The Afro-Atlantic Context of Historical Materialism

Marx was a mid-nineteenth-century lawyer who, as a second choice, pursued a career as a journalist and labor activist. In neither profession did he manage to earn enough to sustain his family or to fulfill the bourgeois aspirations to which his upbringing had accustomed him. It did not help that he lacked an academic appointment and yet spent much of his time writing on political economy. His greatest influence was posthumous, shaped by the uses that others could make of his millenarian language and model of history. He generated his most influential language and reasoning while he was, for political reasons, exiled in England — a land he had long admired from afar as a model of the sort of economic development and prosperity that was then yet to evolve fully in the German-speaking land of his birth.

Marx argued that capitalism structures people's actions, dispositions, and worldviews much as a religion does. His description of capitalism and narration of its dynamic history focuses on the tension between who is doing the work of industrial production and who is receiving the rewards of it, as well as the tension between how people see their collective activities and what is really, in Marx's view, happening underneath. In the context of his own financial discontent, he formulated a general argument about the historical sources of and reasons for the general discontent of the population he collectively reified as "the workers" and "the proletariat": a system of social compulsions in which the fundamental operators were no longer people but social constructions that he called "commodities" (objects manufactured expressly for the purpose of exchange) and "capital" (profits mobilized for the purpose of generating more profits).

Under capitalism, for Marx, the paradigmatic form of labor is the industrial labor of free, wage-earning factory workers. For Marx, the primary problem with this system is that the manner in which commodities are imagined justifies a maldistribution of the proceeds of labor, a maldistribution that favors the owners of capital, or the capitalist class, over the workers. Marx's intended contribution to early nineteenth-century political economy was a razor-sharp focus on the unfairness of reigning patterns in the distribution of profits from manufacture and on the history-making rivalry between wage workers (that is, the "proletariat") and wage payers (capitalists). For Marx, it is labor that generates all profit and is the foundation of all social organization. Therefore it is the laborers who deserve to reap all of its benefits.

Marx's binary classification of the actors under capitalism — capitalists and proletariat — appears to reflect his personal social experience, his hopes, and his fears. He minimized and even actively denied the contemporaneous existence, labor, subjectivity, and importance of a third class: the tens of millions of mainly African or African-descended enslaved people whose labor was integral to the process through which European and Euro-American capitalists, according to Marx himself, falsely imagined that their money was, by itself, giving birth to more money. Marx also imagined out of existence a range of other actors in this system, including the Native Americans whose land was appropriated for the founding of Marx's much-idealized United States of America, which he described as "virgin soil colonized by free immigrants" (Marx [1867] 1990: 931fn1), as well as the coastal African merchant-monarchs who, through trade and the ritual transformation of social relationships, also seem to have seen themselves as making cowrie-shell money give birth to more cowrie-shell money. (More on that subject in part III.)

The Afro-Atlantic priestly heirs to these sacred traditions have long been more successful at making and mobilizing the collective subjectivities that they prescribe than Marx was at creating or mobilizing a unified proletariat through his own preferred fiction — that is, that labor alone produces value and does so in proportion to its duration. Indeed, as the reader will see, Afro-Atlantic priests ritually make and install such collective subjectivities in people's heads, resulting in dramatic performances that the patients of these rituals typically swear are completely involuntary on their part.

Because they live in a world physically and socially connected to but imaginatively different from that of Marx, Afro-Atlantic priests do not typically cognize the social roles in production or profit making as "proletariat" versus "capitalists." Yet Afro-Atlantic priests far more effectively cognize a phenomenon common to the imagined worlds of both Europeans and Africans. Marx and most Marxists tend to explain away the ritual processes of collective value and subjectivity making that create, for example, races, nations, ethnic groups, and cults, even though these social units are much more consciously real to their participants than are the proletariat and the capitalist class. Typically, for classical Marxists, races, nations, ethnic groups, and cults are "superstructural" fictions concealing the real agents and operators of history. Yet the Marxist faith in unseen and often ineffective collective agents — proverbial "classes-in-themselves" — hardly seems more empirical than the subjectivities conjured by capitalists and African priests. Indeed, the Marxist prediction that the "working class" will ultimately recognize itself as a collective entity is of a piece with the equally false prediction that all religion is on the way to disappearing.

Like all prophecies, Marx's was less an uncanny premonition or scientific extrapolation than a recommendation about the ways people should act toward each other in the here and now. The limited efficacy of Marx's class ontology has always lain in the hope that it inspired, not in its descriptive or predictive accuracy. Marx's historical materialist prophecy was a quasi-religious element of Lenin's success in building the Soviet Union. In ritualized and forcible ways — and not as the historical inevitability...