Not Subjects of the Market, but Subject to the Market: Capitalist Slavery as Expropriation

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231182376
• Author: Michael Gorup
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231182376

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(6) 981 –1007

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231182376

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Article

Not Subjects of the

Market, but Subject to

the Market: Capitalist

Slavery as Expropriation

Michael Gorup1

Abstract

This essay draws political theory into dialogue with recent work in

economic history and the history of capitalism to develop an account of

the unique injustice produced by capitalist slavery in the antebellum United

States. Prevailing approaches to thinking about slavery in political theory

tend to disembed it from its broader socioeconomic context, which has

led theorists to overlook some of the distinctive horrors associated with

capitalist slavery in particular. In response, I develop a theory of capitalist

slavery as expropriation, conceived as violent domination harnessed to the

imperatives of capital accumulation. Capitalist slavery-as-expropriation

encompasses two analytically distinct moments: the moment of confiscation,

in which human lives and capacities are enclosed via commodification, and

the moment of conscription, in which enslaved labor is mobilized via routine

violence. Though enslaved people were not market subjects, this framework

reveals the extent to which they were nevertheless subject to the market.

Keywords

slavery, capitalism, domination, social death, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass

1Assistant Professor of Political Science, New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael Gorup, Assistant Professor of Political Science, New College of Florida, 5800 Bay

Shore Road, Sarasota, FL 34243-2101, USA.

Email: mgorup@ncf.edu

1182376PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231182376Political TheoryGorup

research-article2023

982 Political Theory 51(6)

1. Though, see the growing body of literature that aims to develop a republican

account of structural domination, on which I draw (Cicerchia 2022; Gourevitch

2013; Gourevitch forthcoming; Hasan 2021; Roberts 2022).

The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle,

the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and

nakedness, are its inevitable consequences.

—James W. C. Pennington ([1849] 2005)

For an institution that is supposed to be long dead, slavery continues to play

a conspicuous role in contemporary American politics. Recent scholarship

has revealed the “peculiar institution” to have enjoyed a disturbingly vibrant

afterlife, shaping the development of U.S. politics and society well beyond its

formal abolition in 1865. Its spectral presence can today still be detected in

the basics of constitutional design (Waldstreicher 2010), patterns of contem-

porary political behavior (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2018), and the persis-

tence of racialized inequality (O’Connell 2012). It also continues to haunt our

political language. To this day, slavery represents the summum malum of

much political thinking—marking the absolute nadir of injustice, unfreedom,

and abjection. Disagree as they might about what concepts like justice, free-

dom, or equality mean, academics and ordinary citizens alike can nonetheless

agree that slavery must represent their opposite.

But this agreement begins to come undone once we shift from merely

naming slavery’s wrongness to explaining it. In political theory, there are

two prominent views worth considering. For neo-republicans, slavery is

the paradigm example of domination. It is in opposition to this image of

slavery-as-domination that contemporary republican thinkers such as Philip

Pettit (1999, 2013) and Quentin Skinner (2009) have developed their signa-

ture conception of freedom as nondomination. “The condition of liberty,”

Pettit (1999, 31) writes, “is explicated as the status of someone who, unlike

the slave, is not subject to the arbitrary power of another.” Domination, on

this view, refers to an uncontrolled power of interference held by one person

or group over another. Importantly, domination is conceived as a relationship

that obtains between agents, who may be individual persons or collectivities

but cannot be structures or systems.1 According to neo-republicans, slavery

represents an extreme form of personal domination wherein one person (ser-

vus) is entirely dependent on the uncontrolled will of another (dominus). A

benevolent master is no less a dominator than a cruel one—what matters is

the power an agent possesses, not how they wield it.