1
We must first of all address the problem of slavery in general: slavery as a concept, as an institution, as a social relation and a relation of power, as an ideological configuration, as a “culture,” as a philosophical and “scientific” discourse. This is not a matter of archeology. I am not excavating anachronisms, discussing obsolete ancient histories, or working to overcome insignificant obstacles. As a form of control over labor power and as a common sense – a hegemonic ideological and cultural configuration – that is characteristic of but not exclusive to the ruling classes, slavery is one of the pillars of Eurocentric modernity. From a historical point of view as well as a structural one, it is therefore necessary to understand the logic of slavery, which is inscribed in the very fabric of the modern world, even if its properly historical expressions may have changed over time.
To the extent possible, I will try to indicate the fundamental differences between “ancient” (or “premodern” or “nonmodern”) slavery and slavery in modernity, by which I mean slavery in the context of the formation of the capitalist world-system, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. I follow Immanuel Wallerstein in defining the “world-system” as a socioeconomic and political unity of diverse societies, in which one or more of these societies is hegemonic; this unity thus forms a complex with a center and several peripheries and semi-peripheries. I will also briefly re-examine the complex question of racism. As I noted in the Prologue, racism, as we understand it today, is a modern “invention” that is very closely tied to the equally modern phenomenon of racial slavery. In what follows, I will have occasion to demonstrate repeatedly that racism made it possible for this form of slavery to become one of the most profitable enterprises in modernity. The importance of understanding racism is thus even more apparent than the importance of understanding slavery: while slavery has disappeared as a legal institution, racism remains modernity’s ideological unconscious, persistently renewing the “contents” of the “form” that subtends the modern world-system. Again, it is not simply that history explains our present. History is present.
Elements for an Ethnohistorical Sociology of Slavery
Critical thought must be as open as possible; the problem of slavery requires it. It is important not to idealize a dubious “human nature” or the societies of the past or non-Western societies. Undoubtedly, however, the West has committed unspeakable crimes, crimes in a certain sense worse than those committed by any other culture. This is because, as I noted above, the West has claimed to represent culture as such. Beginning in modernity – because earlier no such claim could be made – the West claimed to be synonymous with “civilization,” to be the only possible civilization as well as the bearer of Reason (in the singular). Through a “fetishistic” ideological operation, nearly all the rest of humanity was excluded from this Reason. And when, beginning in 1492, the West began the most enormous and genocidal process of enslavement in recorded history, it frequently appealed to this “universal” rationality. This places critical thought in a dilemma: if, on the one hand, for excellent, anti-ethnocentric reasons, a thinker like Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that there is only one human rationality, that human beings have always thought in the same way, but have only thought about different things,1 on the other hand it is essential to historicize these differences, which might otherwise seem to be “structural.” Only such historicization makes it possible to give an account of the inevitably dominating drive that some forms of what the Frankfurt School would call European “instrumental rationality” managed to impose on the rest of the world.
Of course, slavery as such is not a modern Western invention, although only the modern West instituted slavery on a “globalized” scale. Nearly all known societies, from the very dawn of history, have known some form of slavery. As Orlando Patterson writes, there is nothing especially notable about the institution of slavery: it has existed from the origins of humanity through the twentieth century, to the extent that there is probably no human group on the face of the earth whose ancestors were not either slaves or slaveholders at some time.2 Recent archeology seems to have demonstrated irrefutably that slavery (though at times effectively a preparation for ritual sacrifice) was omnipresent in not only the history, but also the prehistory of humanity, and that this undeniable fact has been hidden from us for so long by a misplaced “political correctness.”3 In many of the major civilizations that theoretically gave way to what would become the West – including ancient Greece and Rome – slavery was not only an institution that was tolerated, even promoted and regimented; it was also an economic, social, political, and cultural relation that was indispensable for the functioning of society at all of these levels. The need to mobilize “external” labor power in order to complete projects that exceeded the capacities of individuals or families is almost as ancient as human society itself. This need presented itself every time a society accumulated sufficient economic resources and political power, concentrated in a few hands (those of the king, the dominant religious hierarchy, the most powerful tribe, the aristocracy, and so forth). The necessary external labor power could be obtained by force, whether by force of arms or though formal or customary law, or, as was often the case, through a combination of all of these. The specific form of the resulting workforce could vary widely; it could be constituted through debt bondage, clientelage, peonage, helotage, indentured servitude, migrant slavery, and so on. But in every case, the social and juridical status of this workforce was very different from that of wage laborers. To be sure, “free” labor was not absolutely unknown in antiquity, although it was intermittent and episodic. Suggestively, no word for labor, defined as a general social function, exists in either ancient Greek or Latin.4 Only with the development of capitalism did wage labor appear as the characteristic form of labor and as the specific trait defining this mode of production (regardless of its quantitative dimension, which has become the subject of a debate that is very fashionable today but that has no bearing on the effort to characterize a socioeconomic system). In any case, much more “modern” philosophers – that is, philosophers who, like Locke, inherit not only another way of thinking, but other “relations of production” – could easily be deceived in this respect:
Given … the “common sense” that was so deeply rooted and undisputed in his day, it is understandable that the positions taken by Aristotle in defense of slavery were “normal” in the historical context of the society in which he happened to live. His imagination, which was so vast and fertile, came up against insuperable limits, given his place in a slave mode of production and in the spatiotemporal coordinates of the fifth century bc. Hence his famous justification of slavery: “It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.” More than two thousand years later, John Locke could write in his First Treatise that slavery was “so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” From the “horizon of visibility” offered by an England that had already been irreversibly transformed by capitalism, where the old peasants expelled by enclosure had already become proletarians and made up the majority of the population, Locke thus argued for the “resolution” of the problem of slavery in terms of the same naturalness that Aristotle had used to defend the fairness of slavery and the utility of its existence. Here, significantly, the relation between theory and the mode of production is exposed. And Locke’s limitations are exposed as well, given that, from his historical and class perspective, the problem of the slave trade, whose center was precisely in England, does not seem to have been too worrying.5
Even today, specialists continue to debate just how “indispensable” ancient slavery was. One of the most important of these specialists, Moses I. Finley, has argued that slavery’s role in providing an economic basis for ancient societies, and the societies of Greece and Rome in particular, has been greatly overestimated.6 For his part, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, in his monumental study of class struggle in antiquity, has convincingly demonstrated that the famous claim about the “class struggle” between “masters and slaves” made by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto is purely rhetorical and polemical: in strictly historical terms, true class struggle, both in Greece and in Rome, developed much more profoundly between the great territorial property owners and the demos or the plebs, who were impoverished peasants.7 Both Finley’s argument and Ste. Croix’s are of great interest for my purposes; they support my sense that, however paradoxical it may seem, the exploitation of the labor power of slaves was a much more essential element in the formation of the capitalist mode of production than in the so-called slave mode of production. But here I will set this discussion aside in order to return to it later, in the appropriate context. For now, I will simply note that, generally speaking, and whatever the nuances of the historical debate, it remains true that slavery was a constitutive component of all “ancient” societies. This constitutive role is something that we have tended to take for granted; it does not scandalize us as much as the claim that capitalism was built largely on the basis of slave labor. Still, ancient slavery does not cease to present us with aporias.
Consider a paradox that is apparently just as scandalous as the one I have just mentioned: the marvelous society that was fifth-century bc Athens, which “invented” philosophy, tragedy, historiography, scientific research, and more, also “invented” democracy … thanks to the fact that it had slaves. I underscore this scandal: not that Athens could invent democracy despite its reliance on slavery, but rather that it did so thanks to this very reliance. (“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin famously claimed.8) Put differently, because the division between manual and intellectual labor (a division that Marx, among others, considered central to any class society) was highly developed, and because much of the society’s materially productive work fell to slaves – who made up the immense majority of the population of Greece, including the Athenian polis – “intellectuals” (philosophers, for example) were afforded the luxury of theorizing about all of these things, including democracy.
To be sure, many intellectuals noticed this paradox, this veritable contradiction on which they were standing. But even when they wanted to, there was very little they could do to address it: the whole logic governing the reproduction of society, as the philosophers themselves could know and conceive of it, depended largely on the institution of slavery, on the reproduction of relations of production that were based on slavery. And this was not a matter of purely and exclusively economic necessity; it involved ideological and cultural elements as well. To a degree, it was therefore “logical” (which obviously does not necessarily mean “right”) that the philosophers would seek to justify slavery ideologically, at times with highly specious and sophisticated arguments. A thinker as intelligent as Aristotle, whose philosophy has been so singularly decisive for subsequent thought and rationality, could thus claim, in a work as extraordinary as the Politics, to find the “explanation” for slavery in the very nature of men. It was simply the case, he asserted, that some men were born to be slaves, while others were born to be masters, as if their fates had been permanently sealed by an inescapable destiny.9 (To be fair, we should note that, despite the “physical” focus of his anthropology, the idea of “nature” did not have for Aristotle – or for any Greek thinker of the period – the biologistic and “scientific” implications that it came to acquire in modernity. If there is inevitably a measure of ethnocentrism and, indeed, of cultural “racism” in Aristotle’s thought, his is not the positivist and “naturalist” racism that we find in modernity. Nor did the Greeks tend to identify certain “races” or peoples – “black” people, for example – as slaves “by nature.” This tendency, too, is a relatively modern invention.)
On the other hand, why limit the claim about this “contradiction” to ancient Greece or similar societies? Is it perhaps the case that, as I have already insisted several times, the great enterprise that was globalized slavery coincided with the emergence of the most sublime understandings of individual liberty, of political democracy, of historical progress in modernity? As we will see, there is in fact no contradiction here, at least in the strict logical and formal sense, though there may indeed be a contradiction in the dialectical sense of the word. The simultaneity of modern slavery and the equally modern idea of “liberty” was, as Patterson notes, a social and historical necessity.
Of course, the idea of a “natural” slavery appears to us today to be utter nonsense: because slavery is a human “institution,” the reasons for it are always and necessarily historical. And not only today, not only for us: in many so-called “archaic” societies, slavery had nothing to do with any “nature,” although these societies did not reason in the terms that we would call “historical” or “philosophical.” (This is not, clearly, because they did not have the intellectual capacity to do so, but rather because they did not have the need to do so, at least in the same way as we do. In fact, in their myths, in their rituals, in their religion, in their art and their literature, there is an enormous amount of implicit historical-philosophical thought.) Slavery could exist in these societies for ritual, military, or political reasons, or for reasons related to the organization of lineage and kinship, for instance. Here, however, slavery was not, as in ancient Athens, necessary for the material production of life. For this reason, it did not require any particular justification or a “philosophy” that could seek to account for it.
In the same way, in the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires, slavery clearly existed. But, as we know, although the economic organization of these empires did include slavery, it did not depend on slave labor, since it was based on a sort of theocratic “statism” organized around institutions of reciprocity and redistribution – something like an authoritarian “welfare state.” Here the labor of slaves, properly speaking, was of secondary importance for production. As John V. Murra, one of the leading authorities on this question, has explained, the Inca state maintained both “vertical” and “horizontal control” over its subject populations through a wide range of different “relations of production” (the acllas, the yana, and the mitima, among others).10 But none of these were the same as pure and simple slavery, although all formed part of a “tributary despotism” organized by the state.
Even in ancient Rome, as Ste. Croix informs us, many thinkers, before adopting the Aristotelian doctrine of “natural slavery,” believed, with the Stoics, that the fall into a state of slavery was caused by Fortuna (a concept adopted by Machiavelli much later, which can be defined as a combination of “luck” and “destiny”). By this account, enslavement did not imply a necessary inferiority, let alone a “natural” inferiority, on the part of the slave, although it did justify the master’s greater “Fortune.” This idea was passed on to the early Christian Church, and then replaced by Divine Providence, which saw in slavery a “spiritual” advantage, in that it represented something like an “earthly” version of the believer’s “enslavement” by Christ, which was really this believer’s true freedom. Already in Saint Paul, we read not only that the true believer should accept his slavery, but that, even if the Christian slave could win his freedom, it would be better for him to remain a slave in order to take full advantage of this condition, spiritually speaking. Saint Augustine explained the condition of the slave even more directly through recourse to the doctrine of original sin. The Bishop of Hippo was a master in the art of dialectic, and so dialectically he argued that to be a master was also a “punishment,” one that was perhaps even more punishing than slavery. According to Augustine, mastery entailed permanent exposure to the libido dominandi, such that “the more the master acts like a master, the more he becomes the slave of his passions.” Let me note in passing that this argument is by no means negligible, as long as one takes care to note its place in an apologetic discourse. Several centuries later, it will lead to Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage.
Sociologically speaking, it is interesting to note that early Christian communities recruited freed slaves and, to a lesser extent, “pure” slaves. They saw no stain or degradation, in other words, in the social status of enslavement, given that, as we have just seen, slavery constituted a punishment for original sin. In addition to “humanizing” slaves, their status confirmed that they were God’s children.11 It was thus considered perfectly legitimate for a Christian master to own slaves who were also Christian.
During the crisis and decline of the Roman Empire, as Robin Blackburn explains, the number and condition of slaves reflected imperial structures and the new hegemony of the warrior aristocracy.12 These “warlords” often found it more profitable to employ not large contingencies of slaves, but rather a colonus, or individual slave, to cultivate their lands. Each such slave would be assigned a parcel of land, and in exchange would pay tribute in the form of labor and spices, in a system that in some ways anticipated feudalism’s characteristic forms of servitude. The legal status of the colonus, however, remained that of a slave and not an “indentured” or “contracted” servant. In any case, in the early and high Middle Ages in Europe, slavery survived as a juridical order, even if its nature was gradually redefined. As late as the tenth century ce (and in Eastern Europe, especially Russia, until much later), we can find forms of full-fledged slavery, as well as the persistence of the Christian understanding of slavery as a means of “spiritual education” for the peasant masses. During the so-called “crisis of feudalism,” we witness, especially in Eastern Europe, a recrudescence of slavery that in some ways presages slavery in its properly modern form, since, as we will see, in the American colonies, settlers first attempted to enslave not only indigenous peoples but also whites “imported” from Europe itself.
As strange as it may seem – though it only seems strange for reasons that we could call unconsciously ideological – the decline of slavery in the feudal era was closely related to the European encounter with Islam, especially in the context of the Crusades. (Of course, slavery’s decline was also related to the development of certain productive forces and concomitant transformations in the dominant relations of production.) It was only after Muslims advanced into the heart of Europe that Christian doctrine began to be modified and gradually to prohibit the enslavement of believers. In fact, this modification represented a return to the Old Testament’s prohibition of slavery, at least when the master and the slave were from the same “race.” And this return followed from contact with Islam. The Koran expressly prohibits the enslavement not only of Muslims, but also of Christians and Jews who agree to live peacefully under Islamic law. On the one hand, despite these restrictions, the Koran does accept the existence of slavery, and in fact Muslims had many slaves and were the first to systematically enslave black Africans. On the other hand, however, the Koran presupposes freedom and rules out the enslavement of free people, except in very specific and carefully delimited circumstances.
At this point, fierce theological debates began to center on the question of whether one Christian could be enslaved by another or sold as a slave to a non-Christian. But the Christian Church observed no such scruples when it came to Muslims or Jews. Especially after the Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215, the idea that Jews were (not always metaphorical) slaves to the king began to be widespread. Of course, the Jews were considered “guilty” of the execution of Christ, and as such they were despised and thought to deserve not only discrimination and persecution, but also the most abject subjugation. There were, to be sure, frequent attempts to convert them, but many, including eminent theologians, argued that such an enterprise could only succeed on the day of the Last Judgment. Saint Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, argued influentially that it was on account of their sins that the Jews had been reduced to slavery in Egypt and subjection to Mosaic law, “and being subdued became … fit … for liberty.” Even Thomas Aquinas, who did not favor the systematic mistreatment of Jews, nevertheless argued that their “guilt … caused them to be condemned to perpetual slavery.”13 Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, was far from being alone in this view. On the contrary, he could draw on numerous texts, including the most prestigious texts, to support his claim. These included the Bible, for example, and in particular the book of Genesis. His is thus a clear case in which “racism” obviously did play a pivotal role in the justification of slavery, although it was a religious and cultural racism rather than the biological racism that would emerge in modernity. In any case, biological racism did not acquire a “scientific” basis until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth. Among the “early” colonizers of the Americas, strictly religious justifications for slavery were of central importance.
But one fact is worth underscoring in this connection. Especially – and not coincidentally – after the Crusades, the yoking together of slavery and racism tended to accompany the territorial expansion of certain European powers. I cannot recount this history in all its disagreeable details here, but it suffices to point to several cases in passing: the Irish, the Slavs, the Tungusic peoples in Russia, the Moriscos and Ladinos in Spain, and, of course, the first black slaves, who began to be “imported” from Africa (generally to work as domestic servants) long before the first Portuguese incursions into the continent for the specific purpose of gathering slaves. In these cases, no consistent racial ideology arose. (For instance, many Christian theologians, citing the Bible, associated black skin with the “color of sin,” but others seemed to hold Africans in high esteem, perhaps remembering that Saint Augustine, although he may not have been black, was from North Africa.) Nevertheless, here and there rationalizations did take the form of appeals to the “cultural inferiority,” “savagery,” or “primitivism” of subjected populations. These views were thus undoubtedly among the ideological and cultural precedents that would contribute to the new racism that emerged with the colonization of the Americas and the looting of human beings from Africa.
Neither the Renaissance nor the Protestant Reformation called the legitimacy of slavery into question. Nevertheless, the dominant classes of these periods had to endorse what Blackburn calls “a marked popular prejudice against slavery,” at least when it came to the enslavement of “coreligionists.”14 By contrast, this period witnessed an ongoing and even growing tendency to enslave foreigners, those perceived as “other” from an ethnic or religious point of view. The printing of the Bible, which could now be read in the vernacular, allowed for the circulation of the myth of the “curse of Noah,” which was used to justify the enslavement of certain “races” of people and of black people in particular. This is a well-known but perhaps insufficiently analyzed “source” of slavery, though one that is, as we will see, thoroughly deformed. This discourse departs from a passage in the Old Testament that recounts the ignoble acts of Ham, the third son of the patriarch Noah. After seeing his father drunk, Ham mocked his nudity. Unlike Ham, his brothers Shem and Japheth expressed respect for their father by covering his naked body without turning to look at it. For mocking and laughing at his father, Ham was punished by God, who cursed his descendants and condemned them to serve forever as slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.
This biblical story does not refer to skin color as a sign of the curse. It was the Church fathers who, in their interpretations, established this connection in an effort to account for the African peoples’ difference and justify their subordination.15 Such an ideological distortion seemed to be authorized by the interpretation of the myth according to which the descendants of Shem and Japheth populated Europe and Asia, respectively, while Ham’s descendants populated the African continent and the Arabian peninsula, the lands called Kush in Hebrew and also known as Ethiopia. This region was thus thought to belong to an accursed people, a people condemned to slavery and marked by their dark skin, a sign of their unalterable difference. Despite these arguments, according to one of the tenets of Christianity, all human beings, no matter their differences, descend from a single ancestor: Adam, the first man created by God. This thesis, known as monogenism, had its counterpart in polygenism, which preached the existence of different origins for different races. These ideological developments acquired even more sinister and “universal” significance with the growth of an increasingly autonomous realm of market exchange, and with the emergence of a concept strictly linked to the growth of this market: the proto-capitalist concept of private property, the main “philosophical” substrate of the colonial enterprise.
The Concept of Slavery
Still, bearing all of these differences in mind, can we identify a common denominator that would allow us to define slavery in general? Attempts to do so are always somewhat artificial: as we have just seen, we are dealing with a historical-cultural phenomenon in which differences are, almost by definition, more important than similarities. In this case as in many others, no one definition can encompass all of the nearly infinite historical forms of slavery. Thus I will not propose such a definition here, or in the limited space that is left in this chapter. Nevertheless, it often happens that global hypotheses become points of departure for thought, even if they later need to be qualified and “filled in” with more concrete contents. In any case, here it is worth engaging in the intellectual exercise.
Obviously, in a strictly sociological and historical sense, and setting aside any more or less metaphorical use that we might make of the word, it is necessary to distinguish slavery itself from all other forms of submission, in which certain categories of persons or social classes are subjected by others. It is necessary to distinguish slavery itself from serfdom, for instance, or from the exploitation of labor power in wage labor, to name just two paradigmatic instances.
In general, the slave is thought to be defined by three main characteristics: his person, and not only his labor power, is the property of another; his will is subject to the authority of his master; and his work or services are obtained through physical coercion. (This last characteristic responds to what Marx posited as the substantive difference between “slave” or “feudal” modes of production and the capitalist mode of production. In the former, coercion is extra-economic, and so are the means of extracting “surplus.” In the capitalist mode of production, by contrast, coercion is intra-economic, or internal to the logic of relations of production. I will return to this distinction.)
The threefold definition that I have just provided should be further specified. In descriptive terms, it could be applied, for instance, to wives or children in despotic, patriarchal families (as in ancient East Asia or classical Athens, where women and children enjoyed practically no juridical rights and were subject to paternal law). For this reason, many scholars have added that slavery must transcend the limits of family relations. Defined as “movable property,” as we find the slave defined already in classical Roman law, the slave does not depend for his status on his relation to one master in particular. Nor is this status determined by his location or the duration of his enslavement. Slavery is a hereditary and inalienable condition of being property in one’s person. This does not mean, as we will see, that slaves could not earn juridical freedom. In fact, many did, and Roman laws took pains to specify the conditions for a slave’s manumission. Already in ancient Greece and even more so in Rome, freed slaves were occasionally “given the benefits” of citizenship, which meant they could, among other things, own property (including slaves). But manumission was always a voluntary act on the part of the master. As such, far from belying the slave’s status as the master’s property, manumission clearly confirmed this status.
In legal terms, the slave was nothing more and nothing less than a thing. (Here we can add a further distinction: being a thing is not exactly the same as being a “commodity,” as the slave will be in modernity – that is, under conditions of other relations of production, another socioeconomic system, and another juridico-political regime. The ancient slave could be bought and sold, and in this sense might seem to resemble a commodity, but he was not one in the capitalist sense of the term.) Clearly, such a juridical status did not always exist: explicit laws that sought to define and regulate slavery were almost always passed long after slavery was “informally” established. But in Egypt, for example, already before the Eighteenth Dynasty, the slave was defined as a “thing,” and the same was true in ancient Babylonia, Assyria, India, and China, as well as in Greece and Rome, as we have seen. We can still find this legal status in the laws of some parts of medieval Europe. As the laws that governed “movable property” evolved and moved away from the laws of the most ancient civilizations, they concurred in stipulating that a slave could be bought, sold, transported, leased, left as an inheritance, given as a gift, held as a guarantee against a debt, included in a dowry, garnished in a bankruptcy, and so on. For more than three thousand years, these legal characteristics of slavery remained more or less unchanged.
But of course, in social and historical terms the question becomes more complicated: a “thing” is the effect of certain causes, the result or product of a process that is relational, social, cultural, political, and more, especially when the “thing” in question is also a human being. Early on, ancient Greek and Roman jurists openly acknowledged – and indeed could not avoid acknowledging – that the slave was “something” whose status was double: both a “thing” and a “person.” This led to specific legal problems, different from those associated with “immovable property” or from other kinds of “movable property,” including animals. Greek and Roman legislators, who were far from naive, knew very well that the slave’s juridical status was in large part a formal condensation of social and political relations. For this reason, their acknowledgment of the slave’s vexed status was also an implicit acknowledgment that the concept of slavery – in societies in which the reality of slavery is essential to social reproduction – involves the whole broad range of human questions. I will try to indicate briefly the main questions thus involved.
To begin with, there is one more thing that I would like to clarify, in order to dispel any remaining illusions: all human relations are structured and defined by relative power, where “relative” means “in relation.” All human relations are thus structured and defined by the relative power of the subjects who interact, who are in relation to one another. Here, as in Max Weber’s classical definition, power is the opportunity that exists in a social relation for one of the participants in that relation to make his will prevail over the resistance of the other.16 In this way, it would seem that in the beginning what Nietzsche called the will to power is something more or less constitutive of human relations (and sometimes especially those relations that are most defined by affect or by love). But of course, this “will” does not necessarily or always take coercive, violent, or forceful forms. In relations of inequality, one party, for whatever reason, objectively has more power than the other. I have already emphasized that these relations have historical explanations. They also can be arranged on a spectrum from asymmetry, which can be legible, to situations in which one party is in a position to exercise total power over the other with impunity. This is clearly the case in slavery in the strict juridico-political sense: as “property” or a “thing,” the slave approaches the point of total powerlessness, while the master wields all but total power.
Again, all relations of power have, as it were, three facets or aspects that are only analytically distinguishable:
But let me complicate the question further. As Hegel acutely observed in his classic analysis of the dialectic of master and slave, the extreme situation in which one party wields total power over another can become self-contradictory or even self-canceling. This situation can effectively lead to the master’s complete dependency on the slave, while paradoxically the slave’s powerlessness can become his secret means of controlling the master. This is the situation that Hegel calls the struggle for recognition, in which ultimately, as Marx would say, the slave has a whole world to win and nothing to lose.18 (For this reason, too, in his psychoanalytic reinterpretation of Hegel, Lacan locates what he calls jouissance on the side of the slave.) Of course, in order for this potential reversal to become reality, the slave would have to “become conscious” (to use a reductive phrase) of the power that is hidden in the very heart of his powerlessness. The master knows this, if only obscurely, and he tries to prevent this realization from happening. Hence Hegel’s discussion of the struggle between consciousnesses that is part of the struggle for recognition. Even when the master wields “total power,” the psychological, ideological, and cultural dimensions of power that I considered above are necessary in order for him to influence the consciousness of the slave.
In his discussion of this dialectic, Frantz Fanon counters that Hegel’s “ontology” is far too abstract and ignores the historical specificities of colonialism and slavery: “I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.”19 As we will see, this privileging of labor over recognition is one of the most characteristic features of the new spirit of capitalist slavery, which is not yet the form of slavery that I am addressing here. In any case, even if the master remains indifferent to the recognition that the slave can offer him, the second and third dimensions of power named above are still necessary to him, since he has to begin by persuading the slave of his inferiority.
Nevertheless, the first dimension – naked force, including the most brutal forms of violence – is of course essential to slave societies. It is essential, that is, not only to the founding of these societies (which clearly depends on an act of extreme violence that transforms free human beings into slaves), but also to their reproduction. Under other systems of domination, social reproduction can depend, at least in principle, on the other dimensions of power, even while maintaining the threat of violence, which remains a last resort. Logically, some variable amount of violence will always be necessary to sustain any society based on any form of domination or power. Nevertheless, organized authority can often, if not always, avoid brute force, at least in the majority of societies that we call “developed,” societies in which the dominated class is not made up of slaves strictly speaking. The problem in slave societies – meaning those societies that depend directly on slave labor for their reproduction – is that it is always necessary to reduce new subjects to the status of slavery by force, since other slaves die, escape, are freed, and so forth. These slaves, in other words, disappear not only as bodies but also as functional beings, since they are by definition beings whose function is inseparably linked to their bodies. An unemployed worker does not cease to be a worker who could at least theoretically sell his labor power to another factory. By contrast, a dead slave – but also a freed slave – ceases to exist as a slave. He has become a lost “thing” that must be replaced. A slave society must therefore exercise a permanent, “structural” violence to ensure that it is always creating new slaves in order to recreate itself and the slave system as a whole.
At first, it would seem that the slave has no obvious motivation to work. He has completely lost his freedom, whereas the worker who is not enslaved always has at least a margin of freedom, however illusory this freedom may be and even if the “freedom” that he has only serves to sustain the illusion. The slave does not receive a wage, whereas the worker at least receives something in exchange for his or her labor, however exploitative his wage may be. Thus the second and third dimensions of power that I have identified are potentially less efficacious in slave societies, and the first dimension, the dimension of brute force or violence, is more necessary. The nearly nonexistent “compensation” that the slave receives must be reinforced with the constant threat – and the reality – of punishment. We will soon see, when we consider the history of racial slavery in more detail, that these punishments took extremely brutal and sadistic forms. For now, I want to emphasize that every society based on slave labor has had to apply such punishment. Whether or not there have been “better” and “worse” masters, the exercise of violence over slaves has always been necessary to the very logic of slavery and not merely a question of individual sadism (even if, in many cases, such sadism has also been present). There has thus been no slave society which has not relied minimally on whipping and all too often on much worse forms of punishment. Nor has there been a slave society in which masters have been really or severely punished for mistreating or even killing their slaves. This is of course perfectly “logical”: if the slave is a “thing,” a piece of property that belongs to the master, then the latter can, as it were, destroy that thing without anyone’s having the right to hold him to account. At best, after the advent of modernity, one master could be obligated to compensate another for damage caused to the latter’s slave, which constituted an attack on his property, comparable to crashing into his car or breaking the windows of his house today.
But another violence is operative here, one that we might call symbolic. The slave’s “life” is structurally a substitute death. This is the case not only for the obvious reason that the threat of punishment by death permanently hangs over the rebellious or simply “slacking” slave, even if, in practice, masters would seek to avoid killing their slaves, who were valuable property, after all. This slave’s life was also a form of death because – whether the slave was captured in conquest, was taken as a prisoner of war, or had his sentence commuted after committing a capital crime – at the very origin of his condition, his life was “spared.” This life came to belong to the master, became the master’s. It thus became, for the slave, merely a suspended death, not in the purely natural sense in which any living thing’s life is bound for death, but through a historical use of force. The slave’s “life” has no value in and of itself; it does not constitute an autonomous positivity but instead the negativity of death. It is for this reason that Hegel says that the slave ultimately prevails: because being, in a certain sense, already dead, he has less fear of death than the master does. It is the master who truly “risks his life” in struggle. But of course this is a philosophical argument that the slave himself could only arrive at with great difficulty. Moreover, as we have seen, Hegel’s own reasoning depends on the “consciousness” that the slave acquires of his “advantage,” a consciousness that is only hypothetical. The constitutive negativity of the slave’s existence, added to the fact that he has no socially recognized existence apart from his master, makes the slave a social nonentity, a nonperson, strictly speaking. The slave is a “thing” bereft of juridical, political, and all other rights, but also a “thing” lacking in even its own life. He or she thus has no identity that could be “recognized.” The slave is no one, is nothing but a set of “applications” or uses for the master.
Clearly, however, this is not exactly true in reality. Here again we return to the dilemma that Greek and Roman jurists faced: the slave is juridically and formally a thing but “substantially” also a living being. Even if the slave was born already enslaved – but especially if this was not the case, and the slave underwent the experience of enslavement, of becoming a slave – he or she knew perfectly well, though this knowledge may not have been completely conscious, that his or her condition was not a “natural” one. This knowledge constituted the basis for a psychological identity and even a social one inasmuch as the knowledge followed from an experience shared with other slaves. Thus, when the slave is called a social nonperson, there is an implicit reference to a society of slaves into which the slave was introduced by force, by means of the most extreme forms of physical and symbolic violence. Separated from his or her own society – with its kinship ties, its language, its forms of social and economic organization, its religion, its rituals, its shared beliefs, and its customs – the slave has also been suppressed or canceled out as a “person” in the society of masters. But there is also what I am provisionally calling a society of slaves: a completely “artificial” society, since it has been effectively fabricated by the masters, but one in which a certain “sociality” nevertheless arises, despite the masters’ pervasive power. According to the very organizational logic of the slave system, slaves must work, eat, and often sleep together. A “society” thus emerges, one in which the slave begins, if only confusedly and in fits and starts, to acquire a consciousness, to recreate an identity (or create a new one from scratch). Slaves have always organized themselves in ways that lead to certain forms of religious and aesthetic syncretism, reinterpretation, or transculturation. Such more or less “hybrid” or “disguised” practices let them conserve part of their culture even while they also reluctantly create a “new” culture. This is the only way to account for the long – and not always ineffective – history of slave rebellions as well as for the less directly “political” forms of collective action, including marronage. These histories even lead, as in the case of Haiti, to veritable and victorious revolutions. To be sure, very often the leaders of these movements were freed slaves, as was Toussaint Louverture, in the Haitian case. Such leaders would naturally have had greater mobility, education, and individual freedom than most of those whom they led. Note, however, that for all their exceptionality, these leaders were the products of the societies made up of slaves. In addition, they could hardly have become “leaders” if they had no social basis on which to build and no society, however nascent, to lead.
The masters knew this well, if only vaguely. This is one reason why the second and third aspects of power that I identified above were so important for securing the masters’ domination. The master must reinforce, through what I called the control of public symbols, the “nonidentity” of the enslaved, their status as social nonpersons. The slave, however he or she has been “conscripted,” is from the first defined by a “civil death,” as a “person” who is socially dead. In addition, as is well known, it was a generalized custom for masters to “baptize” their slaves anew, depriving them of their first proper names and replacing them with new ones, in a ritual for reinforcing the slave’s sense that his previous identity had been liquidated.
Deprived of all rights and all genealogical ties, all sense of rootedness, the slave belongs to no legitimate or recognized social order. He or she undoubtedly has a past (then again, so does any “thing”), but this is a purely physical or chronological past. He or she cannot inherit and has no cultural tradition. He or she is not permitted to integrate his or her ancestors’ experiences into his or her own experience, or to belong to what Patterson calls a “community of memory.”20 Even when they take traditional or ritual forms that might be equivalent to marriage, slaves’ sexual relations are not recognized, and of course their children have no right to inheritance or to proper names. Any slave’s children or spouse can be sold, given as a gift, or handed over to another unceremoniously, since all slaves are “things.” Under these conditions, it is difficult to establish any social bonds or minimally stable kinship relations, and the “sociality” to which I have referred is therefore almost always ephemeral, informal. (This does not mean, however, that signs of “identity” can never re-emerge, or that identities can never be reconstituted.) All surviving autobiographies of slaves or former slaves underscore the intense terror provoked by such forced separations, which dramatically destroyed all possibility of belonging as well as all frames of reference.
All of this leads scholars following Patterson to refer to the slave’s natal alienation as opposed to his “social” alienation in the usual sense, though of course the latter is implied in the former. Together with this sense of natal alienation, the slave carries a profound sense of shame, dishonor, or disgrace – something that might seem anachronistic or even trivial to us, but that is of enormous importance in premodern societies, as Julian Pitt-Rivers demonstrates in his extraordinary studies of Mediterranean culture.21 For, as Thomas Hobbes had already noted in the seventeenth century, honor is an attribute of power and inseparable from it.22 The slave’s total powerlessness thus entails a complete absence of any right to respect and transforms the slave into a subhuman.
This status, which is of course one more index of the subject’s or slave’s objectification, gave rise to a complex and fascinating dialectic in the relations between master and slave, in what we could call the social and political psychology of relations of production in slave societies. The owner of slaves, unlike the common farmer or planter, possessed a private source of honor, which became part of his social identity: the slave himself.23 We could even say that, before capitalist modernity, the master is much less concerned about what his slave produces (in the strict, economic sense of the term) than what he signifies, symbolically and culturally, as an index of prestige and status. Indeed, this constitutes a specific cultural difference between the modern, bourgeois form of slavery and its ancient form. Many masters bought or forcefully acquired slaves for symbolic reasons alone. Even when their interests were properly “materialist,” the secondary benefit that followed from their status as slaveholders was crucially important to them. Hence Patterson’s emphasis on “the master’s need for honor and recognition,” and his “definition of slavery on the level of personal relations: slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”24
Ancient and Modern Slavery
I do not have sufficient space here to fully explain the differences between ancient, or “classical,” and “modern” slavery, although I will explain these differences in more detail when I discuss the particular characteristics of racial slavery. Suffice it to say for now that many of the sociocultural tendencies that I have just outlined persisted in the colonial plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the rest of the Americas. These included the slave’s “natal alienation,” the “aristocratic spirit” associated with the owning of slaves, the personalization of the master/slave dialectic, and so on. But these features were all fully subordinated to a new economic logic that, in general, required production at a relatively large scale for a market tending toward the global. This is not to deny that the simple fact of slavery’s existence introduced precapitalist “deformations” into the economies and societies of even in the most “bourgeois” plantations (the British and, in second place, the French), to say nothing of those run by the Spanish or the Portuguese. Still, it is also important not to deny what the truly dominant logic was in these modern contexts.
Here, all social, cultural, and even “psychological” factors were overdetermined by the strictly economic necessities of production, accumulation, and rates of profit. Every aspect of this new logic served to reproduce the logic itself, in a different “niche” and at a different scale. From a certain point of view, the slave trade itself was transformed into a veritable industry and, for a long time, one of the most “productive” of the period. It was formally organized along industrial lines, in keeping with the “means-ends rationality” that, for Weber, characterized all capitalist enterprise. And although this “industry” frequently relied on the protection of metropolitan colonial states, especially when mercantilist policies prevailed, it depended even more frequently on capitalist “entrepreneurs” for its organization and development. This was true to such an extent that the “new” capitalist, landowning class often pursued its interests autonomously, even when these contradicted or were antithetical to those of the metropolitan state.
This fact, together with slavery’s place and function in a regime of capitalist accumulation newly operating at a global scale, clearly differentiates modern slavery from its premodern forms. As I explained above, under capitalism, or even during the proto-capitalist phase of accumulation that allowed for the emergence of capitalism proper, the slave acquires the status of a full-fledged commodity, properly speaking. The slave becomes “something” in which capital is invested with the hope that this investment will yield a “return,” that is, surplus value. Christopher L. Miller recalls Patrick Manning’s eminently rational – and therefore that much more shocking – argument, which perfectly describes the internal logic of the modern slave economy: human lives were, monetarily speaking, much more valuable (that is, profitable for capital) in the “New World” than in Africa, not least because technological developments in the Americas (Marx’s “means of production”) were more “advanced” thanks to innovations introduced by Europeans, which exponentially increased slaves’ productivity (Marx’s rate of relative exploitation).25
Slave labor was thus inseparable from – and in many cases decisive in – the process of capital’s valorization, which Marx analyzed so exhaustively.26 As we will see, evidence of this valorization could be seen already in the early seventeenth century, with the slave trade spurring massive growth in shipping, then the textile industry, and so on, and leading to an increase in demand for a wide variety of products and spices and an attendant growth in the population and prosperity of European port cities and their service sectors, especially in England and France.
It is therefore important not to retroactively assign to ancient slavery what are in fact the socioeconomic attributes of modern capitalism, emphasized in Marx’s analysis. A good example – and this is not just any example – is the notion of private property itself and its relation to the means of production. First of all, is the slave a “means of production”? In a certain sense, yes, undoubtedly. The slave embodies both labor power and the means of production simultaneously, since the distinction between person and labor power does not apply to the slave as it would to the proletarian. The master is, both juridically and materially, the owner of the slave’s entire person, all the time. He is not merely the owner of the slave’s labor time and labor power. There can be no doubt that both in antiquity and in modernity the slave belongs to the master, is the master’s private property.
What, then, of the difference between the two? Where does this difference reside? It resides in the mode of production as a whole. Capitalism has to globalize, inevitably, through the territorial expansion of markets for the sale of surplus goods, but also through the territorial specialization of its different areas of production. This characteristic of capitalism, which today appears to be the most obvious trait of what is called “globalization,” was already at work in the period of “so-called primitive accumulation,” though it of course operated at a different scale and had different characteristics. It was not a purely economic phenomenon, at least not in the strictly “economistic” sense of the term. Instead we could call it a “byproduct” of the class struggle in Europe. For as Eugene Genovese rightly notes: “A ruling class does not grow up simply according to the tendencies inherent in its relationship to the means of production; it grows up in relation to the specific class or classes it rules.”27
Capitalism did not simply follow a logical and mechanical course of development. It did not, in other words, proceed by conquering and consolidating individual national markets before expanding outward. In order to assimilate national peasant populations, it had to stray from this path, taking detours for a period of time, not least because peasants generally had sufficient force to resist the new forms of exploitation that capitalism entailed. In this sense, capitalism has always shown “colonial” or “imperialist” tendencies. The ability of peasants in Western Europe to resist the worst forms of exploitation entailed by the transition from feudalism to capitalism – including their transformation into “proletarians” permanently alienated from the means of production – placed limits on the forward march of bourgeois development. To overcome these limits and obtain the labor power it needed to pursue what were at first limitless possibilities for development, the bourgeoisie therefore had to turn outward, and it did so in an almost instinctive way. Ironically, then, we can say that in a certain sense – certainly not the only one – the relative success of European peasants in their fight against the bourgeoisie had the effect of condemning their weaker counterparts in Africa and the Americas (as well as in Eastern Europe, as I have mentioned). These populations were used as substitutes, to provide partial relief.
The paradox should be clear. From this perspective, modern slavery was part of the process of global proletarianization, a process that would have been cut short if the bourgeoisie had had to depend entirely on the labor of Western European peasants. I do not mean to suggest that slaves were juridically proletarians; on the contrary, members of the proletariat are, crucially, “free” under the law. I mean instead that slaves were linked to the proletariat because functionally they served the interests of capitalist expansion and accumulation. This was also the function of the proletariat: to produce an excess of value – an unlimited surplus value – that would allow for the equally limitless reproduction and expansion of the newly formed world-system. I would underscore this point: it may be possible to speak loosely of interconnected “world-systems” before capitalism. I am thinking, for example, of the closely interconnected commercial networks under the political and military domination of a central power like imperial Rome, which might have been the first but was far from the only such power. But only the capitalist system requires in its intrinsic logic a domination that is not only global but also fundamentally economic. And we know that the source of all economic power is control, of whatever kind, over labor power.
It is important to understand that, in the specific context of racial slavery, this control over labor power was thoroughly bourgeois and not “feudal” or “semi-feudal,” as is sometimes said. Many of the scholars who have considered this history, from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century to Eric Williams in the mid-twentieth, give us the impression that slavery was mainly the product of a “state voluntarism” associated with mercantile practices. (This is not to say that these practices and the state did not also play a role, but rather to insist that their role was not primary.) This account exempts and excuses “civil society” by downplaying its role in the slave trade. But an enormous amount of scholarship on the slave trade during the past half-century renders the myth of state voluntarism unsustainable. As I have already indicated, what is called the “European miracle” depended not only on Europe’s control over international trade, but also, in at least equal measure, on the profits made possible by slavery. Blackburn has shown that these profits contributed to Europe’s monopoly on global industry.28 But the monopolies were limited in their efficacy until they gained the support of entrepreneurial businessmen and independent planters. The colonial operations of the state – especially Spain and Portugal, but also Holland, England, and France – were closely connected to the dynamics of European “civil society,” and as the slave trade or slave “industry” flourished and grew the role of these states grew ever more circumscribed. There was thus in this sense no separation whatsoever between the state and civil society, despite liberal scholars’ habitual assertions. On the contrary, state authorities during this period responded to the demands, directives, and what would today be called lobbying campaigns of social actors who were all, in a broad sense, already capitalist. As Steve Stern writes:
This kind of activity had emerged in civil society as an expression of private interests that were relatively autonomous from the political structures of the state … At various moments and to different degrees, the colonial state legally sanctioned, encouraged, and even sought to regulate this activity. But its origin, its internal dynamics, and its socioeconomic meaning reflected the interests of private initiatives more than state policies.29
The clearest proof that the essential dynamics in the treatment of slaves were not statist or mercantilist is that already during the seventeenth century, but above all in the eighteenth, mercantile mechanisms of regulation were dismantled piecemeal and ultimately eliminated altogether. This did not imply the elimination of the plantation economy or the slave trade, however. On the contrary, it facilitated the considerable growth of both. Control of commodities produced by slaves – and above all slaves themselves as commodities – gave enormous economic power to the newly dominant classes. This power was distributed among – and fought over by – states, to be sure, but it also came to be wielded by traders, businessmen, bankers, and private landowners and slaveholders.
This, then, was already a fully modern configuration. On plantations, the hyperexploitation of slaves was frightening, and the punishments administered were truly unprecedented in their cruelty, but the organization of work (about which we will have more to say) was entirely in keeping with the “impersonal rationality” and the functional logic classically associated by Weber with the modern factory. Plantation slavery reached its most powerful expression in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century, when none of the plantations there was really and truly ruled by the metropolis. Here, an idea became reality: the idea that only religious respect for the liberal principles of the market could guarantee prosperity in, and capital accumulation for, the economy of the center. And this is, of course, another thing that differentiates modern slavery from slavery in its ancient forms, which, paradigmatically in the Roman Empire, were rigidly controlled by and centralized in an imperial state.
We are thus compelled to reach an unpleasant and unflattering conclusion: those who inaugurated bourgeois modernity were fully capable of committing the kinds of atrocities, genocides, and monstrosities that we tend to associate with the “barbarous” past of antiquity. Indeed, these moderns were capable of committing such crimes at an incomparably greater scale than ever before. Yet this fact should not surprise us too much. The new forms of instrumental rationality that, according to Samir Amin, were both causes and effects of colonial administration were of course used not only in science and philosophical thought, but above all in the sphere of the economy and production. As I have already said, the very concepts of “economy” and “production,” when they are not euphemistically deployed, refer very simply to domination over labor power at least as much as they refer to technological innovations in productive forces. Such a close and even inextricable connection between slavery and modernity gives us reason to remain mindful of the dark side of what we typically call “progress.” It shows us that modern “civil society” – a euphemism for “the bourgeoisie” – is fully capable of contributing “spontaneously,” as it were, to highly destructive human behaviors and tendencies.
The Question of Racism
Among these destructive tendencies is modern racism, which, as I have said, is intimately connected to colonialism and the slave trade. This is also to say that it is connected to emergent capitalism. But before taking up this connection, some brief philosophical reflections on racism as ideology are in order.
What exactly does it mean to be a “racist” in the most general sense of the term? A plausible response might be that a “racist” is anyone who is incapable of tolerating the difference of the “other,” whether that difference is ethnic or religious. But is the question really so simple? Or rather, doesn’t this answer simply lead to another set of questions: What exactly is “difference”? Who exactly counts as the “other” whose difference the racist cannot tolerate? Obviously, different social communities, or even the same communities at different stages in their histories, define this “other” in different ways, and those who are designated “other,” who occupy the place of “otherness,” do not always remain the same. This assertion should already suffice to attest to the cultural, as opposed to “biological” or “somatic,” character of all definitions of “difference.” Such historical and cultural distinctions, however, do not exhaustively account for the fact that all human communities have created their “others,” whoever they have been and however they have been defined. Is there, then, a “structural” constant that, apart from these variations, might let us characterize the “racist imaginary” in general?
In his book Anti-Semite and Jew, published in French as Réflexions sur la question juive, Jean-Paul Sartre makes a provocative and disquieting claim that I will permit myself to paraphrase: in strictly logical (as opposed to ethical, ideological, or simply humanitarian) terms, it is impossible not to be racist.30 Let’s imagine the best-case scenario (one that surely applies to all of us): a “progressive” and open-minded subject, a self-proclaimed enemy of all discriminatory attitudes, who feels an ethical imperative to “tolerate” the “difference” of the “other.” Here a problem already arises: who is this progressive subject to decide that the “other” is, in fact, an “other,” someone “different,” in the first place? Anyone who claims this right, exercises this power, has already positioned him- or herself, however unwittingly, above the “other.” He or she has claimed a position of superiority from which to distribute “differences” and kinds of “otherness.” Of course, there are historical reasons for this: normally, anyone who appears as “different” appears this way because he or she has already been placed in a position of inferiority, subordination, or subalternity. But this historical reasoning does nothing to change the logical necessity that Sartre considers. The person assigned to the place of “otherness,” of “difference,” could very well turn around and say to the tolerant, “progressive” person: “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. You are the other, the different one, not me.”
The “progressive” person thus obeys the same logic as the racist, although for the victim of this logic, being “tolerated” is of course not the same as, say, being sent to a concentration camp. The fact remains, however, that the “progressive” person, like the racist, has identified an altogether secondary trait in the other, a detail that might be insignificant, and has elevated this into an ontological condition, a matter of the other’s very being. In this way, he transforms the other into an “other.” He sees a skin color, for example, and says, “he is black.” Or he takes a religion and says, “he is Jewish.” But the “other” is of course many other things besides being black or Jewish. These are only parts of the totality of his being. Both the progressive person and the racist thus act fetishistically: they confuse (con-fuse) part and whole, the particular and the “universal,” the concrete and the abstract.
This is because in every other respect the “other” is just like me: a human being with two legs, two eyes, a nose. Or in any case this “other” potentially shares with me all other kinds of human difference, being male, female, or transgender; Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or atheist; homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual; married or single; poor or rich; and so on. These differences make up the unity of the species that we call “human.” One could therefore say, in what is only an apparent paradox, that what the racist cannot “tolerate” is in fact the so-called other’s similarity, and that he therefore posits or invents an absolute difference, converting the other into an embodiment of radical difference or into a monster in the strict sense of the term, and deciding that this difference is unbearable. This is what Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, famously calls “the narcissism of minor differences.”31 But if, instead of looking to Freud, we look to Lévi-Straussian “structural anthropology” (although Lévi-Strauss himself never tired of emphasizing the importance of certain features of Freudian thought for his own theory), we confront a very similar logical operation. This anthropology teaches us that all human societies generate systems of classification through which to discriminate among the members, at first in the purely taxonomical sense, which need not imply the differential valorization that we find when dis-crimination becomes a matter of in-crimination. As is well known, for Lévi-Strauss, the so-called structures of kinship, which establish the “incest taboo” and thus enforce exogamy, are the most basic method for this kind of discrimination or classification. At a more sophisticated level, we find what Lévi-Strauss labels the “totemic illusion,” in which the obsessive classification of animal and plant species typical of “primitive” societies serves as a metaphorical translation of the classification of human groups. These operations are constitutive of any society, including the most “egalitarian” society, inasmuch as they constitute a precondition for cultural “symbolization.”32
As I noted in the Prologue, the first colonizers of the Americas engaged in this kind of classification, but they also went beyond it to engage in what I have called dis-crimination as in-crimination. They portrayed indigenous people as monsters with two heads, cannibals, perverts, heretics beyond saving, and all kinds of other nonsensical things. So, too, did slave traders invent the black or African “race,” defining it as uncivilized and savage, without culture or religion (whereas, of course, the cultures that these traders encountered were often extremely complex and characterized by highly sophisticated religious, ritual, linguistic, and artistic forms). For these reasons, the traders claimed, Africans deserved to be subjected for their own good, to more powerful whites. Building on these justifications, it was easy to produce and promote the fetishistic operation that identified the color black with the uncivilized, savage, pagan, primitive, and uncultured. This operation was promoted and became widespread.
But I would underscore this point: the fetish had to be produced and promoted. That is: racial difference had to be invented (no doubt unconsciously) in order to justify the submission of human beings who were in all other respects so similar, as we have just seen. It is interesting to recall that Africans were not the first to be enslaved after it became clear that indigenous labor in the Americas would be insufficient. On the contrary, the first such slaves were white Europeans. I will address this in greater detail below, in the context of my discussion of slavery in the Americas. For now, I will only note that during a first phase colonizers sought to increase productivity by “importing” common criminals or debtors from Europe to work as slaves. Their later recourse to the mass levying of Africans was undoubtedly informed by their experiences with these first contingents of forced laborers, whose labor proved insufficient. Furthermore, according to what was said, although it was of course not true, Africans were better able to “acclimate” to the tropics and to handle the heavy labor they were assigned on plantations. But in addition – to venture a hypothesis – the subsequent history of the slave trade also perhaps had to do with the fact that the white slaves imported early on were too similar to their masters: they belonged to the same societies, had the same skin color, and so forth, and this made it difficult to justify their enslavement through appeals to their “otherness.” This was, moreover, a period that saw the emergence of new forms of “humanist sensibility” and a new ethos of “individual freedom.” The contradiction between these new ideas and the enslavement of members of the same societies that defended these ideas would have been glaring and impossible to ignore.
What, then, were the material conditions of possibility for such an operation? In other words, what is the material basis of the fetishist ideological discourse that I have been considering? (I am admittedly guilty of a certain reductionism, because the reasons and mechanisms that explain any ideology are multiple, complex, and interrelated. But I want to call attention to the close relation between this ideology and what is called modernity, which has capitalism as its economic base.) The answer is straightforward: the “material basis” of this ideology is the same as what Marx analyzed under the name of commodity fetishism in the famous first chapter of Capital, Volume 1. This chapter provides the logical matrix of ideological “fetishization” as such: an operation whose historical condition of possibility is the capitalist mode of production.33
This is not the place to rehearse Marx’s whole complex argument, but it is worth recalling a central part of this argument: according to the logic of the capitalist economy, all commodities, including the commodity known as “labor power,” are subjected to the “general equivalent,” the law of value, no matter what the differences between them may be. This accounts for the “inversion” that Marx famously locates in commodity fetishism, whereby commodities or things are “humanized,” as if these things had a life of their own, while the social relations – the “relations of production” – between human subjects are commodified, objectified. The producer, in other words, is reduced in his person, which merely embodies labor power. And does modern (that is, capitalist) slavery not perfectly exemplify this logic? As we have seen, in slavery the person is a thing, even juridically. But we must go beyond this observation in order to demonstrate, with Marx, that “commodity fetishism” is not merely an illusory effect of capitalism that could be dispelled by logical or scientific explanation. It is instead the very logic of the system, the objective logic on which the whole capitalist system depends for its functioning. Put simply and even trivially: from the standpoint of the law of value and of capitalist profit-making or “accounting,” it does not matter whether the commodity is a screw or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, since both objects are reducible to their expressions as exchange value. As Marx explains, in the capitalist economy, unlike in other modes of production, it is the production of exchange values that guarantees profitability or surplus value. Clearly, the commodity must have a use value of some kind – whether real or imagined, material or symbolic – in order to be desirable. But this becomes a mere pretext, a premise to be instrumentalized.
Here a question is bound to arise: is this not just a way of “accounting” for capitalism, a way of thinking or a “philosophy” that emphasizes the dissolution of the concrete particular in the abstract universal, to use the Hegelian language adopted by the early Marx? Is this way of understanding the replacement of the part by the whole and the object by the concept under capitalism not philosophically limited and, worse yet, metaphysical? But we have seen that this is precisely what the racist does: dissolve the concrete particularity of skin color in the abstract universality of “blackness” or race. He or she then identifies the latter with both “inferiority” and an absolute difference that is itself abstract and universal. It is important to understand that this operation must be brought to bear on whole communities defined by a common trait such as “blackness,” before it is brought to bear on particular individuals. When particular individuals are in question, they are taken to be representations of the community who embody the common trait that has been rendered definitive. This is why the famous, would-be exculpatory claim of the anti-Semite – that he has “a Jewish friend” – is perfectly “logical.” He may very well “tolerate” and even appreciate or love a Jew, as long as the latter does not do “Jewish things” – that is, as long as he does not seem to be a representation of the “universal” qualities of his community.
The colonizer has to justify colonial oppression, to himself first and foremost. To this end, it is not enough to give the colonized other “being”; the colonizer has to persuade the colonized (and him- or herself) that this “being” is naturally inferior. Only in this way will the colonized come to “understand” fully the advantages that his new “being” entails, as a “white mask” that will offer access to a superior culture, to civilization (in the singular). Clearly, as soon as the colonized inquires into his or her true being, if only in a confused and doubtful way – as soon as he or she starts to imagine what he or she can do with what history has made of him or her, to deploy another Sartrean formulation – the mask falls, and black skin again acquires “ontological resistance.”34 This, for the colonizer, far from negating, in fact confirms the logic of colonialism. It is as if he were to say: “You see? There is nothing to be done: we elevate the colonized to the level of the white race; we offer them all the dignity that our culture can provide, and they reject it, because in the end they want to be who they are.” The colonizer can thus never lose: if the colonized and racialized other consents to wear the white mask, he or she demonstrates that the colonizer was right to impose his culture. If, however, the colonized rejects this culture, then he or she does so out of ignorance and stubbornness, because he or she wants to dwell or, as Spinoza would say, persist in his or her own, “inferior” being. And if, moreover, he or she resists, then there is reason to repress, torture, and kill him or her, since ultimately civilization (in the singular) must prevail. It would seem, therefore, that, as Rousseau writes, human beings must be “forced to be free.”35 In other words: to be white. And thus to enjoy all the “advantages” of the white race: “civilized” and modern law, for instance, rather than customary or tribal ritual. As Sartre sarcastically says, referring to the French colonial occupation of Algeria: “So we decided to give a handsome gift to the Muslims; we gave them our civil code. And why this generosity? Because tribal property was usually collective, and we wanted to fragment it to allow land speculators to buy it back bit by bit.”36
Again, it was not always this way. “Biological” racism – racism associated with certain physical traits and “moral” qualities, the racism that gave rise to what Tzvetan Todorov calls racialist ideology – could only become a plausible “theory” after the emergence of modern science, with its methods of classification (as in the work of Linnaeus, for instance). These methods could be used to construct “hierarchies” of difference, ranking racial phenotypes.37 In fact, the concept of race, defined in this sense, does not appear in Europe until the late eighteenth century and only later develops into the “racialist” discourse of Gobineau and his followers, and then into so-called “social Darwinism” (which should not be blamed on Darwin himself) in the second half of the nineteenth century. We thus confront another tragic Benjaminian paradox: it is modern science, which contributed so much to our so-called “progress,” that made the worst racist ideologies possible. It was modern science that underwrote these ideologies with its errors.
It is interesting to note that the rise of this concept of race coincides almost exactly with the height of plantation slavery in the Americas. As I noted in passing, before this period, the dominant paradigm for explaining “differences” among ethnic groups remained the one supplied by the Old Testament: the supposed curse cast by Noah on the “sons of Ham” (also called Hamites, meaning black Africans, as opposed to Semitic Africans like Egyptians). This account was still widespread during the early years of colonization in the Americas, especially among the devout Catholic Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. Indeed, it was in part what led Bartolomé de Las Casas to propose substituting indigenous laborers with African slaves.
Writing from a Marxist perspective, O. C. Cox forcefully emphasized the relation between the plantation economy and modern “racialism.” Cox, whose work has been seen to anticipate Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of the world-system, argued that the new form of racism that emerged in the context of Atlantic slavery followed from the proletarianization of the workforce in the Caribbean, and that “racial prejudice” was a bourgeois rationalization used to justify the inhuman and degrading treatment of hyperexploited African workers.38 This thesis was often criticized for its relatively careless use of Marxist categories, for ignoring the fact, for instance, that slaves in the Caribbean cannot be considered “proletarians” in any strictly Marxist sense (even if the Latin proletarii were indeed simply those dispossessed of all property). But the term “proletarianization” can also be understood in a broader and more global sense, one in keeping with the global perspective that is the methodological premise of world systems theory. If proletarianization is defined in this way, as the gradual and often violent separation of producers from the means of production (as in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 24), then Cox’s claims become considerably more plausible, even if they may still need to be refined.
These claims have the additional advantage of letting us articulate “racial prejudice” and what is generally called class struggle. In fact, the racial struggle in modernity emerges in this context as an episode or chapter, as it were, in the history of the class struggle. As we will see, at the height of plantation slavery, this relation between race and class informed perceptions of other “racial” others, such as “mulattos,” sambos, and other interracial people, who were socially disadvantaged and faced discrimination among whites, but who were nonetheless afforded minimal opportunities for social advancement, opportunities that were systematically denied to “pure” black populations. Genovese argues that “slavery must be understood primarily as a class question and only secondarily as a race or narrowly economic question.”39 Elsewhere he quotes Caio Prado as follows:
Racial differences, particularly when manifested in such clear somatic traits as skin color, will, if not create, … at least accentuate a discrimination already made on the social level … Racial features give an unmistakable stamp to existing social differences. They label the individual, helping to raise and strengthen the barriers that separate different classes. Any approach or blending of the classes thus becomes much more difficult, and the domination of one over the other is accentuated.40
This does not mean that the “class question” and the “race question” are in any sense simply equivalent. Each has its own logic and relative autonomy. This has been irrefutably shown in recent decades, with the emergence of “new” social movements, among them ethnocultural and indigenous movements, which are of the utmost importance. African American slavery also had a racial dimension, inescapably, one that should be understood as having been produced by the slave trade itself and that took different forms under different regimes of slavery. But, as I have tried to show here, there can be no doubt that both the “class question” and the “race question” belong to one overarching process: the globalization of capital. Again, these were differences introduced by modernity.
Malcolm K. Read’s paraphrase of Ivan Hannaford offers an acute analysis of this process and its implications for the production of race:
The existence of race in the ancient and medieval worlds … is almost entirely an invention of nineteenth-century historians; no pre-modern author believed that culture was a product of predetermined biological factors; and Antiquity was driven by slavery and barbarism, but not by race. … [T]he idea of race was not fully conceptualized until the French and American Revolutions. And while a racial account of existence, based on blood, physiology, climate, land, soil, and language emerged between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, the patriarchal feudal system transported across the Atlantic lacked “the prejudice, discrimination, and race hatred that marked the colonization of North America.”41
The conclusion could not be clearer: it was the logic of slavery in the Americas that led to the emergence of racism, which responded to the need for an “explanation” for the use of relations of production that had become necessary in this part of the world-system. It is true that a strong statement like this runs the risk of excessive generalization. The claim that before capitalist modernity there was no racism of any kind would seem to ignore the long premodern tradition of persecuting Jews in Europe, for instance (although it is worth remembering that, beginning in early modernity, this persecution was notoriously intensified). The claim should therefore be specified as follows: on the one hand, historians have convincingly demonstrated that in premodern times there was no racism based on skin color, the “curse of Ham” notwithstanding. On the other hand, this kind of racism, supposedly based on science and biology, is characteristic of bourgeois modernity. To say this, then, having worked to avoid overgeneralization, is still to make a sufficiently forceful claim.
A more committed Marxist than Read, Alex Callinicos nevertheless agrees fully with him when he notes that neither the Greeks nor the Romans developed a theory of white supremacy to justify slavery, although there is a (seemingly contradictory) correlation between the ferocious character of racism under capitalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, capitalism’s celebration of individual freedom, something that did not exist in antiquity as an essential value.42 This last point is enormously important. The fact that “premodern” societies lacked a concept of individual liberty – as is logical, given that this concept is a modern invention – not only became a justification for slavery and racism; it also prevented many illustrious “progressive” thinkers – including chiefly Enlightenment philosophes – from fully accounting for the existence of slavery as a concrete reality and not merely a metaphor.
I will return to this analysis in due course. For now, I would like to turn to the origins of the ideology of difference that gave rise to racist thought.
Racism in “Early Modernity”
This ideology of difference appears early and is in no way limited to the Afro-Caribbean areas controlled by England or France. As I have just indicated, discourses of racial difference can already be found among Spanish writers active during the Conquest. To be sure, these writers treat difference and “race” as matters for philosophical and theological speculation. Still, their thought presages modern “racialism” in important ways. In a remarkable essay, María Eugenia Cháves transcribes the following paragraph, dated 1589 and attributed to José de Acosta, a Jesuit who served the colonial government during the sixteenth century and sought, in his Promulgatione evangelio apud Barbaros, to explain the nature of American natives and their societies:
Thus there are people imbued with such inborn malice, which seems to be hereditary, people whose minds are so rebellious and so mired in evil, that it would be very difficult to lift them up. Just as the Ethiopian cannot change the color of his skin or the leopard his multicolored spots, so you cannot do good if you have been taught to do evil … This, then, is the first and principle cause of the fact that in these regions even great efforts bear little fruit, for the people’s seed is cursed; they have no hope of divine assistance; and they are destined for damnation.43
But Cháves also cites the following “analysis,” which is astonishing to say the least:
Before we can understand the diversity found among Ethiopians and in other black kingdoms, we must clarify why monsters are born. Aristotle says this happens when nature fails to achieve the perfect goal of each being engendering another creature like itself. When this emerges, a monster is born. However, it is more reasonable to say that a monster is nothing else but a sin of nature that happens when nature does not achieve perfection whether because of a lack or becasue of an excess of any part of a creature.44
This paragraph is taken from Naturaleza, policía sagrada y profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina i catechismo evangelico de todos los etíopes (or The Nature, Sacred and Profane Customs, and Rites, Discipline, and Evangelical Catechism of All Ethiopians), which was undoubtedly inspired by Acosta’s writings.45 Published in 1627, the book was written by the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who spent most of his life in Cartagena de Indias, where he worked to convert enslaved Africans arriving in the port city. I have already referred to the visual representation of the foreigner as a monster. Although Cháves does not underscore this fact, the word “monster” has a “metaphysical” meaning; it refers, in Sandoval’s phrase, to that which does not “achieve the perfect goal of each being.” The word is thus highly ambiguous and not always negative or disparaging, since the monstrous can also refer to the “normal” (as well as the supernatural, often associated with the monstrous during this period). But, of course, the negative connotation is also present, and to categorize a group of human beings as “abnormal” is an obvious and crass form of Eurocentrism. We will see that it also anticipates the “animalization” of the “Other” characteristic of modern racism. Cháves thus rightly notes:
Today this opinion would provoke amazement, if not outright indignation. Nevertheless, in the first half of the seventeenth century such ideas were authoritative, accepted in learned circles, and part of the great corpus of emergent discourses, constructed with the aim of giving meaning to the “new worlds” added to European knowledge, and of rendering these worlds intelligible.46
Cháves seeks to challenge the claim that theories of race, racial classifications, and racial exclusion began only in the late eighteenth century and to show “that this type of knowledge can be traced back to the Spanish Renaissance and to the set of discourses that emerged after the exploration and conquest of the Americas and Africa.”47
Drawing on his missionary work as well as extensive research, Sandoval considered Africans’ customs, languages, and religious practices as well as their continent of origin. His book was published in two versions, first in 1627 and then, after exhaustive revision, in 1647. In both editions, Sandoval began his consideration of the different “nations of blacks” with a learned discourse that sought to explain the origin of their black skin and to justify their enslavement. It was in this context, then, that the Jesuit introduced the reflections on monstrosity that I have just quoted. For Sandoval, their dark skin, which he understood to be the effect of “a sin of nature,” indicated that the “nations of blacks” resided at a limit, in a region inhabited by human beings whose differences from the rest of humanity take extreme forms. He concludes:
[T]he color black derives either from the will of God, who decreed that there should be variety for the sake of the adornment and the beauty of the universe, or from the particular qualities that are intrinsic to these people, or from Proficit a spermatis natura, that is, from the appearance and qualities of their ancestors. Which is in keeping with the teachings of the philosophers, [who argue] … that white derives from the utmost and most overpowering coldness, as we see in snow, and that black derives from the utmost and most excessive heat, as we see in pitch.48
Here Sandoval rejects the notion that external causes, like climate or parents’ imaginations, produce differences, which would thus be contingent and therefore reversible. Instead, he seeks an inherent, fundamental, and immutable cause capable of accounting for the nature of the “nations of blacks.” This effort will profoundly shape the ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants are defined in (and beyond) Spanish America.
One could infer, not without some basis, that the black skin of the Ethiopians not only comes from the curse Noah put on his son Ham but also is an innate or intrinsic part of how God created them, so that in this extreme heat, the sons engendered were left with this color, as a sign that they descend from a man who mocked his father, to punish his daring. Thus the Ethiopians descend from Ham, the first servant and slave that there ever was in the world, whose punishment darkened the skin of his sons and descendants.49
Here, together with traditional “theological” arguments deriving from the exegeses of the Church fathers, “naturalist” arguments begin to emerge in Sandoval’s appeals to “extreme heat” and “seminal matter.” The “problem,” for Sandoval, can thus be attributed in part to “natural” elements, but its solution can only be religious. Cháves continues:
The conversion of enslaved Africans was meant to function as an effective tool for bringing about their salvation. Both for Acosta and for Sandoval, salvation is necessary in order to redeem Native Americans and enslaved Africans from the destiny to which their nature had condemned them, a destiny expressed in their supposed ignorance, their uncontrollable appetites, and their heresies. This was the only way that these peoples could hope to be saved from their difference. But this redemption was to take place in a time and place beyond life and death: at the moment of the Last Judgment and the resurrection. Meanwhile, all Native Americans as well as all the “nations of blacks” had to submit to the authority of the empire of faith, the Word, and hope.
For this reason, although Sandoval does denounce the mistreatment of slaves and the masters’ violence and cruelty, he does not condemn slavery as such. In fact, he finds it necessary to state explicitly that his concern for the salvation of the slaves’ souls does not imply a defense of their liberty, let alone constitute a pretext for questioning the masters’ authority.50
Another important source from the period is Juan Solórzano y Pereyra, a contemporary of Sandoval’s who was also a Jesuit. His Disputatio de indiarum iure sive de iure iusta indiarum occidentalium inquisitione, acquisitione, et retentione is one of his most important works for the history of Spanish America. Consider what he has to say when he seeks to define mestizaje and the identities in which it results:
They took the name mestizos because of the mixture in their blood and the nations that came together to engender them. … And mulatos, although they are included in the general category of mestizos for the same reason, are called mulatos in particular when they are the children of a black mother and a white father, or the other way around. This is in order to show that they are the products of such ugly and extraordinary mixing, and to show with that name that their nature is comparable to a mule’s … In most cases, they are born from adulterous or otherwise illicit and punishable unions, because there are few honorable Spanish men who marry Indian or black women. And the natural defects of the mulatos make them wicked. … The mulato is marked by the multicolored stain and by other vices that usually come naturally, as if they were fed to these babies by their mothers, like mother’s milk.51
Clearly, here mestizaje is seen as the product of sinful and even criminal relationships that lead to pollution, impurity, and contamination. This is probably an unconscious acknowledgment of the kind of universal and archaic religious taboo studied by Mary Douglas or Victor Turner.52 The discourse on mestizaje as a phenomenon that contaminates and threatens the colonial order does not emerge ex nihilo, of course, with the Spanish colonization of the Americas. It has roots in the discourse of limpieza de sangre, “cleanliness” or “purity of blood,” prevalent on the Iberian Peninsula during the Reconquista. This discourse sought to maintain separate identities and to justify Christian dominance, and it emerged together with the military campaigns that sought to expel Arab communities from the peninsula that had been settled for as long as seven centuries (as well as Jews who had in some cases been there even longer). Lest we forget, though the fact may be so obvious as to barely need underscoring, the Reconquista was, not coincidentally, completed in 1492.
But something else emerges in the passage from Solórzano y Pereyra cited above as well: the early use of zoological metaphors in the discourse of race – in this case in the reference to mulatos, likened to mules. Terms including zambo, mulato, coyote, and lobo are all at the source of an emergent naturalist and biologizing language of race, and for this reason they are all markers of modernity. This language will be so successful as to persist through the twentieth century (and indeed into our own day), when it shows no signs of disappearing, in figures used to justify all manner of genocides: the Turkish called the Armenians “vermin,” just as the Nazis called the Jews “rats,” and the Hutus called the Tutsis “cockroaches,” just as the leaders of the military dictatorship in Argentina spoke of subversive “germs,” and so on. Note that these last epithets all refer to animals or other organisms that are repugnant or carriers of diseases or plagues, whereas the “mule,” “coyote,” or “wolf” arguably still retained a measure of “dignity.” Still, this does not mean that the latter did not belong to an emergent “animalizing” discourse.
On the other hand, as Cháves rightly notes, the “stain of color” was a metaphor used to refer not only to racial or ancestral mixing, but also to the idea of sin and to dirt or filth in a figurative sense. In fact, Cháves is right to say that the “stain” is of course not literally a stain, just as the “impure” is not literally dirty. Such representations, drawn in chiaroscuro, evoke almost physical conditions but point to indignities that are moral and that give rise to concrete forms of exclusion and repression. Nevertheless, here it is crucial to pay attention to the way in which the “almost physical condition” or imagined collective ailment begins to be combined with “moral indignity.” It would be difficult to find an instance of this kind of mixing in the medieval period, for instance. To be sure, a certain logic of exclusion – an imaginary exclusion of the dirty and the impure – had helped to establish the lines of demarcation separating some individuals from others, giving rise to the persecution of “witches” or Jews, for example.53 But in the epistemological framework of Scholasticism, there was no need to establish concepts for rendering individual differences, gradations, or relations such that the other would be “animalized” at best, or made into a demonic creature. Although in the Middle Ages the devil indeed acquires animal-like features – the features of snakes, goats, bats, and others – such images were purely allegorical and theological, not “naturalist” comparisons.54
This period also witnesses the emergence of a particular discursive phenomenon. As people from Africa increasingly came to participate in the phenomenon of mestizaje, the adjectives used to differentiate among individuals multiplied, as did the “multicolored stains” of skin color. As the eighteenth century wore on, signifiers for naming the identities of people of African descent proliferated. For historical as well as cultural reasons, these signifiers in Spanish America did not reach the level of exquisite, “Cartesian” taxonomic detail characteristic of the French colonial context (where the French thought they could identify more than a hundred shades of the color black). But by the late eighteenth century, we are not far from that classificatory delirium. Consider the following three examples transcribed by Cháves:
Next I will cite three examples of typologies, the first two written in Mexico in 1715; the second, also from Mexico, written between 1770 and 1780; and the third written in Peru in 1770:
A Spanish man and an Indian woman produce a mestizo
A Spanish man and a mestiza woman produce a castizo
A castizo and a Spanish woman produce a Spaniard
A Spanish man and a black woman produce a mulato
A Spanish man and a mulata woman produce a morisco
A Spanish man and a morisca woman produce an albina
A mulato man and a mestiza woman produce a mulato torna atrás
A black man and an Indian woman produce a lobo
An Indian man and a loba woman produce a grifo who is also a tente en el aire
A lobo man and an Indian woman produce a lobo who is also a torna atrás
A mestizo man and an Indian woman produce a coyote
Two Indian heathens, idem.
Two mountain Indians or taxpaying Indians or civilized Indians, idem.
A Spanish man and a mountain Indian produce a mestizo
A mestizo man and a mestiza woman produce a mestiza
A Spanish man and a mestiza woman produce a cuarterona de mestizo
A cuarterona de mestizo and a Spanish man produce a quinterona de mestizo
A Spanish man and a quinterona de mestizo produce a Spaniard or a requinterona de mestizo
Two blacks recently captured from Guinea, idem.
A black woman, either born in Guinea or creole, and a Spanish man produce mulatos
A mulata woman is the daughter of a mulata mother and a mulato father
A mulata woman with a Spaniard produces a cuarterón de mulato
A Spanish man and a cuarterona de mulato produce a quinterona de mulato
A quinterona de mulato and a requinteron de mulato produce a Spaniard
A Spanish man and a requinterona de mulato produce a white person
A Spanish man and a white woman produce a person with nearly pure origins
A mestizo man and an Indian woman produce a cholo
An Indian woman with a mulato man produces chinos
A Spanish man with a china woman produces a cuarterón de chino
A black man with an Indian woman produces a sambo de indio
A black man with a mulata woman produces a sambo55
These kinds of typologies were frequently accompanied by painted representations. In this context, hierarchies supposedly indexed levels of “civilization” or the lack thereof. Mestizos with Spanish ancestors tended to return to whiteness and civilization, as for example in the case where “a Spanish man and a requinterona de mulato produce a white person.” Mestizos who were mostly of indigenous or African descent, by contrast, tended toward blackness and being “uncivilized,” as happened when “From a Spanish man and an albina,” a “torna atrás” (or literally “turn back”) is produced. During the same period, in Northern Europe, philosophers and naturalists, including Immanuel Kant, Georges Louis Leclerc-Buffon, and Carl Linnaeus, developed a metalanguage for explaining the existence of intrinsic characteristics, a language that was also meant to justify the differences among human beings.56 Such classificatory systems sought to establish a hierarchy of “primitive” and “developed” human groups. This effort led to the emergence of the concept of “race” as an organizing principle of differentiation. Meanwhile, as the Spanish empire gradually lost its geopolitical hegemony, Northern European powers consolidated theirs. This process in turn led to new campaigns aimed at the discovery of other “new worlds,” and new discursive efforts to name these and assign them meanings in keeping with modern, Enlightenment knowledge. The development and popularization of the discourse of “race,” which rendered previous discourses of difference obsolete, thus unfolded in this context of geopolitical and epistemic transformations. The discourse of race emerged as the product of shifts in dominant languages as well as in the institutions charged with establishing new truths. All of this, for Cháves, points to the necessity of revising the argument according to which the concept of race arises in the eighteenth century. This argument also holds that all previous forms of domination that relied on criteria of purity and blood are legitimated after the fact by the racial theories of the late 1700s:
The process that leads Northern European philosophers and naturalists to develop the idea of race into a scientific concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – in other words, the process that leads them to develop race as a metalanguage with which to account for intrinsic characteristics that give rise to differences among categories of human beings, making some good and others bad, some primitive and others developed – cannot be separated from the history of the knowledges produced on the Iberian Peninsula during the centuries of the exploration, conquest, and colonization of the West Indies and Africa. Nor can this process be separated from the subsequent efforts to establish fields of signification and forms of discourse for naming, controlling, and exploiting colonial territories and their inhabitants.57
I fully agree with these claims. But I would underscore the modernity of the new ideological and discursive apparatuses whose emergence Cháves considers. Although these were at first tentative and combined with theological or metaphysical elements, by the late eighteenth century they are solidly authorized by their supposed basis in extra-theological, “scientific” fact, especially in societies like England’s or France’s. (Theology at least had the advantage of preserving a minimal space for debates like the one begun by Bartolomé de Las Casas, although it is true, of course, that his argument only applied to the indigenous populations of the Americas. “Positive science,” by contrast, is inescapable and definitive in lay public opinion.) Still, there can be no doubt, as Cháves concludes, that “[t]he reproduction of the subordination and social exclusion of indigenous populations and people of African descent, on which modern states are built, has its roots in colonial systems of knowledge.”58
Colonization thus functioned as the motor that allowed for the construction of the modern world-system. The colonial project inaugurated the global division of labor under capitalism and hence also the new, modern practices of segregation and racism.59
The Traces of Time
Of course, racial slavery was neither a linear nor a homogeneous phenomenon. The multiple differences that emerged in the various sub-regions with their various regimes of slavery require case-by-case analyses that I cannot offer here. These differences had as much to do with the internal characteristics of plantation economies as with the socioeconomic and cultural development of the metropolis and thus the complexity and specificity of the social classes involved. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to say that racial slavery was not only marked by new and particular characteristics that distinguished it from ancient and premodern slavery. As a phenomenon that was inextricably linked to the emergence of the modern world-system, and one whose structure responded to and represented a logic that was already capitalist, it was also associated with the majority of those processes that have been seen to define modernity as such: the spread of “instrumental rationality”; the emergence of the nation-state and feelings of “nationality”; racialized perceptions of “identity” supported by new systems of scientific classification (which early on were often combined with pseudo-theological reflections, as we have seen); the expansion of the global market and waged work; the development of administrative bureaucracy and modern systems of taxation; the increasing sophistication of international trade and communications; “action at a distance” and individualist sensibilities; and so forth. The knowledge that emerged as the product of the colonial enterprise established oppositions between civilization and barbarism, light and dark skin, Europe and the rest of the world, the saved and the damned, the dominators and the dominated. These dichotomizing discourses created the foundations for the domination and subalternization of Native American populations and enslaved Africans.
The Atlantic world during the era of racial slavery was the site of vertiginous if inevitably “combined and uneven development.” The latter phrase refers to the coexistence of different modes of production and styles of development, where one of these nevertheless predominates.60 In this case, people previously separated by an ocean entered into relation with one another for the first time. The demand for sugar, cotton, tobacco, or coffee in London, Amsterdam, and Paris led decisively to the proliferation of plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, which were in turn supplied with European commodities and African slaves. The dynamics of the Atlantic economy were sustained by new commercial and business networks as well as by states, and they required the careful organization and administration of trade as well as new means of accounting for the risks of investments. The “encounters” between all the cultures that participated in these dynamics gave birth to new social, religious, political, and ethnic identities.
I might seem to be describing what is today called “globalization.” Would this be true, or would the similarity be merely coincidental? It was indeed during this period that the foundations of the capitalist world economy, to use another expression of Wallerstein’s, were established. It was during this period, in other words, that the economy first became what it is today. Racial slavery, again, fulfilled a crucial function in the creation of this “new world.” Although institutional slavery no longer exists, our present continues to bear the repressed or disavowed traces of its origins in slavery. For economic as well as “racial” reasons, the most iniquitously exploited, marginalized, and impoverished social sectors on the planet are nonwhite, and they reside in the territories historically subjected to colonization. The so-called divide between North and South – the economic and political geography that, as we are beginning to see, has a historical origin and is not strictly “territorial,” given that there are innumerable oppressed “dreamers” and “dreams” residing in the North – is redoubled in what we might call a chromatic divide between “whites” and “others.” The exceptions – this or that “black” or “indigenous” bourgeoisie, this or that functionary (or, more recently, president) of color – in fact confirm the rule. Space and time, geography and history are the frameworks that make these “differences” visible, except for those who are proverbially blind because they will not see. The framework encompasses the whole world, and especially the “center” of the world. Perhaps to compensate for the walls that fell in 1989, this center builds new walls to keep certain “colors” out of the white promised land, while those who do gain access are subjected to new forms of “informal” semi-slavery that cruelly give the lie to the ideological image of global “fluidity.” This is also, and perhaps above all, a modern world-system. The traces to which I have referred are therefore “historical,” but blood continues to flow from the wounds that have never healed.
A Better World?
Undoubtedly, as Stern argues, in our specific historical analyses we must keep in mind the three “motors” of the reality under investigation: the European world-system, the interests of local elites, and the equally local and subversive strategies for survival and resistance that emerge in response, on the periphery. To these three “motors” I would add another: the cultural transformations that a given historical configuration entails, the surplus or excess meaning produced at all levels by all parties in an “encounter,” for all their asymmetry. We find the keys to the “colonial question” in the often contradictory and conflictual interactions among these “motors,” as well as within each of them. But none of this, in my view, means that we should abandon the framework of world-systems theory, even if we do lightly revise it or deploy it critically. I do not agree with Stern’s suggestion that we should abandon concepts like capitalism on grounds that they are “Eurocentric.” Elsewhere I have sought to broaden and complicate these concepts, drawing on István Mészáros’s analysis of the “social metabolism of capital,” according to which the capitalist regime involves much more than the economy and relations of production, because it affects the logic of culture and society as a whole.61 Revisiting Latin American debates from the 1960s and writing with the best anti-Eurocentric intentions, Stern proposes replacing the concept of capitalism with the category of “the colonial mode of production,” a category that is, in my view, too diffuse. I would argue that the question is not whether the category of capitalism is Eurocentric in the superficial sense of being coined by European thinkers, but rather whether it is useful for analyzing both the world-system as a whole and the “local” realities of our Latin American periphery. This includes the question of whether the category is useful for critically dismantling Eurocentrism. I would answer that it is indeed useful to this end, inasmuch as Eurocentrism is inextricably linked to the hegemony of capitalism, so that the critique of these two phenomena is in fact a single critique. As I insisted in the Prologue, we should redeploy this critique from our own place of reading and enunciation, rather than uncritically accepting it “as is.” Such uncritical acceptance would constitute the real Eurocentrism. To be clear about my own position on this subject: there is no reason to renounce in advance all efforts to reappropriate theories, concepts, or categories that can help us and that we can enrich and complicate, even while we work to generate our own “peripheral” concepts. It is this tension that I seek to maintain throughout this book. In the next chapter, I will engage more specifically with the role of racial slavery in the formation of the modern world-system, above all in the Caribbean, though, given its importance, I will refer to the Brazilian context as well. First, however, I will end this chapter by briefly discussing a question that I have so far left unaddressed.
Undoubtedly, the construction of the capitalist world economy occurred to the detriment of the vast majority of the world’s population. Despite the predictions made by the most well-meaning defenders of the new world-system – and despite some of the different but no less optimistic predictions made by Marx himself – this process fueled a “combined and uneven development” that led to deepened economic, social, political, and cultural inequality between the different sectors of the world economy. Indeed, we might even say that this inequality was created. Far from leading to equal prosperity for everyone, the capitalist world economy has led to unimaginable levels of inequality. It is therefore false to claim that, despite all the harm it has caused, capitalism is comparatively more “just” or “equal” than any premodern system. And world-systems theory, among others, has sought to prove the falsity of this claim historically. First, given that none of these premodern systems was informed by the ideology of unbridled productivism, none entailed the apocalyptic destruction of nature (let alone the potential destruction of the human species) that capitalism has made not only possible but imminent. Nor did any previous system produce anything approaching the horrors of Auschwitz or Hiroshima. None implemented a global regime of terror and war comparable with the kind that today subtends what are piously called “international relations.” But even before noting this, we can attend to the economic factors, or what classical economics called “the wealth of nations,” although this cannot be measured in absolute terms: it is clear that under capitalism there is more “wealth” in the world than ever before, but precisely because this wealth exists, it is much more unevenly distributed than ever before. Never before has the gap between rich and poor been so massive; never before has social polarization been what it is today, to say nothing of disparities in the realms of culture, knowledge, or access to technology. Never before, finally, has a system so thoroughly complicated class struggle (and the very constitution of classes) to the point of managing to cause a veritable implosion of intraclass solidarities, the result of a sinister and pervasive ideology of competitive individualism. These are all, again, modern phenomena. This is not to suggest that polarization as such is a product of modernity, but rather to note that the infinite distance between the “poles” is a modern phenomenon, one made that much more dramatic because it arises at a time when both the development of productive forces and the hypothetical empire of “universal democracies” should make a reduction of this distance at least technically possible. World-systems theory explains why, during the last five hundred years, increasing inequality has instead been a truly global tendency.
Of course, there are features of the “modernity” that we have that are worth retaining: laws, institutions, and even behaviors, an ethos that is more or less generalized. All of these have the potential to curb “abuses of power” and to sustain defenses of human rights and individual liberties. It would be foolish to deny that these features of modernity are also indices of perceptible and welcome progress over past historical periods. But this claim, too, is not unproblematic, for such laws, institutions, and behaviors are themselves the battlefields on which a “struggle for meaning” unfolds, a struggle that is, as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, polyphonic and not univocal; its outcome is not decided in advance, or once and for all.62 These very same laws, institutions, and behaviors, in other words, are all too often used as instruments of class domination, in order to conserve and even deepen, in a thousand different ways, the disparities that I have just mentioned. I will never tire of repeating: this is “combined and uneven development.” This means that at any time even authentic “progress” can become what Benjamin would call the mere history of the victors. The struggle over the meaning of history is thus infinite by definition: it is never complete. And an attitude of permanent critical interrogation remains a crucial, counterhegemonic weapon in this struggle. This attitude can be brought to bear, for instance, on the “evidence” used to support official discourses – for instance, the “evidence” used to support the uncritical claim that this world is necessarily better than the world of the past.
Notes
1 Lévi-Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” 1–34. 2 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 57–76. 3 Parker-Pearson and Thorpe, Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory, 110–132. 4 Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks. 5 Atilio Borón, “Introducción: la filosofía política clásica y la biblioteca de Borges,” 18. Translator’s note: My translation. The sentence from Aristotle’s Politics quoted here appears in Benjamin Jowett’s translation. See Aristotle, The Politics, 17. 6 Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. 7 Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. See also Mossé, “Quelques problèmes du développement de l’esclavage à l’époque hellénistique,” 75–82; Vidal-Naquet, “Les esclaves grecs étaient-ils une classe?,” 211–221. 8 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. 9 Aristotle, The Politics, 17.10 Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inca State.11 Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians.12 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 31–94.13 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 46.14 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 83, 42.15 Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 45–75.16 Weber, Economy and Society, 53.17 For all of this, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 27–66.18 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172, n. 8.20 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5.21 Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame, 19–77.22 Hobbes, Leviathan, 61.23 Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made.24 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13.25 Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 45 ff.26 See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. See especially the Appendix containing the unpublished concluding section of the first volume of Capital, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.”27 Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 5.28 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 509–580.29 Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Translator’s Note: My translation.30 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew.31 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 61.32 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, especially 15–32.33 Marx, Capital, 163–177.34 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.35 Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Late Political Writings, 55.36 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 12.37 Todorov, “Race and Racism,” 64–70.38 Cox, Caste, Class, & Race, 82 ff.39 Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 14–15.40 Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 105–106.41 Read, “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” 152.42 Callinicos, Race and Class.43 Quoted in Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 78. Translator’s Note: My translation.44 Quoted in Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 74. Translator’s Note: For the English translation, see Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, 22; translation modified.45 Translator’s Note: The English translation of the title is von Germenten’s, slightly modified; see her introduction in de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, xiv.46 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 74. Translator’s Note: My translation.47 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización.” Translator’s Note: My translation.48 Quoted in Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 75. Translator’s Note: This passage is not included in the selections translated into English by von Germenten. For this reason, the translation here is my own.49 Quoted in Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 77; Translator’s Note: For the English, see Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, 20.50 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 78. Translator’s Note: my translation.51 Quoted in Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 80. Translator’s Note: My translation.52 Douglas, Leviticus as Literature; Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual; Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors.53 See Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath.54 See Russell, The Prince of Darkness, especially 48 ff.55 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 84–85. Translator’s Note: my translation.56 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 86. Translator’s Note: my translation.57 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 87–88. Translator’s Note: my translation.58 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,” 88. Translator’s Note: my translation.59 Cháves, “Color, inferioridad y esclavización,”60 See Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution.61 Mészáros, Beyond Capital; Grüner, El fin de las pequeñas historias.62 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.