By MARCEL ALENTEJO OF THE GOOD DEATH & LAZAR VASCONCELOS OLIVEIRA*

Modern slavery is fundamental to the formation of the subject's identity in the otherness of the enslaved person

1.

Karl Marx's body did not die, it became a ghost in Jacques Derrida's conjunction, its specters haunt at least the collapse of the curtains of the debate around the ruins of the Berlin Wall: the “after the orgy” as Jean Baudrillard ironically referenced as an analogy to the disruption of the century in a deep realist crisis, demarcated by an absence, a nihilism of a modernity that did not come after “political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the productive forces, liberation of destructive forces, liberation of women, of children, of unconscious pulsations, liberation of art” (1996, p. 9).

The embryonic humanist conception of the Eurocentric transparent Self, which represents reality under the dialectic of faculties and imprisons “spiritual concepts” and then, insidiously, translates them into the “scientific” or the knowable, as a way of capitalizing on the mystical power of the spiritual and preserving the spiritual under the pretext of “enlightened understanding” (WARREN, 2018, p. 218), reaches its apogee and ruin in the events of the last century.

Reality gives way to hyper-reality, technique and concrete work tend to increasingly subordinate themselves to abstract work, which in turn transforms the ideology that made the floating table in Marx's eyes a need for paradoxical overcoming, which demands an ontology of the table itself, and not only the anthropocentrism of the primitive accumulation of Marxian writing, always haunted by a strong discomfort or absence of the colonial suffering of the historical subject that apprehends the table.

Contemporary anti-humanism creates new gaps that precede previous unresolved debates that echo in historical studies around the epistemological contributions to the apprehension of reality. If Kant, nor Hegel, are dead or have been poorly resolved in Marx's volatile system, in which reality can be apprehended in its totality, that is, that this contact with it enables the knowability of the concept through experience (sensitivity), a principle of retroactivity establishes itself by its own force; we never leave Parmenides and Heraclitus.

With the critical and post-humanist theories of the 21st century, a question echoes and creates the emerging need for a new theory of political economy, which contemplates the dimension of all objects and their forms of existence. Forcing even more, if we reject the absorption of “race” as an example, proposed by the radical humanists of the black studies like Dubois, Fanon, Wynter etc., we could then ask: can blackness be an object without a subject?

2.

The rubble of the Berlin Wall, in its ruins, generated theories that went beyond the emancipation of man by man under its biased lenses, thus, an object that necessarily acts as a historically constructed hood and that therefore goes beyond the body and its possibilities could create an object without a body? A man distinct from the Others?

Blackness adrift in the diaspora is extracted and used by the Others of the world as alterity, as Ferreira da Silva argued in Homo Modernus: Towards a Global Idea of ​​Race (2022), which forcibly constructs a Subject without an object, or which at least, in theories of civil society as a result of the class struggle, does not clarify the position of the slave in it (Wilderson, 2003).

Blackness, in this sense, becomes an ontological object, but upon close analysis, it does not resist metaphysics, that is, for it its terror, an impossibility of representation. Marx identifies that a particularity of the capitalist mode of production is, according to Bensusan (2020), the transformation of immediate labor into abstract labor in the society of commodities, this fetishistic inversion on which Marx (2015) insisted in The capital, is the essential characteristic of capitalism.

In OOO, all objects have their value and agency, which leads to a revaluation of the floating table to blackness, as in Barret's (1999) unfinished attempt to discuss how the value of blackness is doubly marked by social and economic structures.

This object without a subject is not just the manifestation of a racial identity, but a volatile and dynamic construction, shaped by narratives, expectations and social impositions that often reduce it to an existentialist condition, which, by Jean-Paul Sartre's own definition, attributes something specific to man in relation to other beings in the universe.

The critique of Marxist humanism, by functioning as a “corrective to the presumed logics of humanism, which represents “a healing balm for the human mind” (Wilderson, 2021, p. 229) and transforms the subject into a volatile entity, in constant movement and adaptation, breaks with the essentializing characteristic, always subject to interpretation and use by those who hold the power to define it or were unable to attach them to a total economic theory.

3.

If the enslaved black person is a prerequisite for civil society, for the formation of the proletariat as a class, wouldn’t the critique of Marxist political economy become insufficient if it didn’t incorporate him? Is a political economy that incorporates the enslaved possible? Even more worrying, wouldn’t its historical description and revolutionary theory be compromised?

In political economy prior to Marx, primitive accumulation plays the role of theological original sin, a myth of genesis that justifies the present “state of affairs” through the accumulation of capital, ending the historical retroactive chain of inequalities and justifying them. However, if the presupposition of current capitalist production is the capital-wage relationship, the presupposition of both is the universal subject, as Denise Ferreira da Silva explains.

Freedom, as Patterson demonstrated in Freedom (1991) is umbilically connected to slavery, modern slavery does not present itself as a contingent fact, parallel to capitalist development, but as a basic fact, necessary for the formation of the subject's identity in the otherness of the enslaved, which totals itself in a real accumulation of black bodies.

Primitive accumulation aims to veil the capitalist formation, in an idyllic, friendly course, which goes from the relationship of servant/master to worker/bourgeois, while the history of the accumulation of black bodies reveals that the political economy that only understands the enslaved within the field of “work” or property, inverts the historical order by reducing him to something in which he is presupposed.

In other words, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are not created in the historical overcoming of the feudal or slave-based mode of production, but have in the latter a form of their own for their development. Thus, Marx (2015, p. 786) is mistaken in understanding the freedom of the “free worker” based on his double negativity, in relation to property and other preceding relations of domination.

Slave domination, as Patterson demonstrates in Slavery and Social Death (2008) is not based on a property relationship, nor on a work relationship, but on total domination that is articulated in different ways based on the prevailing social relations. The relationship between master and slave is not a relationship of exchange, like that of wage labor, but of total extraction, in which temporal categories such as surplus value do not regulate the limits of domination for the most part. A critique of political economy that incorporates everything from slavery to the infancy of machines must first recognize the ontological nature of violence, its historical developments, and its laws. It therefore requires a change in the understanding of the limits of canonical revolutionary theories.

*Marcel Alentejo of Good Death instudying physics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

*Lazaro Vasconcelos Oliveira is gundergraduate in social sciences at the Santa Cruz State University (UESC).

References:

MARX, K. Capital: Critique of political economy. Book 1: The process of capital production. Boitempo Editorial, 2015.

BENSUSAN, HN Transversal capital and its attractive offshoots — or the infancy of machines. Journal of rights, work and social policy, [S. l.], v. 6, no. 10, p. 88–109, 2020. Available at: https://periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/ojs/index.php/rdtps/article/view/9305.

BARRETT, L. Blackness and value. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1999.

BAUDRILLARD, Jean. A Transparency of Evil – Essay on extreme phenomena; translated by Estela dos Santos Abreu. Campinas, SP – Papirus, 1996.

PATTERSON, O. Slavery and social death: a comparative study. Edusp, 2008.

______, Orlando. Freedom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

WARREN, CL (2015). Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope. CR: The New Centennial Review, 15(1), 215-248. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215.

WILDERSON III, F. Afropessimism. São Paulo: However, 2021.

______, Frank. Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the slave in civil society? In: Social identities, v. 9, no. 2, p. 225-240, jun. 2003.

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