Analyzing blackness through “the worker” results in liberal discourses of “inclusion” into civil society – means worker emancipation can never be black emancipation

Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemony’s gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to the black subject. We live in the world, but exist outside of civil society. This structurally impossible position is a paradox because the black subject, the slave, is vital to civil society’s political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end — black death is its condition of possibility. Civil society’s subaltern, the worker, is coded as waged, and wages are white. But marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the black subject: in Gramsci we have consistent silence.

The black body in the US is that constant reminder that not only can work not be reformed but it cannot be transformed to accommodate all subjects: work is a white category. The fact that millions upon millions of black people work misses the point. The point is we were never meant to be workers; in other words, capital/white supremacy’s dream did not envision us as being incorporated or incorporative. From the very beginning, we were meant to be accumulated and die. Work (i.e. the French shipbuilding industry and bourgeois civil society which finally extended its progressive hegemony to workers and peasants to topple the aristocracy) was what grew up all around us — 20 to 60 million seeds planted at the bottom of the Atlantic, 5 million seeds planted in Dixie. Work sometimes registers as a historical component of blackness, but where whiteness is concerned, work registers as a constituent element. And the black body must be processed through a kind of civil death for this constituent element of whiteness to gain coherence. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, we are still not meant to be workers. We are meant to be warehoused and die.

The U.S. carceral network kills … more blacks than any other ethnic group … [and] constitute[s] an ‘outside’ in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the unassimilable in the hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes for political prisoners. (James, 1996, p. 34)

Work (i.e. jobs for guards in the prison industrial complex and the shot in the arm it gives to faltering white communities — its positive reterritorialisation of White Space and its simultaneous deterritorialisation of Black Space) is what grows up around our dead bodies once again. The chief difference today, compared to several hundred years ago, is that today our bodies are desired, accumulated, and warehoused — like the cows. Again, the chief constant to the dream is that, whereas desire for black labour power is often a historical component to the institutionality of white supremacy, it is not a constituent element.

This paradox is not to be found at the crux of Gramsci’s intellectual pessimism or his optimistic will. His concern is with subjects in a white(ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threatened with the removal of, a wage, be it monetary or social. But black subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci (like most US social movements) has no theory of, or solidarity with, the slave. Whereas the positionality of the worker enables the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the slave exists as a destabilising force within civil society because civil society gains its coherence, the very tabula raza upon which workers and industrialists struggle for hegemony, through the violence of black erasure. From the coherence of civil society the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought but never forgotten spectre waiting in the wings — the understudy of Gramsci’s hegemony.