ABSTRACT
A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of decolonial Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men, women, and children into human commodities, or human “chattel”—simultaneously property (capital) and labor—indeed, labor and nothing but labor. Thus, the very essence of modern slavery served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called “labor in the abstract” or labor “in general” and requires us to resituate enslaved labor as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labor as such under capitalism. However, the production of labor in the abstract depended upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term Black, devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labor. Blackness names that limit. Thus, the fact of global Blackness is necessary for apprehending labor as such under capitalism. If we comprehend labor to be the antithesis of capital, moreover, then we must also recognize the tendency for all labor under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness). Consequently, the labor theory of value must be complemented with a racial theory of labor, which can be productively repurposed toward elaborating what has remained an as-yet-underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labor.
