The commune is our payable debt

Thank you to Denise Ferreira da Silva for the labour of thinking and writing Unpayable Debt, and to the editor of this volume, Michaeline Crichlow, for inviting me to have a conversation with that work. ¹ My goal is to theorize in solidarity, with the shared desire to imagine a path to a world where the scene of gendered and racialized subjugation, so devastatingly rendered in Ferreira da Silva’s book, is not the relentless condition for everything else. However, Unpayable Debt is not about that world that may or may not come; it is about what obstructs the path to it. Ferreira da Silva asks the question in such a way that makes no other question seem worthy of asking: how does the violent subjugation of human beings rendered non-human, forged in the blood and fire of colonialism and modern slavery, persist so relentlessly, so punctually, eradicating possibility in its tracks, under the category of Blackness? Ferreira da Silva tells us she writes 13 days after the lynching of George Floyd; I write this response almost as soon after that of Tyre Nichols. Ferreira da Silva asks, how do we understand the unimaginable but evident scenario that gendered and racialized human beings carry the status of Thing, from the scene of their original theft and trafficking, enslavement as instruments of labour, objectification by absolute violence, and continue to be instrumentalized for the financial gain of others, to the present day (15)?

The predicament of Dana, in Octavia E. Butler’s, 1979 novel Kindred, allegorizes the theoretical movement of Ferreira da Silva’s intervention: forced, on pain of death, to journey to the past, to save her ancestor who was her ancestor’s enslaver and rapist, Dana owes an unpayable debt, a debt that is not hers to pay (14). Wounded on her return to the present—an arm separated and stuck in the mesh of time—Dana’s wounded captive body, racialized, gendered, bridges two scenes of violence, one then and one now: colonial slavery and contemporary police brutality, colonial slavery and predatory subprime mortgage lending, colonial slavery and mass incarceration, colonial slavery and premature death in a global health pandemic. In Dana’s—and Ferreira da Silva’s—story, the two scenes of violence become one: the Colonial in/as the present. What makes possible the ongoing activation of the Colonial in/as the present, Ferreira da Silva argues, is the persistent misconstruing of gendered, racialized subjugation as cultural and/or ideological deformity. However, for Ferreira da Silva, framing racialized subjugation as an ideological or cultural (or moral or ethical) derangement, not only misconstrues the character of gendered, racialized violence, but facilitates it by miscategorising it. Instead, Ferreira da Silva argues, rendering the continuity of the Colonial requires recognizing Blackness as a political technology that carries the juridico-economic structure of slavery into the present. In other words, it requires recognizing the Colonial and the Racial in/as global capital (15):

From where … does blackness derive such a powerful connection to truth, so strong that it alone sustains the validity of an explanation/justification … [for total violence]? My argument here is that this force resides in the particular way through which the racial dialectic transubstantiates what is politically constituted (by the colonial juridico-economic structure of slavery) into expressions of an organically determined moral deficit (in the case of police shootings) produced by the sight of black skin color (an expression of a moral and intellectual deficit). (124)

Human beings stolen and legally constituted as property, enslaved for their labour in the production of historic accumulations of wealth, and in the colonial reproduction of enslaved workers as the accumulation of wealth in human property, is the scenario that Ferreira da Silva calls the colonial juridico-economic structure of slavery. Its recognition as that which activates the Colonial and the Racial in the present is the method by which Ferreira da Silva carries out her stated objective to re/de/compose the racial dialectic (15; 226)—a ‘mechanism of racial power’ (28–9), ‘that renders blackness [as both] the cause (natural) and effect (moral deficit) of conditions of existence that express economic expropriation (slavery, segregation, incarceration) and juridical domination (whipping, lynching, police brutality)’ (151).

Ferreira da Silva’s re/de/composition of the racial dialectic involves identifying thinkers and theoretical traditions that fail to identify the Racial as a category of accumulation, as a category at work inside capital, thereby concealing its colonial juridico-economic structure (76). Marx’s theory of value is identified at the forefront of mis-identifiers (181): according to Ferreira da Silva, Marx ejects the Racial from his analysis of capitalist accumulation in arguing that enslaved labour production was improper to it. For Ferreira da Silva, while Marx posits that labour time ² is the determining factor of exchange-value, he also posits that enslaved labour, as such, is not value-producing and therefore does not contribute to the formation of exchange-value (77). In identifying enslaved labour as improper to capitalist accumulation, and by imposing the ‘onto-epistemological descriptor’ of ‘not productive Human’ onto the category of enslaved worker (49), Marx makes it impossible to establish a connection between the Colonial, the Racial, and Capital (77).

Here’s where my conversation with Ferreira da Silva’s critique begins because, rather than ejecting gendered and racialized violence from the analysis of capital, I understand Marx’s theory of value as revealing how the movement of capital mediates gendered and racialized violence, and how the Racial’s mediation by capital is the mechanism of its continuity; in other words, it explains the way in which capital becomes the social substance of gendered and racialized subjugation. We can begin with the historical conditions that created the possibility for value to emerge as a mode of sociality and particular form of wealth in the first place. For capital to emerge as it did, as a system of generalized exchange determined by social averages of socialized productivity, it required that production develop to a mass scale, and feed a world market, expanding symbiotically. The running subtext of Marx’s analysis of capital, is that plantation production based on enslaved labour in colonized territories were the conditions that made this development possible. In other words, what Marx calls modern or industrial slavery was one (but one crucial) condition for the emergence of value, as such, and its derivative, capital, as a system of social averages of social productivity objectified as production costs (or, prices). ³

Colonial slavery, therefore, according to Marx, played a necessary part in the long story of capital’s emergence; however, so did slavery’s dissolution. The emerging form of wage labour (an expression of wealth-as-value) acts on enslaved labour (an expression of wealth-in-kind) like a solvent. As a movement that can only be theorized in hindsight, Marx’s theory of value is also a theory of how and why, for capital to ‘stand on its feet,’ wage labour (the state of absolute propertyless, i.e., the ‘free worker’) must subsume its logical inverse, enslaved labour (the state of being absolute property). Free wage labour is not an ethical comportment, as Ferreira da Silva suggests, but rather the state of absolute propertylessness or separation from the means of subsistence. The structural eradication of all means of self-determination through the absolute separation of the bulk of humanity from the means of subsistence is the state of things concealed by the liberal idea of freedom and in its legal formation in/as capital. Capital’s emergence presupposes the dissolving of the category of enslaved labour by that of wage labour—not the eradication of slavery as phenomenon (to state the obvious, since it continues to this day), but rather its obsolescence as determining production relation. ⁴

The emergence of value (as mode of sociality) and the coming to determinacy of production based on wage labour are synonymous. The process is the ascendance of a new form of wealth that can only be created in the context of production based on wage labour, not because value takes the legal form of property (it does), but because for the objectification of surplus labour (value’s substance being the abstracted/socialized product of people’s actual doing and making) to ‘count’ for capital, it must take the form of alien property, or, the not-property of workers themselves (284). The extremely narrow conditions of value-creation determine (as Ferreira da Silva rightly points out) the categorial distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour, rendering much, if not the bulk, of creative human activity, including all forms of enslaved labour, as non-value creating. Capital’s incapacity to register non-waged activity as wealth-creating, Marx argues, is the upside-down, extinction-oriented world that capital creates.

Not all waged labour produces value either. The distinction between productive and unproductive labour refers exclusively to whether the production process in question both contributes to and withdraws from the common reservoir of social wealth (despite appearances, there is only one common reservoir), or whether it withdraws only. Marx’s argument is not that enslaved labour is insignificant for capital (207), nor that its creative capacity is nullified by capital (284), nor that qualitatively distinct kinds of labour disappear in capital (198). Marx’s argument is that, while unproductive labour (including enslaved labour) may make a profit for the owner of enterprise, the enterprise does not contribute new value to the collective reservoir of social wealth. Neither, for that matter, does the labour of the banker, the lawyer, or the accountant, or any other unproductive worker, all still integral to the capital-machine. On the other hand, today, most of the global complement of productive waged workers who do create new value for capital are gendered and racialized workers, equally integral to the capital-machine, even if often treated as disposable. The work of Marx’s analytical distinction between productive and unproductive labour is to demonstrate why, as capital develops, the unproductive portion of human labour tout court (as surplus population; more on this anon) will grow relative to the productive portion. As this happens, the more rapidly does the capital-machine sputter toward crisis, an in-built dynamic that Marx calls overaccumulation, the surface expression of which is the growth of surplus-capital side-by-side with a growing surplus population, both internally generated barriers to ongoing accumulation.

We arrive at the analytical moment where capital takes the form (or, becomes the social substance) of the Racial. ⁵ Gendered and racialized subjugation is mediated by capital’s inexorable formation of a surplus population—human beings separated from the means of subsistence and then ejected from all formal economy as a function of capital’s historically growing levels of social productivity. ⁶ The category of surplus population is a derivative of Marx’s expansive sense of proletariat; it refers, in other words, to the free worker doubly set free: unemployed, precarious, dispossessed, informalized, encamped, trafficked, incarcerated, stateless, migrant and temporary, missing and murdered, or ghettoized in the hellscape known as Vancouver’s downtown eastside—wounded captive bodies in proliferating scenes of subjugation—rioting, blockading, uprising, life-hacking for survival. The category captures the terrifying reality of capitalist modernity, a dynamic concealed by value’s function of abstraction, the movement of dissolving difference, a movement objectified in the apparently neutral marketplace: ‘The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx, 1976: 280). In this famous quotation, Marx is, (1) being sarcastic because capital is the very subversion of these promises; (2) turning the ground of Enlightenment thinking (15). Capital leverages technologies of race and gender (among others) in dividing and hierarchizing the proletariat in order to manage the revolutionary potential of its unification. ⁷

Marx’s analysis demonstrates the way in which capitalist money, and a capitalist world market, capitalist production, and capitalist profits ⁸ come into the world dripping from head to toe in blood and dirt, that is, as a history of separation carried by gendered and racialized violence at every turn. But capital’s mediation of the Racial is, at the same time, capital’s abstraction from all qualitative characteristics of labour-power’s embodiment, including gendered and racialized ascription—that which I earlier referred to as value’s function of abstraction. As such, rather than wear this history prima facie, capital’s economic objectivities announce neutrality, equity, and legality. They do so because they are real abstractions ⁹ (or social formalizations) of their concrete, in-the-actual-world embodiments. The productive consumption of the commodity, labour-power (an abstraction without body, brain, tissue, muscle, gender, race, age, ability, sexuality, etc.), in the process of production (always embodied and real-worldly, and always activating those qualities that labour-power must expel from the process of valorization), is the only viable means of accumulation in a capitalist society. Marx’s analysis shows us how technologies of gender and racialization are inexorable dimensions of capitalist accumulation, not because the Racial and the Colonial are ‘internal to capital,’ but because their abstraction constitutes capital’s concept, just as they constitute the lived modalities of capital itself, capital as it moves in ‘the world as it actually is’ ¹⁰ —i.e., the world of capital’s social forms. This is the very point of Marx’s critique of political economy as the critique of the fetishization of capital’s abstractions.

Ferreira da Silva states that ‘Marx’s formalization of the general law of value’ (or ‘Marx’s equation of value’ (17)) ¹¹ keeps the ‘tangle of violence’ out of things (185). In one sense, this is true. ¹² But, it’s not that Marx-as-theorist effaces the violence of value-forms. Marx’s point, rather, is that capital is the process of this effacement. Capitalist accumulation is sustained, in part, by dissimulating the violence innate to production-circulation. Formal abstraction is the process of keeping the violence that constitutes the ongoing history of separation out of the story. However, the dialectical reversal ¹³ of formal abstraction, namely, fully realized abstraction (i.e., socialization), is the condition of no conditions—the condition of no possibility for the activation of technologies of categorial subjugation because they cannot be registered as such: race, gender, sexuality, age, and so on. I am, therefore, fully in earnest when I say that Ferreira da Silva’s question as follows could not be a better articulation of what Marx understands to be the latent possibility of value as the socialization of labour, as ‘pure sociality’ or fully realized abstraction, which, in a capitalist mode of production, remains unrealized, captured as property:

What if ethical descriptions had at their core a commonality that is not mediated by identity (as a shared particularity that is familial, national, historical) or by liberty (general equality) established through the universality of shared (rational, formal, transcendental) ideas? What if ethical descriptors did not presume substantive or formal commonality (identity or equality) figured as atemporal or aspatial and yet fundamentally immanent? Directly asked: What if the basis of our ethical program was simply that everything that exists, has existed or may come to exist is made of the same raw material, the elementa … whose re/de/composition allows us to say anything about their existence? … such a point of departure … troubles the very notion of value. (73)

Exactly!–Marx might have said.

In solidarity and like-mind, therefore, I follow Ferreira da Silva’s critique of the naturalization of racial difference when the category of Blackness is posited as the cause/effect of racial prejudice, as purely mental content (124), that makes violence an expression of conscious (or unconscious) belief rather than the structure of a post-Enlightenment Liberal polity (189). And I could not agree more with Ferreira da Silva when she points out that there ‘is no real freedom without economic self-determination’ (151). My observation, however, is that Ferreira da Silva partakes of a recent turn where frustration and anger (justifiable, at the very least), in the guise of theory, situate the Racial internal to capital as the only possible way of explaining its virulence, relentlessness, depravity, and madness. In this turn, as much about desire as analysis, it is as if only when the Racial is understood as being internal to capital, comported not simply as a matter of culture or ideology (and therefore nothing so flimsy as feelings or ideas) but rather as the matter of law and economics, does it punch with the theoretical weight of the real, the material. We do need to theorize the way in which, as Gayatri Spivak (1990) expounded more than 30 years ago, colonialism continues in the postcolonial era under the guise of global capitalism. However, to argue that gendered and racialized violence persists because the Colonial persists is to let capital off the hook for its own particular constitutive violence, configured somewhat differently than colonial militarization or accumulation, even in the case of capitalist police militarization, which expresses a different social content in the present from its colonial ancestor. Unlike colonialism, capital (not uniformly, but at its concept) is racialization mediated, gender mediated, Blackness mediated—which is to say subjugation invisibilized (despite the horror of its surface spectacularization) in such a way that allows it to do an end-run around interventions in the name of ethics, Equity-Diversity-Inclusion policies, or campaigns for greater awareness and sensitivity.

One doesn’t need Marx’s critique, nor the re/de/composition of Marx’s critique, to observe that ‘the post-slavery trajectory of black populations [is] one of … economic exclusion and juridical alienation’ (242). Marx’s analysis can tell us why the trajectory from colonialism to capitalism is one of continuity in some respects and revolution in the mode of accumulation, both. But neither Marx, nor the re/de/composition of Marx’s critique can tell us how to abolish the current state of things, and that is the more urgent of the two questions. As Ferreira da Silva rightly says, ‘the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation reminds us that what is before us is not a simple task but a demand for the end of (the) world as we know it, that is, the restoration of the total value expropriated from the Slave and Native’ (189). But the restoration of value to those whom it is owed, yesterday and today, will involve a radical transformation of the form of wealth, from capitalist value to, let’s say, a post-capitalist, socialized wealth-in-kind: wealth as clean air, wealth as no one hungry and unhoused, wealth as thriving ecosystems, wealth as universal healthcare and education, and on, and on. The abolition of capital, the real movement that abolishes the current state of things—today, a state where gendered and racialized violence is the condition for everything else—is the Commune. The Commune names the social relation that abolishes the form of social wealth—that historically specific capitalist mode of sociality—that Marx calls value. The Commune is all our payable debt. ¹⁴