Rev Left Radio - Unity and Struggle (Pt. 3) : Slavery, Capitalism, and Wage Labor

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

This is the third installment in our new and ongoing collaboration with Unity and Struggle. This Rev Left mini-series will trace and engage with the development of Unity and Struggle's deep study of race through the lens of Marxist historical and dialectical materialism. In this third edition, Breht is joined by Eve and Enzo to cover free and unfree labor, slavery, its relation to capitalism, and more.  Check out, and contribute to, Unity and Struggle's study here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2019/11/racestudypart1/ Check out more from Unity and Struggle here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/ Follow them on twitter @unityandstrug Intro Clip by Means TV featuring Mond Jones. You can find that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP3-dQHJjFo  Outro Music: 'Stuck in the South' by Adia Victoria. ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

The relationship between capitalism, racist exploitation, and colonialism is a mutually dependent one. One cannot exist without the other. They support each other and require each other to function. Capitalism is an economic system we have now. We go to work for some major corporations, spend the majority of our day working, and take home just enough to feed ourselves. Financial success within the capitalist system can be broken down into a base. basic two-part formula. Maximize profits, minimize costs.

The people at the top make the profit, they minimize their costs by paying you as little as legally possible. Pay workers as little as possible, sprinkling a little bit of racism, and you got the American dream. So how does that relate to colonialism? Historically, colonialism was when white European nations

went into Africa and what is now the Americas in the Caribbean, set up shop, stole a bunch of shit, enslaved entire communities, and then claim the land as their own. This history of colonial exploitation is deeply tied to our current situation in America today. Modern capitalism was not built

because of some weird, Anglo-Western exceptionalism or superiority. This level of development and industrialization in the West happened so quickly because it was little to no money being spent when it came to the workers. The slave-owning class was successful financially because they were willing to engage

in the immoral act of enslaving people. Something that people knew was completely completely morally wrong even back then. The capitalist system, as we know it today, is quite literally built on the backs of African slaves. It was only when slavery in the raw colonial approach became less profitable and manageable that blacks were allowed to participate

as wage slaves in the capitalist economy. So why is all this matter? Well, we understand that capitalism is bad, we understand that racism is bad, but it is this intersection of race and class that we must understand in order to organize mass power across all working people. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

That clip you just heard was from tattoo artist Mond Jones on Means TV. The video is called Capitalism, Slavery, and Colonization. It's on Means TV's YouTube channel. I'll link to that in the show notes. I just thought it was a great introduction and a great way to remind people that Means TV. has launched and they're doing the Lord's work. So definitely go check them out if you haven't already. So today is the third installment of our ongoing collaboration with unity and struggle. They are basically conducting an open source study of race and capitalism and the

development of race and capitalism together over time. We've had two episodes already. We'll have many more in the future. These are shorter episodes because it is an ongoing collaboration. Every episode we just sort of tackle one of the main topics in that study and progressively move on to the next one. So this will be part three and they'll be part four probably in the next month or so. But today's topic is free and unfree labor and the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Before we get into this episode, I do want to take a moment to give a shout out to a previous guest, Lateef, who came on to talk about disability of struggles and issues surrounding disability about a year or so ago,

Lateef has a new podcast called Black Disabled Men Talk. I will link to that in the show notes. So definitely if you are at all interested in that topic, go check out that new podcast, show them love, let them know Rev Left sent you. And yeah, it's a really important topic. We're going to have Lateef back on to do a sort of more robust conversation and discuss the issues surrounding disability

even more in depth soon, sometime maybe this spring or summer. summer. But in the meantime, definitely go check out that podcast, Black Disabled Men Talk. And shout out to Lateef. Glad that Lateef still doing well. And I'm really happy that he has his own show now. So go support that. All right. Without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into this discussion with Eve and Enzo from Unity and Struggle on the topics of free and unfree labor and the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Enjoy. Yeah, great. Thanks so much for having us back. So my name is Eve and I work with the anti-state revolutionary collective Unity and Struggle. So I live in New York City and I organize in Brooklyn doing migrant defense and anti-gentrication work in Brooklyn. having us. Absolutely. Enzo. Hi, I'm Enzo. I am currently in Virginia, but for the past couple

years, I've been out in Seattle. I joined U.N.S. quite a few years ago, I'm doing work, organizing, tenant work in Houston. But like I said, I've been out in Seattle recently. Wonderful. Well, glad to have you both back. First, let's just maybe introduce the topic today and maybe answer why you think that this topic is important. What is the import of free and unfree labor, slavery and capitalism, et cetera, just sort of introduce the entire discussion for us? Right. So we've been doing this ongoing long-term race study

and looking at different sides of the question about the relationship between capitalism and race. And so in order to dig into this a little bit further, we wanted to look at free and unfree labor and specifically slavery and wage labor under capitalism. And the reason we do this is because one of the foundational beliefs of unity and struggle is that labor is a universal term. We see it as interchangeable with something like self-activity or life activity, and it's at the heart of human relationships. So the way we understand labor is through a mode of production, which can be expressed on a broader scale like feudalism or capitalism.

And under capitalism, our labor is alienated. This appears under capitalism as a division of labor and property relations as two-sacred. of the same coin. So we can't use our labor as we freely wish. It's distorted under capitalism, and we're sort of forced into a specific division of labor, and we're forced to sell our labor as the only thing that we truly own under capitalism. So this is both a subjective and objective phenomenon, meaning it's something that we contribute to on a daily basis by going to work, but it's also something that's imposed upon us. I know that's kind of a lot in a short explanation, but given that sort of foundational aspect of our understanding of capitalism,

we have to look at, you know, sort of both sides of the objective and subjective alienation of our labor. So this section actually looks at more of the objective side. So how does capitalism sort of assert its will upon us and give rise to a racialized division of labor? And in this case, we're looking specifically along free and unfree lines. So under capitalism, that takes the form of slavery and wage labor. Also, we see a relationship between this division of labor and property. And so under capitalism, in this moment of slavery, humans are also themselves expressed as property. So these are two things that we're sort of wrestling with in this section of the race study.

Enzo, would you like to add anything to that? Actually, that was a really good explanation of why we're looking at free and unfree labor. One thing that we've been looking at is the way the free labor under capitalism is both free because it's kind of freely given, but that's the only thing that we have to sell. So how free are we? So we've been kind of looking at free and unfree labor as forced and coerced labor as well. Yeah, and let's talk about that relationship. So what is the relationship between free, unfree, and coerced labor? What are the sort of connections there? So at least looking at the United States, capital kind of took on this distinction of free and unfree labor, and that coincided with race realization. So looking kind of at the works that we've looked at during this section, you see that originally in the United States, having a slave for the entirety of their life meant as much as having a servant for a couple of years. Their mortality rate of laborers and servants was really high. And so you see that it doesn't make much sense at the time.

But at the same time, laborers aren't coming as freely. You have the introduction of slavery. And so slavery kind of takes off in that way. And at the same time, slavery is kind of put on race as well. So you have the kind of formation of race coming in at the time that slavery is entering in the United States. And so coerced labor and forced labor are both compatible with capitalism, but they're very contradictory. So slavery is always going to undermine any free or coerced labor. But at the same time, the existence of coercive labor is always going to be seen as something that you can bring the condition of the slave up to.

So we're looking at that in the formation of the country, but it still actually exists now. So you have examples of capitalism returning to slavery. So in the 70s with the crisis and capital, then you have this turned to mass incarceration and the increases in productivity through prison labor. And then you see now kind of the movement away from that, at least as far as more morality goes. As in people taking a moral stance against the existence of that sort of slave labor. Exactly. Kind of taking on similar wording and similar phrasing to previous abolition. So we talk about ourselves as prison abolitionists.

So the overarching question here, or the next overarching question, I guess, that really ties this whole conversation together is, is slavery capital? And, you know, I think we should take this one at a time because there's various perspectives and different points of views on this question. So the first perspective is the sort of orthodox Marxist take on this question of is slavery capitalist? Do one of you want to take that? Definitely, I can speak to that. Essentially, with orthodox Marxism, we have a definition of capitalism that really kind of hinges on formalistic property ownership. So we see, at least as far as the USSR, the Soviet Union, the party owns the means of production. If the party is just a representation of the people's will, then you have socialism because the people own the means of production.

So it's this focus on very formalistic definitions of things. And so what a proletariat is, as far as like Orthodox Marxism, is a person who sells their labor, for a wage. So if you kind of apply that to slavery, slaves, you have a situation where they aren't selling their labor for a wage. They get no wage and they sell nothing. So at least as far as Orthodox Marxism goes, slavery really isn't kind of integral to capitalism. And so any racialization is going to be kind of incidental. Would you say that there have been Marxist or thinkers within the Marxist tradition that have pushed against that more orthodox view and perhaps expanded the conception of proletariat to include people that aren't formally, you know, exchanging their labor for a wage?

I think that there are many traditions that, you know, fall on different sides of this question. And in our race study, it's a little bit messy because we have a lot of sort of synthesis pieces that are sort of literature reviews or like broad strokes looking at different tendencies. So what we've sort of tried to boil the conversation down to is, Whether or not slavery is capitalist ultimately depends on your definition of capitalism, and it can actually go either way based on that. There's one tendency that we also looked at called World Systems theorists, and this is, you know, people who are sort of a wide range of different Marxists, so from people like David Harvey, who's, you know, more of a sort of like

Social Democrat Marxist, and then other people like Eric William, who was, you know, from the autonomous Marxist tradition and Cedric Robinson, who is sort of like the classic black Marxist world systems theorists, all of these thinkers in different ways think that slavery is capitalist and they have pushed back on this sort of orthodox Marxist tradition. And that's because their definition of capitalism is that it's generalized commodity circulation and being subject to market competition. So if you use that as your framework for understanding capitalism, then slavery is subject to sort of the norms. and rules guiding capitalist production, and the products of slavery are subject to competition,

and so therefore it is capitalist. For us, we thought that there might be a potential pitfall in this definition of capitalism in this world system theory. On the one hand, we found it really helpful in terms of thinking about how social relations are not linear. There's not like some super-developed capitalist structure and then all these other smaller countries or like these sort of like late to bloom countries sort of like follow the model in some sort of linear way. But in terms of seeing capitalism as a global phenomenon that is uneven

and nonlinear. So we found that really helpful. But on the other hand, the focus on commodity circulation and not the conditions of production was a little bit different for us. I think we, you know, we worry a bit about the logical conclusion of a definition of capitalism that hinges on that. And we think that, you know, if you're only focused on commodity circulation, then you could be for, you know, a social democratic transition or a party structured state and, you know, not be looking at fundamentally transforming the conditions of production. So while each of these views has a certain strength in its own right, or at least at the time when they emerge, there's also these blind spots. So we've covered the Orthodox Marxist reaction. We've covered the

world system theorist reaction. The last one is the value form theorists. So would you like to talk about that? Yeah. So this is sort of the tradition that we find, you know, we sort of put unity and struggle in as well, maybe slightly different from some of the people that we read. But the point for us is that these theorists emphasize capitalism or defined capitalism through social relations of production. So we don't have enough time to go into value form theory. That would take a whole podcast on its own. But just a short thing on that is just that the source of all value is human labor and that we alienate ourselves in order to live regardless of whether it's coerced or forced. So under capitalism, we're all forced in some way, coerced or forced to labor in order

to produce value. Okay. So let's just stick with short and simple like that. So using this working definition, you could actually say that slavery is capitalist or it's not. not capitalist. So some of the thinkers we read like Charlie Post, for example, says that slavery is not capitalist because it's not based on wage labor. So this is similar to the orthodox Marxist, but instead he sort of emphasizes the social relations of production and not property forms. On the other hand, there are people like John Clegg who says that slavery is capitalist using the same definition of capitalism because plantations were market dependent, meaning they had to go through a valorization process through the market and through process

of exchange in order to reproduce themselves. So it's not so much that the rules of capitalism, but the fact that slaves could not directly reproduce themselves that they had to trade via their slave owner in order to reproduce themselves. So it's similar to the world's systems, but slightly different. Clegg also emphasizes the alienation. of slaves in a slightly different way because he argues that slaves are doubly alienated and actually emphasizes this experience of alienation in ways that the world system serious don't because on the one hand they don't own their means of production and they also don't own their labor. Having covered those various perspectives, the next question would be

are slaves members of the proletariat? Yeah, I think that that is kind of a really fundamental question and something I think that we're still kind of grappling with because you can see how if you're looking at the history of the United States and the history of colonialism in the United States, primitive accumulation is always the dispossessing of people from the land and making those serfs into the proletariat. But I wonder, you know, if due to the way that colonialism was was kind of happening in the United States whether the imposition of this new kind of proto or hybrid proletariat slaves from Africa could make slaves kind of a proto or hybrid proletariat. Kind of at the end of the day, while it's a fundamental question, it isn't super important

because the proletariat is not the only potential subject for the revolution. you have obviously people who don't work for a wage but do social reproductive labor. And that is also, while not a proletariat, quote unquote, is still a subject of revolution. There's also the historical question of the peasant and the role that the peasant plays in revolution or in France Phenon's work, Wretched of the Earth. He talks about the role of the lump in proletariat and why in the colonized, context. The industrial proletariat in the cities might not be the revolutionary force in the colonial situation. So yeah, there's lots of nuances there for sure. I do want to ask you both a question really quick because I've actually been thinking about this recently. You often

hear people say stuff like wage slavery, right? They talk about having a job under capitalism and even in the modern era as a form of wage slavery. And I've never really talked to anybody about this, but it's increasingly sort of makes me feel a little uncomfortable. because I feel like, yes, obviously, like, you know, wage labor under capitalism is brutal and demeaning and all of that stuff, but to sort of make an inherent comparison to slavery seems a little overdone to me. Do either of you have thoughts on that term wage slavery and how does it, is it an appropriate term given what we've talked about and just sort of your own intuition? I think it's more just expressing people's alienation and what they feel under capitalism,

how oppressive capitalism is but you know it's it's an imprecise term but i think i think that's sort of just to emphasize anzo's point from earlier i think that's why we tend to look at instead of free and unfree labor as as sort of the the two sides of potential forms of labor under capitalism we tend to look at a kind of a spectrum between coerced and forced labor um so even though it's not super precise to say that, you know, that we were existing under a wage slavery system, I think that there are some gray areas, particularly around I'm thinking of like abusive gendered relations or the prison slavery question that Enzo highlighted. It's not a precise term, but I think it does express something about how people exist

under capitalism. And I think it's worth it to, you know, sort of parse out the different forms of labor that exist under capitalism. Yeah, I mean, you know, people that use that term at least just think about really what you're saying when you say it and sort of have a complex or nuanced take on why you're using that term. Because I do agree it is an attempt to gesture towards the alienation and depravity and cruelty of the wage labor system. But sometimes I just think it is used a little too freely and a little too thoughtlessly.

So at the very least, people could take a second to think about how they're employing that term when they employ it. So that's going to cover our main topic today. And, you know, we're going to come back, and the next topic's going to be race and alienation. So we've covered sort of the objective side of things. And next time we're going to cover the subjective side of things. On our sister podcast, Red Menace, around the same time, we'll be releasing our episode on Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which he lays out his entire theory

of alienation. So, you know, in a month or so, both of these. Shows will come out and they could be used as a nice little compliment to one another. But before we wrap up today's episode, can you let listeners know where they can find Unity and Struggle online and how they can engage with and possibly even contribute to this study that you guys are doing? Yeah, definitely. Thanks again for having us. And just a quick shout out to all the people. So again, this is an open study that we've published online. People have been adding questions and comments to the study. So you can find that at Unity and Struggle.org.

And just a quick shout out to our comrades and friends who have connected or offered suggestions, people like Nikita, Nicholas, Renoir, Ava, Servius. And you can find us on social media at Unity and Strug. So that's at Unity, U-N-I-T-Y-A-N-D-S-T-R-U-G, just 1-G, at Unity and Strug. Wonderful. And I will link to all of that as usual in the show notes. Thank you so much, Eve and Enzo, for coming on, and I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

Thank you for having us. It's going to lay me back. I'm stopping my soul. I'm slapping myself. I don't know nothing about southern bells, but I can tell you something tell you something about the southern bells, but I can tell you something about the South. hell when you stand give them cards to take and take I've been hitching like the bitch with pleasing up touching cold in the summer he'd saying please

Get me out For God Put me down I'm stucking yourself I'm stopping my soul I'm stopping my soul I'm stopping my soul I'm leaving soon

I'm going to sing my clothes and bleach them but I'm leaving soon I can get talking about I'm stuck in the soul I'm sucking my soul

or I'm stuck in the soul Oh. Thank you.