Freedom time: Karl Marx and unpayable debt

Abstract

This commentary critically engages Denise Ferreira da Silva’s claim that Marxism is incapable of critically engaging the racial and capital alongside one another. It argues that, while it is true that conventional Marxists have either dismissed, undertheorized, or treated enslaved and colonial labor as ancillary to capitalist development – so-called “primitive accumulation” – rendering non-Europeans, non-proletarian laborers (and especially women of African descent) as outside the universal category of the Human, this is not necessarily representative of either Marx or Marxism. Reading Unpayable Debt alongside recent work by Lisa Lowe, Beverley Mullings, Saidiya Hartman, Nick Nesbitt, and Gary Wilder, I suggest a revisit of Marx’s and Marxist’s analysis of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism is necessary – and particularly the much-neglected work of Walter Rodney – in order to probe the constitutive dynamics of race, class, and gender as a constituent part and critique of capitalism and the struggle for human freedom.