The Plantation Road to Socialism

The Plantation Road to Socialism Chris Taylor ABSTRACT In twentieth-century historiography and social theory, the New World slave plantation has long been understood as the crucible of capitalist modernity. Today, the history of the plantation seems inseparable from the history of capitalism. This essay pushes against this assimilation of the plantation to the history of capitalism in order to consider how ex-slaves improvised with aspects of the institution of the plantation in order to effect a direct transition into a socialist world. Examining a cooperative farming scheme authored by Jamaican peasants in 1865 alongside the pre-emancipation socialist pamphleteering of the radical Jamaican mulatto Rob- ert Wedderburn, it seeks to uncover how black subalterns improvised with the plantation as a means of developing the organizational and imaginative bases of a cooperatively-governed social order opposed to market imperatives, waged labor, and subsistence insecurity. This is a history of a socialism unnamed and out of place; its agents are conservative peasants in an increasingly peripheral zone of the world-system. This essay argues for the political imperative of recovering such unnamed and unlikely socialisms, particularly at a moment when socialism is reemerging as a named and namable politics in the United States. The plantation was always modern. Since at least C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) this insight has underwritten a wide range of inquiry into slavery in the Americas. The “large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation,” James wrote in the appendix to the 1963 edition, was a modern system. It further required that the slaves live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane when reaped had to be rapidly trans- ported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported. The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a modern life. (392) As James relates, the modern quality of the plantation derives from its participation in capitalist logics. He highlights the imperative of production for exchange, the plantation’s location in circuits of global circulation, and the effects of the labor process on the collective subject of labor. Over the decades that have fol- lowed, scholars have further identified and explored aspects of the plantation system that either anticipated or inaugurated features of capitalist modernity: racial governmentality, racist terror, labor management, credit instruments, transport systems, and so on. To be sure, some have qualified the thesis of the plantation’s participation in capitalist modernity (see Genovese; C. Post). Others have called into question a related claim, one associated with Eric Williams: that the surplus capital generated through the slave trade and plantation slavery in the Ameri- cas launched the Industrial Revolution in Britain (Anstey). Nonetheless, that the 552 Chris Taylor plantation maintains some important relationship to capitalist modernity—as prologue, as progenitor, or as an instance—is a relatively uncontroversial claim today. The new commonsense in formation, popularly consolidated in the much- publicized “new history of capitalism” research program, seems to be that New World plantation slavery was always already capitalist, and that the origins and development of the latter cannot be considered without reference to the former (for a critical overview, see Hudson; Clegg). In sum, that the plantation was a key point along the road of capitalism’s development is well known, and has been much discussed. I do not wish to dispute the historical importance of plantation slavery to the rise and spread of capitalism; I assume that such is the case. Nor do I wish to diminish the practical political im- port of these claims, which ask us to take seriously the aboriginal imbrication of racial and economic logics in the rise of capitalism. Nonetheless, I am interested in what this historiographical framing of the plantation and plantation slavery pushes from analytic view. What gets left out when we assimilate the history of the plantation to the history of capitalism? What happens when the history of the plantation only becomes narratable through the history of capitalism? One immediate effect of this assimilation is a conjoint de-specification of the dynamics of the plantation and of industrial capitalism. This de-specification oc- curs in various ways, but there is one analytic move that requires special attention, one that (again) dates at least to James, and one ably critiqued by Charlie Post (cf. 107-21). Scholars operating under this analytic paradigm map the observed features of plantation slavery onto the observed features of European industrial production in order to predicate the former as “capitalist.” The similarities are, of course, myriad. Both units produce for long-distance markets, require a mass labor force centralized under one roof, necessitate the enforcement of work discipline, employ a managerial staff to enforce that work discipline through various means, and so on. In sum, the general logic of capitalism and the particular logic of the plantation achieve a certain homology at the level of the labor process. And thus the problem: from a Marxist perspective, capitalism is not simply a labor process. Rather, capitalism is characterized by a process of value-creation that oc- curs at once alongside and through observable and empirical processes of human laboring within the total capitalist production process. While the slave plantation and the early European industrial factory might share similarities in terms of labor process, the conditions of valorization that obtained across these two sites differed in kind. Marx uses the terms “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption” as a heuristic to chart the different ways in which a labor process is captured by the capitalist imperative of valorization; Marx further associates the former process with the creation of absolute surplus value, and the latter with relative surplus value (cf. 1019-25). When labor is re- ally subsumed under capital, capital transforms the labor process with the aim of “reduc[ing] the portion of the social working day devoted to necessary labour, and concomitantly increas[ing] that devoted to surplus labour” (Endnotes 139). Capi- tal increases this relative surplus—relative because it is “relative to a decreasing necessary part”—most famously through technological innovation (139; emphasis in original). The Plantation Road to Socialism 553 Slave plantations operated differently, for the simple reason that the juridical and economic condition of slavery inhibited the forms of accountancy that would enable planters to distinguish (and act upon the differential) between necessary and surplus labor time. Plantations were fabulously non-responsive to market sig- nals; indeed, members of the New World Group of West Indian social theory have argued that the plantation operated under structural conditions of “incalculabil- ity” (see D. Hall; Best and Polanyi). In their quest for profitability, planters had at their disposal a quite limited repertoire of actions. In falling market conditions, planters could not scale their enterprises back, especially if they were (as most planters in fact were) in debt; they could only attempt to produce greater gross amounts of their staples, and send their goods to markets designated by their creditors. This amounted to an entirely irrational aggregate strategy, and one that was inscribed as hyper-exploitation and extreme violence on the bodies of the enslaved. Planters could also attempt cutting, externalizing, or demonetiz- ing upfront input costs—by reducing medical care that was to be, legally or ideo- logically, provided to the enslaved, or by attempting to internalize the production of subsistence goods (on reductions to medical care, cf. Gosse 58; on subsistence self-sufficiency, see Ford; Gallman). Slave plantations were capitalist to the extent that the entire enterprise was market dependent, and indeed dependent on various markets: credit markets, markets in enslaved humans, commodity markets, and so on. But this general market dependence yielded a total production process that was paradoxically fueled—in the case of subsistence self-sufficiency, liter- ally fueled—by the introduction of internal measures tending toward indepen- dence from the market. The plantation’s formal subsumption into capital, in other words, amounted to a structural compulsion that it simultaneously pump absolute surplus value for the market and attempt to minimize market dependence for everyday inputs. The plantation’s subordination to the capitalist imperative of surplus creation, the articulation of the plantation and the world market, the centrality of the plantation to the development of capitalism—none of these features of the New World plantation imply that capitalist value relations entirely coded or recoded the plantation world.1 As a formally subsumed unit of production in the capitalist world system, the plantation maintained a relation of immanent exteriority to the glo- balizing logic of capitalist value. To assimilate the history of the plantation to the history of capitalism risks excising this position of exteriority, and, in the process, incorporating the time of the plantation into a history that had never fully con- tained it. The plantation’s reliance on pumping absolute surplus value generated a situated economic rationality that in turn decisively textured the everyday life of slavery. It also generated forms of social organization defective for the real subsumption of labor into capital to which the enslaved would attach, and through which enslaved and freedpeople would imagine transitions out of slavery and into some kind of meaningful freedom. As Mimi Sheller puts it, ex-slaves “struggled to maintain customary ‘use rights’ they had won, however marginal” (148); the 1 For a reading of the Althusserian concept of “articulation” that places it in conversation with debates over development, modes of production, and the colonial world, see Foster-Carter.

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