Marx, Mahogany, Slaves, & the Enlightenment

"The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." --Walter Benjamin (On the Concept of History, c. 1940)

Despite our opinions about what the Enlightenment was/is all about, it is clear from her book on mahogany that Anderson feels it was unsuccessful, at least as far as her commodity is concerned. Human "mastery" of (capital-N) Nature couldn't save Jamaican mahogany from extinction. The might of the imperial powers could not reverse a fate they had sealed for themselves. This is usually because (lowercase-n) nature cannot be mastered nor controlled, only an abstraction of it, and only then by the hubris of H. sapiens.

A common thread runs through most of the texts used in the course, and indeed, through much of the story of humanity since its origins: slavery. While the manifestations of slavery may have changed over time, slavery as praxis has not. It is grounded in the theory that one human being is innately superior to and therefore the master of another typically because of a quality that one has that the other can never have, e.g., skin color, bloodlines, the blessing of god/God/gods, etc. The status of slave is imposed and cannot be lifted except by the self-proclaimed master. Slavery doesn't have to be black-and-white, it can be the indirect result of political economy as well, thus we get the call of Marx to the proletariat.

Historical materialism has taken a lot of fire for imposing its own imperialistic strictures on the study and practice of history, for being Eurocentric, and for its seeming denial of agency (see Chakrabarty). But Marx is still relevant because he demonstrates, perhaps unintentionally, how slavery transcends material conditions and is incorporated in economic relationships--true, based partially on ownership of material wealth--deployed by a system comprised of the totality of human interactions that is ruler of all, and beholden to none.

In the same essay quoted above, Benjamin states that the idea of progress is, in the minds of certain political actors, linked to the unfurling and ever increasing sophistication of technology. That once this has been linked to progress, "it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement." [13] In other words, laborers felt that their station in life had improved because the technology used (now) in their homes and at their workplaces had improved. This feeling, it seems from Benjamin's essay, smothered their belief in the goal of achieving a working class utopia via armed revolution.

I raise this issue because there was a statement made in class--which I have been guilty of believing at various points--that workers in "developing" nations don't view themselves as working class slaves but feel they've been given opportunities heretofore unavailable to them, e.g., Chinese laborers in a Foxconn sweatshop are happy to be earning a wage away from the village compound. But does this mean that they aren't slaves? Why, because they can chose something else? But again, can they? If circumstances take away all possible or reasonable alternatives, doesn't one become a de facto slave because one has no other choice? Run away, die of starvation, stay and work, earn enough for bread.

This is important, I think, in keeping us mindful of the inequality of power running through commodity chains (see Talbot). Someone or some group is always getting their neck stepped on by pullers further down the chain. Even Lavaega's attempt to show how rural Mexican yam farmers were able to achieve some sense of autonomy fell flat when it failed to address the almost certain gender inequalities that kept their wives, daughters, sisters, et al. silent. It only goes to serve the agenda of the pullers (read victors) to show the quasi-autonomy that exploited peoples had in the past, as Lavaega has--probably inadvertently--done. Because it obscures the systematically imposed slavery, or perhaps servitude, and coercion that is taking place.