Brad > Recent Status Updates

"All claims to freedom were inherently criminal in slave society. To claim a ‘property’ in oneself was to violate the property rights of masters. And it again reminds us why bondpeople were not constant or fixed capital. Dead labour does not plan, organize, and fight for freedom. But enslaved people did. Over and over again."

Jacobs's article, Urban proletariat with peasant characteristics.

Embedding that liminal class in systems thinking evokes many threads:
- Federici: expropriation of feudal commons as counter-revolution.
- Cabral: "Return to the Source", modern reimagining of customs.
- Pittaway & Szymanski: impeded collectives' productivity -> IMF debt.

"Proletarian struggles over time thus carved out alternative spaces and hours of ‘peasant’ production, exchange, and recreation. And this required securing possession (at least in practice) of land and the goods produced there."

In Reconstruction, emancipated slaves sought to retain such liminal "spaces of reappropriation", thus forming what Ricardo Jacobs terms "a proletariat with peasant characteristics."

"No matter how compelling the evidence of a mass movement for self-emancipation, the liberal tradition ultimately assigns meaningful agency to elite actors."

🔥🔥🔥

"So persistent was the phenomenon that one New Orleans physician racially pathologized it as a Black disorder—drapetomania—defined as ‘the disease causing Negroes to run away.'"

Love when just as I think "I hope the book mentions this", it does!
The pathologizing of dissent is a topic of fascination to me. Unfortunately the other mention of drapetomania that comes to mind is by Thomas Szasz.

"Resistance by exploited classes is almost always tentative, not insurrectionary."

"The receipt of wages does not on its own make plantation slaves into a proletariat; it is the production of surplus value and working-class forms of resistance that do that. But the reality of monetary payments to bonded labourers disrupts the formalist correlation of wages with free labour. And it reminds us that enslaved people did...at times sell their own labour-power."

Next section addresses constant capital.

"Although outlawed at some point in every Southern state, self-hiring (semi-independent hiring out of chattel slaves 'on their own time', even for wages) by chattel workers continued unabated."

"In Marx's terms, enslaved workers actually represent variable capital in the production process."

On the previous note: McNally passingly critiques forms of World Systems theory which "fails to differentiate among the many forms of integration into the capitalist system. In particular, it elides the distinction between formal and real subsumption of production by capital."

The focus here is on racialization and capitalization as lived processes>/i>, rather than categorical structural integration.

Rather than a fixed structure, we need to understand race as a formation, a fluctuating process of social differentiation.

Crucial to this process is the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour. In formal subsumption, production is subjected to capital's global market demands, but only in real subsumption is labour directly managed by capital.

"Rather than conform to textbook models, the actual evolution of capitalism has proceeded through the combination of ‘precapitalist’ relations with capitalist production."

Not an original insight, but worth clarifying:

McNally classifies antebellum U.S. slavery as capitalist , but explicitly says this does not preclude the coexistence of different modes of production.

The egocentric master is in love with the image of himself as an object of adulation from those he dominates. In this erotics of domination, his love for his power over the other involves a fantastic projection in which the enslaved return the ‘love’ of their abuser. Domination here masquerades as reciprocity.

Historians increasingly appreciate that agrarian elites have overseen capitalist transformations in many settings.

For more on the gendered frame of this transition, see Silivia Federici's Caliban and the Witch---but the focus here is on the development of "chattel proletariat" in the antebellum South, with aesthetic trappings of English gentry-in-capitalist-transition.

Going to be so much to unpack:

1. "Freedom-making" as ongoing dialectical process seeking reclamation of agency/consciousness, rather than static finality.
2. Historicizing totality vs. either abstract concepts/crude empiricism.
3. Challenging "post-Marxists" for eclisions of subaltern Marxism and conflation of Marxism with mechanistic stagism.
4. Re-centering production (vs. 'Capitalism as shell game').

And more.

"historians have tended to be fixated on a golden age of the Ottoman ‘classical system’, from Mehmed the Conqueror to Süleyman the Magnificent; any deviation from it is liable to be described as a decline."

Reminder that waning geopolitical dominance and imminent total imperial collapse are not the same thing. It's a centuries-long process...

*Sigh*.

The definite strength of this book's historical analysis is the complexity it brings to "realist" historiography [in the sense of focusing on 'great powers' like the Ottomans or Poland].

Corsairs and raiders were not merely auxiliaries---they could certainly act as such, but "they often had interests and policies of their own, to which their protector-powers were sometimes forced, with great reluctance, to adapt."

Slavery was a fact of life…Its basic features – acquisition by raiding or war, public and private sales, the economic and military function, its legal status, the possibility of manumission – were the same on either side of the Christian–Muslim divide. And...that divide was constantly criss-crossed by individuals and agents of many kinds, seeking to organize an exchange or a ransom.

"Current obsessions over the question of 'free speech' ignore the real challenges...Thinking freely isn't just about having access to ideas: we need to to be able to live our ideas in the world. It's therefore time to stop trying to 'teach critical thinking' by itself and to start literally building a world where people's lives and relationships consistently enable them to think."

The book in a nutshell.

"All of us who seek to build community should admit it: communities wield a double-edged sword, in reasoning and in so much else, as they grant us belonging...Communities meet our most fundamental needs and tell us who we are...They also police you, powerfully shame you and care about who you pair up with...This immense power, driven by our profound relational motivation, can be used for ill or good."

"It is our economic system that determines how isolated we are, and that in turn determines our level of social trust."

"Sometimes the one big demand is the only way through...It is wise to be risk-averse and avoid too much meddling with systems that serve us well; it is foolish not to be willing to uproot a system that is not working well at all."