Jamila M. H. MASCAT

Marx, Slavery and Colonialism:
A Case for So-Called Permanent Accumulation

Marx’s vivid exploration of slavery across his works – spanning from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) to his articles for the New York Tribune (1852-1862) and culminating in Capital (1867) – underscores the significance he placed on the slave trade and the plantation economy in his theory of the genesis and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. In the last two decades, however, a growing number of scholars (Johnson 2004, Issar 2021, Smallwood 2007, Singh 2016), have questioned the potential shortcomings of Marx’s understanding of slavery, suggesting that he may have downplayed the relevance of slave labor – to emphasize the pivotal role of waged labor in capitalism – and erroneously confined it at the “dawn of the era of capitalist production,” namely at the stage of “so-called primitive accumulation.”
    After mapping what Marx wrote on slave trade, slave labor, and the plantation system, this paper aims at reconstructing his conceptualization of the “slavery character” of capitalism (to borrow from W.E.B. DuBois) along with its colonial dimension. Then it seeks to provide an account of the articulation proposed by Marx of the connection between slavery, colonialism, and the development of global capitalism. Finally, the paper engages with critical readings that stress the limits of Marx’s concept of “so-called primitive accumulation” to make a case for the notion of “permanent accumulation” within racial capitalism.
 

Jamila M. H. MASCAT is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University. Her transdisciplinary research works across the fields of Political Philosophy (German Idealism and Marxism in particular), Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Theories, and Critical Philosophy of Race. Her current research interests focus, on the one hand, on theories of partisanship and political engagement and, on the other hand, on theories of postcolonial justice and postcolonial reparations.