The Enslaved,the Worker,and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction : Toward an Underdiscipline of Antisociology

Abstract

At the heart of sociology lies a paradox. Sociology recognizes itself as a preeminently modern discipline yet remains virtually silent on what W.E.B. Du Bois identifies as modernity’s “most magnificent drama”: the transoceanic enslavement of Africans. Through a reconsideration of his classic text Black Reconstruction in America, this article offers an answer to the paradox: a profoundly antisocial condition, racial slavery lies beyond the bounds of the social, beyond sociology’s self-defined limits. Consequently, even when actually dealing with racial slavery, social theories—even radical social theories, such as Du Bois’s Marxism—inexorably misrecognize it. Placing the enslavement of Black people at the center of analysis and drawing on the insights of Saidiya Hartman and other radical theorists in Black studies, an underdiscipline of antisociology is proposed as a collective project to provincialize the social and to more adequately account for the incommensurability of antiblackness.

Keywords

antiblackness antisocial antisociology Du Bois Marxism slavery underdiscipline

At a biweekly meeting last summer, a progressive grassroots organization in Springfield, Massachusetts—one that is decidedly working-class and multiracial—conducted a “political education” exercise. It involved 10 volunteers from about 40 people in attendance and 10 chairs. The point of the activity was to demonstrate visually, through the uneven distribution of chairs, the appalling levels of wealth inequality in the United States. For example, the person representing the top 10 percent would, as of 2016, command 8 chairs, while the 8 people representing the bottom 80 percent would all squeeze onto a single chair (Wolff 2017). The exercise had a historical component, which effectively showed how wealth, or chair, inequality had worsened over the past several decades. Then, the workshop took a jarring turn when it attempted to depict wealth distribution under slavery. The 10 volunteers were divided into 6 “enslaved Africans” and 4 slaveholders, and the enslaved somehow occupied three of the chairs, the meaning of which went unexplained. When the organizer leading the exercise asked what the audience took away from comparing the present to the time of slavery, somebody blurted, “We’re worse off now”—to the nodding approval of many, momentary confusion of many others, and dissent by one or two.

In a 2002 interview, responding to a question about his anarchist politics, Noam Chomsky brought up slavery to illustrate that some of his ideas considered radical had been commonplace in the nineteenth century:

In the 1850s, the scale of the popular press, meaning run by the factory girls in Lowell [Massachusetts] and so on, was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. . . . From their point of view, what they called “wage slavery,” renting yourself to an owner, was not very different from the chattel slavery that they were fighting a civil war about. You have to recall that in the mid-nineteenth century, that was a common view in the United States—for example, the position of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s position. It’s not an odd view, that there isn’t much difference between selling yourself and renting yourself. (Chomsky 2002)

Speaking of the nineteenth century, in 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote, in The Condition of the Working Class in England,

The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. ([1845] 1892: 79–80)

For Engels, not only was slavery a thing of the past, but there was essentially no difference between the English worker and the enslaved, treating as trivial the differences in who is selling, who and what is being sold, and under what circumstances. Otherwise similar, Chomsky further narrowed the gap between the worker and the enslaved: whether “renting yourself” or “selling yourself,” you yourself were doing the deed. In the minds of at least some of the Springfield working class of today, the enslaved had been better off than they. Note that all of these voices hail from the left. One can only too easily imagine their counterparts on the right.

Sociology’s Silence

What about sociology? What does sociology have to say about slavery in general and about the relationship between the categories of the worker, or the working class, and of the enslaved in particular? The short answer is nearly nothing. With few exceptions, slavery is not the focus of our investigations. This silence goes on despite the fact that historical sociology and sociology of race are thriving subfields. I mention these two as perhaps the most obvious areas within which we might expect deep engagements, but as I go over the list of the sections of the American Sociological Association, there are not many in which slavery could not and should not be important. Yet, while historians produce scores of monographs on slavery every year, we can hardly name but a few written by sociologists this century.¹ Of course, slavery is frequently mentioned in passing—in the sociology of race, for instance—but it remains mostly in the unanalyzed background, in the theoretical unconscious. Mainly, it functions as an empty counterpoint, as that against which we theorize the present.

The self-evident, and the most charitable, interpretation of our collective silence is that slavery falls outside the proper domain of sociology, even historical sociology. How could that be? After all, sociology claims for itself the widest berth among the social sciences. Unlike political science or economics, for instance, we do not limit ourselves to a particular slice of the social but assume the whole: all social practices, including political and economic ones, fall within our self-assigned purview. But, if “the social is the complex and inescapable ontological ground of our common life as humans,” as William Sewell (2005:369) puts it, how might slavery lie outside the limits of sociology? Here, I find provocative and useful George Steinmetz’s (2016:101–102) recent observation about the social, or in Pierre Bourdieu’s idiom, social space:

It follows that some human practices exist entirely outside of [social space]. . . . For a practice to be outside of social space, as that term is defined by Bourdieu, means to lack control over any and all power or resources. . . . It is . . . crucial for sociology to establish the limits of sociology. . . . Societalization, or the constitution of social space, is a variable condition, a political accomplishment, not a universal feature of human life.

When studying “extreme antisocial situations,” he suggests that we “pay . . . attention” to the limits of the social, and thereby sociology, and nominates slavery as one such situation (Steinmetz 2016: 101–102).

What would properly paying attention mean in the face of “extreme antisocial situations”? To my mind, it cannot be to ignore them, as we have been doing with regard to slavery. It also cannot be to unreflexively domesticate such situations into normal social science (Kuhn 1962). For example, quite typically but more explicitly than most, one recent, award-winning theoretical book on race does precisely this with regard to “the racial dictatorships of slavery and Jim Crow,” likewise through an appeal to Bourdieu:

Total domination, as Bourdieu has pointed out, “is a limit never actually reached, even under the most repressive totalitarian regimes. . . . The dominated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force, inasmuch as belonging to a field means by definition that one is capable of producing effects in it” [(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:80, 102)]. (Emirbayer and Desmond 2015:152–53)

The authors, Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, offer slave revolts as a quick illustration of the enslaved’s power, resources, capability of producing effects. In this way, slavery is readily assimilated as something legibly social and thus sociological: “contestation and struggle” between asymmetrically positioned social actors “belonging to a field” (Emirbayer and Desmond 2015:152–53).

I propose that we suspend our impulse to assimilate slavery into the social, as tempting as it might be, and examine it anew, as an extreme antisocial situation. Doing so, I suggest, would reveal its incommensurability and unsettle prevailing concepts and theories, radical as well as mainstream. I explore this potential through a reconsideration of a classic text by W.E.B. Du Bois, the still unsurpassed historical sociologist of race and slavery. Specifically, I think through the category of the enslaved in Black Reconstruction in America, drawing on the insights of Saidiya Hartman and other radical theorists in Black studies. I conclude with a few far-reaching implications for sociology and with a return to the question of the enslaved’s control over resources and capability of producing effects.

The Enslaved, The Worker, and Du Bois’s Marxism

I

In history, Du Bois’s masterwork has effected, if much belatedly, a paradigm shift in the historiographies of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, among others. When it first appeared, Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois [1935] 1998) turned on its head the prevailing interpretation, academic and popular, the latter epitomized by D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. In Du Bois’s book, slavery, not conflicting doctrines of federalism, was the obvious cause of the Civil War, and Reconstruction was the peak moment, not the nadir, of U.S. democracy. Radical Republicans, Andrew Johnson, and the Ku Klux Klan switched places on the right and wrong sides of history. Above all, as indicated by the book’s title, Du Bois placed Black people, long denigrated and disregarded, at the center of the story as active agents. “The North went to war without the slightest idea of freeing the slave,” yet in the course of the war and its aftermath, Black people emancipated themselves and undertook “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world has ever seen” (Du Bois [1935] 1998: 716, 727). Though not initially, these and many other heterodox ideas eventually became conventional wisdom. “Nearly eight decades after its publication,” according to Eric Foner (2013:409), today’s foremost authority on Reconstruction, “it remains one of the landmarks of U.S. historical scholarship.”

In sociology, although we now increasingly claim Du Bois as one of our original leading lights, we have tended to focus on his other works, such as The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and “unjustly ignored” Black Reconstruction, specifically its contributions to historical sociology and social theory (Itzigsohn 2013:177). In this underappreciated political-economic analysis, Du Bois sought to shift the emphasis from the political to the economic: “The whole development of Reconstruction was primarily an economic development, but no economic history or proper material for it has been written. It has been regarded as a purely political matter, and of politics most naturally divorced from industry” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:721–22).

Marxism supplied the necessary theoretical language to make sense of and “establish the Truth” of what had happened (Du Bois [1935] 1998:725). However, though a great admirer of Marx, Du Bois was far from a faithful Marxist, as contemporary leftist reviewers of the book were wont to decry. Black Reconstruction reconstructed Marxism, reshaping it to analyze what Cedric Robinson and others would later identify as racial capitalism. For Du Bois, slavery was capitalist through and through—not merely capitalism’s prehistory of primitive accumulation but the “foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:5). The economic story that he insisted was primary was, in good Marxist fashion, one of classes, but class was always structured by race. As in his succinct discussion of Marxism in the pages of The Crisis a couple of years earlier, Marxist categories—including class struggle, exploitation, proletariat, surplus value, capital, worker, labor, and so on—dotted, and connected the dots in, the narrative of Black Reconstruction. Yet he was clear-eyed about the provincialism of an unmodified Marxism:

We can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century. . . . But it must be modified in the United States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned. (Du Bois [1933] 1995:543)

This is in large part because for “Negro labor,” in addition to “the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system” borne by all laborers, “the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers” (Du Bois [1933] 1995:541).

II

Now, I turn to just one particular aspect of Black Reconstruction: how Du Bois’s reworked Marxism conceptualized the enslaved and their self-emancipation. Introducing the main protagonist, the book’s first chapter, on the enslaved, set the stage for the ensuing drama of their struggle. Here, Robinson (1977:45) captured the import of Du Bois’s initial analytical move:

Now let us pay close attention to what Du Bois was saying. Slavery was the specific historical institution through which the black worker had been introduced to the New World. However, it was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance that these black men, women and children had to American development, but as workers. (His first chapter is entitled “The Black Worker.”) The language of his analysis was quite important to Du Bois. [italics in original]

Du Bois ([1935] 1998:16) conceived of the history of slavery as a part of labor history, the history of the working class: “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor.”

Of the boom in cotton production in the nineteenth century that was at the heart of global capitalism, Du Bois ([1935] 1998:5) discussed the centrality of the enslaved:

The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire. [italics added]

Later in the chapter, he compared the living and working conditions of Black and white “workers,” usually but not always to the disadvantage of the former. For example, Du Bois ([1935] 1998:9) conceded,

The Southerners could say with some justification that when the mass of their field hands were compared with the worst class of laborers in the slums of New York and Philadelphia, and the factory towns of New England, the black slaves were as well off and in some particulars better off.

On the other hand, “Negro slaves in America represented the worst and lowest conditions among modern laborers. One estimate is that the maintenance of a slave in the South cost the master about $19 a year, which means that they were among the poorest paid laborers in the modern world” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:9). Toward the end of the chapter, he wrote, “Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:15).

With the enslaved cast as Black workers, if “among the poorest paid,” Du Bois ([1935] 1998:55) understood their self-emancipation as a “general strike”: “The black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.” They also took up arms as Union soldiers. Again, going into the war, the North had had no intention of freeing the enslaved, and both the North and the South had overlooked them, which historians would replicate for generations. Yet, if one had bothered to look, as Du Bois did, on center stage were the enslaved insisting on their own freedom. Once the war commenced,

What the Negro did was to wait, look and listen and try to see where his interest lay. . . . As soon, however, as it became clear that the Union armies would not or could not return fugitive slaves, and that the masters with all their fume and fury were uncertain of victory, the slave entered upon a general strike against slavery by the same methods that he had used during the period of the fugitive slave. (Du Bois [1935] 1998:57)

To bring the economy to a halt, some half a million people fled the plantations. Du Bois ([1935] 1998:67) averred, “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work.”

III

In the interwar period, as he adopted and adapted Marxism, Du Bois’s politics shifted, from liberal to radical (Itzigsohn 2013; Sullivan 2003). While I do not dispute this accepted narrative arc, I suggest that Marxism not only spurred and shaped but also constrained his radical views. Marxism, as radical as it was and even as retooled as it was by Du Bois, continually, inexorably misrecognized slavery and underestimated the nature of domination and suffering it entailed. This social theory could not fully grasp this extreme antisocial situation. Categories designed to clarify social dynamics, even highly exploitative class dynamics, variously faltered as they encountered the outer bounds of the social.

Of Black Reconstruction, which she considers to be one of the “greatest works of the black radical tradition,” literary critic Saidiya Hartman (2016: 166) writes,

The agency of the enslaved becomes legible as politics, rather than crime or destruction, at the moment slaves are transformed into black workers and revolutionary masses fashioned along the lines of the insurgent proletariat. However, representing the slave through the figure of the worker (albeit unwaged and unfree), obscures as much as it reveals, making it difficult to distinguish the constitutive elements of slavery as a mode of power, violence, dispossession and accumulation.

By “constitutive elements of slavery,” she alludes to Orlando Patterson’s (1982:1) Slavery and Social Death, in which he identifies three “constituent elements of slavery”: direct force or coercion, natal alienation or “the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations,” and general dishonor (p. 7). According to Patterson, “slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons [italics in original]” (p. 13). “The ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished” (p. 7), the enslaved is “a socially dead person” or, alternatively, “a social nonperson” (p. 5). In other words, beyond the pale of the social.²

Throughout Black Reconstruction, but especially in chapter one, Du Bois’s own words often overflowed—could not but overflow—the category of the worker when it was made to stand in for the enslaved:

It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual. . . . No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate. The tragedy of the black slave’s position was precisely this; his absolute subjection to the individual will of an owner. . . . The proof of this lies clearly written in the slave codes. Slaves were not considered men. (Du Bois [1935] 1998:9–10)

The enslaved worked, but they were not workers (Wilderson 2003).³ The source of their oppression and suffering was not that they had “no means of production of their own” and were thereby “reduced to selling their labour power in order to live,” per Marx and Engels ([1888] 1978:473, note 5). They were the means of production.

In Black Reconstruction, the enslaved, “the black worker,” is implicitly and often explicitly male. Surely, all of the preceding discussion also applies to the female enslaved. However, when we specifically consider them, we are confronted by the full thesis of Hartman’s (2016) essay, “The Belly of the World.” The category of the worker not only obscures the “constitutive elements of slavery as a mode of power, violence, dispossession and accumulation” but also conceals the “sexual and reproductive labor [that] is critical in accounting for the violence and degradation of slavery” (Hartman 2016:166). For example, labor, production, reproduction, and accumulation, as Marxist categories in relation to the working class, assume grotesque meanings relative to the enslaved. “Slavery conscripted the womb, deciding the fate of the unborn and reproducing slave property by making the mark of the mother a death sentence for her child,” according to Hartman (2016:169). Christina Sharpe (2016:74), another literary critic, characterizes the “womb” of the female enslaved as “a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold” and the “birth canal” as “another domestic Middle Passage.” In the nineteenth century, while the enslaved produced cotton in ever greater quantities in the United States, the enslaved population increased from 1.2 million in 1810, two years after the prohibition of importation from abroad, to 4.0 million in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. According to historian Walter Johnson (2017:27), the enslaved’s “value” in 1860 “was equal to all of the capital invested in American railroads, manufacturing, and agricultural land combined.” Was this capital accumulation through production? Reproduction?⁴ Could exploitation adequately, much less fully, account for the female enslaved’s abjection? As chattel, the enslaved were subject to sale, and the ever-present threat of sale, and the internal slave trade of the antebellum period forced the relocation of over two million, a third of them from the upper to the lower South (Johnson 1999). In this extreme antisocial context, kinship, like other social and sociological categories, “loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations [italics in original],” as Hortense Spillers (2003:218), yet another literary critic, reminds us.⁵ Briefly but powerfully, Du Bois ([1935]1998:43–5) himself refers to these realities, but the conceptual framework of the Black worker nonetheless remains firmly in place.⁶

Misrecognizing and underestimating enslavement, the theoretical lens of the worker, general strike, and, later in the book, dictatorship of the proletariat could not but distort the true character and scale of the freedom struggle that the enslaved took on.⁷ Their grievances were far deeper, and their freedom dreams far loftier, than those of the worker. Their fight was literally an existential one—fundamentally unlike all other struggles in which the social existence of the actors, even dominated actors, is assumed. Again, Du Bois’s descriptions of the potential pasts and foreclosed futures sporadically overwhelmed the Marxist categories he employed. With their “back to the wall, outnumbered ten to one, . . . and all the world against [them],” Black people undertook a task of “national and worldwide implications,” and what was lost in this “splendid failure” was nothing short of a “different world” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:708; see also Du Bois [1933] 1995:544)—that is, a radically different ontological ground on which the formerly enslaved would have fully legible, legitimate presence and claims.

IV

Throughout the book, Du Bois found potential allies in the past of Reconstruction and the present of the 1930s. The potentiality was rooted in the idea of the Black worker. By the time he drafted Black Reconstruction, Du Bois was profoundly pessimistic about the prospect of an interracial coalition of Black and white workers: “There is not at present the slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united class-conscious proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon” (Du Bois [1933] 1995:543–44).⁸ “Hate and fear” as they did, however, “white and black workers” nonetheless shared “practically identical interests” (Du Bois [1935] 1998:700). Hence, in Black Reconstruction itself and especially in sympathetic commentaries on it in recent decades, there has been a lingering sense of lament, of seizable opportunities forgone.⁹

Notably well ahead of its time, Black Reconstruction was not bound by methodological and theoretical nationalism. Du Bois placed the history of slavery and Reconstruction in the context of global capitalism and the color line that, as he had long maintained, “belt[ed] the world” through U.S. and other Western empires ([1906] 1995:42). In this vein, he repeatedly connected the plight and struggle of the Black enslaved/Black workers to those of other workers of color. For just one example, at the end of the first chapter on the enslaved “black worker,” he concluded,

That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny. . . . Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black. (Du Bois [1935] 1998:16; see also pp. 630–35)

If not all the workers of the world, he posited the common fate and desired unity of “yellow, brown and black” workers—all those who could not collect the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness (Du Bois [1935] 1998:700).¹⁰

Du Bois’s vision of a unified and insurgent dark proletariat is surely attractive to most scholars and activists on the left today; as described by his biographer, David Levering Lewis, “Du Bois was the premier apostle of the gospel of the solidarity of peoples of color” (Du Bois 1995:637). I would suggest resisting or at least scrutinizing this multiracial pull. As noted previously, the enslaved may work, but they are not workers. There is an irreducible incommensurability between the enslaved and the worker, even the racialized and coerced worker. It is a difference in kind that is continually misrecognized as a difference in degree or even no real difference at all. Here, again, the excesses, the unruly fragments of Du Bois’s analysis, prove more telling than the ill-fitting categories:

In this vital respect, the slave laborer differed from all others of his day: he could be sold; he could, at the will of a single individual, be transferred for life a thousand miles or more. His family, wife and children could be legally and absolutely taken from him. . . . It was a sharp accentuation of control over men beyond the modern labor reserve or the contract coolie system.

Negroes could be sold—actually sold as we sell cattle with no reference to calves or bulls, or recognition of family. (Du Bois [1935] 1998:11)¹¹

Collapsing the enslaved into the worker does violence to the incomparable violence that distinguishes the former from the latter and other modern subjects. A social nonperson is not a type of dominated social person among others, and social death is not a form of social injury among others. Solidarity of the dark proletariat, or of the working class as a whole, appeals to our political desire more than dispassionate appraisal.

Throughout Black Reconstruction, the limits of the social come into view as fugitive facts and ideas overrun Du Bois’s Marxist categories. A closing passage, I suggest, could and should push us to radically rethink slavery and freedom beyond his chosen, and any other, theory of the social:

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead. (Du Bois [1935] 1998:727)

Conclusions and Implications

At the heart of sociology lies a paradox. Sociology recognizes itself as a modern discipline par excellence—a discipline born of modernity that theorizes, empirically investigates, and, indeed, does its part in constructing modernity¹²—yet remains oblivious to what Du Bois sees as modernity’s most magnificent drama: the transoceanic, transcontinental enslavement of Africans. The paradox is not aporetic. Sociology’s modernity is both the riddle and the answer: for if “sociologists . . . authored ideas of the modern social space as a realm that we denizens inhabit and control” (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005:1), the extreme antisocial condition of slavery lay beyond not only that social space but beyond the reach of those sociological ideas. Tracing precisely the outer limits of the social, the outer limits of the sociological define and confine the discipline to a tautology of its own making.

Let us, at last, take Du Bois seriously and bring the enslavement of Blacks, racialized through enslavement as Black, to the center of our concern. At once, the social—the modern social space, the modern social world—reveals itself to be much less and other than what we, as a discipline, had assumed, and our first task becomes one of provincializing the social, clearing conceptual room for its disclaimed and repressed twin, the antisocial, and rethinking everything about the social itself, how it has been subterraneously structured by the antisocial.¹³ For those of us concerned with domination and freedom, we may learn, I contend, that more fundamental than any antagonism or contradiction within the social, such as that between capital and labor, is the one between the social and its antisocial other.

To be more accurate, I should acknowledge the plurality of the antisocial—antisocial others—for, as Steinmetz (2016) suggests, there are extreme antisocial situations other than slavery, including concentration camps and a certain severe subset of colonial formations. Nonetheless, following Du Bois, I posit the singularity of racial slavery relative to the modern social world: articulated to transoceanic trade, empire-building, and capitalism, racial slavery became an antisocial formation of global scale and significance, which also distinguishes it from premodern cases of slavery. As philosopher Charles Mills (2013:35) observes,

The peculiar experience of Africans under Western modernity, which originally turned them into “negroes” (lowercase), creating a race where previously none had existed, impressed a forced diaspora on them that took them to Europe and the Americas . . . , made the extraction of their labor central to the making of the modern world, . . . while still leaving them globally identifiable as the people who were appropriately designated a “slave race” in modernity, the very period when slavery was [otherwise] dead or dying in the West.¹⁴

In the face of modern slavery, sociology first defended and soft-pedaled (Magubane 2016). Then, it fell silent and looked away. It instead spoke about what it saw elsewhere, anywhere else. It spoke about oppression and liberation there and said there was all there was. It reproduced the divide between the social and the antisocial and universalized the former while repressing the latter. In effect, it reenacted the enslaved’s social death as sociological death.

What is to be done? I propose that we develop an underdiscipline of antisociology, a subversive counterpart to sociology, to investigate extreme antisocial practices and formations, including foremost the enslavement of Black people, and their heretofore unregistered effects on social practices and formations.¹⁵ For the study of slavery, all social theories and concepts are suspect. They need to be vetted, amended, and, in many cases, discarded. As I indicate above, even the most radical social theories, such as Du Bois’s Marxism, fall short—cannot but fall short. Welcome efforts to further racialize and radicalize Marxism, through concepts such as racial capitalism, may still prove insufficient as long as they fail to appreciate the singular position of racial slavery in it and of Black people as those globally identified as the “slave race.”¹⁶ For example, however stretched temporally and conceptually, primitive accumulation on its own can only partially—which is to say, cannot adequately—comprehend racial slavery when it purports also to account for the enclosure of the English commons or the neoliberal privatization of public goods. As discussed previously, what is accumulated and how, what is dispossessed and how, under racial slavery are incommensurable. In the end, a sufficient Marxism must reckon with capitalism or racial capitalism as not only a social formation but also, and more fundamentally, an antisocial formation. The same goes for other radical social theories and their objects of analysis and critique.

What is true for radical social theories also applies to social theories in general. Here, let us return to the conflicting interpretations of Bourdieu by Steinmetz and by Emirbayer and Desmond and to the question of the enslaved’s “agency” that insistently dogs the concept of social death. These social theorists all agree that within social space, everyone has at least some minimal access to “power or resources” (Steinmetz 2016:101) and thus “capab[ility] of producing effects in it” (Bourdieu as quoted in Emirbayer and Desmond 2015:153).¹⁷ In fact, there is a seeming consensus in sociology on this point. Sewell (1992:10; see also Giddens 1984) similarly writes,

But however unequally resources may be distributed, some measure of both human and nonhuman resources are controlled by all members of society, no matter how destitute and oppressed. Indeed, part of what it means to conceive of human beings as agents is to conceive of them as empowered by access to resources of one kind or another. [italics in original]

However, Steinmetz (2016) crucially differs from the others on what social space, or the social, encompasses. For him, according to his generous, extrapolative reading of Bourdieu, there are limits: social space is not comprehensive. Put incongruously in Sewell’s terms, not all present in society are necessarily of society, much less as members—the enslaved being a paradigmatic case.

But the enslaved acted. But they resisted. But they had agency. But they were agents. But they were really like everyone else. But they were human. In the context of proslavery advocates and apologists—Du Bois’s predicament—such statements were critical and necessary.¹⁸ In our present moment, at least when directed at academic audiences, they no longer serve a critical or necessary purpose yet continue to underwrite historical narratives of slavery (Johnson 2003). These platitudes are also promptly invoked whenever slavery is characterized as social death. That the enslaved acted and resisted, which Patterson (1982) himself points out without contradiction, should go without saying, lest we tediously revive and rehash nineteenth-century debates. The difficult challenge before us is not to show that the enslaved were “agents” but how to conceptualize the enslaved’s “agency,” how to see it for what it was rather than anamorphically through prevailing, often implicitly liberal, ideas of agency that are based on the tacitly assumed universality of the social.

The “life” of the enslaved is radically uncertain, radically subject to forces beyond their control. They have no legitimate standing in the social world. They have no legitimate claims to power or resources, including their very “own” selves.¹⁹ What Spillers (2003) writes of “kinship” applies to all other aspects of the enslaved’s “life.” Categories taken for granted in social life “lose[] meaning” in social death because they “can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment” from without (Spillers 2003:218). The point is not that the enslaved always, continuously suffer these invasions. Constant terror does not require constant violation. Rather, according to Patterson (2018:ix), “the fact of its possibility [is] experienced as an ever-present sense of impending doom that shadow[s] everything, every thought, every moment of [the enslaved’s] existence.” Basic needs of humans as social beings—such as senses of belonging, trust, and efficacy—are under relentless, “prolonged assault,” and “all ties [are] precarious” (Patterson 2018:ix). To put Anthony Giddens’s (1984) conceptual vocabulary to unauthorized use, the enslaved utterly lack ontological security or, inversely, exist in a state of radical ontological insecurity.²⁰ What I am suggesting is that relative to such extreme antisocial conditions, we must continually doubt the adequacy of and reconsider all social categories of practice and analysis, including “agency,” “worker,” and, as Hartman (2016) and Spillers stress, “gender” and “sexuality.” In relation to the enslaved, they are “all thrown in crisis” (Spillers 2003:221). Provisionally or inescapably, many of the concepts may prove “inaccurate yet necessary” (Spivak 1976:xiii), but we can no longer assume or pretend that they apply unproblematically across the divide between the social and the antisocial.²¹ James Baldwin (1962:95) sees all too clearly both the extreme antisocial condition and the conceptual crisis it provokes: “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language.” An underdiscipline of antisociology would endeavor to develop such an impossible language. Words will fail, but we must fail radically better.²²

Baldwin’s statement, from 1962, refers not only to slavery proper but to all that followed. Of the approaching centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, he writes in the same book, The Fire Next Time, “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon” (Baldwin 1962:22). As I elaborate elsewhere, Baldwin’s writings remain just as depressingly vital today, a half century further removed from “emancipation” (Jung 2015). The undiminished relevance of Baldwin, as well as Du Bois, is a symptom of what a number of radical scholars in Black studies have been theoretically working through: the ongoing unfreedom of Black people.²³ Against the predominant narrative of progress and freedom across the humanities and the social sciences, Hartman (2002:757) argues that “the time of slavery” has yet to pass, that the present is still in its grip. Chattel slavery may be, for the most part, no more (Patterson and Zhuo 2018), but for Hartman (1997:10), “notwithstanding the negatory power of the Thirteenth Amendment” in the United States, and comparable moments of abolition elsewhere, “racial slavery was transformed rather than annulled.”²⁴ What follows in the wake of the “nonevent of emancipation” (Hartman 1997:116) is the “afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, impoverishment”: “Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone&. black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (Hartman 2007:6). Buried beneath ever-mounting mountains of statistics, models, narratives, concepts, and theories of social science lies this elusive antisocial math. Antiblackness, part and parcel of racial slavery and its afterlife, remains a foundation stone, an extreme antisocial condition of possibility, of the modern social world and of the modern discipline that arose to describe, explain, shape, and critique it.²⁵ We need to dig deeper.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Iyko Day, Cedric de Leon, José Itzigsohn, Zach Sell, João Vargas, Caroline Yang, and the editors of this journal for their thoughtful comments.

Notes

Author Biography

Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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