Enslaved by Capital
When Saidiya Hartman visited Ghana some years ago to follow
the tracks of the slave trade in Africa, she was told by an African American who
had lived there for many years, “Soon the Europeans will own all of it again.
Do you think slavery is just some old buildings and dead folks? No, it’s when other people decide whether you live or
die.”[1]
American history is often presented as a long, upward climb
towards freedom. The Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are
created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Originally, of course, “all men”
was taken to include only white men who owned property, and of course that
excluded all women, and all non-Europeans, especially native people and people
of African ancestry. Most of the latter
were enslaved and were intended by the Founders to stay that way. But, so the
story goes, over the next two centuries, the nation struggled to grow into its
image of itself as the “land of the free”. The abolition movement and the civil
war put an end to slavery; the suffragists succeeded in winning the right to
vote for women; the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s liberated
African-Americans from the shackles of Jim Crow, and the Women’s Movement made
progress towards the goal of equal treatment and opportunities for women. So
while it was hypocritical to call the US a free country at its birth, it’s
close to being one now.
Now this story of a largely successful campaign for Freedom
is increasingly difficult to believe. The police regularly harass, arrest, and
kill black people with only imaginary provocation; women and people of color
are commonly denied equal pay for equal work and equal opportunities for advancement.
Latinos and Latinas are regularly harassed and terrorized by government agents.
People with darker skins pay more to borrow money. Women and children are
frequently enslaved for sex and unpaid labor. And we could go on and on. But
what I want to focus on is the kind of slavery that is so common and pervasive
that we don’t even see it, the slavery captured by the remark I quoted at the
beginning: slavery is “when other people decide whether you live or die.” The
people of Ghana are not free if everything is owned by Europeans. In other
words, freedom is not just a matter of political rights granted by the State,
or civil rights – the right to be treated equally regardless of your ancestry
or your gender or sexual orientation. Freedom is also a matter of who owns and
controls the conditions of life: the kinds of work we can do, under what
conditions and for what wages; what kinds of food, housing, transportation, and
entertainment are available and at what cost.
When we go to work, we come under the rule of the boss and
the business or agency he or she represents. We are not, usually, whipped or
beaten for not meeting the boss’s requirements, but we can be punished in other
ways, including the loss of our livelihood. Moreover, though we may be able, depending
on the state of the market, to choose to work for a different boss, we do not,
unless we are independently wealthy, have the option of not working for wages
at all. These two factors – needing to work for wages in order to live, and
needing to obey our masters as we work, make it appropriate to call ourselves,
as Marx did, “wage slaves.”
It seems, then, that it’s only when we are off work that we
are free – though how much “free” time we can have depends often on the demands
of our employer. We may have to be available on a moment’s notice to go to
work, or the wages we are paid and the cost of living, may require us to work
overtime or work two or more jobs. For the most part, we have very little voice
in how much we are paid or what it costs to buy housing, food, clothing and
other necessities. So here, too, we are slaves in the sense that other people
decide, not just whether we will live
or die, but how we live. We are not
legally owned, as chattel slaves are, but our lives belong to us only at the
margins, in the few hours we can manage to do things we really care about. And
even in our so-called “leisure” time, the culture and entertainment available
for us is produced by people answerable not to us or people like us, but to the
owners and managers of corporate capital whose only goal is holding onto and
growing their wealth and power. And their wealth, don’t forget, is not a
product of their labor but ours. Our share of that wealth we have produced is
paid out in wages that steadily lose their value relative to the cost of the
living. Meanwhile, the profits of not
working, but merely owning things,
climbs to record levels.
We suppose that slavery is over; it belongs to the past. We
are not chattel slaves. So we think we are free. We live in a democracy, not a
tyranny, so we call ourselves free. We have basic political rights, like the
right to assemble and the right to speak our minds – at least in theory if
often not in practice. But our democracy is highly controlled by the rich and
powerful; governments, especially the national government, does not represent
those of us whose only input is to vote for which member of which ruling class
party shall pretend to represent us. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels
claim that “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Today, it is not just
the executive, but the legislative and judicial branches that work to
facilitate the extraction of wealth from the people. Consider the climate
crisis: As Bill Resnick and Margaret Klein Salamon pointed out recently KBOO’s
Old Mole Variety Hour, only the federal government could conceivably
marshal the resources and the authority to take the actions necessary to
prevent the climate catastrophes coming at us, but the petroleum and related
industries have managed to delay and water down every serious attempt to slow
down or stop the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. The accumulation of
capital comes first. Those who manage and defend that accumulation are the
others who decide whether, and when and how, we shall live or die. We are,
then, slaves of capital.
Nevertheless, we can think: we are all, as Gramsci pointed
out, philosophers in spite of ourselves, and we have the power to rethink the hegemony
we are living under, the hegemony of profits, private property, and
individualism that keeps us in on our self-destructive course. As optimists of
the spirit, we claim that a better way of life is possible, and indeed
necessary, a life in which we are not slaves of any kind, in a world where we,
cooperatively and together, decide how to live. Working together for our common
future, we can make a future of freedom possible, a world in which we not only
survive but flourish.
[1] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route (New York: 2007, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), p. 43.
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