The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method

Abstract

Abstract“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx couldhistoricallythink the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-formtheoreticallyunthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for debate, only the status of its interaction with capitalist circuits (a rearrangement of difference within unity). Mirroring the Marxist methodology of rising from the “abstract” to the “concrete,” this article moves to substitute the abstraction of labor with that of slavery and closes by restaging the concrete development of “real subsumption” through the problem of abolition. Such a substitution deconstructs Marx's method by situating slavery's transposition to brute force (and race's reduction to false consciousness) as the productive source of the capitalist form of value.