The plantation complex in the colony of Puerto Rico: on material conditions

Abstract

This essay develops a loosely understood Marxist notion of material conditions in light of the Caribbean plantation complex. The racial order endemic to the plantation and its continuation in post-emancipation contexts undermines any spurious base/superstructure distinction at work in an understanding of material conditions even in some accounts of racial capitalism. Material conditions are as ideological as they are “infrastructural” (Sylvia Wynter) in being ongoingly articulated by anti-black coordinates of sense. The ongoing actualization of the racial order of slavery is understood not as required by altered material conditions, but rather as altering material conditions. The essay considers the continuity of the racial order of the plantation through the contract in a specific site, namely, post-emancipation Puerto Rico.