Exh ap 1
“The entanglements of bondage and liberty shaped the liberal imagination of freedom, fueled the emergence and expansion of capitalism, and spawned proprietorial conceptions of the self. This vexed genealogy of freedom plagued the great” Saidiya Hartman
The longstanding and intimate affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy that was/is separate from the sanctity of property and proprietorial notions of the self. Saidiya Hartman
“Furthermore, Afro-pessimist analysis exposes the often unacknowledged ways that radical movements perpetuate anti- Black racism. One such way is in the rhetoric repeatedly used that takes an assumed (historically oppressed) subject at its center—e.g., workers or women
This conflates experience with existence and fails to acknowledge the incommensurate ontologies between, for instance, white women and Black women. To speak in generalities, of simply workers or women, is to speak from a position of anti-Blackness, for the non-racialized subject is the white, or at least non-Black, subject. For this reason, movements against capitalism, patriarchy, or gender mean unfortunately little if they don’t elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and if they don’t unqualifiedly seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness.
This is not to privilege anti- Black racism on a hierarchy of oppression, but to assert—against the disparaging lack of analysis—the unlivability of life for Blacks over centuries of social death and physical murder, perpetuated (at varying times) by all non-Black subjects in society.”
“ Afro-pessimism can also be used to critique prevalent liberal discourses around community, accountability, innocence, and justice. Such notions sit upon anti-Black foundations and only go so far as to reconfigure, rather than abolish, the institutions that produce, control, and murder Black subjects.12 Take for example the appeal to innocence and demand for accountability, too frequently launched when someone Black is killed by police.
“The discourse of innocence operates within a binary of innocent/ guilty, which is founded on the belief that there is an ultimate fairness to the system and presumes the state to be the protector of all. This fails to understand the state’s fundamental investment in self-preservation, which is indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of capital.
The discourse goes that if someone innocent is killed, an individual (the villainous cop) must be held accountable as a solution to this so-called injustice.
The structural reality of anti-Black violence is completely obfuscated and justice is mistook as a concept independent from anti-Blackness. Discrimination is indeed tragic, but systematic dispossession and murder is designedly more—it is the justice system—and no amount of imprisoned cops, body cameras or citizen review boards will eliminate this.”
CS “ CSS: Well, the antagonism according to the Marxists is that between capitalist and worker. Would you agree that the essential antagonism in social relations and political relations is in fact between capitalist on the one side and worker on the other”
“ FW: No. All of my work is an interrogation of that assumptive logic. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that I have left Marxism. I’m sometimes misunderstood to be saying that the cognitive map that Marx gives us should be thrown out. That’s not what I’m saying.
How do you throw out a cognitive map that explains political economy so well? What I’m saying is that in Das Kapital vol. I, Marx has two opportunities to think the relation between the slave and everyone else and each of those opportunities presents him with a kind of paradox, a conundrum; and instead of meditating on that he bounces off of it and continues to posit that the world is out of joint because there is a dichotomy between haves and have-nots, because there’s a dichotomy between those who accumulate capital and those who work for a wage.
What I’m saying is that his hit on the slave and then bouncing off of that are a disavowal of the nature of the slave relation, which is symptomatic of the problems in political organizing and political thought on the Left. I’m saying that the antagonism in Das Kapital should be relegated to a conflict because there is an aspect of the thinking which presents itself with a coherent way out.
The slave/non-slave, or the Black/human relation, presents us with a structural dynamic which cannot be reconciled and which does not have a coherent mode of redress.”
“ FW: One of our claims is that Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness—that is a very controversial claim; that claim is actually the fault line right now of African and Black Studies across the country, the claim that Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart.
But I can’t argue against everyone who disagrees with that right now.
If you take that move and you take out property relations—someone who’s owned by someone else—you take that out of the definition of slavery and you take out forced labor, and if you replace that with social death and those three constituent elements, what you have is a continuum of slavery-subjugation that Black people exist in and 1865 is a blip on the screen.
It is not a paradigmatic moment, it is an experiential moment, which is to say that the technology of enslavement simply morphs and shape shifts—it doesn’t end with that.
Well, the master is everyone else, whites and their junior partners, which in my book are colored immigrants. It’s just that colored immigrants exist in an intra-human status of degradation in relation to white people. They are degraded as humans, but they still exist paradigmatically in that position of the human.
So yes, I am saying that. Now part of the reason is that one of the things that we are not doing is talking about the different ways in which different Black people live their existence as slaves. I’m willing to do that, but what’s interesting to me is the kind of anxiety that this theory elicits from people other than yourself. I mean this is the calmest conversation that I’ve had on this subject [laughter]. You could say to someone that you are a professor at UC Berkeley and there is a person in a sweatshop on the other side of the Rio Grande.
This person in the sweatshop is working sixteen hours a day, cannot go to the bathroom, dies on the job from lack of medical benefits... and you are a kind of labor aristocrat. And they could say, “Okay, well that’s interesting.” And you could say to that person,
‘But if you read the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian communist, you come to understand that even though you live your life as a proletarian differently than a sweatshop laborer, you both stand in relation to capital in this same way, at the level of structural, paradigmatic arrangement.’ That person would say, ‘Oh yeah! I get that, I get that.’ You say to someone that all Blacks are slaves and that we’re going to change the definition of slavery because the other things are not definitions, they are actually anecdotes, and your teacher in third grade told you that you don’t use an anecdote to define something.
And that person says, ‘Oh wait a minute, I know a person who’s richer than me and also Black and they live in the Tenderloin...’ and it just goes off to the races. It’s a symptomatic response primarily because they understand that what Black people suffer is real and comprehensive but there is actually no prescriptive, rhetorical gesture which could actually write a sentence about how to redress that. Most Americans, most people in the world, are not willing to engage in a paradigm of oppression that does not offer some type of way out. But that is what we live with as Black people every day.”
CSS: Let me take us on what sounds like a bit of a detour, but I think it will help you clarify certain concepts that you’re forwarding, and that’s to go to Antonio Gramsci’s work and think about a word that he had a very specific definition of, which is “hegemony.” And of course Gramsci, coming out of the Marxist tradition, was very interested in workers and capital and the struggle between capitalists and workers, although he was also interested in a lot of other things. What did Gramsci mean by the word hegemony?
FW: In 1922 Antonio Gramsci was working for the Comintern and he asked Lenin the following question: “How did you create this successful revolution and I can’t get it off the ground in Italy?” Lenin said, “Well there is no trough of civil society between our working class and the command modality of capitalism, the violent manifestations of the capitalist state.
We go on strike and the Cossacks come out.” And Gramsci began to theorize: between working class suffering and state violence and state institutionality there’s this thing called civil society which captivates the workers—in other words, induces a kind of spontaneous consent to the values of capital. Guild associations, schools—today it would be talk shows, but not this talk show of course [laughter]—and he began to theorize that what Lenin meant by hegemony, which is the domination of imperialist countries over countries that are trying to evolve into a kind of revolutionary dispensation, is different than what he needed to develop his theory of hegemony and so he came up with three constituent elements: influence, leadership, and consent. By influence, leadership, and consent he means the influence of
Consent is never a constituent element of the slave relation. If only Marx had picked up on this, but he says in Capital that he doesn’t understand the slave to exist in a relation of pure force but then he moves away from that. So, why is that?
Well, one of the things that Orlando Patterson points out is that any stratified society—by that he means for example a capitalist society—only comes into being through a kind of pre-history of violence—the violence that it takes to move from feudalism to capitalism.
But once the state of capitalism is set up the violence goes into remission. But then he goes on to say that what’s interesting about the slave estate—the slave estate is actually a phrase from the Black feminist Hortense Spillers—or the slave relation is that the violent pre-history of the slave relation carries over and becomes the concurrent dynamic of the current history of slavery.
And that is really, really profound. It is so profound, that it’s traumatic and painful even for Black politicos and Black writers and you see the pain of that coming through in slave narratives. In the film Twelve Years a Slave, there’s a lot of narrative energy put into making sense of how and why Edwin Epps beats his concubine, Patsy, and why his wife wants him to beat her.
So it kind of looks like ordinary sadism and jealousy on the wife’s part and so it actually almost becomes a sort of sick love triangle. Alright, put the film away. Pick up the book and what you find is that the violence against the slaves in the book that became the movie actually has no utility, it has no rationale.
For instance between a place like Berkley and San Jose there were about four hundred plantations—I know because my father is from one of those plantations—and you have what I would call a bacchanal of pleasure, not a kind of utilitarian need to extract work or obedience out of people, number one. Number two, what you find is that the families on these plantations all participate in the regular beating of slaves—children, wives, husbands... It sustains the psychic health of the people in the first ontological instance. In the second instance, it gets good sugar cane production out of them—and that could even be questioned.
CSS: I hear that and I think that prompts me to ask the final thing I want to bring up with you which is regarding how we hear a lot about groups and people who are victims. There is this victimhood frame and so these people have been victimized by, let’s say, another group of people and then the critique is that, by focusing on that, by concentrating on that, you then deflect attention away from their subjectivity, from their agency, from what they can do about their circumstance. Are you concerned that the master/slave relation, which is positioning Blacks as foremost a victim, in my mind, and then focusing only or mainly on a group status as victim, tends to deny—and we’re speaking here now about Blacks—the kind of agency, I think you would admit, that they have at least some semblance of ? And maybe some more than others based on their position in society?
FW: I don’t agree with that and we don’t have the time to actually get into this, but my book, Red, White and Black, is a critique of agency as a generic category. What I’m saying is that, okay, I’m not Elijah Mohammed, I don’t believe that the white man is the devil and that this is all divined by god. I do believe that there is a way out.
But I believe that the way out is a kind of violence so magnificent and so comprehensive that it scares the hell out of even radical revolutionaries. So, in other words, the trajectory of violence that Black slave revolts suggest, whether it be in the 21st century or the 19th century, is a violence against the generic categories of life, agency being one of them. That’s what I meant by an epistemological catastrophe.
Marx posits an epistemological crisis, which is to say moving from one system of human arrangements and relations to another system of human relations and arrangements. What Black people embody is the potential for a catastrophe of human arrangements writ large. I think that there have been moments—the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s and 1980s is a prime example—of how the political violence of the Black Liberation Army far outpaced the anti-capitalist and internationalist discourse that it had and that’s what scares people; and as Saidiya Hartman says, “A Black revolution makes everyone freer than they actually want to be.”
A Marxist revolution blows the lid off of economic relations; a feminist revolution blows the lid off patriarchal relations; a Black revolution blows the lid off the unconscious and relations writ large.(though there was black revolutions that Frank Wilderson ignores like here)
“ Afro Pessimism says that blacks people are excluded from the shared notion of humanity, regardless of social station, affiliation or proficiency.
Question: Why are the theorists under consideration [in this seminar] called “Afro-Pessimists,” and what characteristics do they have in common?
“Afro-Pessimists are framed as such…because they theorize an antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e. they perform a kind of ‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists argue] that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously, hence without former transgression, and the even if the means of repression change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself. Finally (and this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white person), a lot of repression happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the white person…
Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the world as we know it comes an end…); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist relational-schema] would be seen as the only true antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender would take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological).”
Though this is balanced out by this:
A core group of anti-racist scholars pretty much exceptionalize anti-black racism as something that is qualitatively different deeper, different and worse than any other form of racism based on some truly unique misreadings of Fanon mostly.
This results in a view that any other oppression ends up being secondary to the master - slave relation between blacks and virtually everyone else (You can't go full Manichaeism!). So it's used to suggest things like "you can't be racist against white people", "Palestinians aren't really facing as hard and essential racism as blacks" and other really similar ideas.
This reflects very well the class positioning of the intellectuals-academics that came up with it. By making their own condition exceptional (within the many racisms that different minorities experience) they pretty much make their own views exceptional and in the very competitive and individualistic middle class, some other minority group ascending as an equally valid view within post-colonial studies etc that they do, would create many competitors for their position and in essence their class position.
Counter counter point: Anti-black racism and skin-color-based slavery in the US has obviously had a huge and particular influence on US history, culture, law including on the descendants of slaves in the US. It’s a formative and important responsibility for BIPOC and especially African Americans to it fix.
Applying that meaning or importance to what anyone in the US thinks about Koreans or wealthy Hindu computer programmers who run Google and Verizon is absolutely misguided
The CRT like legal liberalism examines issues of race, racism, and equality by focusing on the exclusion and marginalization of those subjects and bodies marked as different and/or inferior. The disadvantage of this approach is that the proposed remedies and correctives to the problem like inclusion, protection, and greater access of opportunity—don’t ultimately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth claims or interrogate the exclusions constitutive of the norm but instead seek to gain equality, liberation, and redress within its confines.
When we examine the history of racial formation in the United States, it is evident that liberty, property, and whiteness were inextricably enmeshed. Racism was central to the expansion of capitalist relations of production, the organization, division, and management of the laboring classes, and the regulation of the population through licensed forms of sexual association and conjugal unions and through the creation of an internal danger to the purity of the body public.
Whiteness was a valuable and exclusive property essential to the integrity of the citizen-subject and the exemplary self-possession of the liberal individual.
Although emancipation resulted in a decisive shift in the relation of race and status, black subordination continued under the aegis of contract. In this regard, the efforts of Southern states to codify blackness in constitutions written in the wake of abolition and install new measures in the law that would secure the subordination of freed black people demonstrate the prevailing disparities of emancipation. The discrepant production of blackness, the articulation of race across diverse registers of subjection, and
Notwithstanding the dissociation of the seemingly inviolable imperial body of property resulting from the abolition of slavery and the uncoupling of the master-and-slave dyad, the breadth of freedom and the shape of the emergent order were the sites of intense struggle in everyday life. The absolute dominion of the master, predicated on the annexation of the captive body and its standing as the “sign and surrogate” of the master’s body, yielded to an economy of bodies, yoked and harnessed, through the exercise of autonomy, self-interest, and consent.
The use, regulation, and management of the body no longer necessitated its literal ownership since self-possession effectively yielded modern forms of bonded labor. However, as Marx observed with notable irony, the pageantry of liberty, equality, and consent enacted within this veritable Eden of rights underwent a radical transformation after the exchange was made, the bargain was struck, and the contract was signed.
The transactional agent appeared less as the self-possessed and willful agent than as “someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect—but a tanning.”10 Although no longer the extension and instrument of the master’s absolute right or dominion, the laboring black body remained a medium of others’ power and representation
case. In ‘The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy’, Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton claim that Marxist approach oaches treat racism as merely a divide-and-conquer strategy for class struggle and super exploitation, and that Marxists fail to understand that racism – and anti-Blackness in particular – is not an ideology that can be refuted but is rather ‘fundamental to class relations themselves’.
Wilderson’s ‘Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society’ advances a similar critique, arguing that the Black/Slave poses an insoluble problem for the Gramscian discourse on race, since it is not wage labour exploitation but ‘the despotism of the unwaged relation’ that drives anti-Black racism. For Wilderson this discourse fails to think anything other than capitalism as the ‘base’ structure, from which other superstructural phenomena such as racism emerge.
Marxists have thus failed to recognise that ‘Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent’ and that it is ‘as close to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation’. The Black/Slave blows apart key assumptions in Marxist thought, which renders it useless to for the analysis of the afterlife of slavery; this is the ‘scandal of historical materialism’.
counterpoint : “But Wilderson’s and Sexton’s critique of Marxism is shallow at best. In volume one of Capital, Marx clearly states that ‘the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins’ signalled ‘the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’. In a letter to Russian literary critic Pavel Vasilyyevich Annenkov, Marx also writes that:
“We are not dealing here with indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat, we are dealing with direct slavery, the slavery of Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern states of North America”
Marx makes a clear distinction between slave labour and wage labour, refusing to conflate both in the category of the proletarian. In the specific case of the United States, he believed that the worker’s movements had been paralysed by the existence of slave labour and their inability to adequately address it.
In Capital, he writes, ‘labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’ The possibility of a unified proletarian revolution thus relies on the abolition of slavery.
While this may sound as if Marx’ is theorising race as merely a divide and conquer strategy, as many critics have accused him of doing, there is an entire discourse within Marxism that has taken seriously the role that the racial plays in structuring social formations in the Americas.
Instead of going back to what Marx did or didn’t say about slavery, however, it may be more constructive to ask in what ways transatlantic slavery forces us to rethink the fundamental categories of Marxist political economy.
Another counterpoint is that anti Afro Pessimism writer Robin Blackburn and other historians of slavery draw on Cedric Robinson’s concept of ‘racial capitalism’, which can be used to refute the claim that slaveness and Africanness are one and the same.
In Black Marxism , Cedric Robinson argues that racism was already present in Western civilisation prior to the flourishing of Capitalism. Thus, Capitalism and racism grew together from the old order to produce the ‘racial capitalism’ characteristic of the modern world.
A new world system that relied on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide for its continued expansion.
The value of Cedric Robinson’s work lies in Robinson’s ability to uncover the contingent relationship between slavery and Blackness: he argues that early European proletarians were racialised subjects from oppressed groups, such as the Irish, Jews, Roma or Slavs, who were victims of dispossession, colonialism and slavery within Europe.
With the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade, new notions of difference emerged, based on more aggressively racialised conceptions, that were used to justify the political economy of slavery. For Robinson, white supremacy masked itself as an economic rationale, which in turn organised racial hierarchies, with the production of cotton at its core. As Chris Chen writes in ‘The Limit Points of Capitalist Equality’,
counter counterpoint: Even anti Afro Pessimism writer Robin Blackburn acknowledges that New World slavery was more than just a divide and conquer strategy; Blackburn said that it represented an intensification and racialization of prior forms of slavery.
Like early African or Roman slavery, chattel slavery was based on the idea that a person could be bought and sold. But unlike previous techniques, the New World version institutionalized slavery and made it hereditary. Once a person had been enslaved, it was highly likely that their descendants would continue to exist in a relation of bondage. Capitalist imperialism out of Europe is built upon an inherently racially (white) supremacist foundation. I believe that it could have burst out of Africa as well, but with the foundation of black supremacy instead.
Europeans are not inherently more evil than other people, and had capitalist imperialism started elsewhere, it would've been just as brutal
Afro Pessimism claims that movements against capitalism, patriarchy, or gender mean unfortunately little if they don’t elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and if they don’t unqualifiedly seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness
Importantly though, rather than a fixed ideology, Afro-pessimism is better looked at as a theoretical lens for situating relations of power, at the level of the political and the libidinal.
Libidinal economy – the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification, of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias—the whole structure of psychic and emotional life—that are unconscious and invisible but that have a visible effect on the world, including the money economy. See Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms and Chico, cosmic hoboes in “Further Reading.” [All further references here will be listed in “Further Reading” unless otherwise noted.]
Afro Pessimism says that Antiblackness is a body of critical literature that deals with structural oppression on the black body.
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