Second slavery, capital and other slaveries

Abstract

The present contribution examines three historical problems of theoretical implications that are present in Dale Tomich’s work on the “second slavery”. I find it more interesting to reflect on three basic points that are part of Tomich’s thesis: The crisis of “old colonial slavery” because of the irruption and development of the world-economy. The relationship between slavery and capital. The conception of the world-economy as a transnational social formation, in which capitalism plays the role of nexus and motor of local particularities (with their corresponding labor modalities), particularities that were gradually subordinated to the market and to “social labor” (commodity-producing labor with the abstraction of the relations of production in which commodities are produced).