Capitalist Slavery and Its Afterlives

This essay enters into critical dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022). It explores the original insights but also the blind spots of the book’s interpretation of capitalist slavery, which hinges on a specific understanding of Karl Marx’s value-form analysis and his monetary labor theory of value. Drawing inspiration from Frantz Fanon as well as more contemporary voices, the author argues that the book’s Marxist analysis needs to be further stretched to fully grasp how processes of racialization under slavery have contributed and continue to contribute to capitalist accumulation. He then turns to Silvia Federici and Françoise Vergès to advocate for a further stretching of the book’s Marxism, this time with the aim of illuminating the fundamental role of social reproduction for capitalism in general and for capitalist slavery in particular.