Interesting article of the evolution of liberalism as a social, political, and economic theory out of slavery, including wage slavery. Liberalism is work in progress. Humanity has come a long way, and still has a long way to go before realizing the ideal of liberalism, if that is even possible practically.
Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The wealth created by slavery generalized these ideals, allowing more and more people, mostly men, to imagine themselves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-interests not subject to the jurisdiction of others. Slavery was central to this process not just for the wealth the system created but because slaves were physical and emotional examples of what free men were not.
But there is more. That process of individuation creates a schism between inner and outer, in which self-interest, self-cultivation, and personal moral authority drive a wedge between seeming and being. Hence you have the emergence of metaphysicians like Melville, Emerson, and of course Marx, along with others, trying to figure out the relationship between depth and surface.
Enslaved peoples multiplied the fetish power of capital at least fivefold: they were labor, they were commodities, they were capital, collateral, and investment, they were consumers (since in many parts of South America, they were paid wages), and, in some areas, they were money, the standard on which the value of other goods was determined. They were also items of conspicuous consumption.…
There are numerous figures who affirm the value of freedom, the right of self-government, and at least some of whom will go on to engage in republican revolution against colonial domination. Yet these same individuals show little to no sympathy for the slaves, or even participate in their re-enslavement.…
That contradiction was the structuring contradiction of the day (and still is, no?). Spanish-American merchants wanted “more liberty,” and they defined liberty as their right to buy and sell humans as they would. In the United States, Kentucky’s 1850 “bill of rights” stated that the “right of an owner of a slave to such a slave, and its increase, is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.”…
Others have made this point, including David Brion Davis, that the struggle over slavery, both for and against, had the effect of reifying slavery as the supreme evil, and reifying freedom — defined as the absence of formal slavery — as the supreme good. The issue is complex, obviously, since for enslaved peoples slavery was indeed the absolute evil, and they valued political freedom as a supreme good. And there were many abolitionists who viewed chattel slavery within a broader spectrum of exploitation, including wage slavery, that needed to be abolished. And I know that scholars of the US have shown that conceptions of US citizenship, and freedom, are layered, complex, and contradictory.
Still, as someone who has worked primarily on Latin America, I can’t help but compare that region’s deep tradition of social rights to the US’s antipathy to those rights, at least among a mobilized and consequential sector of the US public.
Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America.
The cult of white supremacy that grew out of that history evolved into today’s cult of individual supremacy. Paul’s statement would be totally incomprehensible to most people in Latin America, indeed the world, as silly as anything that came out of Alice’s mouth: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” The problem is that the US has had a world of its own, so the idiocy of white supremacy, and its progeny, individual supremacy, is perpetuated.
Jacobin
Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin
Alex Gourevitch, assistant professor of political science in the Department of Political Science, Brown University interviews Greg Grandin, professor of history at New York University
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