We can say, for now, that Marx recognizes trans-Atlantic slavery’s ostensive “capitalist nature” as a historical particular, important for the development of capital and the means by which it is reproduced, yet ultimately inessential to his critical presentation of capitalist totality. Sequestering his profound insights into the genesis of subjectivity from the constitutive problem of slavery and blackness, the slave can only analogically reappear as theoretical ammunition in a comparative explication of capitalist materiality. Marx’s grafting method is incongruous with his major methodological innovation: Slavery is theoretically abstracted out of the capitalist totality, even though the purveyors of personal domination—masters, purportedly—are recognized in their transformation into those capitalists who, in Marx’s articulation, are themselves sufferers of abstract domination. Indeed, in the second volume of Capital, Marx again affirms that the slave market “retains an element of natural economy” and “receives supplies of the commodity labour-power from war, piracy, etc., and this pillage is not mediated by a process of circulation, but is rather the appropriation in kind of other people’s labour-power by direct physical compulsion.” The difference that historiographers have identified in the slave market, where slaves were being produced for circulation in a complicated causal relationship to blackness, is explicitly disavowed, its qualitative difference repressed. Slavery’s modes of subjection, then, never become the Marxist premise from which to re-think the condition of production of knowledge and social life, of mind and matter, of freedom and necessity. A large determinant of this repression is that Marx never theorizes race as a productive force. In a key fragment found in Marx’s “Wage Labor and Capital,” Marx parrots Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to ask (and answer) “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.” His critique of Proudhon’s tautology does not fare much better, as Marx continues: “A Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relationships.” Blackness is naturalized apart from the economy, and slaveness is contingent on broader relations of production. By naturalizing, and thus neutralizing, the power of racial slavery, capitalism’s disavowal of its own conditions of reproduction is theoretically carried over into Marxism, insofar as, to be a little glib, Marx is himself a product of capitalism and immanent to its standpoint. Or, as Hortense Spillers suggests with respect to Freud, Marx “could not ‘see’ his own connection to the ‘race’/culture orbit, or could not theorize it, because the place of their elision marked the vantage point from which he spoke.” Because Marx’s method expresses the political ontology of the human (only), it is one-sided: Slavery, as a real abstraction, goes behind Marx and Marxists’ backs.
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