Rights-Based Exploitation

The fundamental problem with slavery wasn’t that Black people were exploitable labor; the fundamental problem with slavery was that slaves were other people’s mere assets, not persons able to participate in systems of self-determination.

To be an asset means that you generate value for others. That value can be in production, but your value can also be elsewhere. Sure, much of the slave’s asset value turned on the slave’s capacity for productive labor, e.g., picking cotton, but they had other asset values. Owners could trade them like commodities, borrow money against them, collect insurance payouts from them (Aetna insured slaves), and park money in them as a stable investment. In the same way that homeownership has value beyond merely a place to live, slave-ownership has value beyond the slaves’ productive labor.

The end of slavery simply transformed the way in which Black communities were assets. Black people didn’t stop being mere assets when they were share-croppers or free laboring domestic help. It is not as if the black workforce had organized protections or secure rights. The end of the Freedman’s Bureau took care of that. It was just an asset transformation. We were White assets in a different way.

There is a peculiar kind of exploitation that can only happen as a rights-based subject. For example, with a universal right to an education, we can employ a lot of White teachers to teach Black children. Not that these teachers teach the quality of culture that will enable community-wide self-determination. That’s the point. The teachers get paid by the body. The students are assets. The students, as rights-based subjects, hold exploitable value. Their exploitable value just isn’t a matter of them working in the cotton fields anymore.

Trump’s Crime Bill would move thousands of prisoners to home monitoring. That’s great, but with ankle monitoring fees that range from 5–25 dollars a day, and the evacuation of the 4th Amendment that comes with your home now being liable to search, it’s just another way of making money off of Black people. We have privatized prisons by moving the prison cell to your apartment.

Even though the United States doesn’t need Black male labor anymore, the US is not finished with them as assets.

Black communities have value as communities of debtors and renters.

Finance can be a means of self-determination, but without other structures of self-determination, extending financing is just a new mode of exploitation. There is a great section in David Garber’s book on Debt where he shows how wealthy people have always forgiven the wealthy’s people’s debt, and poor people have always forgive poor people’s debt, but the wealthy rarely forgive the poor’s debt.

One problem, for example, with the Universal Basic Income is that it just a means of rights exploitation. A right to $1,000 a month secures rent for landlords, payment for utility companies and revenue for grocery chains without extending self-determination to the citizen, because it does not provide enough resources to shape the agenda or fight back against landlords, utility companies, etc. Programs like the Universal Basic Income allow people to continue to function as assets for the elites.

To be clear, the difference between being a mere asset and being a self-determined participant is that self-determined participants are positioned to set the terms of the interaction. For example, Black communities are exploitable assets of the Democratic party. We do not set the agenda. The most negotiating room we have been habituated to have is the black face of White supremacy. That is what we got in the Obama Presidency.

By the way, Colin Drumm is a smart young theorist who has shifted my thoughts on this subject. Keep a look out for him.