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The author explores two metaphysical errors in the Marxist understanding of wage labor and plantation slavery. The source of the first problem is the Hegelian repertoire of concepts for a dialectical schema of history. The second problem is Orientalism, as it implies a contrast at the extremes between the wage laborer and the Asian communal slave, between freedom and unfreedom-thereby building freedom into the very definition of wage labor.
Key Words: Wage Labor, Slavery, Freedom, Orientalism
The relationship between slavery and capitalism remains vexed. Debate remains focused on how pivotal it proved in early capitalist development. Eric Williams's arguments have been defended and developed. But even one of the strongest defenders of his modified thesis, Joseph lnikori (2002), has assumed a modal difference between slavery and capitalism by posing the question as one of the contribution of slavery to the growth of wage labor in the mother countries. In this short essay, I want to consider obstacles to understanding capitalist plantation slavery as itself a form of wage labor. In particular, I want to demonstrate how logicist and Orientalist assumptions have led to an ossified understanding of wage labor in the Marxian tradition.
I have elsewhere defended my adoption of Jairus Banaji's understanding of wage labor as that condition of vulnerability in which the means of production and means of life are confronted as alien personifications, and advanced only on the condition that the dependent worker create surplus value for this alien personification. Such an understanding of wage labor throws into relief its enslaved nature. It allows the deconstruction of the modal difference between capitalism and modern plantation slavery, revealing the former's basis in enslavement and the disguised nature of wage labor in the latter. Wage labor would seem to be a freer form of dependent labor than serfdom and slavery, but appearance of a formally free exchange dissolves from the perspective of the totality. Individual workers may seem to enjoy choice and freedom, but once we consider capital as a self-renewing totality, there is no real mutual exchange at all, for the capitalists as a whole are merely returning in the form of a wage a portion of the new value which they have simply appropriated without equivalent. The working class as a...