Book Review: ‘The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean’ by Nick Nesbitt

By Brant Roberts – Oct 26, 2024

Over the past fifteen years a new tradition of critical Antillean theory has been flowing in the veins of new analyses of the Haitian Revolution and its relation to political theory more generally. One need only look to Susan Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics, Nick Nesbitt’s Caribbean Critique, or the pages of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy for evidence. Nesbitt’s latest work is no exception. Presented as a ‘tropical refiguration’ of Karl Marx’s thought, Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean is an exceptional work grounding Marx’s analysis of slavery and capitalism within critiques of colonialism and the capitalist social form via Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James and Henry Christophe, among others.

A professor of French and Italian at Princeton University, Nick Nesbitt is a prominent scholar of critical theory, whose works focus on the Francophone-Caribbean and Haitian history. The Price of Slavery reads as an expansion of his previous works on the Haitian Revolution, and on critical theory in the Caribbean more broadly. Given his academic prose and general approach to analysis, some precaution should be taken as much of the book requires some beforehand knowledge of Marx, as well as the history of the Haitian Revolution and arguments regarding the historiography of slavery in the Caribbean. In short, it was not written for a popular audience.

Chapter one opens the first half of the book starting from Marx. Overall, it is a critical rereading of Eric Williams’ classic work Capitalism and Slavery, and attempts to present a theory of the relationship regarding colonial-slavery as a social form in the Caribbean via Marxism. The arresting claim of the work is that colonial-slavery in the Caribbean did not produce surplus-value. The idea is that only commodified wage-labor produces surplus-value, while slaves who obviously do not receive wages cannot produce surplus-value. This argument presents a rather mechanical Marx, devoid of any interest in slavery beyond debates about whether or not there is a direct relationship to the production of surplus-value within a slave system – be it under feudalism, antiquity or capitalism – and ultimately reducing Marx’s analyses of slavery to a strictly economic argument. His understanding of Marxism not only begins with Marx, but ends with him as well.

Nesbitt’s disagreement with Williams extends to an argument made in The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James that Haitian slaves were, given their work and the organization of enslaved labor in the sugar factories, ‘closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time.’ (111-112) While Nesbitt may semantically disagree with James, he neglects the political point that theorists such as Stuart Hall and many others have pointed out before, that race is the modality in which class is lived, or – in the case of the Haitian revolutionaries and other slave rebellions in the Americas – race is class, and the slave system is akin to the horrors of capitalism. The Haitian Revolution had the character of a proletarian revolution, with class-struggle taking center between those who wished to reinstall the slave system and the former slaves fighting for liberty – akin to proletarian revolutions whereby the working-class fights to overthrow the shackles of capitalist-exploitation and achieve freedom. In short, Nesbitt’s argument is reduced to a semantic-interpretation of Marx’s particular analysis of slavery juxtaposed to wage-labor, rather than the principle political point of James’ analysis.

In chapter two, Nesbitt rethinks Marx’s analysis of value-form and adapts it to the historical conditions of Caribbean slavery. A rather dense chapter, he works delicately to reveal the ‘specifically capitalist form of chattel slavery’ (103) which is constructed during Marx’s time. He also makes sure to analyze the methodology guiding Marx’s ideas on slavery, the lack of any relation to wage-labor, and the transhistorical form of commodity production.

Chapter three opens the second half of the book and repositions the focus towards Black Jacobinism. With a particular focus on C.L.R. James’ classic work The Black Jacobins, Nesbitt analyzes how the Haitian Revolution was the transition from one social form (colonial-slavery) to a new social form based on emancipation via the liberating process of revolution. Nesbitt correctly points out the three guiding factors which structure the logic of James’ history: firstly, the decree of abolition and the impact of the French Revolution on the island; secondly, the courage of the enslaved to fight for their freedom; and thirdly, the importance of leadership in guiding the revolution towards success against multiple invasions and the Napoleonic attempt to reimpose slavery. His critique of James’ dogmatic approach to accepting the French Revolution as a strictly bourgeois revolution is more than welcome.

Chapter four delves into the history of the post-emancipation labor in the Caribbean, and argues that the newly transformed class of agricultural laborers cannot be considered proletarian due to ‘competing social forms – from forced sharecropping to the general refusal of work – that replaced it in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.’ (131) Here Nesbitt’s historical research shines through and he shows remarkable attention to the historiography of post-emancipation life in Haiti. Towards the end of the chapter, he concludes by continuing his original thesis in regards to the lack of a price-form for labor during the transitional period for Haiti. This idea will no doubt cause some controversy for historians to debate in the future.

Chapter five criticizes the colonial and postcolonial forms of Antillean labor and the state via a Black Jacobin approach through the writings of Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire and Jacques Stephen Alexis. The most innovative point in the chapter is that Black Jacobinism, from its inception, ‘has maintained that the state form can nonetheless become the proper site for the establishment of popular sovereignty and justice as equality when the domination of the masses and their interests replaces the dictatorship of the monarchists, plantation slaveowners, and capitalists.’ (161) This argument reveals some of the intrinsic problems of Aimé Césaire’s approach to departmentalization of the French Antilles and his understanding of how radical change can take place.

One would expect in a work dealing with the history of slavery in the Caribbean, and the attempt to offer a new theory of slavery within the Marxist tradition, some references or even arguments with scholars such as Walter Rodney, Gerald Horne or many of the other scholars whose works historicize and theorize the question in countries around the region. Surprisingly none of these scholars can be found in the footnotes despite their extensive scholarship on the matter. The theorists which Nesbitt chose to prioritize are telling. He does not thoroughly engage with the historiography of slavery in the Caribbean and its relation to capitalism on the whole, but rather chooses to work within critical theory more broadly and within the Francophone-Caribbean more particularly. With the key exceptions of James and Williams, the Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean are both neglected.

Perhaps surprising was the lack of any engagement with Frantz Fanon’s works in relation to the general thesis. Though much of Fanon’s writings focus on North Africa and his experience in France, it would have been fascinating to see how Nesbitt might engage with the question of surplus-value production and capitalist-based-slavery in the context of Fanon’s critique of the formal Marxism with which he was familiar with in both France and Martinique. As Fanon famously stated, ‘Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.’ (Fanon 2001:_31) How Nesbitt might have engaged with this critique in light of his particular analysis of slavery would have been enlightening.

Another pitfall in his argument is his rejection of Eric Williams’ thesis that slavery was key to the rise of and transformation of British capitalism. ‘As such, the terms Williams adopts in his analysis are incapable of supporting (or disproving) his radical proposition: that slavery was decisive in the development and transformation of British capitalism.’ (19) It is a truly astonishing claim in light of how slavery became an important agrarian appendage – via agriculture, the extraction of raw materials, cotton, sugar and mining – of industrial development in England, and how it amassed riches in France, Spain and Portugal as well.

One must ask when the book was originally published in 2022, why write this book now? Why debate whether slavery was a capitalist social form in our time? In a time when reparations for slavery is still an openly debated subject in both the US and across the Caribbean, and US bill H.R. 40—which explores the idea of the federal government addressing reparations—was finally being explored openly in the US Congress at the time of its publication, why write a book that attempts to use Marx in order to deny that slavery did not produce surplus-value? Why go to such lengths in the first two chapters to attempt to prove this point? While Nesbitt addresses the horrors of slavery, and certainly recognizes the injustices of the system, by making this argument he undermines the push for reparations. Neither social movements, nor the left writ-large, gain from this work. As it stands, or rather limps, only those who profited from slavery benefit from Nesbitt’s analysis.

Given his excellent body of work, one hopes that he will address these questions in the future.

References
Franz Fanon 2001 The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin Books).

(Marx&Philosophy)