The Price of Slavery, the Cost of Poetry

In The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), Nick Nesbitt revisits the relation between Atlantic slavery and capitalism, questioning the paradoxical nature of their relation, and further engaging with critiques of the system in the Black Jacobin radical tradition. Taking exception with Nesbitt’s premise qua Marx—that only free labor can produce surplus value—this response argues that the polymorphic nature of slavery belies Marx’s absolutist correlation of free labor and surplus value, suggesting the essential relation between unfreedom in its many forms and capitalism. It is arguably in their very commitment to the nation state that the figures of the Black Jacobin radical tradition evoked in the book necessarily fall short in their radical critique of capitalism. In this regard, it is telling that Nesbitt finds only poetic texts adequately critical: feats of imagination seem necessary to challenge a total social form from within institutions designed to maintain it.