader than the political-economy, it included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean.

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

Introduction

The plantation was a total social and economic unit, supplemented with a system of routine surveillance to support nakedly unapologetic authoritarian governance that greatly shaped the very horizon of development in Caribbean societies, even long after political independence. Combining vertical relations of domination integral to extracting labour with some limited horizontal relations to aid the day-to-day functioning, the plantation fostered anticipatory obedience and instinctual habituation to unspoken imperatives. While eagerly catering towards aggressively extractive market relations this unit actively dismissed viewpoints that countered the supremacy of market forces. The interplay between domination and egalitarianism enabled processes of creolization leading to new cultural forms in speech, like picong and kas kas; new modes of kinship, like extending fictive kin and religious syncretism. But social and economic relations of production remained rooted in extraction. There may have been individual acts of resistance, but the unit’s overseers stymied democratic change the moment resistance became inconvenient.

Well aware of these conditions, West Indian intellectuals in the post-war era sought to explain the economic structures of Caribbean societies by reference to path determinacy set by European colonial formations and the associated sequestering of surpluses. Known as ‘a Theory of Plantation Economy and Society,’ this body of thought was developed by the New World Group comprising George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan, complimented by people like C. Y. Thomas, H. R. Brewster, Joan Robinson, Owen Jefferson, Gordon Lewis and Trevor Monroe among others, and then joined by Kari Polanyi Levitt and Archie Singham from abroad.[1] This interdisciplinary project had many intellectual tributaries and confluences, in addition to a wide delta of applications and interpretations.^[2] In the spirit of independence, Girvan writes, the theory sought to “reflect the political aspect of decolonization on the intellectual, economic, social and cultural spheres.”^[3] Put differently, one aim of the Group was to decolonize hereto accounts of the ‘general process’ to better comprehend the functional role of race and empire in capital accumulation.^[4]

Emerging from the incubator of the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona in Jamaica, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. The year before Jamaica had become independent of British direct rule, with University College (as it was known then) severing its ties in the same year from the University of London to become The University of The West Indies. Led by students and young lecturers, this reformation was broader than the critique of political economy. It included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for.

Across the West Indies, Independence also brought pragmatic matters to the fore—the need to produce constitutions, currencies, and passports being some basic examples. Well read and highly educated, members of the New World Group knew that independence would not automatically produce tidy democratic states. Formal decolonization and democratization were conjunctures of vicious contest; the stakes were setting an enduring social trajectory. Even to this day, the mythology of Independence in the West Indies sanitizes how in this decisive political moment there was a quick realignment of interests and deal-making as local factions sought to build constituencies to win power electorally, and otherwise occupy the commanding heights of their societies as British flags were lowered.[5] Along with trade unionists, urban radical social movements and the organized poor,[6] these intellectuals sought to better conceptualize the workings of power in their national, regional, and international contexts. They strove throughout to understand how rule by markets was constituted through historical and material forces.

In the case of members of the New World Group this activity was undertaken inside of key state institutions, like public universities, at least in the 1960s. However as the 1970s unfolded some members, like Best, had been driven from these same institutions. Best responded by forming Tapia in 1968, which ran in Trinidad and Tobago’s 1976 election as a political party.[7] It won 3.81% of the vote.[8] Other members like Girvan stayed in academia longer, but left to do development work, becoming the Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. Although there are some exceptions in more radical spaces,[9] arguably it has only really been since the CLR James Centennial Conference in 2001 that the New World Group has received recognition for their theorizing by members of the local establishment. That said, this ‘bump of a revival’ to use Brian Meeks’ turn of phrase has been selective.[10] The Group’s critique of the US and UK ruling classes are permitted; critiques of the local ruling class remain less welcome.

Set within intra-Marxist debates on early accounts of capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Girvan, Beckford, and Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean. As either founders, editors or key contributors, these three figures are notable for their early involvement in the transnational publication, New World, of which 14 issues were published between 1963 and 1972 between Georgetown, Guyana and Mona, Jamaica.[11] University work was a centralizing force keeping Girvan, Beckford, and Best in frequent contact. The by-product of this close collaboration was that all three had multiple ground-breaking academic monographs which draw upon the work of the others. I will elaborate upon these ties in the third part of the paper.

At the same time I also want to be cautious in this essay to not perpetuate the trope of extraordinary figures. Even while the West Indies is comprised of small societies where interpersonal relations are visible and traceable, it would still be an error to reify any person—they could not and did not have the singular influence of which they are credited. It is better to think more about a generational cluster of scholarship advancing lines of critique and the circumstances that enabled or constrained that critique.

Accordingly, in this paper I survey the arguments and analysis offered by the Group as their historical studies intervene in the debates on race, capitalism, and Marxism. Through doing so, I aim to contribute to a non-European and non-American centric approach to the historical study of racism and exploitation. There are several steps involved in making the argument that the Group has much to offer Political Marxism. The first portion of the paper covers the intramural debates in Marxian accounts for capitalist development. I then turn to revisionist inter-war economic historiography of the Black Atlantic, as this was an archive for the Group’s later synthesis of modernity and conceptualization of how the ‘general process’ involves the realization of civic ascriptions and their associated modes of articulation as they dynamically respond to the imposed demands of production and circuits of accumulation. Looking forward, for my claim that the Group can contribute much to Political Marxism to make sense, it is worthwhile revisiting some standard Marxist accounts of capitalist development.

Standard Marxist Accounts of Early Capitalist Development

The transition from feudalism to capitalism has generated a vast historical literature of which the Brenner–Wood exchange on the Low Countries is emblematic of how the role of race has occasionally been overlooked in the analysis of early capitalist development.^[12] Robert Brenner attributed the development of capitalist property relations there to declining soil fertility and a resultant resource gradient leading to a division of labor within rural commodity production. Farmers subsequently turned to the market to purchase consumptive goods, which in turn created new instruments and urban development. Still, Ellen Meiksins Wood objected that there are “fundamental differences between commercial and capitalist societies.”[13] While granting that the Low Countries had active markets in land, labour, and capital, and some mechanized manufacturing (most notably in shipbuilding), for Wood this society lacked social reproduction predicated upon market dependence, meaning that it lacked other necessary characteristics of capitalism, like the accumulation imperative or the revolutionary need to overhaul forces of production. But in their back and forth, both Wood and Brenner fail to give attention to the role played by the transfer of surpluses from the East and West Indies, or how enslaved people provided the fiscal security for the commercial ventures undertaken by the VOC.

Lest one suspect that these errors belong to Political Marxism exclusively, similar kinds of oversights also exist in the classic debates on manorialism over where and when primacy between urban or rural sectors emerged during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. To briefly elaborate, Pierre-Philippe Rey argues that the process of converting feudal obligations into money rents was external to capitalism, like the already existing practice of expropriating peasant’s surpluses. Guy Bois notes how basic units of feudal production were agnostic to increasing productivity nor sought profit-orientated investment. Instead, small-scale peasant holdings preferred subsistence routines sufficient to meet levies and satisfy ideologies of self-sufficiency. Lords, on the other hand, were primarily concerned with preserving civic hierarchies. Still, as technology (and its organization) slowly improved over two centuries—like village plow teams becoming more efficient—so lords increasingly appropriated surpluses in the form of money. In time these reconfigurations of manorialism weakened feudal institutions and strengthened commercialism that by the 16^th century rural areas had been commodified and many smallholders pauperized. These processes culminated in levies being exceeded by rents, and thus a preference given to the later.^[14] But while Pierre-Philippe Rey and Guys Bois offer strong empirical evidence for their respective arguments, in general they discount the role of international trade with the Western Hemisphere in aiding urban development. Moreover, while it is not quite true that plantations were simply manors taken abroad, neither is it entirely false.

Even Perry Anderson’s more expansive conception of “the feudal dynamic” and its contradictions neglects the role of Atlantic imperialism.^[15] He writes that the “private sovereignty” of the “parcelized” manor weakened the power of centralized authority due to overlapping jurisdictions. Medieval towns took advantage of the uneven capabilities of the state and intra-feudal rivalries to acquire relative autonomy, in turn making them conducive to nascent urbanization as peasants fled serfdom. These developments were not without revanche as the feudal system sought to seize this wealth generated by these sites of agrarian commerce. Against the backdrop of commodity production and exchange, absolutist states emerged. Justified by the traditions of Roman law which emphasised sovereignty and unconditional private property, absolutist states swept away parcelized sovereignty and feudal rights to land. Violence proliferated as national monarchies consolidated, culminating in an inversion of the feudal system; sovereignty became public and property became private.

As Anderson points out, absolutist states were contradictory war machines. They combined feudal era dispossession of rival economies through military force with modern directed economic investment. To direct war and wealth, a bureaucracy was built to collect taxes which weakened the levy system, while also diminishing peasants’ holdings. To offset their lost feudal standing, aristocrats oversaw this planned predation. Being placed in charge of the military and administrative apparatus well positioned them to engage in rent seeking activities. Nevertheless, warfare and dispossession undermined the development of markets, supply chains and the collection of taxes therefrom. And so, absolutist states sought loans from the commercial-financial complex. Over time, these loans represent the relative power shifts in European classes.

New claims, expropriations, and exploitations stemmed from this re-organization of power, but this power was nevertheless predicated upon a primordial conceptualization of trade as a zero-sum exercise. Provided the bourgeoisie produced weapon systems they were granted considerable autonomy which allowed for capitalist forces and relations of production to expand. The primary beneficiaries of early capitalist expansion were aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, who were integrated in the state; what Pierre-Philippe Rey terms a ‘double mix.’ In their respective ways, these classes used the absolutist state to construct a ‘national interest’ to pursue their prerogatives by managing the enclosure, commodification and conversion of existing goods into private property. The costs of this transition were borne by peasants who became cottagers and journeymen who became wage labourers. To the extent they could, these groups resisted and fought a long war against this transition. While Anderson’s account of the uneven and combined development of Europe well primes us to review the unseen, uneven and combined development occurring concurrently in the Western Hemisphere, the account also illustrates how issues of race, enslavement and imperialism are treated as somewhat peripheral concerns in early capitalist development, framed as effects rather than contributing factors.

Even contemporary analysis of capitalist development under-explores the role of race. For instance, reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement,’ Wolfgang Streeck recounts the antinomies of European industrialisation. It brought “expulsion from the land, proletarianization, exploitation, repression and cruel discipline” as well as “emancipation from traditional ways of life, new solidarities, trade unions with the capacity to fight for higher wages and better conditions, and the possibility of industrial citizenship and social reform.” The development of co-ordinated, co-operative large-scale production presented new stakes and techniques over the “division of the proceeds” between capital and labour, which also appeared in the organization of factories.^[16] With their power to strike, labour gained considerable bargaining power, at least relative to other preceding forms of organized production.

In response, between 1840 and 1920 capitalists seized upon new technologies like telegraphy, rotary power printing, the telephone, punch card processing and the like to improve their means of calculation and communication, while taking steps to safeguard this control through intellectual property regimes. Many of these technologies were enrolled to support Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, a project Caitlin Rosenthal characterizes as adapting and refining techniques practiced in the new world plantation system.[17] What was conceptualised as innovative business practices was simply the use of technology to re-establish control on the labour process. In the post war era, microprocessors simply continued this trajectory by consolidating power and control with capitalists.^[18]

To help erode recent concessions and recapture lost dividends, capitalists sought to offset labour power by interpolating workers to their project while begrudgingly commissioning the state to provide welfare programs to quell grievances and unrest. For example, in the wake of the 1968 revolts, European manufacturers cooperated with unions to humanize industrial work to forestall anti-capitalist protests. “Some workers and their representatives gained the right, not just to be informed and consulted,” Streeck writes, “but also to contribute to decisions about work organisation, technology, working hours and training.”^[19] Nevertheless these defensive concessionary tactics were coupled with more aggressive investments in transportation and communication technologies. Factories were relocated to towns without a labour tradition while vulnerable migrants were employed, all this in hopes of preventing worker self-organization. In Britain, the latter was accomplished by importing labour “obviously of a selective type.” West Indians migrants “largely [came] to [fill] vacancies created by the upward mobility of British labour and were acting as a replacement population.”^[20]

Of interest, Streeck does not mention how “crumbs from the colonial table,” as Walter Rodney described it, were used as loyalty rents for the proletariat to create wedge issues. Neither does Streeck refer to how “capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation.”^[21] Where race implicitly emerges as a topic is when he discusses how production was outsourced to the Global South, a process that gained traction throughout the 1990s. “The hellish Manchester of early industrialisation still exists, but on the global periphery,” Streeck writes, “too far away for school trips.”^[22] But as WEB Du Bois might add, there were never school trips to working plantations.

Given Brenner, Wood, Rey, Bois, Anderson and Streeck’s neglect of the role of race and imperialism in capitalist development it is perhaps more than understandable that scholars like Cedric Robinson have complicated relationships with Marxist historiography. Although hardly the first or last scholar to think about the role of race in capitalism, Robinson provided one quintessential account of the role of racial hierarchy by arguing that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”^[23] With brevity in mind, he suggests that the reason European and American Marxists make race-relations incidental and contingent whereas class relations are necessity is because Marxism is irrevocably locked to the West’s “racialist architectonic”. Herein “race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce and power” because racism “runs deep in the bowels of western thought.”^[24] As such, for Robinson there are explanatory limits to Marxian categories on matters of race.

While there is value in critiquing his details, Robinson’s remarks provide a useful prompt for a richer synthetic account of early capitalist development, one which can greatly benefit from the explanatory insight offered by the literature which analyzes the triangular trade in the Black Atlantic. Indeed, the Black Radical tradition is especially good at pressing home the deep connection between (and still reverberating effects of) enslavement in the Western Hemisphere and contemporary capitalism;^[25] what Robinson calls the “dialectic of imperialism and liberation.”^[26] This connection is racial capitalism, a market-system propped up by states that permits, nay relies upon racial and gendered violence as an ‘extra-economic’ means to force reproduction to occur through the market. From this vantage, the capitalism-slavery debate very much informs the race-class debate, the debate about modern state formation and racial formation are all roughly equivalent attempts to plot the realizations of domination and dominion that emerged during the expansion of markets during modernity.    

The Initial Caribbean Counter-Analysis

The reason I have spent a few pages overviewing the debates on early capitalist development is to show the terrain on which The New World Group struggled. Yet even while their analysis emerges from positions on the margins of this terrain, by no means are they marginal to these discussions. In this respect, the Group inherited much from Caribbeanists like CLR James, WEB Du Bois, and Eric Williams.[27] In providing a “counter-culture of modernity”—to poach a term of art from Paul Gilroy—James, Du Bois and Williams had an ambivalent relationship to the centers of analysis, “sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest critics.”^[28] As such it is instructive to review their interpretation of the histories of, and contradictions in, the global political economy. Doing so allows us to see the subsequent continuities of themes and iteration of topics in the New World Group’s analysis of the role of drainage in uneven and combined development during modernity.

To begin with Williams, he foregrounds the role of mercantile trade wars in the latter half of the 17^th century between major European powers as setting in motion a series of nested contests, amongst which were control over the Western Hemisphere and India. Through private interests and royal chartered companies, Britain pivoted from purchasing goods from the Dutch and instead invested in domestic industry and colonial agriculture. Regarding the Caribbean colonies, anticipating development economists like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson,^[29] Williams demonstrates how due to the interplay of the characteristics of specific crops, land markets and labour demands led to different institutional arrangements. For example, sugar production was particularly labour intensive. This meant that planters initially sought to enslave indigenous populations, but when this finite labour pool was depleted due to genocide, then planters drew upon the English poor and convicts through servitude and indentureship. While there are clear differences between white servitude and black enslavement, these contracts were treated as a property relation thereby providing the template for enslavement.^[30] Moreover, “the capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”

While the Colonial Board unsuccessfully sought to curtail the abuses of servitude, these legal protections did not encompass West Africans. As the legal space was provided, planters turned to mass enslavement to leverage economies of scale for high rates of profit. This consolidated into triangular trade, wherein slavers from Liverpool purchased slaves in West Africa, sold the enslaved to Caribbean planters, then returned with agricultural goods to Britain. This new labour regime led to rapid social change. As an illustration, in 1645 Barbados had 11’200 small white farmers and 5’680 black slaves. By 1667, there were 745 large plantations and 82’023 slaves. A 500-acre plantation in 1640 cost £400, yet by 1648 the price had increased by 3500%. In 1650, its agriculture was worth £3 million, just under £670 million in contemporary terms, and so became a vital component of the wider British economy. To select but one of his examples, Williams relays how “in 1697 British imports from Barbados were five times the combined imports from the bread colonies; the exports to Barbados were slightly larger.” He adds that “little Barbados, with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.”^[31]

Unable to survive in this market without land to expand into, many whites left the colonies despite incentives to remain, like restrictions of trades and qualified franchises for Colonial Assemblies. A diminishing tax base led Colonial Assemblies to impose high duties on imported slaves to raise revenue, and to which merchants predictably objected. While colonies were contested, in the end “the plantation economy had no room for poor whites,” Williams wrote. “The victims were the Negroes in Africa and the small white farmer.” Intense social inequality of this kind meant that only wealthy planters and the enslaved remained, thereby revealing the general tendency of capitalism. Between 1763 and 1778 London merchants avoided investment in the Liverpool slave trade because they thought it was running at a loss.

Douglas Hall’s assessment of the early 19^th West Indian sugar industry was that irrespective of how “well-equipped and well managed” estates might have been (and many were not), planters “lacked the basic permissives of calculability of success or failure in their businesses. They seldom had any realistic idea of how the enterprise stood financially, or what its prospects were.” Hall relays how British Merchants were aware of how financial illiteracy caused debts and mortgages to accumulate interest.^[32] Nevertheless “industrial expansion required finance.”^[33] And for the bulk of the 18^th Century those best positioned to invest capital were big planters and slave traders.^[34] Concurrently, their wealth allowed them to exert considerable influence as well as the ability to purchase political office which in turns shaped the governance of triangular trade system. In summary, Williams argues that “the contribution of slavery to the development of British capitalism,” specifically the role of the “slave trade [provided] the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England.” The wealth generated by Atlantic trade provided demand for consumptive goods which stoked domestic economic activity. Effectively sugar cultivation in the West Indies provided solutions for the various economic crises in Europe, meaning that the so-called periphery was at the center of European capitalist development. In short, ‘slavery drove growth.’ For Williams, this system only ended when planters’ desires for monopoly threatened profits and expansion in other sectors.

Given that context creates conceptualization, Williams argued that depending on land and labour colonial economic formations divide into two models. The first was “the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers, while the second “has the facilities for the production of staple articles on large scale for an export market,” and can be illustrated by the American and Caribbean colonies respectively.^[35] Accordingly, while they write about 18^th Century Caribbean agricultural production and 19^th Century American industrialism respectively, there is comparative value in comparing and triangulating James’ and Du Bois’ insights into race and capitalism. In doing so they offer good templates to go beyond provincializing accounts by noting the global nature of capitalism.

James’ analysis of 18^th century capitalism vividly demonstrates how systematic sexual violation, starvation, racialization and natal alienation were inseparable from the balance of payments in international trade. Against the backdrop of the shifting balance of power in Europe, the wars to capture these spaces generally testify to the value of colonial agricultural production and extraction: few states would bother if it was not ultimately profitable. Similarly, James notes how the possession and repression of the enslaved became central to the ruling ideology of San Domingo. This ideology included latent fear of insurrections by the 500’000 enslaved, or the enslaved being recruited by invading armies.^[36] Within this context James provides a social history of mutable identities, one in which politics greatly shapes interests and affiliations. As an example of this refusal to flatten thought, he details the antagonisms between the Governor and the Intendant, given that “the source of its power [was] so many thousands of miles away.” On the eve of the Haitian revolution, the Governor had just over 500 personnel to act as “a counterweight to the power of the planters in the small whites of town and country,” who numbered “about 30’000.” Ideologically opposed to budding absolutism and independently minded, the bureaucracy “frequently encroached on the Intendant’s administration of justice and finance,” but themselves lacked capacity for the reach and enforcement of rule.^[37] Building upon these cleavages, James’ language of “small whites” and “big whites” is analytically perceptive. For example, most of the big landowners and rentiers—big whites—lived in Europe and employed white labour—small whites—to safeguard their property.^[38]

Neither did James shy away from discussions of how racial hierarchy intersected with differentiated class positions themselves shaped by alliance building, and aspirations of upward social mobility.^[39] Small whites were reticent about Mulattos’ rising social status: while Mulattoes’ increasing wealth was resented, small whites courted them lest they “swell the ranks of their enemies.”^[40] While big whites sought an alliance with Mulattos to suppress revolts, nevertheless the French Assembly worried that “to give rights to Mulattoes who outnumbered them would be to hand over the colony, military and civil, to these bastard upstarts and their allies of the counter-revolution.”^[41] Similarly, the dividends from enslavement were a source of factional contests within European states. For example, James points out how in the wake of their revolution, the French Republic deemed the colonial surpluses vital to consolidate rule, both internally and externally, while creditors, not wanting to lose their investments, went to considerable lengths to protect their property which eventually culminated in the 1802 expedition to put down the revolution. In the end, supposedly the freedom of some required the enslavement of others.

Notwithstanding politics and positions—and he places considerable emphasis on these in his analysis—James’ indictment is systematic, as one of his most famous passages illustrates: “There were good and bad Governors, good and bad Intendants, as there were good and bad slave owners. But this was a matter of pure chance. It was the system that was bad.”^[42] This system was not localized, confined to a specific place and specific time, but rather the realization of a dynamic tri-continental economy designed to perpetuate subordination which was maintained by routine acts of extreme violence. James’ analysis illustrated how enslavement was not residue of a by-gone era, some pre-capitalist endeavour that wage-labour surpassed, but rather was emblematic of a mature supra-national capitalist system that could only be escaped through savvy revolutionary action.

Turning to the United States Du Bois discusses how enslavement created a subject of capital and white supremacy which became an immutable category and an indicator in racial formation. “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale,” Du Bois wrote.^[43] The effects of this consolidating racial formation were not confined to the United States, rather “new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.”^[44] Du Bois’s analysis argues that racial formation was leveraged to extract surpluses that were then transferred across the Atlantic.

In the empire of cotton enslaved people were both labour and capital. As for the later, in the 19^th century British merchants made advances to American cotton planters, who in turn used this credit to produce, hoping to use slavery to cover expenses and gain a profit. Likewise, “sugar cultivation” Williams wrote “was a lottery.”^[45] The enslaved were the collateral upon which advances in this mode of production depended. In the early part of the Atlantic slave trade black women were disposable, but once colonies settled, as the slave trade was outlawed, so Black women became integral components to reproducing the whole. The system relied upon sexual violation to produce capital. As commodities and capital themselves, through reproduction Black women produced capital for planters. One consequence of this rich analysis of the social relations of production showed the historical interconnection of the global geographies of commodity chains, labour processes, and class and civic ascriptions, and the silences around the peculiar institutions that formed the bedrock of the accumulation of capital. Accordingly, the social history of the white European working class cannot be separated from the entitlements, privileges, wages, and spoils of whiteness, which was used to make demands for political rights and higher social standing.

In summary, the core features of capitalism are racialization and instrumentalization, commodification and securitization, financialization and violence, with cascading effects felt the world over. During the Black Atlantic sphere of circulation, new grammars of difference came to justify and legitimate enslavement, which in turn produced a myriad of class, status, and identity distinctions. This returns us to the work of Robinson. He argued that there were severe limitations to orthodox Marxism and black nationalism. He found in both a common dogma; fictitious essentialism that produced uncritical narratives about the proletariat or Black subjects leading credence to the belief that capturing the commanding heights was sufficient to change patterns of domination. But in assuming that identity gave rise to political consciousness these projects neither had an adequate understanding of domination nor the basis of its institutional implementation. Inter alia simply changing the names and faces of the people in charge would be little genuine democratic emancipation, points that harken back to James’ analysis of the Caribbean. Rather, what was required was a programmatic agenda that channelled the Black revolutionary thought that encountered the raw violence that sustained tri-angular trade.

In their respective ways Williams, James, and Du Bois identified an Atlantic political economy where the movement of people, goods, and surpluses in this sphere of circulation directed the rise of industrialism. This system was spatially differentiated, had a global division of labour as well as several modes of articulation, but nevertheless comprised a single system. Within the proletariat, metropolitan whites received loyalty rents for their affiliation with this system, which included status and other civic ascriptions that were initially plotted against the enslaved and then later colonial subjects. In addition to entitlements, small whites received a (narrow) share of the spoils from the imperial system, calculated to be just enough to divide the proletariat, quell moral dilemmas, and stall class struggles. The dialectic between whiteness and blackness takes place against the backdrop that is the dialectic between metropole and hinterland, between empire and slavery, all mutably co-defined. In short, the legacies of imperial class relations connect capitalist exploitation and racial distinctions. And so there is nothing to gain from giving analytical priority to Europe over Africa, factory over field, white proletarians over the black enslaved. For Williams, James and Du Bois there were no distinction between histories of modern slavery and histories of capitalism, the distinction between them only seeks to propagandize in capitalism’s favour. It was this analysis that brought incredulity from the European intellectuals. “For years,” James wrote, “we seemed, to the official and the learned world, to be at best, political illiterates.”^[46]

The Theory of The New World Group

As I suggested in the previous section, pressing against ‘white ignorance’[47] the Caribbean critique of political economy produced a unique social imaginary that offers a credible counter-analysis of modernity. This counter-analysis is at the heart of a Caribbean lineage of imaginative acts of self-invention that seek to find new, and arguably more potential for, just social relations. Doing so was an inter- and multi-disciplinary venture. For example, Girvan noted that the New World Group deliberately courted the views and insights from “historians, poets, literary critics, economists, political scientists, sociologists and journalists,”[48] linking their views with the pursuit of a Caribbean critique of political economy. For Girvan, the Group was a “demonstration of the potential for the development of a unified Caribbean consciousness, and of the feasibility of collaborative efforts that transcend the sterile divisions of discipline, occupation and territory.”[49]

From the main three protagonists, Beckford’s contribution was perhaps the strongest, if also the least known, because his work was essentially the Caribbean counterpart to Marx’s detailing of the social transformations in England between 1750 and 1850 brought by capital. In greater detail than Williams, and with a wider lens than James or Du Bois, in Persistent Poverty Beckford describes a metropolitan economy centred on London and other European ports.[50] Merchants and emerging industrialists provided the working capital for New World planters. Planters worked with colonial land proprietors, where contracted to provide agriculture, and imported enslaved persons to work the field and serve the house. Some of the enslaved escaped to form Maroon communities. In compressed form, Beckford described the Atlantic economy with its various class, race, legal and occupational components as these work within and make institutional frameworks that govern the use and abuse of power. The ultimate end of this project was to externalize costs in the Caribbean and repatriate benefits out of it, stoke racial conflict to redirect local energies, then create a local elite that was both psychological dependent and ideologically affiliated with metropolitan interests.[51] Unable to be fully captured by equations, all these relations and structures factor into the long run determinants of import and export prices.

Although close friends, Best thought that while Beckford did generate a robust and dynamic “theory of income distribution” wherein metropolitan merchants exercised first claim, it was through “a quite gratuitous embrace of the cosmology of historical materialism.”[52] Still, it was this gratuitous embrace that Beckford used to demonstrate how capitalist-directed investments and the rationality of profitability explains the location of particular industries on the world scale, while the falling rate of profit is offset by ever more severe repression of the enslaved (and later apprenticed) workforce. Beckford’s agenda to redress these issues is standard—land and property regime reform, significant redistribution, economic integration—insofar that social scientists generally understand that these actions aid egalitarian goals. One difficulty, Beckford admitted, was the legitimation required for these domestic policy targets, especially when there was much psychological dependency. And so Beckford charted a James-like revolutionary course: “change must begin in the minds of people, relating to the concept they have of themselves.”[53]

For his part Best, along with Levitt, argued that colonial governors had designed domestic economies to ‘simply be’ hinterlands of exploitation revolving around a kernel of enclave mono-crop production. Although these plantations had weak formal linkages to other local industries they nevertheless constituted “a well-defined set of institutions” and “a distinct pattern of economic behaviour.” To wit: “our central hypothesis,” they write, “is that this legacy represents an endowment of mechanisms of economic adjustment that deprive the region of internal dynamic.”[54] At stake in this theorization was the viability of the Sir Arthur Lewis’s model of development, which to simplify for present purposes is a social democratic economic conjecture about the necessity and suitability of foreign capital in facilitating national development strategies. Sir Arthur Lewis proposed that because Caribbean countries had cheap labour, they were well positioned to discard the production of staple goods and instead industrialize if external capital was courted. Capital inflows would subsequently restructure the economy generating, in time, local capital that could be redeployed to produce social goods. Effectively within this ‘dual economy’, surpluses could be concentrated then redirected for national development goals.[55] Best recoiled at this suggestion: blacks were more than a source of cheap labour. “Our fundamental difference with Lewis was not that he saw imperialism and foreign capital as part of the solution while we saw it as the heart of the problem,” Best wrote.[56] Put differently, his work insisted that the Caribbean industrialization projects were a continuation of metropolitan interests restructuring and under-developing the region, with the one major change in the post-independence period being administrative. Colonial officials were replaced by local elites acting as compradors while erstwhile continuing the elite enrichment practices of their forebears.

There is another area where the Group had useful insights, and this was the critique of orthodox post-war development economics.[57] More than his companions, Best was the most willing to appreciate the limitations of the epistemic capabilities of development economics, but also preserve it. Rather than the kind of Leninism Beckford deployed, or the kind of dependency model Girvan gravitated towards, Best thought that advances in method would come when led by Caribbean imagination. The difficulty was that Best’s skills as a political philosopher lagged his skills as an economic historian. His views around ethnicity are a good example of this. Best maintained that Marxists treated race ‘simply as’ a class problem, not a distinct set of prejudices that constitute society in their own right. By contrast he foregrounded ethnicity to such an extent that it became akin to ethnic reductionism wherein “class is merely a special case of ethnicity”[58] To tease this out, Best believed that social bonds precede property relations, that class analysis properly conducted discounts meaningful cultural attachments. The chief difficulty with this conclusion is that it neglects that Marx’s critique of alienation tackles the same ground; that the commodification of labour upends the social bonds that humans wish to freely pursue.

Lastly, Girvan had a much greater interest in demonstrating how multinational extractive industries, whether sugar in Jamaica, bauxite in Guyana, or oil in Trinidad and Tobago did not serve the interests of Caribbean people.[59] Many of these were contemporary empirical studies of firms, sectors, and complexes in the 20^th century. Girvan undertook them primarily to show how the development strategies adopted by West Indian governments were unlikely to generate self-sustaining growth with full employment because their economies were structured to be perpetually dependent on metropoles, consistent with the models created by Beckford and Best. Notwithstanding their respective differences, the common theme of the New World Group was economic dependence to metropolitan interests and the work of local collaborators and compradors to legally entrench that dependence. As an alternative Girvan proposed enhancing regional economic integration through a Caribbean Free Trade Association, a point which generated considerable technical debate, and which I will address in the next section.

Given pressing matters of governance, how these political economists conceptualised decolonization as involving both thought and action had a sizable impact in the postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean. Beckford provides a tidy statement of the New World Group’s agenda: “Our aim remains clear: to promote radical change in all aspects of Caribbean life and society so as to release the long-suppressed creative energies of the peoples of the region”.[60] Still the Group insisted that historical analysis had to be the starting point for a development programme capable of producing a synthesis which could temper the warring ethno-political blocs that traversed the region. In doing so the Group challenged the intellectual and disciplinary insularities of economics in the mid-20th century. “Self-consciously adopting the perceived interests of the people,” Michael Witter writes “these scholars waged a long and distinguished struggle against the ideas in economic theory that justified and rationalized the disenfranchisement and exploitation of the working people.”[61] Attentive to history but not beholden to it, altogether their analysis of the path dependency borne from early capitalism sought to better account for the role of race and class in modernity. Equally important, the plantation theory was purposefully antagonistic to modernization theory, which was prescriptive in international development agencies during the period when the Group was active. Contra modernization theory, the Group argued that development was not possible based on a set of ‘prudent’ policy choices because the legacies of colonial policies meant the local economy was built to cater to the imperatives of metropolitan capital above all else. In short, economic configurations had a material history, and in the Caribbean these configurations were resistant, if not wholly antagonistic, to democratic desires.

Although some participants like Lloyd Best were feverishly anti-Marxist, the New World Group’s theorization can best be understood as an intervention in intra-mural Marxian debates through front loading issues of racialization and the class characteristics of a global division of labour. At stake here was to what extent were Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression.^[62] These were not ill-informed critiques. For example, while at Oxford, Best was frequently Stuart Hall’s lunch companion when the later was editing Universities and Left Review.[63] Conversely for Girvan, what deficiencies existed in Marxism were of application, not foundational or methodological.^[64]

In this regard the Group had several main contributions to post-war 20^th century social thought. Building upon the observation that sugar plantations were different from tobacco plantations, tenant plantations were different from company plantations and so on, they sought to explain how these differences conditioned subsequent political structures. For example, in Appendix II ofPersistent Poverty, Beckford outlines four primary types of plantations: company, tenant, family and state. While they all are characterised by a “high degree of central control and co-ordination” they are distinguished by forms of capital at disposal and the ratio of assets on the books between land, machinery, and the enslaved. For example, the bulk percentage of investment for tenet and family types was in land, while for companies it was in equipment, processing machinery, and enslaved persons. These differences are also expressed in management. Resident family plantations tended to combine ownership and management roles, while tenant farms had supervisors. Company plantations management tended to be on behalf of owners living abroad, and it tended to be more authoritarian and sought to undermine the community in which it was located.^[65] These differences explain the specific nature of politics in and over Colonial Assemblies. To simplify for this paper, family and tenet planters sought representation, while state and company plantations undermined those initiatives.

Second, the Group sought to correct for economic and ideological dependence on the West; demonstrating how plantations and multinational corporations were the institutional means keeping Caribbean economies stagnant,^[66] while framing any resistance to the retelling of capitalist development from the Caribbean point of view as intellectual institutional racism. In this spirit, the Group was aware of the historical contradiction between liberal universalism and the lived experience of enslavement and colonialism. For example, in the Caribbean, legal codes enforced racial segregation and subordination. It was not rule of law, but rule by law. In this vein, they had extensive discussion about neo-colonialism, that being fiscal rule without occupation in the post-independence era.^[67] In short, the legacy of centuries in a colonial condition would not be wiped out merely by a legal instrument conferring constitutional sovereignty.

Accordingly, arguments around reparations are not confined to fiscal concerns. It involves decentering notions of justice that arise from the standpoint of the Northern metropolitan bourgeoises. Taking its place would be approaches that foreground the dialectical relationship between the South and North, seeking to account for native genocide - approaches that also acknowledge the ways in which gendered and racialized social reproduction occurred through stratification and subordination were pivotal.^[68] When doing so, this line of analysis demonstrates that race and class are different realizations of generative logic which aims to subordinate people to the global operations of capital, that they are both expressions of relationships to the means of production. Altogether, the Group outlined a conception of justice predicated upon attention to extensive harms caused by long causal production chains that developed during the modernity.^[69]

The great value of the Group was to conceptualize then demonstrate how multiple historically contingent modes of domination co-articulate in ways that can amplify or dampen one another. Through mutual reinforcement or occasional antagonism, these modes have their own effects. This granular approach allows scholars and researchers to identify the mechanisms by which capitalist rule occurs in a specific times and places, and how this rule is connected to other times and places. For example, if Robert Paxton is correct to note how fascism is the application of technologies of colonialism to subjects in the metropole^[70]—like how factories and the task system were tested in the Caribbean before being imported to Europe—then the Group offers a prescient critique of how and why authoritarian tendencies are presently emerging in the North. The point is not about blowback (or even comeuppance) but about the geographic connections of contemporary governance. In doing so, the Group’s scholarship reaffirms how the subordinated have a history of responding to unfavorable conditions not solely with agony, but with political acumen. Acknowledging this reality can greatly improve the contemporary analysis of value struggles as well as accurately comprehend the authoritarianism consolidating the world over.

In the post-independence period the Group took stock of the various contradictions, competitions, and antagonisms that circulated in the social life in the West Indies and suggested that efforts to induce modernization were short-sighted. Rather as Best wrote, first it was necessary to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another.”^[71] This agenda put the group in conflict with the post-independence political class, whose budding radicalism was tempered and redirected into cultural nationalism.[72] For example, contra the views of notable Caribbean political economists like Sir Arthur Lewis who thought that Caribbean development was hampered by unemployment and a weak local capitalist class and so required ‘industrialization by invitation,’ James stressed how propensity could be achieved through labor taking a greater control of production. Effectively, moving Caribbean societies from an agricultural base to industrialism would likely prove difficult unless there was greater attention to the legacies of colonial governance created by racial capitalism. In summary, for James emancipation can best be achieved through a social reconstruction of the way people relate to one another. Sadly, James’ views did not prevail.

Legacies of The New World Group

So what of the impact of the Group? Given that he spent time in James’ London reading groups and wrote for the Group’s journal,[73] Walter Rodney’s work on the history of capital in Africa can provide an example of the operationalization of the Group’s conceptualization of capitalist development, a topic discussed in the beginning of this paper. Rodney’s thesis is that over centuries, the war machines Anderson describes were used by European imperialists to loot and otherwise reverse African social development. “The wealth that was created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential,” he wrote.^[74] Simple, but hardly simplistic. Echoing Williams’, James’ and the Group’s insight that so-called peripheral spaces were not marginal to global economic flows, Rodney argues that it is the prevailing ideology that marginalizes and diminished Africa’s central role in the expansion of European capitalist development. Indeed, the human and ecological damage was so intense and so enduring that only “an act of the most fraud” could “arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.”^[75] This looting—accumulation by dispossession in current parlance—reflected capitalist tendencies to forcefully exploit humans and nature to produce wealth for a few by immersing the many.

To wit, between 1445 and 1870, Portuguese, French and British mercantilism enslaved Africans for use in their Western Hemisphere colonies. With trade narrowed to the enslaved and a few other goods, as well as with depleted labour, and social shockwaves of internal conflicts for enslavement, this undermined the development of African productive capacities. Technical stagnation, even in regions not directly affected by enslavement, was the result. “A loss of development opportunity” that was “destructive…or at best extractive.”^[76] From 1870s onwards European capitalist states occupied African territory to extract raw materials like metals and so on. The sad contradiction was “what was called ‘profits’ in one year came back as ‘capital’ the next”, Rodney wrote, “what was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.”^[77]

As in the Caribbean and North America, racist ideologies sought to justify this naked power restructuring Africa from Cape to Cairo. And like enclosure before, policies were designed to make Africans build infrastructures for extraction and the means of their oppression. Peasants were turned into wage labourers and a reserve industrial army. Subsistence farming was replaced by cash crops. Political organizations were outlawed. Suitable local agents were cultivated that by independence, the African nationalists who came to power were “frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters.”^[78] Rodney’s analysis demonstrates the explanatory utility of the Group to understand the dynamics of post-colonial institutions, norms, and relationships, and how these same things undermined universal needs. In short, Rodney uses his initial situation in Caribbean social theory to argue for matters pertaining to (neo)colonial economic drainage, facilitated by compradors who themselves partake in practices of elite enrichment, often at the expense of workers. As Rodney’s work demonstrates, the Group had an influence in shaping the agenda in the critique of neo-colonialism.

The New World Group had other intra-Caribbean discussions that revolved around how independent Caribbean countries be part of the late 20th century world economy. In short, the terms were whether these countries would be vulnerable to metropolitan capital inducing competition between countries if they industrialised independently of one another, or whether it would be more prudent for the region to form a trading bloc. While generally against Sir Arthur Lewis’s industrialization agenda, the Group was split. Best and Beckford argued that the Caribbean consisted of distinct differently plantation economies with associated institutions, meaning that any regional agreements had to take account of these factors. This observation was related to the debate on pluralism: was the Caribbean composed of plural societies with persons who only shared functions to produce, as M.G. Smith argued, or were there other unifying factors, again like worldviews and social values, as R.T. Smith had argued. Ultimately this theorization amounted to little as the new ruling class endorsed and implemented the Lewis model because it allowed for more opportunities for elite enrichment.

It is beyond the purview of this paper to extensively discuss why the Group disbanded in 1973, “why...this rich flowering of creative, Pan-Caribbean intellectual effort [withered], and eventually died,” as Girvan wrote. For most members, the fracture was nominally over debates about the Caribbean Free Trade Association in Trinidad and the Rodney Riots in Jamaica that played out through unreconcilable personality clashes. Another common explanation is that a younger generation of scholar-activists like Walter Rodney and Trevor Munroe did not share Best’s hostility to Marxism, nor did they treat it as an ‘imported’ ideology. Conversely, Best argued that the younger generation were impatient to take political power while being ill-equipped to govern well. For his part, Best was wary of Caribbean Marxism, which he thought displayed neo-Stalinist tendencies and was prone to “simply fudge from Monthly Review.”[79] Instead, a prerequisite course of action was to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another”, Best argued.[80] (Best’s assessment would only grow stronger from the mid-1980s following the Grenada Revolution, a moment where as Charles Mills wrote “the left spectacularly discredited itself.”)[81] Another immediate reason is that the Group’s scholarship did not have much purchase within the rising Black Power movement.[82] But these accounts are rather unsatisfying because while they may involve events in history, regrettably they are insufficiently historical. Rather the rollout of neoliberalism in the region did much to reorientate scholarship away from critical questions while positioning potential collaborators as present competitors, as I explain below.

With the passage of time, the failure to form the West Indian Federation ever more appears to be a key political error for the Anglo-Caribbean. As Girvan writes, regardless of the design at the time, the failure to pursue economic integration meant there was little material delivery to support the ideals of independence. “Insular statehood”, he writes brought about a situation where “Caricom economies are probably more dependent, with less autonomy in policy-making, than fifty years ago.”[83] The result is that their economies are more susceptible to global recessions, meaning many countries that would have been in the bloc have had to relinquish policy control in any case, but now it is the IMF whose austerity programme is even stringent by the standards of those that endorse that policy course. Structural adjustments have caused a cascade of other problems, like dependency on food imports, criminogenic environments that aid transnational crime networks, extremely high murder rates, and compromised political systems. Granted Caricom has commissioned innumerable technical reports on economic transformation, but as Girvan notes, regardless of the soundness of these policy suggestions, they lack sovereign legal enforcement. There is, he writes, “no real machinery to ensure implementation.”[84]

Another factor in the wain of the Group’s influence can be attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and its local impact on the production, circulation, and consumption of research and scholarship. For the most part Anglo-Caribbean social scientists were on hand to undertake commissioned research, consult on policy, or undertake technical reports for governments and international organizations. Undeniably government contracting re-directs the focus and efforts of research activities while also greatly narrowing the scope for radical analysis and critique. Writing in Jamaica, Brian Meeks testifies to how nascent neoliberal hegemony “contributed to a hermetic atmosphere in which many intellectuals abandoned the occupation of creative thinking for narrowly conceived consultancies”; lamentably, “little has changed” Meeks writes in “thirty years” hence.[85] One consequence was intellectual flight abroad, “to migrate to a place where the university professors and their projects where still valued.”[86]

Meanwhile as neoliberalism consolidated in the Caribbean in the 1980s, so social scientists found that they could supplement their incomes by conducting research for NGOs, development banks, and international organizations. There was also the prospect of earning dollars or pounds through overseeing research directed by foreign universities. For radicals facing entrenched administrators who frequently saw little value in critical projects, like Best did when Sir Arthur Lewis was principal of UWI, Mona, they left the academy to pursue private ventures.[87] Given the already small pool of academics, the shift from focusing on publishing critical peer-reviewed scholarship to unpublished internal consultancy reports curtailed the dissemination and preservation of critical ideas, but it also reflects how the international political economy more broadly shapes how and what gets studied in the Caribbean. Migration also shaped the scholarly agenda as many academics emigrated. With the main site of Caribbean Studies moving to North American and the UK academic spaces, so Meeks is very adamant that academics studying the Caribbean were “insulated from the worse corrosive effects” of local experiences of neoliberalism; with distance these scholars were more willing to forgive the local political class their sins. In these conditions, each successive generation of diasporic Caribbeanists overlooked the New World Group’s critique of capitalism.

In later years Girvan was despondent about the Group’s intellectual contributions. But this self-assessment is too harsh, I believe. The theory that they produced was a good precursor to 1990s analysis of globalization and 2010s analysis of enclave extractivism, thus validating the general tendency of capital to restructure societies in line with the imperatives of value in motion. While I endorse Girvan’s insights about the current provincialism in the Caribbean academy (it would be a mistake to provincialize Caribbean Studies because from the beginning it was always global^[88]) I otherwise find his pessimistic assessment unwarranted. In broad strokes, perhaps even to first approximation, it is correct. Granted, the Group needed to broaden its scope to include due attention to the global dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. They also needed to acknowledge the role of gender in capitalism, with women as commodities and—through birthing—the main producers of capital. But I want to be clear: additions are not negations.

For the purposes of this essay, in addition to a rich archive of empirical social scientific studies on firms, industries, and the circulation of commodities in the Atlantic, the Group’s most important contribution was to provide a perspective on early capitalist development that differed from the accounts typically circulated in white metropolitan Marxist parties. It is for this reason that I fully endorse Brian Meek’s assessment that “New World still remains the most ambitious attempt to build a postcolonial, Pan Caribbean movement of radical intellectuals.”[89] Along these lines there is one related point worth making. As a broad tradition encumbered with a complex genealogy that shapes the structure of inquiry, Marxism nevertheless is perhaps the most perceptive critique of capitalist modernity. Within this tradition, the Group’s output stands as testament to help scholars better appreciate how the entrenched forces in metropoles and the lay assumptions that they generate can inadvertently creep into Marxist critique thereby sidelining work that is equally perceptive and comprehensive. This acknowledgement can perhaps make current critical practitioners less hubristic, recognising that the current fashion in the theorising might not represent the best theorising taking place today.

So to return to Girvan’s self-criticism, if he had cause to be critical of his compatriots in the Group, it would have been interesting to hear his critique of the historiographies in The New History of Capitalism. While this turn displays an array of new data, new methods, new techniques, and new concepts, it is still very much either mainstreaming or catching up to the insights that Black Radicals had in the first half of the 20^th century. Indeed, much of this turn comes without reference to the enslaved ways of life. As Walter Johnson writes, “uncannily, the most ambitious and perceptive examples of the “new history of capitalism” turn out to have been written over seventy years ago.”^[90] But inclusion of Black Radical insights means little if it amounts to simply inviting these insights into pre-existing and unchanged spaces. The proper barometer is whether those included have a say and resources to shape the structure of and relations in that space. And it is why the work of Group remains the benchmark that this turn still must meet. They accomplished far greater insight through a Black internationalist imagination fostered by movement and migration. So, while the scholars in this turn are being awarded tenure at Ivy League intuitions, it is important to remember that in his old age James languished in absolute poverty, starving in a room above the OWTU Building in South Trinidad.

Conclusion

Although members had different stances and intramural debates with Marxism more broadly, the New World Group—well known for offering interventions on what Stuart Hall called “the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture”^[91]—arguably sets the stage and agenda for much of the critical scholarship on capitalism, through for instance focusing attention to the role of Black labour in creating the value of billion-dollar digital corporations. Extending the range and utility of this line of critique is especially important when noticing how Black Radicals more broadly have been marginalized in the New History of Capitalism.^[92] In my estimation the Group has had one of the most comprehensive critiques of modernity, but due to the coloniality of knowledge and ‘white ignorance’ much of this has been insufficiently recognised. So altogether the Group have earned a place to weigh in on the current debates on race and class, and more. Indeed, through their emphasis on totality as well as in their social commitments, the Group presents a model of scholarship that very much stands adjacent to the ones practiced in the late 20^th early 21^st century academy, models that reward increased narrow disciplinary specialization all but ensuring that holistic revolutionary activism is thoroughly excommunicated.

During its decade of operation, the Group produced a considered conceptualization of how the West Indian plantation was the instrumentalization of human beings in service of capitalist forms of exploitation and expropriation; technical mechanisms coded distinctions while operative civic hierarchies working hand-in-hand with fiscal instruments to support the extraction of surplus value, with all of the above policed by a combination of public and private interests. Involving the spheres of circulation, conflicts, and constraints, black bodies were sites of financial experimentation. Throughout, plantations feature and foster racial discrimination, white supremacy, and massive exploitation, features that are all too common in our contemporary social relations. And indeed, the degree to which the vulgar nationalism version of the plantation society thesis had adherence and purchase in the Caribbean Girvan believed it was indicative of an isolated regional intellectual politics more concerned with performative claims than empirical demonstration.

Although capitalism has undergone tremendous change since the early 19^th century, there are also certain continuities that persist in the early 21^st century. The path determinacy of the commodities associated with the plantation still haunts distributions of privilege and abjection the world over. With respect to research and practice, scholars need to appreciate how this legacy (mis)shapes contemporary politics across the globe. One response to these conditions is to develop a politics centered on expanding the autonomy to ultimately ensure that subordination becomes a relic of the past. This cannot simply be about redistribution, recognition, or reparation. It calls forth an alternative kind of polity with new social relations that do not feature value struggle. As a prerequisite step, this means addressing powerlessness and establishing egalitarian demos that can steer an economy orientated towards priority and sufficiency. In Walter Rodney’s spirit, this line of analysis seeks to reinforce the conclusion that development is possible “only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system.”^[93]

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[1] Strictly, Thomas and Brewster would not include themselves in the Group, but their companionship, orbit and influence in heterodox Caribbean political economy warrants recognition.

[2] For Girvan, these tributaries included Marxist economists ranging from Paul Sweezy to Andre Gunder Frank, with supplementation by Caribbeanist anthropologists like Sidney Mintz’s ideas about a creolized oikouménē and American sociologists like Erving Goffman’s ideas about total institutions. Girvan 2006.

[3] As Girvan 2007 wrote, “The 1960s in the Anglophone Caribbean was a time of transition—psychological, no less than political. The old colonial order was in dying, but there was much debate over what would replace it.”

[4] On the general process see Marx 1859.

[5] Lindsay 1975.

[6] See Gray’s 1991 extraordinary study of radicalism and social change in Jamaica in the post-Independence era for an example of the kinds of national contests taking place in West Indian countries.

[7] Tapia’s main electoral planks were constitutional reform through devolution of power away from central government, the pursuit of full employment policies, and “a fully blown welfare state which would ensure cheap and adequate social services.” Ryan 2002, p. 47. The aim was to eliminate gross social inequalities.  

[8]Ryan, 2002, p. 55.

[9] Meeks 2001

[10] Meeks 2001

[11]Part of the journal’s archive can be found at https://newworldjournal.org/.

[12] See Brenner 2001, Wood 2002.

[13] Wood, 2002, p. 50.

[14] Rey 1982, Bois 1984.

[15] Anderson 2013, Anderson 1974.

[16] Streeck 2019.

[17] Rosenthal 2019.

[18] Also see Beniger 1986.

[19] Streeck 2019.

[20] Peach 1967. Also see Tidrick 1986

[21] Rodney, 1972, p. 199-200.

[22] Streeck 2019.

[23] Robinson 2000, p. 2.

[24] Robinson 2000 p. xxxi, p. 76. For more on Robinson’s critique of Marxism see Timcke 2022.

[25] Orlando Patterson defines enslavement as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” with Moses Finley adding that “The slave was himself a privately owned commodity, denied in perpetuity ownership of the means of production, denied control over his labour or the products of his labour and over his own reproduction.” Herein, a person’s reproduction depends entirely on the will of those that own the enslaved. Rife with ‘social death’ the discretion over life and death makes the system conducive to atrocities. Patterson 1982 13; Finley 2001 496.

[26] Robinson 2000, p. 166.

[27] I follow Sidney Mintz in including Du Bois as a contributor to the Caribbean archive. In addition to Haitian paternal linages, trips to the Antilles, like to Jamaica in 1915, helped cultivate a sense of what society could be “beyond the color line” Mintz, 2010, p. 3.

[28] Gilroy 1993, p. 1, p. ix.

[29] Acemoğlu and Robinson 2005; Acemoğlu and Robinson 2012.

[30] Planters distorted the voluntary limited contacts of servitude into a property relation, while Williams claims was accomplished because it accentuated prevailing European norms where “subordination was considered essential.” Williams 1994, p. 9.

[31] Williams 1994, p. 54-55. Douglas Hall provides comparable figures for Jamaica in 1790. See Hall 1962.

[32] See Hall 1961.

[33] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[34] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[35] Williams 1994, p. 1.

[36] For more details on some of these points see Patterson 1970.

[37] James 1989, p. 35.

[38] An example of the transnational movements of Big Whites as well as the politics between governors and planters, see Cudjoe 2018.

[39] This complicated politics is crisply encapsulated by James when he writes that, “The higher bureaucrats, cultivated Frenchmen, arrived in the island without prejudice; and looking for mass support used to help the Mulattoes a little. And Mulattoes and big whites had a common bond-property. Once the revolution was well under way the big whites would have to choose between their allies of race and their allies of property. They would not hesitate long.” James 1989, p. 44.

[40] James provides some background for this jockeying. He writes that “the Negro Code in 1685 authorized marriage between the white and the slave who had children by him, the ceremony freeing herself and her children. The Code gave the free Mulattoes and the free Negroes equal rights with the whites.” In the decades following the Negro Code, Mulattoes “were beginning to fill the colony, and their growing numbers and riches were causing alarm to the whites.” So Mulattoes were begrudgingly accepted to the extent that they could provide numbers to repress slave insurrections. James 1989, p. 36-37.

[41] James 1989, p. 100.

[42] James 1989, p. 35.

[43] Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[44]Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[45] Williams 1994, p. 23.

[46] James nd.

[47] Mills, 1998.

[48]Girvan nd.

[49]Girvan nd.

[50] Beckford, 1972.

[51] Beckford, 1972, p. 155-156, p. 37.

[52] Best 1992, p12, p 6.

[53] Best 1992, p. 233.

[54] Best and Levitt, 2009, p. 19.

[55] See Lewis, 1950; Lewis 1954.

[56] Best 1992, 11.

[57] Girvan 1973.

[58] Best 1992, p. 15.

[59] Girvan 1971, Girvan 1973.

[60] Editor’s Introduction 1967.

[61] Witter, nd.

[62]Writing in another context but to a similar debate, Cornel West asked, “to what extent are Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression?” West 1988, p. 51.

[63] See Maharaj-Bell, nd.

[64] While the New World Group did not have access to the full archive of Marx’s work, they very much anticipate some of Kevin Anderson’s conclusions, these being that Marxism was not wedded to a singular view of history nor periodization. The Group also followed Marx’s internationalism to find the anti-colonial analysis in this tradition thereby coming to reject the claims that Marxism was Eurocentric and unable to adequately account for race. Anderson 2010.

[65] See Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[66] Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[67] E.g., Charle 1966.

[68] Beckles 2013.

[69]E.g., Ramphal 1962. Beckles 2013 following in this spirit.

[70] Paxton 2004.

[71] Best 1967.

[72] See Oxaal 1968. Farler 1968.

[73] Rodney, 1966.

[74] Rodney 1972, p. 25.

[75] Rodney 1972, p. 206.

[76] Rodney 1972, p. 105, p. 107.

[77] Rodney 1972, p. 212.

[78] Rodney 1972, p. 279.

[79]Best, 2002, p. 63.

[80]Best 1967.

[81]Mills, 2010, p. 146.

[82] See Quinn, 2014 for context.

[83] Girvan, 2011.

[84] Girvan, 2011

[85]Meeks, 2014, p. viii.

[86]Meeks, 2001, p. xiv.

[87] See Maharaj-Bell, nd; also Meeks 2001.

[88] Wolf 1982. Gomes and Timcke 2021.

[89] Meeks, nd.

[90] Johnson 2018.

[91] Hall 1989, p. 151.

[92] For a critique of how some of these scholars in this turn have overlooked Black Radicals see Hudson 2016.

[93] Rodney 1972, p. ix.

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: