Marxist analysis is cohered through the exploitation of black subjects. The possibility of worker emancipation operates through a politics of recognition by the world that is inaccessible to blackness.

[28] This is to name the essential limit of Lazzarato's account as the failure to analyze the ways in which the domination of capitalism is constituted by the domination of anti-blackness. In making this claim, I am following Wilderson's argument that "the privileged subject of Marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capital—a wage. In other words, Marxism assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy" (Wilderson 2003: 225). The essential limit of Marxism, he argues, is its theorization of capitalism in terms of "exploitation (rather than accumulation and death)" (Wilderson 2003: 234). Marxism thus begins from and stays within the being of whiteness, a being whose coherence is premised on the denial of the fact that capital "was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a Black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a White body with variable capital" (Wilderson 2003: 230).

[29] The position of the worker, in virtue of its raced difference from the position of the slave, asserts a capacity for analogical relation—even amidst exploitation—with the exploiter. The exploited and the exploiter, despite their asymmetry, share a being that is made through the denial of blackness, which is positioned as the slave; the worker possesses an analogical relation to the owner that the slave does not. To presume that the slave position can be analogized with the worker position is thus to attribute the latter's analogical capacity to the former, which is without analogy. It is to presume an analogy between what is capable of being analogous with what is not: "the ruse of analogy" (Wilderson 2010: 37).

[30] This means, as well, that there can be no question of an intersection between separate but equal spheres of class and anti-black racism, much less of an account that takes up anti-blackness as a means of proceeding toward a supposedly essential antagonism of class. Against such accounts, Wilderson remarks that, within them, "racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy" (Wilderson 2003: 225). On the contrary, what is essential is anti-black racism, or the incommensurability between non-being and being: class division concerns relations between analogizable terms (owner and worker) that, however conflictual or exploitative, presume a common being, a being whose making—and being made coherent—is premised on (the denial of) the real non-being of the slave.

[31] All this is to say that anti-black racial ontology is the condition of possibility for the Marxist demand—central to Lazzarato's own version of autonomist Marxism—for being free from exploitation. As Christina Sharpe remarks: "The legal captivity of Africans and their descendants was central to the codification of rights and freedoms for those legally constituted as white and their legally white descendants. That is, freedoms for those people constituted as white were and are produced through an other's body legally and otherwise being made to wear unfreedom and to serve as a placeholder for access to the freedoms that are denied the black subject" (Sharpe 2010: 15). The being of freedom, or the articulation of a free being – that is, the very link between being and freedom—is premised upon a denial of blackness, or non-being. This is the case even (or especially) when freedom is expressed as a possibility, for such possibility—pertaining only to that which has already emerged as being—cannot articulate that which this emergence denies. As Saidiya V. Hartman remarks, the "language of freedom no longer becomes that which rescues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition" (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185).

[32] Freedom names the modulative, mutational possibilities of being(s). Marxist discourse, however innovative, addresses free beings, or the being of freedom. It leaves unthought non-being, the reality of which is logically prior to all being, and thus to all possibilities of being. It is for this reason that Lazzarato's account of capitalism in terms of debt, while an extremely innovative form of contemporary Marxism, still fails to articulate the essential antagonism of non-being.[17] When Lazzarato speaks of the indebted man, of the "we" of debt inheritance, he is speaking of the position that Marxism ascribes to the worker—instead of a capital-work relation we have, in Lazzarato, a credit-debt relation.[18] Debt innovatively re-defines the meaning of work, but it does not change the positionality of the worker, which remains as the position of the debtor.[19] His critique proceeds in virtue of a link—foreclosed by debt—between being and freedom, without ever articulating that the very possibility of this link is premised on the denial of non-being, on the making of blackness as that which is without the possibility of being free. Lazzarato thereby fails to address how the being of the worker, now the indebted man, is rendered visible by standing out against the background of (black) flesh.[20]