The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method

Abstract

Abstract“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for debate, only the status of its interaction with capitalist circuits (a rearrangement of difference within unity). Mirroring the Marxist methodology of rising from the “abstract” to the “concrete,” this article moves to substitute the abstraction of labor with that of slavery and closes by restaging the concrete development of “real subsumption” through the problem of abolition. Such a substitution deconstructs Marx's method by situating slavery's transposition to brute force (and race's reduction to false consciousness) as the productive source of the capitalist form of value.

A Stethoscope to the World: The Fault Lines Between Marxism and Afropessimism

“…Namely, that "Marx has wage labor arising 'out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom,' implying that any continuation of slavery into capitalism would be the result of a stubborn persistence on slavery's part." 36 This is in keeping with Marxism's obeisance to the narrative closure Wayne would later articulate, as the idea of slavery's outmodedness denotes an intelligible telos for the wishful proletariat; capitalism emerges after slavery as another status quo to be defeated by the narrative agent. For Marx, the advent of mechanization is a manifestation of the capitalistic status quo and the challenge it poses for the worker protagonist.…”

“…reduces race to an 'epistemology' for the 'rational and cultural relationships of domination,'" such that "his rejection of Marx's abstractions all too easily translates into their redemption." 4 In his contributions, Wilderson does not avail for the possibility of Blackness' redemption, as Robinson does. Whereas Robinson construes Black subjects as indeed dispossessed subjects mutually coherent with their oppressors, Wilderson attends to the imposed incoherence of Blackness by an anti-Black world.…”

“…5 Likewise, this situation motivates Sorentino's claim that "Marx's method expresses the political ontology of the human (only) … Slavery, as a real abstraction, goes behind Marx and Marxists' backs." 6 Afropessimism likewise "wills" that the "political ontology of the human" is not the political ontology of the Black slave, who is structurally deprived of the same affordances as the suffering proletarian. This ontological idiosyncrasy is even effaced by Robinson's commitment to rendering a suffering Black proletarian, who is equipped with "the political ontology of the human," 7 such that they are beholden to "historiagraph[ies]" and "temporal[ities]" beyond "the Master/Slave regime/episteme."…”

“…After all, in her own Afropessimist intervention vis-à-vis Marxism-"The Abstract Slave" cited previously-Sorentino argues that the capacity to consent or not to consent is foreclosed to Black slaves, as slaves "do not confront their phantasmatic objective conditions (form) as in the case of commodity fetishism, and instead remain in a unity with those conditions (force)." 31 Unlike the difference between the worker as a being and the worker as a conditional source of labor for the capitalist, there is no separation between the slave as a being and the slave as an unconditional source of labor for the master. Because the slave is ontologically destined to serve the master, the "explanation of racist difference" and the "justification for the continuation of anti-black violence"-those which are features of "the ontological figuration of black fungibility" that Sorentino brings to bear-emerge from the same source: the ontological designs of the white or non-Black human subject.…”

Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”

“…Beckert and Rockman ; Tomich ). And while Marxism certainly has methodological and political purchase, we argue that the now perennial and unsolved problem of how race connects to class (and slavery to capitalism) points to the need to call upon and develop new frameworks of approach (Bledsoe and Wright ; Sorentino ; Wilderson ). Drawing from a tradition of theorising interested in the non‐economic utility of the slave (Sexton , ; Spillers ; Wilderson ; Wynter , ), we are interested in what becomes available for critique when identifying the constitution of slavery through its “metaphorical aptitude”, the way the slave operates as “the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves” (Hartman :7).…”