(Self-)Possession, (Anti-)Blackness, and Abolition
Photo taken in Rome, Italy on October 5, 2022
I found myself in Rome on September 25, 2022. It was election day and the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) — an anti-migrant nationalist party whose descent can be traced back to the original Fascist party — were on their way to winning the most seats in the Italian parliament.
Although the derivative fascists were winning parliament, if the prevailing street art was any indication of reality, they weren’t necessarily winning the streets of Rome.
In several neighborhoods of Rome, individuals and groups who aspired to communistic ideals and practices of freedom had spray painted radical glyphs on the walls. Though not the most popular of these glyphs, there were two very familiar ones that regularly caught my eye: : “BLM”, standing for Black Lives Matter, and “ACAB”, standing for All Cops Are Bastards.
Inspired by these encounters this essay aims to articulate the relationship between chattel-slavery, wage-slavery, mass incarceration in the United Settler States; anti-migrant policies and global apartheid more broadly; and the worldwide prevalence of anti-Black power formations. I have been compelled to write on the topic because everything that I have read thus far on the topic has been less articulate than I would like. But this is no fault of the authors whom I have read on the topic: their texts are meant to become articulate by being read and responded to, and this is my response.
I. (Self-) Possession
I spent the morning of September 26th gazing at the ruins of the “human, all too human” Axial Age civilization of ancient Rome, the imperialist patriarchy and military-slavery-coinage complex that set so many templates within the Euro-Atlantic West, and inspired so many wet dreams of dominion. Surveying the archaeological sites, I imagined the spectacular cruelties and horrors that took place at the Colosseum, the pretenses of nobility at the Forum, and the ill-gotten luxuries of empire and slavery enjoyed atop the Palatine.
After I got back to my lodgings, I sat down to re-read passages from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s remarkable book, The Dawn of Everything, in order to help me better understand the civilization whose ruins I had just surveyed, and to reckon with one of its most enduring legacies. Specifically, the ancient Roman Law conception of property that has come to inform the modern Euro-Atlantic conception of freedom as self-possession and, further, the distinction between the chattel-slave and the wage-slave — with the latter, the wage-slave, often termed the “free laborer” or “worker” in our prevailing doublespeak.
What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.
Today’s wage-slave is someone in “full possession” of their own person. What the wage-slave sells to their employer in return for wages are temporary usufruct rights (usus and fructus) over their person under the terms of an explicit or implicit employment contract. The wage-slave retains their abusus rights for themself and themself alone. The legislation of wage-slavery, which is more typically called “labor law” in our prevailing doublespeak, is primarily concerned (i) with regulating the terms under which employers can purchase usus and fructus rights from wage-slaves (a.k.a. “employees” or “workers”) and (ii) with determining the recourses that wage-slaves have to take action against employers who overstep the bounds of employment contracts and engage in abusus of wage-slaves. Thus when the unionized wage-slave limits their dreams of freedom to maximizing the recourses available to them to take action against their employer for trespassing upon their abusus rights, they still accept wage-slavery on its own terms.
The chattel-slave differs from the wage-slave in having been “fully dis-possessed” of their own person: slave-masters are entitled to usus, fructus, and abusus rights over their chattel-slaves unless and until their slaves are emancipated. Indeed, the legislation of chattel slavery is primarily concerned with enabling the slave-master to exercise their full rights, and especially their abusus rights, within limits established to prevent such exercise from harming public order and public health. Given this, those who conceive of reparations as payment of “back wages” for the usus and fructus of the chattel slave miss the point. The abusus of the chattel-slave was the condition of possibility for the usus and fructus of the chattel-slave, and reparations must acknowledge and make amends for the abusus of the chattel-slave as that which precedes, exceeds, and succeeds the usus and fructus of the chattel-slave. And yet, to make amends for the abusus of the chattel-slave without dispensing with conceptions of freedom as (self-)possession is also to miss the point.
There is, undoubtedly, some degree of salvation to be had in being a self-possessed wage-slave rather than a chattel-slave possessed by a slave-master. That being said, there is no denying the fact that extreme forms of corporal and symbolic violence are involved in the making and maintenance of both the wage-slave and the chattel-slave. What’s more, the violence that makes and maintains the wage-slave cannot be disentangled from the violence that makes and maintains the chattel-slave and, here’s the rub, the dismally limited Western(ized) conception of freedom as “self-possession” takes all of this violence for granted. Thus, it is no coincidence that there are more people living as slaves today than ever before in human history, at least 50 million people.
There is nothing natural or necessary about a society in which persons are (self-)possessed. Indeed, ideals and practices of (self-)possession are absent from many non-Western(ized) cultures, and when they are present, such ideals and practices very often have a limited sphere of influence, being circumscribed by other ideals and practices that take precedence. In many, if not most, cultures prior to the global hegemony of the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal West, everyday affairs have tended to be defined by what David Graeber calls “baseline communism”:
[T]he understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply… Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project.
A “great need” could be the need to avert a deadly disaster, such as a child falling onto the subway tracks. A “reasonable cost” might be giving a cigarette, or not answering a request to “hand me that wrench” with, “What do I get out of it?”
Seeing the world through Graeber’s lens, one finds that ideals and practices of (self-)possession can only ever take precedence and dominate social relations when and where such communistic relations break down and enmity prevails amongst peoples. What’s more, wage-slavery and chattel-slavery, which are founded upon ideals and practices of (self-)possession, effectively propagate themselves by and through employing violence and threats of violence, ranging from the crude to the subtle, that encourage just such breakdowns, that encourage enmity and prevent the repair and (re-)creation of communistic relations amongst peoples.
Graeber writes that the “surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so.” The reverse is equally true: the surest way to know that one is living through a breakdown of communistic relations and an increase of enmity amongst peoples is that there is an ever increasing demand for things to be measured and accounted for. To quote Graeber one last time:
[I]mpersonal rules and regulations…can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force. And indeed, in this most recent phase of [financialization], we’ve seen security cameras, police scooters, issuers of temporary ID cards, and men and women in a variety of uniforms acting in either public or private capacities, trained in tactics of menacing, intimidating, and ultimately deploying physical violence, appear just about everywhere — even in places such as playgrounds, primary schools, college campuses, hospitals, libraries, parks, or beach resorts, where fifty years ago their presence would have been considered scandalous, or simply weird.
The fact that it is possible for people today to talk about the “financialization of everyday life” and the fact that “performance metrics” have been introduced into almost every sphere of life in our globalized and technologically networked society, are two clear indications that communistic relations are in trouble. It is no wonder, then, that we find institutions deploying violence and threats of violence everywhere.
II. (Anti-)Blackness
Thus far, I’ve treated wage-slavery and chattel-slavery as ahistorical abstractions. But I will now need to recognize the fact that the concrete forms of wage-slavery and chattel-slavery that we are living with today are intimately and inextricably interlocked with racism. To be specific, anti-Black racism. As Cedric Robinson wrote, anti-Black racism has been Euro-Atlantic capitalist imperialism’s “epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power.”
Frank B. Wilderson III, in a interview titled “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation”, describes the fundamental thrust of this ugly truth succinctly, referring to two important historical milestones: 625, when the King of Islamised Egypt conquered a kingdom in the bilād al-sūdān (i.e., the “land of the blacks”, now known as the Sudan) and imposed a treaty on the kingdom that demanded hundreds of slaves be supplied to the Muslim king of Egypt every year; and 1452, when the Catholic Church issued a papal bull that legally granted Portugal the right to enslave any and all people they encountered south of Cape Bojador, on the coast of Western Sahara:
[T]here is a global consensus that Africa is the location of sentient beings who are outside of the global community, who are socially dead. That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625, and was passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to that global consensus you can’t think Black. You can think Uganda, Ashanti, Ndebele, you can think many different cultural identities, but Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from the global consensus that decides [Africa is the land of the socially dead].
Putting aside all that the Euro-Atlantic West plagiarized from the Islamic world, the notion that dark-skinned peoples from Africa constituted a biopolitical race of human beings known as Black/Negro who are, by nature, well-suited for slavery — as opposed to being infidels or kafirs disfavored by Allah but upon whom He may still bestow grace or baraka at any moment according to His will — was a specific Western social invention entailing a great deal more than just slavery and social death. As R.A. Judy writes in the book Sentient Flesh, the Euro-Atlantic version of the imposed designation “Black/Negro” has two distinct senses. On the one hand, the imposed designation has a biopolitical-economic sense: “the word Negro, along with all its cognates, entails an anthropological categorization, whereby those so designated belong to a physically distinct type of not fully human hominid, which is what makes them legitimately available as prospective commodity assets.” On the other hand, the imposed designation “Negro” carries an ethnographic sense, “the term connotes not only the slave formed in capitalism but also the populations of people who may be enslaved, and who remain Negro after slavery’s abolition.”
The biopolitical-economic sense of the designation Black/Negro is thus the definitive sense: the ethnographic Black/Negro being nothing other than the person susceptible to becoming Black/Negro in the biopolitical-economic sense. Using myself as an example here, being a child of dark-complexioned persons from Sub-Saharan Africa, I am Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense, which is to say, in other words, that I am a person susceptible to receiving the biopolitical-economic designation Black/Negro under the power formation of racialized slavery. That my ancestors were not enslaved by the European settlers of the New World and that the power formation of racialized slavery is no longer explicitly operative today does not put an end to my being Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense: I continue to be ethnographically Black/Negro because the power formation of racialized slavery did explicitly operate for a period of time, and the remnants of its explicit operation have been repurposed in the biopolitical-economic power formations that have succeeded those of racialized slavery.
Considering that chattel-slavery can only be maintained and advanced by violence and threats of violence that work to undermine communistic relations and promote enmity amongst peoples, imagine the almost unimaginable violence that was deployed to undermine communistic relations and to promote enmity amongst the peoples of Africa so as to effectively turn Africa into “a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins. We often speak of the tens of millions of enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic. We often speak of the millions more enslaved Africans who died on the trek to the coast, and in captivity before ever boarding a slave ship. We do not speak enough of the millions of Africans who were never enslaved but were tortured and murdered to establish and maintain the social conditions that enabled their fellow Africans to be enslaved — that is to say, we speak too little of those brutalized in order to ruin communistic relations and generate a climate of enmity throughout Sub-Saharan Africa from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century.
With that in mind let us now imagine the almost unimaginable violence that was deployed to institute, maintain, and advance racialized chattel-slavery in the New World. Such “scenes of subjection”, as Saidiya Hartman would say, served to ruin possibilities for communistic relations with and amongst Black peoples, and to inspire widespread enmity towards Black peoples amongst peoples of all races. The brutality that undermined communistic relations with and amongst Black peoples in the New World was what legitimated the possession of blacks as chattel-slaves and established the “Negro race” as the “slave race”. What needs to be stressed here is that such violence served to inspire enmity towards Black peoples amongst peoples of all races all over the world — not just amongst white European peoples, but also amongst the indigenous peoples of the New World, the peoples of South and East Asia, the peoples of the Middle East, and, perhaps most importantly, the Black peoples of Africa themselves. Such enmity persists to this day. The world continues to reject the communistic principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to their needs” with (dis)respect to Black peoples, such that Black peoples are regularly tasked with doing far more than anyone is able to do, while also being given far less than what they need to survive and thrive.
Why go to such outrageous extremes of violence, when such extremes were not easy to perpetrate and perpetuate? The fact of the matter is this: the production of Negro chattel-slaves between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries was the libidinal economic condition of possibility for the production of wage-slaves during that same period. The Europeans’ ideals and practices that defined freedom as self-possession would not have made any libidinal economic sense without the making of the Negro chattel-slave. Freedom as self-possession can only become something to aspire to when one has to confront the possibility of being possessed by another. This is to say that it is only in relation to the chattel-slave that the wage-slave appears as a “free laborer” or “worker” to themself, and to the world at large.
At the same time it is imperative that self-possessed wage-slaves do not consider themselves kin to chattel-slaves possessed by slave-masters, lest the two conspire together to put an end to their respective slaveries. The corporal and symbolic violence that simultaneously produced the Negro race as slave race and the white wage-slave as free laborer effectively served to ensure that there was minimal kinship between wage-slaves and chattel slaves. In particular, the brutality that underscored taboos and laws against miscegenation — working by and through augmenting the white male patriarch’s powers to intervene in and regulate the sexual intimacies and reproductive choices of the women of their household dominions — effectively served to progressively separate whites and other non-Black races from the Black race, preventing whites and other non-Black wage-slaves from forming kinship bonds with Black chattel-slaves. This is to say, in other words, that capitalism and patriarchy worked together, hand-in-hand, to invent the Black race as the slave race par excellence and, thereby, to create the conditions for the wage-slave to appear as a “free laborer”.
Now, I imagine that some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Thankfully, chattel-slavery has been made illegal.” I beseech you here, “Yes, but not so fast!” To borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, emancipation in the United Settler States, and just about everywhere else, was in many senses a “non-event”. The effective result of emancipation was, almost everywhere, the formation of an apartheid regime. In the United Settler States, although individual blacks were no longer owned by individual whites following emancipation, the Jim Crow laws (a.k.a., Amerikkkan apartheid) effectively maintained and reinforced the rights of whites as a social category (as the master race) to exercise abusus rights with respect to blacks as a social category (as the slave race). This means, in other words, that emancipation allowed individual blacks to claim self-possession, while Jim Crow effectively dispossessed blacks as a social category. There were no longer to be individual slaves, but there remained the “Negro race”, which as a social category remained socially dead, slave-stock. Lynchings in the post-bellum United Settler States, which took off after emancipation and which were often executed as punishment for imagined attempts at miscegenatory sexual trespass, were spectacular demonstrations of the fact that, under Amerikkkan apartheid, whites as a social category could exercise abusus rights with (dis)respect to blacks as a social category in the name of protecting the purity of the (master) race with relative impunity and extreme prejudice — whiteness being deemed a shared possession or property of the master race that could be devalued by any white person being found in proximity to or intimate relations with a person of the black/slave race.
Hartman describes this failure of Reconstruction following emancipation in the United Settler States, and along with this failure, doubts about the claims of progress and the definition of freedom:
While the inferiority of blacks was no longer the legal standard, the various strategies of state racism produced a subjugated and subordinated class within the body politic, albeit in a neutral or egalitarian guise. Notwithstanding the negatory power of the Thirteenth Amendment, racial slavery was transformed rather than annulled. […] [T]his transformation was manifested in debt-peonage and other forms of involuntary servitude that conscripted the newly emancipated and putative free laborer, an abiding legacy of Black inferiority and subjugation, and the regulatory power of a racist state obsessed with blood, sex, and procreation.
[…] In the aftermath of emancipation, miscegenation acquired a political currency that was perhaps unprecedented. During Reconstruction, states passed stricter antimiscegenation statutes. […] This fixation on imagined sexual trespasses revealed the degree to which the integrity and security of whiteness depended upon Black subjugation. The commingling of the races as putative equals within the body politic threatened the integrity of both races — the mongrelization of the white race and/or the engulfment of freed blacks by the white race due to Saxon superiority. Thus the proximity and intimacy of Black and white bodies deemed proper or appropriate under the social relations of slavery became menacing in the aftermath of emancipation. [...] The production of a miscegenation crisis facilitated the classification and control of blacks as a subjugated population.
As individual Black slaves were granted the freedom of self-possession, more emphasis was placed on apartheid measures: the filtering and channeling of the Black race (as the slave race) apart from the white race (as master race) by increasingly elaborate codes of conduct. If individuals assigned to the Black race failed to conduct themselves properly, they could be lynched — subjected to abusus by any member of the white race — in order to prevent contagion and the defilement of the master race by the slave race.
Now, I imagine that some of you are now thinking, “Thankfully, the victories of the civil rights era put an end to the Jim Crow regime.” “Yes, but not so fast!” Michelle Alexander and others have (in)famously written about a New Jim Crow (a.k.a., New Amerikkkan apartheid) that has developed from the Old Jim Crow, undermining the advances of the civil rights movement. Those advances codified laws, rights, and regulations that effectively outlawed lynchings and other extrajudicial practices wherein and whereby whites acting as private citizens belonging to the master race could exercise abusus rights over and against members of the Black slave race in order to protect purity as property of the master race. But what whites can no longer do as private citizens, they remain empowered to do either if they become public officials, or are deputized by public officials to act in the name of public health, public safety, and public order, with the term “public” effectively connoting the white race. The Black race no longer being the race of slaves par excellence but, instead, the race of criminals, delinquents, and underachievers par excellence.
Thus, following the civil rights movement, mass incarceration took off: there was a significant increase in the exercise of abusus rights against blacks being justified as a “public service” by police officers, prison wardens, public prosecutors, child welfare service providers, judges, other law enforcement officials, as well as those deputized (a priori or ex post facto) by such law enforcement officials. Today, blacks as a social category become chattel by being placed under arrest, institutionalized, or otherwise made into “wards of the state”. The (deputized) public official is authorized to exercise abusus rights over Black “wards of the state” as long as they are able to cast their exercise of abusus rights as a public service, without any explicit reference to the existence of a “slave race”, but instead with reference to a statistical population having a greater likelihood to exhibit criminal or delinquent behaviors. In practice, this has meant that anyone and everyone can, by proxy, potentially exercise abusus rights with (dis)respect to blacks as a social category by “snitching” and reporting Black persons to the police or another civil administrative agency, as public nuisances, public health threats, or public safety threats.
Emancipation and civil rights both turned on the dismally limited Western conception of freedom as self-possession, and the violence that such a conception of freedom takes for granted. There is undoubtedly a degree of salvation to be found in emancipation, which has kept individual white masters from legally owning and abusing individual Black slaves, and a degree of salvation to be found in civil and human rights, which has kept whites as private citizens from citing the need to prevent defilement of the white master race by the Black slave race in order to justify their abuses of Black people. But let us not overlook the fact that emancipation and civil rights have their limits. These limits are rendered cruelly apparent to us by and through the effects of the reigning paradigm of policing. In a profound text titled “The Avant-Garde of White-Supremacy”, Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton deftly articulate the post-civil rights era refiguration of chattel-slavery by way of this paradigm:
[The police] prowl, categorizing and profiling, often turning those profiles into murderous violence without (serious) fear of being called to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realization that they are simply people working a job, a job they secured by making an application at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in the first place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect.
But they do more than prowl. They make problematic the whole notion of social responsibility such that we no longer know if the police are responsible to the judiciary and local administration or if the city is actually responsible to them, duty bound by impunity itself. [...] While the police wreak havoc on the lives of those they assault, exercising a license implicit in and extending racial profiling, they engage in a vital cultural labor. On the one hand, racial profiling enables those unprofiled (the average white man and white women who are linked to one) to ignore the experience of social dislocation that profiling produces. They may recognize the fact of profiling itself, but they are free from the feeling of dread. Indeed, profiling creates insouciance in an atmosphere of organized violence. Official discourse seeks to accustom us to thinking about state violence as a warranted part of the social order. For them the security of belonging accompanies the re-racialization of whiteness as the intensification of anti-blackness. The police elaborate the grounds for the extension of a renewed and reconfigured white supremacist political economic order. On the other hand, there is terror and the police are its vanguard. [...] One cannot master [this terror], regardless of the intimacy or longevity of one’s experience with it. One can only sense its frightening closeness as a probability, as serial states of brutality or derogation. The dread and suffering of those in the way of these repeated spasms of violence is always here and always on the horizon.
Going further and digging deeper, we need to recognize that all of the above speaks to a reality beyond the refiguration of chattel-slavery through the paradigm of policing within one particular New World slave state. For what are the “humanitarian intervention” and the “development aid project” if not the exemplars of the paradigm of policing writ large on the world stage?
The ignorability of police and civil administrative impunity within the United Settler States has its counterpart in the ignorability of the impunity of the international peacekeeping forces and the philanthropic organizations that conduct “humanitarian interventions” and “development aid projects” in the “outlaw states” and “burdened societies” of Africa — with Africa being home to 34 of the 50 poorest states, many of whom are, effectively, “wards” of the administrative organs of the “international public”. Similar to how police and civil administrative impunity in the United Settler States effectively serves to maintain the Black race as the slave race by another name, as the “criminal” or “delinquent” race, the impunity of the peacekeeping forces and the philanthropic organizations participating in “humanitarian interventions” and “development aid projects” in Africa effectively serves to maintain Africa as the land of the socially dead by another name, the dark continent of “failed” and “fragile” states.
What’s more, many Black Africans today, fleeing extreme poverty in their homelands, undertake perilous journeys to wealthier, whiter nations, where police and civil administrations are licensed to profile them as “illegal immigrants” and to exercise abusus rights over and against them as a public service in the name of immigration and customs enforcement.
All of this forms the basis for a global apartheid that turns on “pass laws” that distinguish between whites, blacks, and coloreds by using nationality as a proxy for race. Today’s ever more bureaucratized and militarized border regimes effectively serve to maintain the privileges of those who have citizenship or legal residency in the wealthier, whiter nations of Empire — the caveat being that a greater degree of global mobility is granted to a select few from the poorer colored and Black nations of the periphery who are considered to be good prospects for facilitating outflows of financial, human, and natural resources from the poorer Black and colored periphery to the wealthier, whiter core, where so much ill-gotten wealth is being amassed and enjoyed.
Those whose nationalities are approximate blackness endure the worst and most discriminatory treatment under these bureaucratized and militarized border regimes. Police, judicial, and penal practices in all of the wealthier, whiter core nations of Empire converge in that they are applied with special diligence and severity to persons of non-white phenotypes, who are easily spotted and made to bend to the police and the judiciary, to the point that one may speak of a veritable process of criminalization of “immigrants” in general, and of Black immigrants in particular, with Black peoples being the first to be spotted for having been cast as the exemplars of the non-white phenotype.
III. Abolition
Against the “burdened individuality” of freedom as self-possession, abolitionists today are striving to realize communistic ideals and practices of freedom — that is, freedom from any and all forms of violence that would force people to give more than they are able, while being given less than what they need. To put a positive spin on it, abolitionists today are striving to (re-)construct a world in which everyone is free to give no more than they are able to give, and to receive as much as they need to live and thrive — a world in which there are no chattel-slaves, no slave-masters, no wage-slaves, and no capitalists.
To function as a chattel-slave is to be dispossessed of one’s person, denied what one needs in order to live and thrive, and forced to endure injury by having to do more than one is able.
To function as a slave-master is to possess and exercise abusus rights over chattel-slaves; it is to have the freedom to demand that the chattel-slave do injury to themself by doing more than they are able, and to have the freedom to deny the chattel-slave what they need in order to live and thrive.
To function as a self-possessed wage-slave (or a so-called “free laborer” or “worker”) is to have the freedom to do injury to oneself by demanding more of oneself than one is able and, in addition, to have the freedom to deny oneself what one needs in order to live and thrive. The self-possessed wage-slave is not, in fact, free to give no more than they are able and to receive as much as they need. Rather, to the contrary, the wage-slave is only free to exploit themself unto sickness and death. Given that the wage-slave must sell their usus and fructus rights to others in order to earn a living, all that the wage-slave retains for themself is their abusus rights. Ay, and here’s the rub, the wage-slave struggling to make a living is often forced to exercise their abusus rights over their own person by obligating themself to do more than what they are able and to receive less than what they need.
To function as a capitalist is to be self-possessed but, instead of being forced to make a living by selling your usus and fructus rights to others, the capitalist makes a living buying others’ usus and fructus rights and by investing in and lending money to other capitalists, slave-masters, and underpaid or unemployed wage-slaves. The capitalist only ever exercises their abusus rights over their own person in order to demonstrate and enjoy freedom as self-possession as a privilege, unlike the wage-slave who must exercise does so in order to make a living.
The capitalist/wage-slave relation cannot be disentangled from the slave-master/chattel-slave relation, for the latter is the libidinal economic condition of possibility for the former. The existence of the slave-master/chattel-slave relation is what makes it possible for us to conceive of and desire freedom as self-possession and, thus, to conceive of and desire the capitalist/wage-slave relation one we can enter into freely.
Going further and digging deeper, the specific slave-master/chattel-slave relations that condition capitalist/wage-slave relations today, in our deathly world of suffering, are entangled with anti-Black racism. The formations of biopolitical-economy during modernity were such that Black peoples were de jure and de facto the premiere chattel-slaves between the 16th century and the 19th century. Ay, and following the “non-events” of emancipation, decolonization, civil rights and human rights legislation, we find that, today, an anti-Black paradigm of policing, writ large in the form of a global apartheid regime, has refigured the former slave race as the criminal and delinquent race and refigured the ancestral homelands of the former slave race as outlaw and burdened states. Police and other civil administrators, intra-nationally and inter-nationally, are employed to prowl, categorize and profile Black people as delinquents, strip them of their autonomy, and to make them into “wards” of public institutions.
The social roles of the chattel-slave, the slave-master, the wage-slave, and the capitalist are today upheld by the existence of police and the prisons that the police are tasked with filling. It is no wonder that the Tiqqun collective writes in its “Preliminaries to any Struggle against Prisons”,
The function of prison in the overall economy of servitude is to materialize the false distinction between criminals and non-criminals, between law-abiding citizens and delinquents. This “purpose” is as much social as it is psychic. It is the imprisonment and torture of the prisoner that produces the citizen’s feeling of innocence. Thus, as long as the criminal aspect of all existence under Empire is not acknowledged, the need to punish and to see punished will persist, and every argument against prison will continue to miss the mark.
What needs to be added is this: Any and every argument against prison will continue to miss the mark if it doesn’t also recognize that Black peoples are everywhere distinguished as the criminal and delinquent race par excellence for having first been brought into being by Western social invention as the slave race par excellence. Ay, and the exemplary “global citizen” is the rich white man for having been brought into being by the very same artifice as the exemplary slave master and capitalist. It is not just the imprisonment and torture of delinquents in general, but of Black delinquents in particular, anywhere and everywhere they are to be found across the globe, that produces the global citizen’s feeling of innocence and, even more importantly, a willingness to accept the dismally limited Western conception of freedom as self-possession.
No wonder that the slogans Black Lives Matter and All Cops Are Bastards appeal globally to radicals struggling to realize communistic ideals and practices of freedom. Given the genesis and structure of our world, to struggle for communistic ideals and practices of freedom is to struggle for the abolition of (self-)possession; to struggle for the abolition of (self-)possession is to struggle for the abolition of anti-Black racism; and to struggle for the abolition of anti-Black racism is to struggle for the abolition of the policing and prisons.
