Abolishing capitalism directly trades off with emancipation

When Marx does turn to the disintegration of the clan (gens) and the consolidation of kin-centered households (oikos), he centralizes tensions associated with rank and hierarchy already present in the primitive commune (Dunayevskaya, 1991: 180). It is in these tensions that we can grasp his speculative foray into barter as liminal zones where communities encounter each other in difference; it is also in mediating this difference that slaves play a pivotal role, not through repression, as in Engels, but in absentia, as the “n’est pas” of capitalism (Marriott, 2021: 19). If money masks the impossibility of commensurability, and labor and race ground the conditions for commensurability exemplified in freedom, slavery is not-capital by marking the space of incommensurability itself, encrypting nonsubstantialism in the heart of exchange. The integration of slavery into the story of money and subjectivity can work as a wedge to expose the origins of money in violence but necessarily makes slavery a vehicle for other concerns, which is precisely the problem of slavery. Understanding (and abolishing) capitalism—developing substantive conditions of freedom through a determinate negation of capitalist subjectivity—comes at the cost of understanding (and abolishing) slavery and the absolute negation it secrets.

Sohn-Rethel’s historical and textual medley, including both Engels and Thomson the classicist, is one telling example of how this cost is subjectified. Because Sohn-Rethel derives money from immediate commodity exchange, his rendering of transcendental subjectivity remains “external to the actual social mediation” (the social activity of labor) and instead migrates to the private abstract mind (Engster and Schlaudt, 2018: 293). While appearing to historicize philosophical categories, Sohn-Rethel diverges from Marx’s logical reconstruction, leaving the specificity of production and abstract labor underdetermined. In this way Sohn-Rethel expresses the other side of a premonetary theory of value: “not a labor abstraction but an exchange abstraction” (Postone, 1996: 178). It is ultimately the “real abstraction operating in exchange” that unites, for Sohn-Rethel, “the birth of philosophy in Greek society of slave-labour, and of the birth of modern science in European society based on wage-labour” (2020: 23). The exchange a priori would seem to locate the condition of transcendental subjectivity in a non-historical unification of slavery and wage-labor. But slave labor has historical movement in Sohn-Rethel too, movement whose consequences for subjectivity remain unspecified. Though arguing that “monied wealth” “did not spring from the land or from the workshops of manual producers,” Sohn-Rethel adds one addendum: “at least not before these were replaced by slaves, who themselves became the source of commodities for exchange” (2020: 85). Here we can deduce that by replacement, SohnRethel means the effect of Solonian reforms, though his only reference to Solon concerns the lawmaker’s success in “separating society from nature and presenting it as a moral order based on obligations peculiar to man” (at which point he cites Thomson’s The First Philosophers) (2020: 59). Slaves become a disrupting force in Sohn-Rethel’s efforts to keep production and circulation separate, despite his nod to money-begetting slavery and its role in history. By repressing the contemporaneity of capitalism, rejecting its unity of production and exchange in favor of the latter, Sohn-Rethel also represses the contemporaneity between slavery and labor as a feature of the material-social conditions of possibility for transcendental subjectivity as such.

In this respect, slavery’s status as a relic can indicate a certain truth behind commensurability: the emergent social ontology implicit in theories of subjectivity. “For the historicalmaterialist text and the liberal text,” Denise Ferreira da Silva writes, “equality presupposes liberty—that is, ‘wage labor’ comes into a condition of equality in the market because the market is (first and foremost) free to sell it as any other commodity over which it has a claim as private property” (2022: 212). Money, differently put, promises freedom, the freedom that comes from “the proprietor of labour-power” selling their time, in Marx’s famous words,

for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. (1990: 271)

This promise—the difference between selling oneself and selling one’s time for a limited period—is another way of composing the achievement of the unity of circulation and production: where exchange has not seized on production, “the property-relation conceals the slave’s labour for himself.” Where production depends on the indifference to labor, however, “the money-relation conceals the uncompensated labour of the wage-labourer” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 232; Marx, 1990: 680). In the gap between the obvious property relations of slavery and the subtleties and niceties reflected in the monetary theory of value also comes the possibility for (Marxist) critique: the exploitation that formal freedom both enables and veils becomes the locus of liberatory imaginaries.

But what if what the money-relation conceals is not (only) the uncompensated labor of the worker—what if the money-relation sets off on its social history by concealing the immanent effect of its circuit (racial slavery, on the one hand, transcendental subjectivity, on the other) and the source of its anxiety (anti-blackness)? From this speculative adjustment we might deduce that behind the money-form is not a slave waiting to be paid but a non-substantialist slave who cannot appear—a slave who, remember, “does not come into consideration as engaged in exchange at all.” Slavery’s becoming money-begetting can be considered a prelude to a metamorphosis of slave as object and laborer as subject. In Marxist terms, the “becoming-necessary” of the wage form (Althusser, 2006: 193–194), is undergirded by retaining the wage’s contingency—the laborer being “free in a double sense” (Marx, 1990: 272) to choose otherwise (death). The coherency of the wage relation—the very absence of substance it necessarily comes to circulate—is sustained by the ways slavery stands in for the excesses that money (and race) seeks to overcome.