The Haitian Revolution

Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity

Eduardo Grüner, Ramsey McGlazer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios hispanoamericanos

It is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth.

Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti's declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Grüner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or "counter-modernity, " a path along which Latin America and the Caribbean have traveled ever since.

A key work of critical theory from a Latin American perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin America, as well as anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism, colonialism, and race.

1
The Category of Slavery and Modern Racism

We must first of all address the problem of slavery in general: slavery as a concept, as an institution, as a social relation and a relation of power, as an ideological configuration, as a “culture,” as a philosophical and “scientific” discourse. This is not a matter of archeology. I am not excavating anachronisms, discussing obsolete ancient histories, or working to overcome insignificant obstacles. As a form of control over labor power and as a common sense – a hegemonic ideological and cultural configuration – that is characteristic of but not exclusive to the ruling classes, slavery is one of the pillars of Eurocentric modernity. From a historical point of view as well as a structural one, it is therefore necessary to understand the logic of slavery, which is inscribed in the very fabric of the modern world, even if its properly historical expressions may have changed over time.

To the extent possible, I will try to indicate the fundamental differences between “ancient” (or “premodern” or “nonmodern”) slavery and slavery in modernity, by which I mean slavery in the context of the formation of the capitalist world-system, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. I follow Immanuel Wallerstein in defining the “world-system” as a socioeconomic and political unity of diverse societies, in which one or more of these societies is hegemonic; this unity thus forms a complex with a center and several peripheries and semi-peripheries. I will also briefly re-examine the complex question of racism. As I noted in the Prologue, racism, as we understand it today, is a modern “invention” that is very closely tied to the equally modern phenomenon of racial slavery. In what follows, I will have occasion to demonstrate repeatedly that racism made it possible for this form of slavery to become one of the most profitable enterprises in modernity. The importance of understanding racism is thus even more apparent than the importance of understanding slavery: while slavery has disappeared as a legal institution, racism remains modernity’s ideological unconscious, persistently renewing the “contents” of the “form” that subtends the modern world-system. Again, it is not simply that history explains our present. History is present.

Elements for an Ethnohistorical Sociology of Slavery

Critical thought must be as open as possible; the problem of slavery requires it. It is important not to idealize a dubious “human nature” or the societies of the past or non-Western societies. Undoubtedly, however, the West has committed unspeakable crimes, crimes in a certain sense worse than those committed by any other culture. This is because, as I noted above, the West has claimed to represent culture as such. Beginning in modernity – because earlier no such claim could be made – the West claimed to be synonymous with “civilization,” to be the only possible civilization as well as the bearer of Reason (in the singular). Through a “fetishistic” ideological operation, nearly all the rest of humanity was excluded from this Reason. And when, beginning in 1492, the West began the most enormous and genocidal process of enslavement in recorded history, it frequently appealed to this “universal” rationality. This places critical thought in a dilemma: if, on the one hand, for excellent, anti-ethnocentric reasons, a thinker like Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that there is only one human rationality, that human beings have always thought in the same way, but have only thought about different things,¹ on the other hand it is essential to historicize these differences, which might otherwise seem to be “structural.” Only such historicization makes it possible to give an account of the inevitably dominating drive that some forms of what the Frankfurt School would call European “instrumental rationality” managed to impose on the rest of the world.

Of course, slavery as such is not a modern Western invention, although only the modern West instituted slavery on a “globalized” scale. Nearly all known societies, from the very dawn of history, have known some form of slavery. As Orlando Patterson writes, there is nothing especially notable about the institution of slavery: it has existed from the origins of humanity through the twentieth century, to the extent that there is probably no human group on the face of the earth whose ancestors were not either slaves or slaveholders at some time.² Recent archeology seems to have demonstrated irrefutably that slavery (though at times effectively a preparation for ritual sacrifice) was omnipresent in not only the history, but also the prehistory of humanity, and that this undeniable fact has been hidden from us for so long by a misplaced “political correctness.”³ In many of the major civilizations that theoretically gave way to what would become the West – including ancient Greece and Rome – slavery was not only an institution that was tolerated, even promoted and regimented; it was also an economic, social, political, and cultural relation that was indispensable for the functioning of society at all of these levels. The need to mobilize “external” labor power in order to complete projects that exceeded the capacities of individuals or families is almost as ancient as human society itself. This need presented itself every time a society accumulated sufficient economic resources and political power, concentrated in a few hands (those of the king, the dominant religious hierarchy, the most powerful tribe, the aristocracy, and so forth). The necessary external labor power could be obtained by force, whether by force of arms or though formal or customary law, or, as was often the case, through a combination of all of these. The specific form of the resulting workforce could vary widely; it could be constituted through debt bondage, clientelage, peonage, helotage, indentured servitude, migrant slavery, and so on. But in every case, the social and juridical status of this workforce was very different from that of wage laborers. To be sure, “free” labor was not absolutely unknown in antiquity, although it was intermittent and episodic. Suggestively, no word for labor, defined as a general social function, exists in either ancient Greek or Latin.⁴ Only with the development of capitalism did wage labor appear as the characteristic form of labor and as the specific trait defining this mode of production (regardless of its quantitative dimension, which has become the subject of a debate that is very fashionable today but that has no bearing on the effort to characterize a socioeconomic system). In any case, much more “modern” philosophers – that is, philosophers who, like Locke, inherit not only another way of thinking, but other “relations of production” – could easily be deceived in this respect:

Given … the “common sense” that was so deeply rooted and undisputed in his day, it is understandable that the positions taken by Aristotle in defense of slavery were “normal” in the historical context of the society in which he happened to live. His imagination, which was so vast and fertile, came up against insuperable limits, given his place in a slave mode of production and in the spatiotemporal coordinates of the fifth century bc. Hence his famous justification of slavery: “It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.” More than two thousand years later, John Locke could write in his First Treatise that slavery was “so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” From the “horizon of visibility” offered by an England that had already been irreversibly transformed by capitalism, where the old peasants expelled by enclosure had already become proletarians and made up the majority of the population, Locke thus argued for the “resolution” of the problem of slavery in terms of the same naturalness that Aristotle had used to defend the fairness of slavery and the utility of its existence. Here, significantly, the relation between theory and the mode of production is exposed. And Locke’s limitations are exposed as well, given that, from his historical and class perspective, the problem of the slave trade, whose center was precisely in England, does not seem to have been too worrying.⁵

Even today, specialists continue to debate just how “indispensable” ancient slavery was. One of the most important of these specialists, Moses I. Finley, has argued that slavery’s role in providing an economic basis for ancient societies, and the societies of Greece and Rome in particular, has been greatly overestimated.⁶ For his part, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, in his monumental study of class struggle in antiquity, has convincingly demonstrated that the famous claim a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Publisher’s Note
• Introduction by Gisela Catanzaro
• Prologue
• 1: The Category of Slavery and Modern Racism
• 2: The Rebellion of the (Slave) Masses and the Haitian Revolution
• 3: The Disavowed “Philosophical Revolution”: From Enlightenment Thought to the Crisis of Abstract Universalism
• Epilogue
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement