To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

by Walter Johnson, The Boston Review

In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)

It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.

I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal alienation, forced labor, and starvation with any sort of “humane” behavior: these are the sorts of things that should never be done to human beings. By terming these actions “inhuman” and suggesting that they either relied upon or accomplished the “dehumanization” of enslaved people, however, we are participating in a sort of ideological exchange that is no less baleful for being so familiar. We are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves from our own histories of perpetration. To say so is not to suggest that there is no difference between the past and the present; it is merely that we should not overwrite the complex determinations of history with simple-minded notions of moral progress.

The Racist Dawn of Capitalism

By Peter James Hudson, The Boston Review

A decade before his assassination at the hands of a nationalist in 1914, French socialist Jean Jaurès completed a historical work that radically changed the study of the French Revolution. Where others had focused on disputes over politics and political ideology, Jaurès’s four-volume Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française took as its subject the transformations wrought by an emergent capitalism, foregrounding irruptions within the French economy. Through a Marxist lens, Jaurès emphasized the conflict between the ancien régime and the newly empowered bourgeoisie and excavated from the archives of the revolution the struggles of French workers and peasants.

Slavery and Capitalism

Sven Beckert, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that were in doubt) and Korean Marxists analyzing its allegedly self-destructive tendencies. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy, while the French economist Thomas Piketty attained rock-star status with a 700-page book full of tables and statistics and the succinct but decisively unsexy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press).

Remembering Slavery in South Africa

Gabeda Baderoon, Africa is a Country

“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped by slavery.

What do you see when you recognize slavery?

The Mandé Charter of 1222

The Mandé Charter of 1222

1.The hunters declare:

Every human life is a life.

It is true that a life comes into existence before another life

But no life is more ‘ancient’, more respectable than any other

In the same way no one life is superior to any other

2. The hunters declare:

As each life is a life,

Any wrong done unto a life requires reparation.

Consequently,

No one should gratuitously attack his neighbour

No one should wrong his neighbour

No one should torment his fellow man

Lewis Gordon: PBS Conference October 26, 2013

Lewis Gordon on 12 Years a Slave

Abolition from Below: The 1808 Revolt in the Cape Colony

ABOLITION FROM BELOW: THE 1808 REVOLT IN THE CAPE COLONY by TigersEye99

Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Slavery

Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Slavery, Gordon by Michael Beyer

Cocoa is blood and they are eating my flesh

Toby Green, London Review of Books

• Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs
  Ohio, 230 pp, £24.95, June 2012, ISBN 978 0 8214 2006 5

For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking the forests of the interior with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into warring statelets whose main business was to bring slaves to the coast, thus helping Atlantic slavery to reach ever further into Central Africa. These countries remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber.

Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why

Adolph Reed, Jr.

by Adolph Reed, Jr., Nonsite.org

Django Unchained, or The Help

On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten as their history.

Counter Power and Colonial Rule in the Eighteenth Century Cape of Good Hope: Belongings and Protest of the Labouring Poor.

by Nicole Ulrich, 2011

Framed by an anarchist reading of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The

Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the

Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), this study examines the dynamic nature of colonial and

class rule in the eighteenth-century Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, and the

forms of belonging and traditions of political protest developed by the labouring poor.

This study draws on archival material from national and international repositories,

focusing on government records, criminal court trials, and travellers’ accounts.

Colonial rule, the under-class, and resistance in the Cape are located in a global

context, with special attention being paid to changes associated with the ‘Age of

Revolution and War’ and rise of the modern world. Breaking with the tendency to

treat different sections of the motley (many-hued) labouring poor in the Cape as

discreet, often racially defined, and nationally bounded population groups, segmented

also by legal status, this study provides a comprehensive study of labour in the Cape

that includes an examination of slaves, servants, sailors, and soldiers recruited, or

imported from, Asia, Europe, and other parts of Africa.

John Locke: The Philosopher of Primitive Accumlation

by George Caffentzis, Bristol Radical History Group, 2008

John Locke is the most famous philosopher born and raised in the vicinity of Bristol. He born in Wrington, Somerset about 12 miles from Bristol on August 29, 1632 and he was brought up in the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol.

Locke is also not only the main intellectual founder of liberalism, but also of neoliberalism, the “ruling idea” of the ruling class of today.

CLR James and the Black Jacobins

by Christian Høgsbjerg, International Socialism

Aimé Césaire, the late, great Martinican poet and activist, once noted that it was in Haiti that the “colonial problem” was first posed in all its complexity.¹ In 1492 the tropical Caribbean island was “discovered” for the Spanish Empire by Christopher Columbus, a discovery that resulted in the half a million strong existing indigenous Taino population being all but exterminated within a generation as a ruthless search for rivers of gold led only to rivers of blood. Columbus had described “Ayiti”, as the Taino had called it (“Land of mountains”), as a “paradise”, and promptly therefore renamed the island La Española—or Hispaniola—”coming from Spain”. But for the Taino, their hopes of finding paradise were irredeemably lost. In the words of the historian Laurent Dubois, Haiti was “the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas”.² 

Lecture by Jacques Depelchin

Frantz Fanon in Africa and Asia

Samir Amin, Pambazuka

Fanon was a person with a wide-ranging mind, a bright man with great qualities be it through the rationality of his ideas or for his courage to tell the truth. Specialised in psychiatry, he possessed all what was needed to be a very good psychiatrist. His publications, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ among others, dealing with the mental trauma of the colonised patients of Algeria testify to the pertinence of his great ideas. His book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ makes explicit his vision of the revolution that need to take place to pull the human race out of the barbarism of the capitalist system. And it is by virtue of this great vision that he has won over the hearts and minds of all Africans and Asian freedom lovers.

What is Slavery to Me?

by Pumla Dineo Gqola

Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch.

The Black Jacobins

A review by Kenan Malik

The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot of colonialism began to unravel when ‘black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.’

In 1791, almost exactly three hundred years after Columbus landed there, a mass insurrection broke out among Haiti’s slaves, upon whose labour France had transformed its colony into the richest island in the world. It was an insurrection that became a revolution, a revolution that today is almost forgotten, and yet was to shape history almost as deeply as the two eighteenth century revolutions with which we are far more familiar – those of 1776 and 1789.

Sojourner Truth: “Ar'nt I a Woman?” (1851)

BlackPast.Org

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) was arguably the most famous of the 19th Century black women orators. Born into slavery in New York and freed in 1827 under the state’s gradual emancipation law, she dedicated her life to abolition and equal rights for women and men. Two versions of her most noted speech appear below. Scholars agree that the speech was given at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851. After that, there is much debate about what she said and how she said it. The version that is most quoted was published in the 1875 edition of Truth’s Narrative (which was written by others) and in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage which appeared in 1881. Both versions were published 25 years after Truth spoke. However the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle published its version of the speech on June 21, 1851. Since that version appeared within a month of her presentation, many historians believe it to be the more accurate rendering of the talk. However both versions rely on the interpretations of others. Since no written transcript of the speech has appeared, what Truth actually said, as historian Nell Painter has pointed out, will probably never be known.

The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker 

"For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged."—David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history.