The Plantation Road to

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 . 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 social- ist 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 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 slav- ery 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 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 participa- tion 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 sys- tem 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 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 devel- opment 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 disci- pline, 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 -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 , 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 ” (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 condi- tions, 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 vari- ous markets: credit markets, markets in enslaved humans, 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 plan- tation to the development of capitalism—none of these features of the New World plantation imply that capitalist value relations entirely coded or recoded the plan- tation 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. 554 Chris Taylor extension of these rights into the post-emancipation period marked a kind of ordi- nary refusal of liberal capitalism. Materially structured by the formally subsumed plantation, the black plantation quotidian incited projections of plantation futures that cannot be fully subsumed into the history of capitalism. Some such projected plantation futures were socialist. In the essay that follows, I explore a few pre- and post-emancipation programs that pushed the post-emancipa- tion plantation into the institutional base for a socialist society. As might be evident from my description of the slave plantation’s location in the world system’s cartogra- phy of value, the plantation road to socialism could not be identical to that laid out in those Marxist theories of revolutionary transition that assume the industrial urban as the privileged locus and agent of social change. Indeed, I will show how black thinkers and subaltern political agents seized upon aspects of the planta- tion’s quotidian functioning—features that derived from the plantation’s immanent exteriority to the value relations of capitalism—as the institutional basis for a transi- tion from plantation slavery to socialism. The transition out of plantation slavery did not ineluctably lead to an embrace of possessive individualist subjectivity, as some Americanists have recently argued (see Greeson). In the cases I examine below, we rather witness black political subjects attempting to hold onto and retain elements of the plantation order resistant to and defective for administered attempts to convert ex-slaves into an agrarian proletariat. In particular, I explore how ex-slaves retained the plantation order’s non-monetization of subsistence as a practical demand, and how they converted material and institutional elements of the plantation into mecha- nisms for this demand’s realization. While the political history of this demand is fre- quently (and I think rightly) narrated through the rise of “reconstituted peasantries” in the Americas, this demand had other outlets for its realization—particularly when rural smallholders confronted crises of social and household reproduction (Mintz 132). Such a crisis forms the background of the case I explore below, in which Ja- maican smallholders in 1865 negotiated a subsistence crisis by petitioning for the foundation of a collectivized agricultural unit. They did so not through the idiom of socialism, however, but by hewing to a model provided by the plantation. And that is indeed my point: Aspects of the plantation order defective for the value relations of capitalism could provide practical pathways to, and pedagogies of, a socialist order. Nineteenth-century intellectuals and activists on both the left and right stressed the propinquity of the plantation and a socialist order. For the pro-slavery intellectual George Fitzhugh, the slave plantation was basically social- ism minus racial equality and democracy; Joseph Davis, Jefferson Davis’s brother, sought to run his massive plantation on Owenite principles (Fitzhugh; Hayek et al.). From the Left, abolitionist Fourierists in the United States and the Caribbean saw the phalanstery as the solution to a post-emancipation future of the plantation (see Guarneri; Connor 174; Toussaint 158-216; Taylor 147-86). Marx himself never really considered the plantation as a point of entry into a socialist future—and this in spite of his sensitive late writings on the possible futures of the post-emancipa- tion Russian agrarian commune (see Shanin; Harootunian).2 Indeed, both Marx

2 At the request of a Russian comrade in 1881, Marx began composing a series of drafts for a letter regarding the proper historical-materialist approach to the fate of the post-emancipation The Plantation Road to Socialism 555 and Engels seem to have anticipated that the post-emancipation zones of the New World would atomize into a world of “squatters” (Marx and Engels 167). The plantation world appears foreclosed from the new “political of labour” that Marx articulated in the inaugural address of the First International, an ad- dress keenly attuned to the global political possibilities opened by the U.S. Civil War (180). Marx’s text requires supplementation from black subaltern thought and practice in order that we might begin to glean the various roads to socialism practiced and theorized in the genealogy of hemispheric American radicalism. Far from being a sublatable moment in the history of capitalism, for these sub- alterns the plantation marked a possible point of direct transition to socialism before their real subsumption into capitalism. My point, of course, is not that the plantation was ‘good’; I feel silly in issuing such a disclaimer. The historical point I am making, rather, is that post-emancipa- tion subalterns poached aspects of the plantation’s institutional organization as a model for post-emancipation economic collectivity even as they refused—and as a mode of refusing—enslavement, racial terror, and dependence upon markets for land, subsistence, and wages. It is this creative re-use of an institution seemingly impervious to such refashioning that intrigues me. As we know, the improvisation with the plantation order I explore did not yield a socialist world. The potentiality I identify in this moment was smashed by the forces of history—the indifference of liberal empire, the armed colonial state. But I am not interested in this history solely for the concealed potential it bears, the other possible futures, and so histo- ries, it indexes. Rather, I wish to take the case I explore as monitory for criticism today. If, as Michael Denning argues, American Studies historically functioned as a “substitute ” (358), I suggest by way of conclusion that hemispheric American studies today needs to consider the vernacular idioms through which popular movements surrogate a Marxist politics. As socialist, communist, and anarchist left movements surge today in the United States, Marxist critics need to remember that the absence of an idiom does not indicate the absence of a desire— that something like a communist impulse can encode itself in various ways and seek realization across heterogeneous scenes. I offer this account of the plantation road to socialism as a reminder that there are many pathways to such a future; we need to see them.

Russian agrarian commune. Partly at stake in this question was the status of history in volume 1 of Capital. Members of the Russian Left who saw Capital as providing a generalizable, globally iterative account of the stages of capitalist development believed that the Russian commune was fated to dissolve, with former commune members thrown into an agrarian or urban proletariat. Marx would argue that Capital’s historical narrative of the transition from feudalism to capital- ism was specific to Western Europe and non-modular; Russia’s history was different, and its future would be, too. Marx argued that, under the pressure of the state and capital, the Russian agrarian commune might dissolve. At the same time, the collectivization of labor on the agrar- ian commune, as well as the fact that commune land was never privately held, could provide the basis for a socialist agriculture in the countryside. While the Russian commune might appear archaic, he concluded, the entire point of is the replacement of “capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, that is, [collective] communist property” (qtd. in Shanin 102; emphasis in original). 556 Chris Taylor

Peasant Economy and the Reconstituted Plantation

It began with a letter; it ended with a massacre. On April 25, 1865, Governor of Jamaica John Eyre forwarded to the British Colonial Office a short memo- rial entitled “The Humble Petition of the Poor People of Jamaica and Parish of Saint Ann’s.” Addressed to Queen Victoria, the petition detailed the extraordi- nary hardships that the queen’s free subjects currently endured. Things had not always been so bad, the petitioners stressed. After full emancipation in 1838, the petitioners had received reasonably decent wages for work on local estates; with these funds, they had purchased land to plant small provision gardens. But times changed. Remunerative work became scarce, wage rates plummeted, employers frequently delayed paying those who did have work, and decades of use had nearly exhausted the soil of their provisions grounds, “compell[ing them] to rent land from the large proprietors at the rate of 2l. 8s. for one year” (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 136). In sum, the smallholders of the parish were acutely suffering the contraction of the Jamaican economy in the wake of emancipation, the liberalization of Britain’s markets in colonial produce, and, most acutely, a drought. So they wrote to “our Most Gracious Sovereign Lady” requesting as- sistance (136). They also offered their sovereign recommendations for the form that this as- sistance should take. The queen, her humble petitioners proposed, should make them a grant of land, they would “form a company” to cultivate it, and a metro- politan agent appointed by Victoria would receive and sell their produce on the British market (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 136). Through the plant- ing season, they suggested, the queen should “give us subsistence while we work” (136). Sweetening the deal, the petitioners promised to “put their hands and heart to work” in order that they might “thankfully repay our Sovereign Lady by install- ments of such produce as [they] might cultivate” (136). And what they intended to cultivate was quite varied: “coffee, corn, canes, cotton, tobacco, and other pro- duce” (136). Such a program, they note, would lead to the rapid “improvement” of the island (136). Alas, the queen did not provide the smallholders with land and provisions. Instead, the Colonial Office responded with a letter, known as the “Queen’s Advice,” which, as Thomas Holt puts it, “took the form of a lecture in classical ” (277). The smallholders should not look to the state for assistance, it declared; their financial security was bound up with the flourish- ing of the plantations, which for the Colonial Office meant black participation in the labor market. The “prosperity of the labouring classes as well as all other classes depends,” the missive lectures, “upon their working for wages, not uncer- tainly or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at times when their labour is wanted, and for so long as it is wanted” (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 139). If “they would use their industry, and thereby render the Plantations produc- tive,” they would earn all the money they needed, and more (139). The circulation of the “Queen’s Advice” throughout the island is frequently cited by historians as one important ideological moment within the overdeter- mined historical process that caused the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the subsequent massacres that suppressed it (for a contemporary account, see Un- The Plantation Road to Socialism 557 derhill; for scholarly accounts, see Bakan; Holt; Heuman). At the very least, the “Queen’s Advice” expresses and exposes the Colonial Office’s indifference to the economic straits of the post-emancipation peasantry, as well as its willingness to continue to throw its support behind a tottering plantocracy. Indeed, by and large, the road to Morant Bay, and post-emancipation Caribbean history broadly, is narrated as the effect of the opposition between peasant economy and the state- backed post-emancipation plantation economy—between an economic mode that valued subsistence, independence, and flexibility and one that required continu- ous labor and the subordination of workers to the market (cf. Mintz 133 for a general distillation of this antagonism). In this context, what is striking about the St. Ann petition is that the smallholding peasants do not oppose the “economic potential of peasant agriculture” to plantation agriculture (Holt 277). Nor does the institutional arrangement that they recommend track those that underwrote the economic practices of the island’s post-emancipation peasantry (on these practices, cf. Mintz 180-213). More than anything, the institution sketched by the petitioners resembles a plantation. They pledge to grow a set of export crops on a large scale; they require “a much larger extent of cultivation” than that to which they currently had access (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 136). Their plans for marketing their produce is nearly identical to the system that had ob- tained in the British Americas since the eighteenth century: everything would be sent to a metropolitan factor for sale in foreign markets, and the factor would set the profit fetched against the mortgage and short-term credit extended for sup- plies and provisions. (Indeed, the petitioners cut the figure of stereotypical planta- tion proprietors when complaining about export taxes: “We […] have heavy taxes to pay, and have to pay the export duty on our little produce when selling it to the merchants.” [136]) Their scheme, moreover, demonstrates their responsiveness to global market conditions. The diversity of crops they propose to plant shows them shying away from sugar, the market for which was dominated by the slave planta- tions of Cuba and Brazil. Their openness to planting cotton suggests their aware- ness of its market scarcity due to the U.S. Civil War.3 The petitioners, in sum, project an export-oriented agricultural unit producing on an expanded scale, one that would make use of existing marketing and transportation infrastructure, and one attuned to global economic dynamics. Their proposed company only departs from past plantation practices in one crucial detail: the company’s land would

3 In diversifying their holdings, the petitioners seem to show the influence of a scheme pro- posed by the missionary E. B. Underhill. In a letter to the secretary for the colonies decrying the impoverished state of the peasantry, Underhill suggested (among other proposals) the “forma- tion of associations for shipping [smallholders’] produce in considerable quantities”; at the same time, he wished to discourage smallholders from growing sugar, arguing that a profitable sugar plantation requires too much capital (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 2). Underhill’s letter was reprinted in Jamaica, and it set off a phenomenon of “Underhill meetings.” (For a good critical description of the agitational print world of Morant Bay era Jamaica, see Sheller 174-227.) While the petition from St. Ann seems at first glance to have simply taken on board Underhill’s suggestion, his idea of “association” was limited to the sale and export of goods. The petitioners, I argue, radicalize this associative inclination to include land tenure and labor process. It is for this reason, moreover, that I do not link the St. Ann petition to the “free vil- 558 Chris Taylor be collectively labored upon by and for its collective owners—not by an enslaved labor force for the profit of a planter and his creditors. The St. Ann petitioners do not, then, oppose peasant economy to plantation economy. Rather, I would suggest that their program sutures elements of peasant economy to the institutional form of the plantation and, in so doing, shows these smallholders working toward a vernacular socialist solution to political and eco- nomic oppression on the basis of the plantation form. To be sure, the petitioners do not use the term “socialism.” Their pitch to the queen is rather made through the idioms of empire and monarchical loyalism; the signatories, moreover, all ap- pear to be men, suggesting an adherence to post-emancipation masculinist norms of household independency and publicness. Nonetheless, I will argue that their proposal points toward a transformation that is socialist in form, if not affiliation; and I will argue that this socialist form derives from their creative re-articulation of institutional features of peasant and plantation economy. In order to tease out the socialist potentials that inhere in the plantation form, I turn now to the writings of Jamaican mulatto Robert Wedderburn, a socialist active a few decades before the petitioners from St. Ann sought to establish their plantation. Wedderburn should be regarded as one of the first—if not the first—theorists of the plantation road to socialism. In reading the St. Ann petition alongside Wedderburn, my aim is to situ- ate the former in the horizon of the black radical tradition (see Robinson). The fit is not perfect; the St. Ann petitioners were unlikely to have conceived of themselves, or their program, as “radical.” What interests me, however, are the ways in which practical negotiations with structural limits produce political imaginings that are radical, whatever the self-understandings of the agents involved. I use Wedder- burn’s named socialism, in other words, as a lens through which we might see the unnamed, otherwise illegible “socialism” of the smallholders of St. Ann. Wedderburn was born in Jamaica in the 1760s. His mother, Rosanna, was en- slaved, and his father was Rosanna’s Scottish owner. Wedderburn’s mother had ne- gotiated that Robert would be born free, and so he was, to be raised by his grand- mother in Kingston. As Rediker and Linebaugh relate, “Wedderburn joined the Royal Navy during the American Revolution,” and he was quickly plugged into the world of plebeian radicalism (288). In England, Wedderburn became a work- ing-class Methodist, and eventually a follower of the agrarian socialist Thomas Spence. Through writing, editing journals, preaching, and debating, Wedderburn advocated the self-emancipation of the enslaved, the abolition of in land, and a radicalization of political democracy. In 1817, Wedderburn founded a journal entitled The Axe Laid to the Root wherein he articulated his program for a transition from plantation slavery to socialism. For Wedderburn, the road to plantation socialism led through the provision ground. Provision grounds were small plots of marginal plantation land on which the enslaved grew subsistence crops. Jamaican planters began to make serious use of provision grounds during the U.S. American Revolution, when the supply chain of foodstuffs from the northern colonies was disrupted and then later prohibited lages”—post-emancipation communities founded by religious leaders that let or sold land to independent smallholders (see C. Hall). The Plantation Road to Socialism 559 by post-war imperial law. The grounds were crucial to the reproduction of life on the island. Slaves not only used them for subsistence, but they also typically produced a surplus that then was sold at the island’s booming Sunday markets. As many as 10,000 slaves would attend the Kingston market each Sunday, their provision grounds providing the material basis for this vibrant internal economy (Berlin and Morgan 10). As Mary Turner argues, enslaved producers’ engagement with the market gave rise to the use of practices—labor withdrawals, strikes, infor- mal bargaining—one would tend to associate with waged workers (44-46). Plant- ers’ tables were stocked with the provisions their slaves grew; the entire plantation export system was dependent on the “free time” work of slaves (McDonald 28). Ken Post argues that the slave plantation “in fact articulated two complementary (but antagonistic) modes of production,” planter-directed cash-crop production and enslaved-directed provision production (23). The post-emancipation period witnessed a tendential split between these articulated modes, as many ex-slaves sought to hold onto and expand their control over small plots for independent pro- duction and petty marketing. Indeed, ex-slaves converted money earned through the period of slavery on their provision grounds into the petty capital required to purchase small plots after emancipation. Post argues of Jamaica that “a free peasantry came into existence before any fully-articulated capitalist social forma- tion had replaced that of slavery”; this peasantry formed “a non-capitalist ele- ment within a capitalist articulation” (33). The residual effectivity of the provision ground system helped block the full subsumption of Jamaican society into capital- ist value relations. Wedderburn anticipated aspects of these post-emancipation dynamics. In the first issue of The Axe Laid to the Root, he writes: Above all, mind and keep possession of the land you now possess; for without that, free- dom is not worth possessing; for if you once give up possession of your lands, your op- pressors will have the power to starve you to death, through making laws for their own accommodation; which will force you to commit crimes in order to obtain subsistence; as the landholders in Europe are serving those that are dispossessed of lands; for it is a fact, that thousands of families are now in a starving state; the prisons are full: humanity impels the executive power to withdraw the sentence of death on criminals, whilst the landholders, in fact, are surrounded with every necessary of life. (82) Notably, Wedderburn describes the provision plots of the enslaved as their “possession[s]”—and, in many ways, they were. By the time of emancipation, the enslaved appear to have secured a customary right to their provision plots; in some cases, these lands were even heritable and alienable. In the post-emancipation pe- riod, these grounds would provide an important site of antagonism between the planter class and emancipated Jamaicans, as planters sought to change the rules of access and tenure in order to bind an adequate labor force to their plantations, and as ex-slaves sought to “keep possession” of what was customarily theirs (Holt 67). The emancipated performed in practice what Wedderburn envisioned in the- ory: they attempted to interrupt the process of primitive accumulation in Jamaica, to impede their intended formation as a rural proletariat, and to realize a freedom “worth possessing” by holding onto the possibility of subsistence unmediated by waged work. 560 Chris Taylor

However, Wedderburn wished to forestall the formation of a mass peasantry independently producing on privately owned plots. Following Spence, he asserts that “the earth was given to the children of men,” and that it has been given to all, “making no difference for colour or character,” as an inappropriable commons. Thus, “any person calling a piece of land his own private property, was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud” (82). Even as Wedderburn advises the enslaved to “keep possession of the land you now possess,” he intends this “possession” to transition into a form of landholding in common: “When you are exhorted to hold the land, and never give it up to your oppressors, you are not told to hold it as private property, but as tenants at will to the sovereignty of the people” (83). If the plantation’s provision grounds possessed a centrifugal force, propelling the enslaved away from the plantation for subsistence, Wedderburn wants to re-aggregate and re-centralize landholding in a post-emancipation pol- ity. Instead of a “division of lands,” Wedderburn follows Spence in advocating a “division of rents,” a division that “admits no with-holding an equal share of the rents from any one, not even from a criminal, much less from persons of different political or religious opinions; birth or death is the alpha and omega of right or exclusion” (83). In this post-emancipation commune, property no longer serves as a mecha- nism of distribution. One’s belonging to the polity entitles one to an equal share of the produce that it yields. The upshot here is that, from the vantage of capital- ism, work itself undergoes a radical recomposition. If political belonging and not property determines one’s equitable share in the polity’s produce, the property that classical political economy holds one to possess in one’s labor time does not mediate one’s claim to that produce. Subsistence, the wage form, and labor time are radically delinked, as no institutional form (like the market) exists to measure them. Put flatly, both work and subsistence are entirely demonetized. The world that Wedderburn conjures would thus seem to negate both the liberal-capitalist order that colonial administrators attempted to install after emancipation, as well as the plantation slavery order whose negation Wedderburn desires. Yet, Wedder­ burn’s agrarian commune in fact sublates a key feature of the plantation order: in neither the plantation world to be negated nor in the agrarian commune to emerge from it does money mediate access to subsistence. Indeed, Wedderburn’s basic point is that, in the form of the provision ground, the plantation order unwit- tingly developed an independent that would facilitate a tran- sition from the social death of slavery to socialist self-rule. Neither waged work nor money need intervene to lubricate this transition. As I noted, this pursuit of non-market-dependent subsistence would fuel post- emancipation land politics in Jamaica. Contra Wedderburn’s wishes, however, this aim would be pursued through smallholding on private lands, not within an agrar- ian commune. Indeed, the general rise of smallholding across the post-emanci- pation New World might be enough to prove Wedderburn’s program hopelessly utopian, rendered moot avant la lettre by popular practices and of the enslaved. After all, even before emancipation, free and enslaved blacks articulat- ed critiques of slavery through a kind of vernacular Lockeanism, one that accord- The Plantation Road to Socialism 561 ed labor a normative, property-generating force.4 The Boston-based black radical David Walker, for instance, asserted, “This country is as much our as it is the whites” because enslaved blacks “work their farms and dig their mines, and thus go on enriching the Christians with their blood and groans” (58). Walker’s con- temporary Maria Stewart would argue similarly, “[W]e have performed the labor, they [whites] have received the profits; we have planted the vines, they have eaten the fruits of them” (59). Subaltern blacks, enslaved and free, mobilized normative claims about the property-generating force of labor to critique their dispossession and exploitation by racial capitalism; such claims would seem to provide the popu- lar ideological scaffolding for the smallholding economy that emerged—or whose emergence was frustrated—in post-emancipation polities across the Americas. What the St. Ann petition reveals, I suggest, is a willingness on the part of these peasants to collectivize and scale their enterprises up in order to avoid de- pendence on labor markets for wages and rental markets for smallholdings. In- deed, the tendency of the petition is toward the demonetization of all transac- tions internal to the company; they even propose that the queen should “give us subsistence while we work” (Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica 136). The only point at which their proposed company touches upon money is when they offer to “repay our Sovereign Lady by installments of such produce as we may cultivate.” Market-based calculability only affects this company in its external transactions—transactions which are to be carried out by an appointed metro- politan agent. At the same time, this program does not contravene the smallhold- ers’ vernacular Lockean­ belief in the normative force of labor. Indeed, the pe- titioners stress their desire and ability to work as the basis of their claim on the crown. What the program does imagine changing, however, are the distributional mechanisms articulating land, labor, and subsistence. When the rural smallhold proved inadequate to realizing their desire for market independence, they sought out other institutional arrangements. In the process of negotiating the limits to the smallholding economy, these petitioners wound up articulating a vision of social organization that bears a striking similarity to that developed by Wedderburn. Where Wedderburn looks forward, anticipating the founding of an agrarian so- cialist commonwealth as the plantation’s negation, these petitioners looked back- ward to the plantation, reconstituting it as an institutional figure for collective self-management and independence from the market. Even as I stress the conservative radicalism of the petitioners’ scheme, we must note the structural limits that would have impeded the reproduction of this pro- jected agrarian commune. Given the fact that they intended to continue to produce for the world market, the discipline of the market—and the —would have eventually exerted its imperium over the commune’s labor process. (We do not know, anyhow, how they proposed to organize labor on their collective farm.) Marx’s critique of the Owenite “co-operative movement” more or less holds for the smallholders’ plan as well: “however excellent in principle, and however use- ful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual

4 For a challenging, sharp attempt to recover vernacular Lockean thinking in the colonial world, see Sartori. 562 Chris Taylor efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometri- cal progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries” (Marx and Engels 180). As Wedderburn had, Marx argued that such tactics needed to scale up, “to be developed to national dimen- sions” (Marx and Engels 181). Yet, as postcolonial agricultural experiments have demonstrated, including Jamaica, even scaling up such enterprises to the national is inadequate to achieving emancipation from the global law of value (see Beck- ford; Phillips). (Marx, writing in and of the core of the world system, could be rather more sanguine in the assumption that scaling co-operative labor up to the national might shatter the hegemony of the world market.) The plantation road to socialism, in other words, would require revolutionary structural transformations at the level of the world system to realize itself. A democratically collectivized plantation is not, then, the end of the road. My hope here has been to show that it could mark a beginning.

The Black (Not Exactly) Radical Tradition and Marxism in the Americas

That capitalism operates through the generation of localized forms of social organization that wind up becoming defective for capitalism at a later moment is a well-known structural phenomenon of the capitalist world-system (see Wil- liams; Shanin; Harootunian). This essay has been interested in the social life of the defective, of the residual, and in the ways in which such residual, defective forms of social organization can provide the institutional and epistemic apparatus for collective imaginings of socialist futures. These labors of collective imagining can be difficult for historians and theorists to see; these difficulties are intensified when considering the effect of the plantation on black subaltern imaginaries in the Americas. Given that the plantation marked the utter negation of black life, it seems counter-intuitive that ex-slaves might sublate aspects of the plantation economy into projects of freedom—even if scholars have routinely demonstrated that freedpeople adapted and accommodated the persistence of the plantation in myriad ways (cf. Mintz 131-79; Holt 143-78). Yet, in trying to realize a meaning- ful freedom—a form of life that had been structurally frustrated for the emanci- pated by the play of race, colonialism, and liberal capitalism—the petitioners of St. Ann creatively rearticulated the plantation form to the shifting conditions of their post-emancipation, smallholding present. The plantation against capitalism, then. In this telling, however, the plantation names not a residual structural deformation in the general logic of capitalism’s development (as it would for Eric Williams) but a project from below. To read this project from within the black radical and hemispheric socialist tradition, as I have suggested we should, might seem strange; after all, the petitioners pitch themselves as desperately unradical, as hardworking, at least rhetorically grate- ful subjects of the empire. But that is precisely the point: the formally subsumed plantation world generated vernacular norms, desires, and social pragmatics that collided with capitalist axiomatics at a later moment, giving rise to a transitional socialist politics in all but the name. The Plantation Road to Socialism 563

We are living through a moment in which socialism has resurged as a named and namable politics in the United States. This socialist resurgence has reignited a host of debates: on class and race (frequently pitched as class versus race), on economism versus culturalism, on electoralism, on organizational form. In offering this reread- ing of the St. Ann petition, my desire is to make a plea for the historical importance, and persistent salience, of impulses not immediately namable as socialist to U.S. and hemispheric left politics. In many ways, Marxist American studies has always had as its concern the unnamed or unnamable socialist impulses circulating in coded fash- ion through the social, from James’s look at pop culture in American Civilization through Jameson’s classic essay on utopia and to McClanahan’s blistering new work on the “crisis subjectivity” of hopelessly indebted students. To consider the importance of unnamed socialisms to the past and future of the American Left is not simply to expand, in a gesture of greater inclusivity, the borders of radical politics. Nor is it simply a consolatory or reparative practice, one through which the critic locates in the order of the symbolic a felt lack in the social real. Rather, con- sidering these unnamed socialisms requires us to map the structural, conjunctural, and subjective forces that incite radical responses from collectivities that would not necessarily name their politics as socialist, communist, or anarchist. In the current conjuncture, as waged labor decreasingly mediates the social for an increasing mass of people, as the composition of work shifts and circulation struggles overtake pro- duction struggles (for an attempt to theorize the shift toward circulation struggles such as riots and blockades in the post-1973 period, see Clover), a Marxist American studies needs to continue to uncover intimations of socialist impulses in unlikely places—those peripheral places that are tendentially the general space of the social.

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