Freedom time: Karl Marx and unpayable debt

Again, I do not intend to show that Marx does not count “slave labor” as part of the accumulation of capital or prove that he should have done so. Historical materialism cannot remain intact after a confrontation with the Racial. For one thing, raciality immediately renders plain the liberal (ethical-juridical) basis of Marx’s assembling of capital as a totality; that is, that liberty is historical materialism’s guiding principle for assembling capital as a historically specific moment.

Unpayable Debt is a tour de force, combining philosophy with political economy and critical, race, and feminist theory and – entirely unexpected for this reader – physics, all of which is seamlessly weaved together by literature. In terms of its vision, scope, content, and audacity, there is only one other comparable work that comes to mind – Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis.” But as a book that critiques both Marxism and Liberalism, Unpayable Debt is infinitely less unwieldly and more tightly stitched in comparison to Wynter’s much anticipated but for now still unpublished magesterial draft manuscript. The journey of Dana, the main character in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, provides the scaffolding that frames Unpayable Debt. We follow her journeys across time and space, between 1970s Los Angeles and early1800s Baltimore, aware that, each time she is called upon to imperil herself to save the life of her white slave-master ancestor, she is consciously securing her own existence by ensuring the survival of her African American ancestors. Denise Ferreira da Silva cleverly invokes Octavia Butler’s cyclical conception of time as an allegory of the African American experience, challenging the premise that only paid (monetized) free labor-power creates value measured in terms of linear time, and rejecting the post-Enlightenment-informed notion of universal liberty embodied in the category of the European worker. Ultimately, Ferreira da Silva questions the entire conceptual edifice that privileges Euro-Western conceptions of work (proletarian labor) at the expense of other forms, including enslaved labor, peasant labor and especially women’s reproductive labor. Colonialism and slavery, and the violence that they engendered, have historically been conceived as juridically and geographically outside of Europe, at best ancillary to Marx’s analysis of capitalism and auxiliary to his methodology of historical materialism. But for Ferreira da Silva, these reductions and exclusions that dismiss enslaved black labor-power and labor production under colonialism as “primitive accumulation” are profoundly problematic, part of historical materialism’s “racial dialectic.” While most Marxists consign primitive accumulation to capitalism’s periphery, Ferreira da Silva lingers in it, questioning, for example, both Rosa Luxemburg’s and David Harvey’s failure to fully appreciate the constitutive and constituent role of colonialism for capitalism, and how integral the violence enacted on the enslaved, colonized, and dispossessed, and especially women, was to the process of capital accumulation (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 184–185, 190–191, 201–203). What’s at stake? Unpayable Debt suggests that the racial dialectic calls into question the humanity of the non-European and un-waged and has had direct bearing on life chances of people of African descent in the living present (policing, surveillance, incarceration, health, premature death, etc.).

At the core of this critique is the logic of G.W.F. Hegel’s “transcendental I,” the immanent self-movement of consciousness, what Ferreira da Silva describes in Unpayable Debt’s antecedent, Toward a Global Idea of Race, as Hegel’s reconstitution of the “Kantian formal (‘pure reason’) universal, the transcendental, as a historical (desiring or living) thing, namely productive (interior-temporal) force, ‘Spirit.’” (Ferreira da Silva, 2007: 71, 72–73). For Ferreira da Silva, the transcendental I – the transparent I, the “Will to Truth,” “the tools of science and history” which “remain the productive weapons of global subjection,” (2007: xvii, xix) it’s movement over time – finds penultimate expression in Marx’s writing (2007: 190, 191–192), and especially Capital, though she does insists that both Liberalism and Marxism affirm the racial dialectic: Both frame European free labor (“wage slavery”) as the universal equivalent of freedom. In this scenario, enslaved and colonial labor are the antithesis of universal freedom, and people of African descent become the nonhuman Other to their European descended counterpart (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 248, 259–284, 294–295).

Marx was obviously indebted to Hegel, but as he declared, his “dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought” (Marx, 1967: 29) For Ferreira da Silva, Marx’s presumed telos of time and his materialist conception of labor and history is an example of historical materialism which informs the racial dialectic by consigning people of African descent to the margins of history. However, numerous instances in Capital, Grundrisse, and other works by Marx demonstrate his acute awareness of the role that slavery and colonialism played in the development of capitalism. ² As an example, Marx wrote in volume one of Capital: “as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour…are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of American Union,” Marx adds, “preserved something of a patriarchal [conservative] character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself” (1967: 226–227). ³ Here Marx comes close to equating the surplus-labor of slavery with the production of surplus-value, but he does not take the step, perhaps because slave labor is not waged (money paid per hour). Nonetheless, the weight of this example, and many others like it, suggests that he devoted considerable thought to the socioeconomics of slavery in relation to capitalism. None of this, however, contradicts Ferreira da Silva’s point that Marx and Marxists undertheorized slavery, colonialism, and race or that, in doing so black humanity has been diminished, discredited, and denigrated. Marx’s preoccupation was largely with Europe, and he largely applied his method to an investigation of the capitalist mode of production in the European context. When, for example, he made the point that the demise of slavery, feudalism and serfdom in Europe was a necessary condition for the producer (worker) to “freely” sell their labor, and hence a condition for the emergence of modern capitalism (1967: 669), he was both fully aware, and yet not attending to, the reality that slavery and colonialism in the Americas was an important condition for the development of capitalism in Europe and, by extension, in North America.

Unpayable Debt’s critique of Capital is part of an ongoing and growing body of critical work that both challenges and engages with Marxism. Beverley Mullings argues that despite the monumental contributions of Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams, Oliver C. Cox, and especially C.L.R. James (all from Trinidad) to our understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, slavery and class struggle in the form slave labor rebellions, the contribution of these Caribbean scholars to our understanding of the dynamics of capitalism have largely been ignored in hegemonic critiques of capitalism (Mullings, 2021: 152). Citing Silvia Federici as an example of a feminist analyzing capitalism exploitation of colonial subjects, women, descendants of the enslaved Africans, immigrants, and labor, she also argues that the book nonetheless overlooks “the fact that as property, Black people were not only dispossessed of their reproductive and productive labour power, but also,” as scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Achille Mbembe have argued, “of their right to be recognized as human.” For Mullings, this particular “form of primitive accumulation was effected through the appropriation of language, memory and culture, and had the simultaneous purpose of exercising biopolitical control over Caliban’s children through terror and death” (2021: 152–153).

Like Ferreira da Silva, Lisa Lowe equates historical materialism with Hegel’s teleology of world history and situates C.L.R. James and his American counterpart W.E.B. Du Bois among other black radical thinkers who rejected Marxism’s teleological assumptions and “the notion that slavery was ‘prior’ to modernity and insisted that slave labor was the central contradiction of modern capitalism and modern history” and not mere primitive accumulation (Lowe, 2015: 143, 148–149). While it is debatable, however, whether The Black Jacobins’ “decolonized dialectics” of contingency (Ciccariello-Maher, 2017) entirely averts conventional Marxist teleology, Lowe certainly pushes the boundaries too far when she erroneously suggests that James abandoned his adherence to Marxism, beginning with his 1963 revised edition of The Black Jacobins (Lowe: 154, 156).

While Saidiya Hartman also invokes James and Du Bois, describing The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction as “two of the greatest works of the black radical tradition,” she also argues that “representing the slave through the figure of the worker (albeit unwaged and unfree), obscures as much as it reveals, making it difficult to distinguish the constitutive elements of slavery as a mode of power, violence, dispossession and accumulation, or to attend to the forms of gendered and sexual violence that enable these processes.” She critiques Black Reconstruction on the grounds that, while “women’s sexual and reproductive labor is critical in accounting for the violence and degradation of slavery,” it “falls outside of the heroic account of the black worker and the general strike” (Hartman, 2016: 166). In other words, black Marxists have been complicit in ignoring the labors and burdens of black women which were “central to the processes that render the black child as by-product of the relations of production” (2016: 168).

Ferreira da Silva engages the ideas of many of the same thinker that Mullings, Lowe, and Hartman engage: James, Wynter, Spillers, Williams, Cox, Du Bois, etc., although not to the same extent. She shares their preoccupations, but her philosophical work of art involves in-depth deliberation and elaboration of those ideas, boldly taking the critique where perhaps none have gone before. That said, I would suggest that Ferreira da Silva conflates the telos of historical materialism with Marx’s dialectical materialist method – the many-sided observation of socio-economic phenomenon, its movement, tensions, and contradictions. For Walter Rodney, a Marxist historian and theorist who wrote about slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and race and class, Marxism was both a revolutionary ideology and a malleable methodology, an approach to socioeconomic investigation rooted in specific places and particular historical moments, and Marx’s dialectical approach – dialectical materialism – a method of investigation which, when applied to different contexts necessarily leads to different conclusions and the emergence of different concepts that cannot necessarily be applied elsewhere. In this sense, Rodney and other Marxists or socialists preoccupied with Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas (Ferreira names Fanon as an exemplary figure in this regard whereas for Rodney Cabral is the exemplar) have conducted the intellectual labor for those parts of the world (Rodney, 1981: 7–8, 9–10). ⁴ In this spirit, even Ferreira da Silva’s work might be read as extending a conversation in which black Marxists have engaged.

Perhaps another way of critically engaging Unpayable Debt is to read it alongside other books that critically engage Marx. Two books, Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, and Gary Wilder’s Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity, both published in 2022, share Unpayable Debt’s preoccupation with Marxist political economy. In The Price of Slavery Nesbitt attempts to rescue Marx from facile interpretations of Capital that have woefully misunderstood his labor theory of value. Nesbitt acknowledges the importance of Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, James’s The Black Jacobins, and the work of Aimé Césaire and the much-neglected Suzanne Césaire, but his ultimate goal is to vindicate Marx, and he takes pains to distance Marx from the notion of enslaved labor power as a creator of value. James claimed that the enslaved who toiled on the “sugar factories” in the North Plain of Haiti were closer to a modern proletariat than anything that existed in Europe (James, 1980: 315–326). Cedric Robinson described the veracity of James’s slave-as-proletariat point as “rhetorically powerful,” (Camp and Heatherton, 2017: 102), but Nesbitt, who otherwise lauds The Black Jacobins, outright dismisses James’s conception of the slave-as-proletariat. Citing sociologist Dale Tomich, Nesbitt writes: “Slave labor power has no monetary form of representation, no price; only the slave does. In a slave market, there is no ‘existence of a money price [for] the buyer of labour,’ only the price of the slave” (Nesbitt, 2022: 49, 52). Unlike workers who, in theory, enter a free contract with the capitalist in order to sell their labor for a predetermined amount of time in exchange for a wage (money), and like cattle who are mere means of production, the enslaved represent constant capital (as opposed to the variable value-producing capital embodied in the wage worker (2022: 55, 98, 142, 144). It is precisely this type of problematic orthodoxy that Unpayable Debt rejects, instead calling for a “re/de/composition” of Marxism (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 248, 259–284, 294–295). This intellectual labor involves recognizing the value of enslaved labor-power whose “excess” (surplus) is appropriated by the owner in a process of “negative accumulation,” as well as considering labor production beyond linear conceptions of time, stretching our conception of the production process to include black women’s reproductive labor – the nurturing black lives by their ancestors prior to and under conditions of enslavement and colonialism (2022: 211, 222–225, 241–242). Ferreira da Silva turns to physics to make the point that, in order to appreciate the importance of enslaved and post-slavery black labor, or what she frequently refers to, drawing from Hortense Spillers, as the “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation,” we not only have to suspend our limited, linear, Euro-Western hegemonic conception of time, underpinned as it is by Hegelian necessity, but supplant it with a more infinite, repetitive, cyclical conception of time premised on the idea that we are all kinetically connected cosmic beings and that the raw materials and instruments of production that labor power both produces and operates combines to create commodities, “whether through transference of potential energy (labor) or internal kinetic energy (calor)” (2022: 249–250, 252). Ferreira da Silva insists that “everything transfers into the environment all the time,” and that people of African descent embody the materiality of the elemental of their ancestors on the African continent and that a Marxist materialist conception of labor and time cannot account for this (2022: 248, 250, 262–263, 294). Here Ferreira da Silva’s conception of the elemental is tied to a wider context in which the entire order of things is called into question by quantum physics and the reality that there is more that we don’t know about ourselves, the cosmos, and our place within it than what we know and think we know (2022: 46, 262–263).

Like Unpayable Debt and The Price of Slavery, Gary Wilder’s Concrete Utopianism is part of a turn towards, or to, political economy, combined with critical theory. Wilder argues that, contrary to conventional representations of Capital, Marx’s conception of time is neither linear or teleological, but rather rooted in repetition, part of what Marx described in volume one of Capital as the “ebb and flow of the industrial cycle” associated with “moderate activity, over-production, crisis and stagnation.” (1967: 427) For Wilder, Marx’s cyclical conception of time is tied to the accumulation, concentration, the consolidation of wealth, and economic growth alongside economic crisis and collapse. Here ghosts of the past haunt the present, and living labor resurrects dead labor, that is to say that congealed labor of the past is carried over or transferred into the present (Wilder, 2022:151–152). Capitalism both naturalizes and denaturalizes linear clock time (2022: 152), and in this spirit, it is not Marx who excludes people of African descent from History, although many Marxists can be justifiably accused of this. While for Wilder, Marx’s conception of time is more cyclical than teleological, he cautions that “It is not enough to simply oppose attempts to treat clock-time as natural or progress as inevitable with equally transhistorical claims about the ‘real’ nature of time as cyclical, durational, repetitive, or spectral. These are two sides of the same metaphysical coin. Each dehistoricizes time in ways that risk depoliticizing the sociotemporal phenomena under consideration. Nor is it adequate to simply criticize clock-time from the standpoint of untimely phenomena as if the latter were intrinsically emancipatory. In their different ways, thinkers like Marx and Freud reveal the alienating and heteronomous implications of being haunted by a persisting past” (2022: 155).

Offering a less orthodox Marxist analysis compared to Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery, and contrary to Ferreira da Silva, For Wilder, Marx’s dialectical approach is historical, futural, and cyclical. And yet, despite what I suggest is at least a partial misreading of Marx dialectical materialism as teleological (there are indeed elements of telos in Marxism), Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt represents a significant, even indispensable, critique of not only the presumed universality of the labor theory of value, but also the tendency of Eurocentric Marxists to ignore or undertheorize the constitutive and constituent relationship between slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Aspects of her arguments are not new entirely new, but her rigorous, vivid, vigorous, and deeply philosophical critique of conventional conceptions of Marxism (and Liberalism); and her creative and expansive reimagination of labor, space and time via Kindred, along with her leap into quantum physics qualifies Unpayable Debt a singular and arguably unparalleled intellectual achievement. It poses fundamental questions about our existence that compel us to question what we understand to be fundamental: “What if,” Ferreira da Silva asks, “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, the quantic things (particle-wave emanations) whose re/de/composition allows us to say anything about their existence? If we begin, as I do, by concurring with this question, such a point of departure for thinking troubles the very notion of value” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 73). Later she adds: “And once existence is imaged as a corpus infinitum, everything else – I mean everything, including each and every one of the master’s tools as well as the formulations, objects, and subjects they created – is up for grabs” (2022: 270). It is impossible, I think, to dismiss the book’s significance for our understanding of both Marxism and capitalism, the dynamics of gender, race, and class and, ultimately, the meaning of our very existence, if we choose to read Denise Ferreira da Silva with the patient and discerning eye that it deserves.