The 1AC is a way to live within capitalism while the alternative is a call for its total eradication and abolition.

A frequent argument made in the European metropoles was that Africans were akin to children who have not and could not attain maturity due to their environmental conditions. This inability to attain autonomy actually legitimized the argument that African slaves were well suited for, or at least reconciled to, their enslavement. The French biologist George Louis Buffon, for example, asserted that African slaves were “easily accustomed to the yoke of servitude,” even if he was unsympathetic to their mistreatment and to the perception that they were accustomed to physical duress.40 Nonetheless, a persistent theme in much of this eighteenth-century literature is that the childlike mind of the African made her enslavement bearable. Saidiya Hartman’s extraordinary work Scenes of Subjection illustrates this in the context of antebellum America. Hartman shows how scenes of “the cheerful laughing Negro,” displayed through the spectacle of song and dance, reflected a normalization of domination on the basis of the enslaved character. As Hartman writes, “The gaze [of the abolitionist witness to the slave coffle] shifts from the spectacle to the inner recesses of feeling and desire—that is, the emotional substrate that presumably resides within the ‘poor slave,’ which mutes the shock of the scene and mitigates its ghastly incommensurability with the suggestion of contentment.”41 In other words, the excessiveness of the violence of enslavement and violent domination is effaced by the diminution of the enslaved person’s sentience. The result, as Hartman writes, is that the separation of fathers and children, the lash, the small irons attaching the enslaved like so many fish upon a trotline, ruthless masters, et cetera, et cetera, although distressing conditions as “we” might imagine them, appear to have little effect on these apparently happy creatures. Songs, jokes, and dance transform wretched conditions into a conspicuous, and apparently convincing, display of contentment. As a result, this circumscribed recognition of black humanity itself becomes an exercise of violence.42 The vast machinery of European imperial commerce that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century was predicated on this nexus between the surplus of violence of lethal domination and a discourse of racialization that legitimated its excesses. Resistance to European domination invariably proliferated across European colonies; this required a whole variety of extraordinarily cruel forms of violent suppression. Moreover, as Mbembe importantly notes, plantations themselves were highly segmented in terms of various roles assigned to Black slaves; some could become the very executioners demanded of them by their white masters: “It was not uncommon for a slave, once freed, to become a slave owner and hunter of fugitive slaves.”43 But the important point to note is that the master-slave relationship was always an unstable one. As Mbembe notes, “The slave master could deploy one form of coercion after another, create chains of dependence between him and his slaves, and alternate between terror and generosity, but his existence was always haunted by the specter of extermination.”44 This “specter of extermination” materialized in the Haitian Revolution of August 1791 when Dutty Boukman signaled its commencement with the ceremony in the Bois Caïman.45 It raged until 1804 with the final decimation of Napoleon’s army sent to reimpose slavery. All throughout the intervening years, the Haitian Revolution was the geopolitical center of the Atlantic world, involving French, British, Spanish forces with the sometimes-ambivalent aid by the nascent American Republic. It also involved a complex set of groups (white aristocrats, small white planters, free Blacks, mixed raced, etc.), class conflicts that were not necessarily based upon predetermined racial notions, shifting alliances, and the catastrophic loss of life—anywhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people died (mainly revolutionary, ex-enslaved Haitians). But what is crucial are two aspects that I want to highlight. First, the Haitian Revolution marked the violent manifestation of Black individual autonomy and its codification in the 1801 constitution by Toussaint l’Overture, which enacted the abolition of slavery. Second, in the constitution of Haiti of 1805 enacted by Jacques Dessalines, the Black sovereignty was explicitly stated in Article 1: “The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti.” The Haitian legal order crystalized a novel emancipatory ideal that was entirely absent in American and French Revolutions. In that sense, as Adom Getachew argues, the Haitian Revolution and the establishment of an independent Haitian state reflected an Arendtian event of bringing forth something new in the world: the assertion of Black collective action and autonomy and the universality of equality across race and gender.46 The “Haitian Revolution,” Raphael Hoermann argues, “harboured an ‘alternative modernity,’ which was diametrically opposed to the racialised, colonialist and capitalist North American modernity and thus had to be suppressed.”47 Second, the reaction to this assertion of Black individual and collective autonomy that challenged the framework of European imperial racial domination unleashed an unbounded, if not genocidal avant la lettre, violence. What explains this incredible violence? In what ways did this assertion of Black autonomy redefine ideas about security, danger, and fear that required such unrestrained violence and later significant ostracism of the Haitian Republic? In a letter to Napoleon in 1803, General Leclerc wrote that to maintain French hegemony over the island, “We must destroy all the negroes in the mountains, men and women, sparing only children younger than twelve, destroy half of those who live in the plains, and not leave in the colony a single man of color who has worn an officer’s epaulette.”48 What I wish to explore in the next two sections is this nexus between the claim to Black autonomy and the fears that it evoked, first, in terms of the unrestrained violence that was perceived to be a necessity in conflict between colonial authorities and insurgent Black slaves, and second, in terms of excluding Haiti from the Atlantic order. The so-called “Black fear” came to define a geopolitical disposition in the United States as it achieved hegemony in the western hemisphere.49 Fears of slave uprisings would be a crucial component in American domestic and foreign policy.50 But most importantly, the Haitian Revolution left a lasting legacy in the construction of a global racial order, in which the maintenance and reassertion of white supremacy was considered of crucial consequence. It is when such white supremacy was called into question that a space opens up for unbounded violence—racial violence.