Brad’s Reviews > Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History > Status Update

"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."

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"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.