The paper explains how money as a master dispositif had guided history through institutions of servitude, slavery, its abolition and free labour through networks ...
Imagining Counter-Dispositif: The Case of Money Through Servitude, Slavery, Abolition and Free Labour P.Madhu Associate Fellow, InterUniversity Centre for Social Science Research and Extension, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala India.
Key Words: Dispositif, Money, new world Slavery, Abolition, Free labour, Network, Protocol, Freedom Abstract:
The paper explains how money as a master dispositif had guided history through institutions of servitude, slavery, its abolition and free labour through networks of human relations. The first section of the paper deals with the idea of money as dispositif. Second section explains how the motive of accumulation of wealth had driven the early modern Europeans into slave traders. Third section explains the abolition of slavery is in continuity with the motive of accumulation. It is explained, the free market for labour is a further extension of the logic of wealth accumulation through control and domination. The fourth section opens the discussion towards imagining counter-dispositif.
Dispositif is naturalised power, the second nature that works from within as our mentality organising our thought patterns, attitudes, behavior and actions. It is an internal singularity, habitus, functioning as strange attractor in enabling us to abstract sense from the chaos of experiences. The internal singularity is an affect of historical and biographical engagement with the network of the socius that empowers us to be culturally conditioned sense making beings. Master dispositif is the deep singularity that draws other cleavages of mentalities towards it ‘naturally’ figuratively comparable to a deep valley drawing streams towards it. In this paper, I argue, money beyond its multiple appearances and usages such as, means of exchange, currency, cash apparatus, or financial statement is a master dispositive, primarily an internal psychic apparatus, drawn from our collective historical ontology, that rules our subjective perceptions. 1
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2529811
The central argument here is that, qua the master dispositif, money has an agential role in guiding history. For instance, though the institutions of servitude, slavery, slavery-abolition, and free-labour appear to us a progress from servitude to freedom I argue, they are just various manifestations in historical junctures since money as a master dispositif has possessed our internal cartography of pathways and ‘progress’. Said in Heideggerian terminology thrown into money’s dispositif is the state of das-man (Heidegger, 2008:212). Human subject moments, as truth moments and authentic freedom, if have to have liberative expressions, that should be through overcoming the eclipse of the Self and not in that being subjected to the dispositif that overwhelms (Badiou 2007; Zimmerman 1986). I Money is understood in multiple ways. Mill, in the Principles, described money as a veil, a mode of exchanging things for one another, by first exchanging a thing for money, and then exchanging money for something else (Mill, 1848:261). For Marx, money is “chemical power of society” a “nexus” between “man and man,” “human life and society,” with nature as “bond of all bonds”, cementing and separating them as “a true agent” (Marx, 1973:377; Marx and Engles, 1992:5). “Science of money,” for Simmel, “is situated in mental states, in social relations and in the logical structure of reality and values, give money its meaning and its practical position” (Simmel, 2004:52). Money is also “bearer of options”, “stored value” waiting for opportunities (Anderson, 1917: 425). For Keynes, it is a store of ‘general purchasing power’ discharged by debt and purchase contracts (Keynes, 1930:3). In other words, economy of past as debt or credit is passed upon through exchange to future as purchasing power through storehouses of present valuations as the mechanism of money. For him, money is co-extensive with current of socius1 in the making, “like certain other essential elements in civilisation” (Keynes, 1930:11).
Dispositif2 is Marx’s ‘chemical power, ’
gravitational pull of discursive formations. Money is gravitational node made of multilinear ensembles composed of lines of desires, aspirations and values that act as a singularity of attracting wants, ambitions and values in triggering their perpetual inventiveness (Deleuze, 1988: 159; Bussolini, 2010: 85-107; Agamben, 2005). Dispositif, as explained in this paper, is a strange attractor, gravity, in the chaotic field of socius, the opus operatum3 structured by and structuring its modus-operandi4 that structures internal dispositions of valuing (Bourdieu, 1990:52).
2
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2529811
Money as commodity, veil, and a store of value or unit of wealth dehistoricises twice away from the character of money. First, it dehistoricises money from history of its physical use and accumulation. Second, caught into its chimera of utility it is not enough recognised that it embodies a history of valuing. History of economy, is not merely a history of physical money its accumulation and distribution, but also that of its dispositif pathways. Money by its dispositif power converted state into a ‘fiscal institution’ as it was never before. Characterising its mutative role, Niall Ferguson presents money as DNA made of ‘long and tangled chains of human motivations, ’ scripting society and its polity (Ferguson, 2002: 423). The “code” of motivations made up by the multiplicity of force relations, for Foucault, is dispositif (Foucault, 1998b:93). Dispositif for Foucault is performative power, produced from one moment to the next, from below. It is capillary power pervades the social field stretching deep into construction of micropractices of its subjects and the “hermeneutics of the psyche” embedded in “politics of the everyday life” (Fraser, 1989: 23). It is the multiplicity of force relations immanent in social. It is all pervasive because it comes from everywhere. Dispositif is not something devised at any “headquarters that presides over its rationality” nor by “castes or groups which control the state apparatus” but it is “psychic power” anonymously produced because of calculations and tacit tactics of ordinary lives embedded in grid of power. Dispositif is productive power - repetitious, inert and self-reproducing. It is the overall effect that emerges from all mobility that frames routine of life politics. It is ‘knowledge’ and technique of life skill learnt from socius that runs through the dynamic-mesh-work as its energy. It forms the “dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localised in them” (Foucault, 1998b: 96). Dispositif is grid of intelligibility, moving substrate of force relations, of social order. It is not a power formed from above as the unity of domination, the sovereignty of the state or a mode of subjugation. It is not acquired, seized, shared or something one holds or slips away. It is not an institution or a structure, but the force field of complex strategical situations that endows those located in its influence over the rules of the game as their internal dispositions. Even so, it is crystallised in the ‘state forms’5 and institutions which are nothing but the affective structure of the ‘truth game’ deceptively projected as the source of the power. Dispositif is the flow of interests that keeps network of the social relations (Swedberg 2005).
3
The network is an assemblage6 created and continued by schema of knowledge its actors are subjected in the process of its creation and sustenance. For Weber, it consists of repeated acts of exchange, and competition among actors (Weber, 1978: 82-85, 635). Network is not just made up of its players, but made up by the emergent flows of intersections,7 structural holes,8 invisible relations,9 competitive processes, and negotiations (Burke 1992). The flow produces and regulates customs, habits, and productive practices, “in which mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens” (Hardt and Negri, 2000:299). I argue in this paper, institution of slavery, movements towards its abolition and the subsequent justification of free market for labour are the effects of the dispositif money and its apparatuses (Foucault, 1998b:92-102). Network of relations mediated by and mediating dispositif is a dense web that delivers everything everywhere, making the space collapsible or stretchable into local or global according to the contingencies of its flows and currents. Networks are systems of interrelationality shared radically horizontal (Galloway and Thacker, 2007:30). Time, of network is not a duration that stretches from the past to the future; rather it is an activity of formulating newer assemblages from the repositories of anytime anywhere. Network acts like the neural network that uses archives of memories at junctures of new challenges. In other words, networks are not constrained by linearity of neat history culled off from cumbersome struggles of multiple contemporariness. It has all the struggles of multiple contemporariness as its repository to draw up new assemblages. Time of network is instances assembled from repositories of any time as opposed to individuality of permanencies or durations (Deleuze, 2004b:288). Dispositif is the protocol of networking assemblages. The protocols of networks emerge through the complex relationship between autonomous, interconnected agents. Protocols regulate flow, direct netspace, codes relationships, connect life-forms and act in manifold modes of individuation that arrange and remix both human and nonhuman elements (Latour 2007). The political action of networks is based on human actors and nonhuman apparatuses. Cash is one such nonhuman apparatus. Networks have both human and nonhuman functioning as active nodes as agency producing edges of the network. Edges are the effects of the causality implied in nodes, they crystallise into institutions that in turn passively carry out actions (Galloway and Thacker, 2007:33). Institutions of slavery, 4
legislations against its abolition, and establishments of free market for labour are instances for institutional edges of the desires, ambitions projections expressed through monetary apparatuses. Networks are through and through multiplicities struggling to become and unbecome by pulls and pushes of aggregate interconnections of dissimilar subnetworks. Subnet topologies are always in a tense relation and transition, collusion and direct opposition with other forms within networks. However, there could be currents of singularity condition them to have certain transition than the other. Money, since occupied its position as an apparatus of valuing increasingly pervading the whole of the socius, I argue, has taken the role of master dispositif modulating history by its dispositif power. No one controls network; but, it is controlled. Money modulates network its current and thereby the socius, so much so as if it had been naturalised as the God of the network (Marx 1844). Thinking by networks and dispositifs is in contradiction with explaining human activities by truisms of natural laws.10 Natural law, in the post-foundationist understanding is a set of anthropomorphic frames that naturalised the ‘nature’ (Crowe, 1977:232). Nevertheless, historically, natural laws were interpreting reality by mathematical abstractions or stemmed from observations or experiments. The idea of nature is born out of epistemic ruptures with the theologically justified anthropomorphic truisms. The word nature was coined in the thirteenth century Europe from the Latin root ‘natura’ which implied the sense of ‘course of things, ’ constitution, quality, and the origin (nasci) as science was in its nascent state taking on to explain empirical regularities. In the beginning of the discourse on nature, family of phrases (Wittgenstein, 2009:35-38) explaining the ‘natural’ (lui naturale), were instinctus naturae,11 legistica tradition,12 Jus naturale13- the concepts prioritised methodologically understanding the nature from observation, experiment and by secular means. Potential threat from secular interpretation of nature to the theological truisms was counterpoised by reassemblage of natural law by the powerful singularities of theocratic and aristocratic influences. As a result, precepts of natural law were replaced by anthropomorphic and theocratic constructs of natura naturans,14 abstractio totius,15 Jus gentium16 and ratio superior17 (Kanne 1979; Crowe, 1977: 136-165) that naturalised totalising schema of the ‘eternal law’ of nature from ‘divine providence’ (Crowe: 1977:53-71; Datson and Stolleis, 2008:6). Ironically, the sprout of arguments of ‘nature’ emerging from practice of technology, experiments, observations, jurisprudence and mathematical logic that were potentially deposing elite dispositions was restored as axiomatic principles justifying the totalising moral logic of ‘divine order’. Nature, which has little to do with the “normalcy of 5
functioning” as social order, had been discursively assembled into a concoction of ‘natural law’ by the theocratic milieu of the thirteenth century had been reinvented by laws of market, economics and even that of the physical universe. For centuries, the perspective had mucked economic logic into explanatory closures because tautology of ‘natural law’ was believed to “guarantee… [the] good and legitimate by providing for a check and a reasoning about what is not good” (Schall 1993). For instance, Edmund Burke in his economic treatise on scarcity wrote, “laws of commerce, which are laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer” (Burke 1795). Nevertheless, by the second half of the seventeenth century Europe, secular and rational interpretation of nature was gaining acceptance parallel to its theological appropriation (Datson and Stolleis, 2008:10). The ‘laws of nature’ as the law of moral order has its genealogy with that of the disciplinary dispositif than in the order of things as exist ‘naturally’ (Foucault 2002). Hierarchising the nature and its fixed ‘laws’ as axiomatic homogeneity, versus, nomadising
18
it as transitory ‘dispositif affect’ of
heterogeneous assemblage is an ongoing politics. The battle affects by driving us to take sides either with understanding the social by ‘laws’ or ‘rhetoric’ (Grant, 2001:1381; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012). Separated from rhetoric, philosophy and political economy, economics has become a ‘Scientistic’19 discipline dedicated towards exploring its laws and statistical patterns (McCloskey 1998; Bourdieu, 1991: 95-96). Explained in terms of laws, in effect, the discipline justified accumulation and naturalised unequal distribution of wealth, ‘objectively’. Instead of discovering laws, such studies often settled for fairy tales.20 Kuznets, equipped with data of historical series of economic performance of the United States from 1913 to 1948, justified the utopia of conservatives that all is well with income inequality, because the natural laws of economics would automatically restore equality at its advanced phase. All that was needed to be assured of the benign laws and be educated of the skills to reap benefits of it, which the study assumed was already happening (Piketty, 2014:11). Thanks to Piketty, for he has put the distributional question back at the heart of economic analysis. He sounds a clarion call that dawn will never come as accumulation has a greater phase and gravity than distribution and with that phase, unless intervened, people and nature would soon be cut to fodder that feed the super rich, who by tactics would ‘sustain’ the world, with further promises of dawn from their towers of ideology. Nevertheless, he also presented his finding as a law, r>g inequality, that is if the return on investments (r) greater than wealth the 6
investment generated (g) that will make the unequal world and thus exploitative (Picketty, 2014: 25). The study of money in its gross history of physical use itself reveals that history of distribution of wealth has always been deeply political and cannot be reduced to apolitical laws of economics (Picketty, 2014:20). Economists by the obsession for pure and objective laws governing the economy converted the discipline into a domain of secular theocracy, an oxymoron (Honnefelder 1995). Since numerical manoeuvrability of the values ascribed to money has patterns and regularity, a science is made out of them with ‘laws’ resemble that of physics. The laws, including the laws of physics have the theological genealogy associated with the Law Giver, a faith overpowered scientists in the nascent periods of science. The Catholic version of natural law, its Protestant appropriation, the enlightenment modernity, the ideology of money21 and its allied constructs of man,22 property,23 individual and the consequent libertarian adaptation of the ideas belong to the same set of discursive formation. Drawn by similar sets of singularity the ideational climate territorialised first the European mind and spread elsewhere forming the global assemblage (Collier, 2007:4). Much that has been christened as natural laws are historically and biographically granted cultural dispositions. It is increasingly understood that “even physical scientists have been revising their conceptions of the nature and significance of scientific laws” (Taylor, 1929:1). Laws, when invoked, contain politics through claims of ‘natural’ authority. Money is the politics of valuation and validation. Numbers and their crunching have politics beneath. Inquiries into ideological ecologies of laws and explanations bring forth them in perspective. The concepts of money and its derivative sets of ideas like property, tax,24 market, labour, value or ownership are not the ahistorical a priory truths- rather they are socially contingent historical ontologies of truth games. They are sets of anachronistic explanandums flowing backward from present to past towards colonising past and future through the political currents of the present. Obviously, conventions of calculations, exchange for returns, property ownership, and the ‘liberty’ to punish trespassers are cultural and historical products than anything fundamental to the human nature (Graeber, 2014: 90-92; Mauss 1967). Money functions more than a medium and operates as an engine of history conditioning its momentum and direction, as dispositif. Nodes of money program it. Money reflects networking of relationships beyond creditors and debtors. It passes its judgement on survival or abolition of systems. Money directs history as the organism nerved with all the 7
veins of values meshworking its grids. Money objectifies and depersonalises (Simmel, 2004: 288), thereby it creates history beyond the expressed subjective positions (Patnaik, 2009:1). Wondering at money, Marx notes, Money abuses all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, this essence dominates him and he worships it (Marx, 1964:37). Money links valuators beyond their space and time. With money, we invest in the future preordaining singularities that drive the present, and even ordain the past towards the future. Values embodied in money reflect the values of the social. It networks human ambitions, both projected and shady, to shape the world and its destiny. Money is not merely a neutral medium of the ‘real’ exchange of goods and services that naturally piles up with relatively worthier as some economists hold (Smithin, 2000:1). Money is the carrier of declared and non-declared, seen and unseen, counted and uncounted values and validations. It is substituted for power, influence and commitment (Ganssman, 1988). The heightened calculative potential of money that has given its scientific attribute, has deprived money its ‘quality’ and converted it into an autopoetic engine of ‘quantity’. Simmel observes, With reference to money, we do not ask what and how, but how much. This quality or lack of quality of money first emerges in all its psychological purity, however, only after it has been acquired. Only when money is transformed into positive values does it become evident that the quantity exclusively determines the importance of money, namely its power as a means (Simmel, 2004:260). Once, it reaches the hands by whatsoever the capillary power of valuations facilitated it, all that matters is its quantity, thus creates the power equations of haves and have-nots, in the conventional sense of power. Claims of scientific understanding of money are mostly about its ‘pure’ quantity and movement. Quantitative differentiations money makes by its possession, however, creates newer flows of capillary power encompassing the whole lots of networks of relationships. Money, Weber held, is not mere voucher; rather, it is the result of power struggles and compromises (Weber, 1978:107). Value money holds is the residual networth of values of all participants, which is generally biased towards its haves than of its have-nots (Weber, 1978: 172).25 8
Money is the historically contingent dispositif that territorialises and deteritorialises flow and path of history (Deleuze, 2004b: 559-562). A dispositif enacts net-worth of its valuing towards making history, cotemporality and ebbs into the future. It is a master dispositif, like language, by which beings are caught into their compelling discourses (Agamben 2005; Foucault, 2002: xxi). “[N]ot only makes money the measure of man, but it also makes man the measure of the value of money,” Simmel views (Simmel, 2004: 358). A certain set of values it carries finds its currency in certain cultural geography whereas certain other values become appealing and emerge operative in other locations. Money disburses values unknown and of distant geographies to new locations and creates creoles and political hybrids of new valuations. Money triggers transitions in the value system by connecting temporalities and geographies, by that grid of valuation transcends itself. The grid of money as it spreads across space and time of multiple discourses it mediates interferences of multiple spectrums of values and thereby it becomes mediated. Objectification, individuation, measurement, unitising, utility, ownership, commoditisation, division of labour and any such aspect of secular modernity are indeed flows from the master dispositif, money. It is both the psychiatric power (Bussolini 2010: 86) of dispositif and the quantitative apparatus, it creates in the process. What emerges visible in the process is the physical apparatus of money as it is monopolised by sovereign states as the instrument of valuing. As a dispositif, it is the psychic apparatus produces power not according to right, but as a technique, not as the law, but through normalisation, not by legislative instruments of punishments, but through gravitating internal dispositions exercised at all the levels of the psyche beyond the regulatory apparatuses of the sovereign states. A keen observer cannot miss that it is the inner dynamics of dispositif that produces its outer edges of observable apparatuses. Nevertheless, the edges serve as the passive apparatus conducting and reproducing the current of dispositif. Essence of the apparatus is in dispositif making it up. Seemingly, money is legally valid tender issued by sovereign states. However, the geography of money belies the appearance. Money as the physical apparatus has already overgrown out of the power of sovereign state determined by the market (Cohen, 1998:3). States continue with the supply and control of national designations of money, but no longer automatically privileged to control the apparatus. Capturing the scenario, it is pointed out as early as in 1992, while the phenomenon had become faintly observable,
9
The state now finds itself confronted by ever more elaborate layers organisation which criss-cross its territorial boundaries…The image of the world where space is appropriated and exclusively controlled by sovereign states is a conceptual tool of doubtful utility (Camilleri and Falk, 1992: 4, 250). Ebb and flow of money are set by market while they are results of all-pervading capillary power of psychic dispositif. The apparatus at the edge functioning as the sovereign states, or institutions of servitude, slavery, legislative bodies or institutions of charity has but remain transformed or retained by dispositif charges produced at the nodes of network relations. The grid of valuation of money works as the tree of oeconomy26 passing its logic from the opus operatum to modus operandi and vice-versa. Money explained by the mathematics of virtual is a field of attractor virtually formed by converging desires, expectations, motives and judgements from various vector coordinates that act as the singularity passing on the long term tendencies of valuation upon socius in the making (Delanda, 2005:9-41). The gross reality of the economics of the physical money has its ethological genesis in the subtler socius and its politics, which Marx termed as ‘silent force of economic relations’ (Marx, 1954:874).
II
Dispositif of money, in a cultural context conducive to it, acts by converting the objects measured by money as money itself. In the ‘new world,’ slaves were money itself, a medium of transaction like other mediums of transactions: cloths, cow, tobacco, salt and other stuff. For that reason, Simmel notes, it was stated whoever serves money is ‘slave’s slave’ (Simmel, 2004:140, 246). The new world slavery begins with the psychic effluence of colonisers for ‘plenty of good land’ available elsewhere (Smith, 2007: 365). The intense desire to grab land as property from ‘barbarians’ (Smith, 2007: 288) elsewhere dispossessing infidels had its support even from the Papal Bull.27 It was in continuation with the mercantile rush for gold and silver (Ferguson, 2008: 20-27), and Smithian call for the wealth of nations. Smith noted, In the plenty of good land, the European colonies established in America and the West Indies resemble, and even greatly surpass, those of ancient Greece. In their 10
dependency upon the mother state, they resemble those of ancient Rome; but their great distance from Europe has in all of them alleviated more or less the effects of this dependency (Smith, 2007: 365). Smith presents as if a superior race gets entry into a land and amicably they negotiate with the local ‘barbarians’ (Smith, 2007: 288) and imagines the disproportion between the great extent of the land [with the new owners] and the small number of the people, which commonly takes place in new colonies, makes it difficult for him to get this labour and would result He does not, therefore, dispute about wages, but is willing to employ labour at any price. The high wages of labour encourage population (Smith, 2007: 365). However, the recorded history reveals, the occupation by ‘superior’ race at ‘plenty of good land’ differently. The new world was a haven of bought slaves and intense slave trading by influential profiteering as never preceded in such intensity in known human history. Slave trade and investment in the purchase of chattel slaves flourished in the context.28 Du Bois summarises the treatment of the slaves as property: In colonies like those in the West Indies and in South Carolina and Georgia, the rapid importation into America of a multitude of savages gave rise to a system of slavery far different from that which the late Civil War abolished. The strikingly harsh and even inhuman slave codes in these colonies show this. Crucifixion, burning, and starvation were legal modes of punishment (Du Bois, 2007:6). The New-Atlantic-slavery is the product of a mentality, the dispositif materialised out of the internal disposition of the West considering itself civilised and the rest as “wandering savages and poor barbarians” (Smith, 2007:319) of the “waste lands of the greatest natural fertility” (Smith, 2007: 365). A social relation of interdependence takes decades of trust establishment in a non-monetary society. Obligations and even relations of dominance were prevalent. What was new with the dispositions of early modern occupiers of the West was that, the land they have occupied and labourers they have ‘purchased’ were claimed to be properties with ‘absolute ownership’ they were legally entitled. Their absolute dominium, to make the matter worse, was believed to be divinely ordained as they were projected by their premium of thinkers of ‘liberty’ (Brewer and Staves, 2007: 1-18). With the purchasing power of money, longer drawn of social process had become faster and unambiguous. Eric Williams rightly 11
remarks, “When slavery is adopted, it is not adopted as the choice over free labour; there is no choice at all” (Williams, 1944:6). Unlike often claimed, the reasons for slavery, is neither civilisational nor moral advancements, but the opus operatum of their economic logic found its way in their modus operandi of wealth accumulation. Nothing but through rituals of monetary exchange the slave owners could be rationalised to hold other human beings as a property with absolute ownership right where the owner and the owned had no culturally mediated previous association. With new world slavery, money is exchanged between buyers and owners by which another person caught and chained from elsewhere becomes a property of the purchaser without any reciprocal rewards. New world slavery is different from other forms of human dominations in degrees, intensity and by genealogy (Blackburn, 1998:4; Drescher, 2002:9). It was not an instance of primordial instinct to enslave relapsed. Neither was it one among many kinds of slavery arrayed in a conceptual museum from time immemorial to the present. The curatorial arrangement of chattel slavery with other forms of social dominations in encyclopaedic order imposes a semblance of world order from times immemorial spread across culture in normalising the counter event,29 its newness hiding its genealogical rupture from the past (Foucault, 1998a: 178). For instance, James Townley, a missionary apologist begins his treatise on abolition of slavery with, the statement, Slavery, in various forms, has existed from the earliest periods of historical record. It appears to have originated in the brutal selfishness of lawless power; and though occasionally, and temporarily modified by the influence of civilisation, or the impulse of humanity, yet it never received effectual and permanent resistance, except from the authoritative precepts of divine revelation, and the mild but energetic principles of the gospel of Christ (Townley, 1800: x) Nevertheless, even serious scholarship has fallen into the trap of normalising slavery through linking it with primordiality. For Karl Marx, the slavery is a relapse “imposed without disguise upon new world” (Marx, 1847: 50). Weber, anachronistically mixes two forms of spatio-temporally disconnected slave conditions one from the ancient Rome and the other from the American experience with slavery in the new world, and universalises slavery for its poor reproduction and lack of efficiency, violating his own methodological stipulation of not “to describe the economic institutions of Antiquity in modern terms” (Weber, 1976: 45, 397398). Slavery, with the onset of modernity, from its epicentre, the European continent, is 12
pursued by the elitist among its citizens, in an organised manner perplexed even the brightest minds as they were confident of ‘the march of civilisation’ into progression. Commenting on the uneasiness of classical Social Science literature on the question of slavery, Robert Blackburn, a historian of new world slavery comments, Exploring the many ways in which American slavery proved compatible with elements of modernity will help to dispel the tendency of classical Social Science - from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises, Auguste Comte to Max Weber - to identify
slavery with
traditionalism,
patrimonialism
and
backwardness
(Blackburn, 1998:4) Ideas of progression of history, clash of civilisations and march of superior race (Mateer 1883:66) and the claims of ‘manifest destiny’ had such a gravity that pulled even the bestknown radicals as subjected to the compelling dispositif (Merk, 1963:ix, 24-60). The spirit of new world slavery, Newman sees, had existed in the ‘integral characteristics of the early modern English society’ in its organisation of labour and the compulsion to work (Newman, 2013:17). Tracing the history of mindset, that later flourished into full-fledged modern slavery, he writes, the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the ‘Statute of the Labourers (1351) were intended, at least in part, to check the potential increase in the power and independence in this land-rich labour-poor environment by mandating and protecting the rights of masters. (Newman, 2013:19). Continuing with the trend, the Vagrancy Act of 1824, that mandated slavery upon anyone caught to be wandering homeless or jobless for more than once, reveals inner inscriptions of the British about the epochal change in their treatment of labour. Tracing the origin of the chattel slavery in British colonies, Newman recounts the story of shipping tens of thousands of jobless people, vagrants, criminals and prisoners of war from England to Barbados islands, from the mid-seventeenth century, to West Africa as bonded labourers responding to insatiable needs for labour by the planters (Newman, 2013: 34). Planters imported labour from England because native Blacks then, despite local practices of bonded servitudes, were not familiar with the total unfreedom of the round the clock labour the planters would extract in sugar production. The British planters had to inculcate its ‘work ethics’ through slave ‘education’ and other means (Newman, 2013: 133). By 13
1650 Barbados was not only became the greatest wealth-producing area in the Englishspeaking world, but also emerged the apt model for accumulating wealth (Newman, 2013: 91). Newman presents the story of the natives of Barbados who were gradually trapped into the new-slavery. He narrates how they became victims of massive transatlantic slave trade and ended in the new world of America (Newman, 2013: 247). Newman convincingly shows that it is not the West African primordial slavery, but the early modern ‘servant regime’ prevalent among the Whites was the impetus for new world slavery (Newman, 2013: 245). Newman’s book repeats the observations made by other scholars that slave labour later gains racial character (Newman, 2013: 253). Its racial character is evident by the fact the White caste by default stayed free from inheritance of slavery whereas the Blacks by default inherit slavery if not given manumission30 (Drescher, 2002: 10). History of Atlantic slavery has shown us that at accumulated desires for domination and expansion that had been lingering in the European minds steadily supplied by its early modernity had found its expression, materialisation and legitimacy and the same had later emerged sophisticated with labels of capitalism and growth. It is a counter event erupted by the intersection of economic, religious, political interests of the societies and governments from Scandinavia to South Eastern Africa, from present day Argentina and Chili to Canada’ had its grossest manifestation ‘between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth century, participants in the Atlantic slave trade included traders, princes, merchants, and planters from Massachusetts to Mozambique (Drescher, 2002: 3). In sum, slave trade has its germination in the British idea of how labour should be organised and used. Interestingly, the spirit is invoked positively in Max Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 2012). Other forms of social dominance prevailed elsewhere were in the world qualitatively different,31 as they have different genealogy.32 Social schemas of dominance gradually brewing into existence have least to be compared with a new proprietor of distant land purchasing slaves to amass wealth using their servitude. “The new-slavery”, it is observed, was “modern” in spirit (Blackburn, 1998: 4). Its modernity comes from the character of money with which the slaves were purchased. Other forms of servitudes33 that are often bracketed with new world slavery are conventions of obligations and indebtedness that reinforce hierarchic or holonarchic34 interdependences especially in non-monetary social orders. They are not modern institutions like new world slavery. New 14
world slavery converted all obligations into monetary terms with attached price tags. Slaves in the new-slavery are saleable commodities. To make something salable it had to be ripped off or disembedded from its context (Paul, 1993: 41-71). Neither the object purchased nor the context to which the object belongs had any right over each other. It has the characteristic of monetary economy inscribed on it. For that reason, what Weber presents as the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is also the spirit of new-slavery. The spirit of newslavery and capitalism is the spirit of money. “This is why they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their owners” observes Graeber (2014:146). It is not accidental that several of the processes that define slavery, also define modernity: property, ownership, purchase, transaction, taxation, identity, time frames, labour, price tags, return on investment, maintenance cost, national sentiment, administration, individuation, instrumental rationality, alienation and the list continues. This is because new-slavery and modernity share the spirit of money. Never before the invention of money, what one owes to the other was neatly measured or thoroughly objectified. The purchased are property, the dominium characterised as the absolute power of the person over the thing (Graeber, 2014: 202). Money, property and even slavery are often misrecognised as if they were natural a priori.35
III
Often, the abolition of slavery was presented as a conscientious heroic step ahead of a few enlightened British souls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 Abolition was a global project,37 though slavery itself of the same kind and intensity was never global.38 Abolitionists bracketed all forms of non-monetary interdependencies, obligations and their consequent social dominations with slavery. It was projected as both the charity of Protestant Christianity and achievement of the rebellion by the enslaved.39 It is also pointed out that it is wrong to consider, first, that revolts were always ways of fighting slavery; and second, that the decision to end the system of slavery in most Western nations was for the most part the outcome of such revolts (Drescher & Emmer, 2010: 5).
15
For, mostly slave rebellions were rebelling for their own freedom, but not against the system of slavery.40 Abolition in the colonies through proselytisation was a means towards the appropriation of free labour and a step towards gripping colonial hold.41 If keenly observed, it becomes clear that the abolition is the result of slavery becoming unaffordable symbolically and economically. Adam Smith, sharing the spirit of the elite class of his period writes, It appears from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves… the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest than to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible (Smith, 2007: 252). It was noted by historians of slavery that “the economic superiority of hiring over servile labour, the new, more “flexible” system of “free” labour was essential for the Western expansion and development” (Drescher 2002:5). By the time abolition was projected as radical or moral goodness of the British, it was already well-articulated commonsensical knowledge that maintaining slave labour is not viable, competitive or profitable viz a viz consuming the fruit of the free labour. ‘Fruitlessness of compulsive labour’ had been an already learnt experiential ‘truth’ in Briton as early as in the mid-late eighteenth century where it was observed in The Morning Chronicle of 15 September 1785, “… in every workhouse in the kingdom. There is in proof too, the felon in the hulks, who produce not a fourth part of the ballast which is raised in adjourning barges, where men are working on their own account” (Drescher, 2002: 18). The popular mood against the costly labour of lazy slaves was part of newspaper editorials and coffee table discussions of the British culture at that time (Drescher, 1987:242). John Elliot Cairnes capturing the mindset prevalent at the climate of abolition writes, [Slave labour] is unskilful; it is wanting in versatility. It is given reluctantly, and consequently the industry of the slave can only be depended on so long as he is watched. […] Secondly, slave labour is unskilful, and this, not only because the slave, having no interest in his work, has no inducement to exert his higher faculties, but because, from the ignorance to which he is of necessity condemned, he is incapable of doing so. […] But further, slave labour is eminently defective in point of versatility. The difficulty of teaching the slave anything is so great, 16
that the only chance of turning his labour to profit is, when he has once learnt a lesson, to keep him to that lesson for life. Where slaves, therefore, are employed there can be no variety of production (Cairnes, 1863:39). Obviously, slavery was ‘abolished’ as it was economically pragmatic to enslave free labour instead of owning an unfree slave. Slavery was abolished because the British capitalism no longer had use of the institution. Economic ideology had been always in the backdrop of the expansion of slavery, its abolition and in the projection of ‘free labour’ as freedom (Waldstreicher, 2006: 183-185). Wherever, there was better bargain, it was observed, slavery was still maintained, even after its abolition (Mill, 1882:252; Major, 2012: 189-197; Raman, 2010: 89-90). As Eric Williams argued in his seminal work on Capitalism and Slavery, Slavery financed industrial revolution – industrial revolution devised free labour (Williams, 1944:52). Free labour in colonies as was a new-slavery introduced in the British colonies, as the chattel slavery as well as culturally prevalent forms of social dominance were economically and symbolically unviable in the emerging new social assemblage. Nevertheless, the new-slavery in the form of free labour was freedom to a limited extent for the people humiliated by the local forms of social dominance and servitudes. However, it was a triple benefit for the colonialists as labour appropriation, symbolic victory over the native dominators and strengthening of the colonists hold could be achieved by the single strategy of abolition. Historically, despite the expectations, abolition had intensified racial bias, as former slaves had become millions of “poor rates” who were feared making “Inroads into property” to “steal for their support” (Anonymous, 1830:198). At this climate, idleness was gaining the currency of being the most evil. Even the radical president of America, Thomas Jefferson, pronounced, that the idle among the freed slaves should be sent “out of the country” (Greene, 1987:1055). The Church as the religious institution was important then, more than for its claim to divine connections. It rose to prominence in a new way as it had a secular role of denouncing idleness 42 of the labour, inculcating ‘labour morality’ and ‘educating’ the labour in the years following abolition. Hence, at the behest of abolition the Church played a crucial role in raising slave schools all over the world as it took the responsibility of “curing the idleness” as a “New medicine for poverty”, where the erstwhile slaves were indoctrinated to overcome poverty through hard work, labour and “individual responsibility” (Tawney, 1926: 226). The congenial temper of the time was, “setting the poor on work”. The religion was 17
shifting its emphasis on the obligation of charity to “the duty of work”. Pamphlets, that echoed slave education reads “The law of God” in the post-abolition socius was interpreted as, “he that will not work, let him not eat”. It was declared, “the greatest of evils is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own idle irregular wicked courses” (Tawney, 1926. 219-222). Making the labour less idled and more responsible was the ‘New medicine for poverty’ doctrine.
The doctrine is newborn as the ‘spirit of
capitalism’ in Weber’s seminal work on the Protestant Ethics. The medicine was administered through churches in all locations of The British Imperium. Mobilised by the spirit James Burgh, a revolutionary protagonist, proposed “to seize all the idle and disorderly persons, who have been three times complained before the magistrate and to set them to work, during a certain time, for the benefit of great trading, or manufacturing companies” (Burgh, 1775: 220-221). Schooling the labour towards greater responsibility had a pastoral dimension of labour appropriation, and a measure towards alleviating moral and economic impact of abolition. Abolition in socius of culturally knit relations of labour, as that was prevalent in India, one of the colonies of the British Empire, Ravi Raman observes, had its impact of enhanced supply of labour for the colonial proprietors and planters (Raman, 2010:67). The proselytisation, baptisms and evangelical activism after the ‘abolition of slavery’ harvested disciplined labour for the property owners, plantations and prepared the world for the burgeoning industrialization. In addition, it is not accidental that the world was becoming more ‘secular’ with reduced attendance in the churches, because, the Church itself, the erstwhile ideological institution for preparing the labour is replaced by secular institutions supplying sustained labour. Interestingly, slavery, abolition and free labour were different manifestations of the same momentum of dispositif. The economy, it was recognised, would perform better through purchase of labour than enslaving labourer. It was at the behest of the economic growth and expansion, slavery had to be given up. It was also ‘grounded in rigorous and elaborate economic analyses’ in terms of profitability, viability, and competitiveness (Drescher, 2002:4). The shift towards free labour happens within the discursive transition of socius preparing itself for the industrial revolution. In Mill’s words, the “free market for labour” was indispensable for industry and free trade (Mill, 1882: 553). But for abolition of non-market social dependencies, labour would not have become freely purchasable.43 Economic Compulsions, and not the goodwill of abolitionists or civilisational advancement destined the abolition. 18
IV Money as a dispositif had constantly drawn the will of socius upon the social and driven it into phases of servitudes, slavery, its abolition and appropriation of free labour. Money, is a master dispositive that continues laying its rails, pathways and trajectories (Bourdieu, 1990:57). The culture of valuations programmed money as dispositif of the socius. Money, the apparatus invented to evaluate objects became the object of value itself. Further, the apparatus made humans its apparatus and mobilised their history to greater and sophisticated servitudes, interestingly, though its subjects were consistently belied of greater freedom. Money, with its capacity for unambiguous accounting naturalised its truth games. Money replaced religion, God, and nature. Money has made humans its property: the possessed and owned by its dispositif power. Money is still not a finished product. It is becoming and shaping us to become in its moulds. Money is our active faith turned into force, activity and struggle. It is the dispositif, the cumulative gravity of socius in the making. Nevertheless, a reflexive will to power, would torpedo the dispositif de-singularising its current. Desinguralizing the current of protocol cannot be achieved by the convention of anthropomorphic countervailing strategies like strikes, armed revolutions or ‘progressive’ legislations from the sovereign powers of authority alone. Dispositif is the unhuman power and hence its resistance too should be unhuman. The politics of counter protocol is the politics of desingularising networks by demodulating the nodes. Counter-protocols should attend the tensions and contradictions within the system (Galloway and Thaker, 2007: 98). System of networks has to be de-disposited through deconstructing the justifications sustain them. The network may have to be re-assembled with the countervailing forces historically resisted the current dispositif but lost in its battle by the swarms of nodes torpedoed the counter-modulation thereby spoiling the communication between the active nodes and effective edges. The prowess of the assembled set of network is sustained by resisting the desingularising force fields of void, its null set. Power of unseen, uncounted, unnumbered, unnamed at the burst of events torpedo the protocol. Recognising the events that ruptures the protocol and cultivating a fidelity extending the evanescence of ruptures could be expected to transform the chains of modulations towards reassembling network altogether differently (Badiou 2007). With the collapse of truisms that sustains networks, they would not withstand the swirls of transitions. Networks can be transformed through praxic choices at the capillary productions and sustenance of dispositif. 19
A dispositif exists defying their rupture by virtue of the linkages and force fields sustain it. It exists because it signifies ‘the truth’ in the ecology of its existence that obscures its a-signifying puissance. Dispositif is not a means to an end as it acts in the case of money. It is the potential of freedom contrived in a network of significations. It binds us ‘productively’ within the network towards producing our own unfreedom. Dispositif acts from within as its internal dispositions echo networks of significations within which it is habituated. However, the essence of dispositif is not unfreedom. The content of socius within which the dispositif is found is not the essence of dispositif. Dispositif is the all-pervading productive force historically caught within the predatory logic of capitalism and its euphemistic promises of freedom. Servitude, slavery, its abolition and free labour, as I have presented the cases, are historically continuing logic of deceits demonstrated with the apparatus of money. Orders of the Papacy, logics of natural law, legislations of abolition, constructs of the free market were giving the content and context of dispositif by which it produced a social order that has no meaning beyond what its signifying networks were hideing. Dispositif is the techne and the art of mind. It is the creative faculty of opening up. “It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth” (Heidegger, 1977:12). What is decisive in dispositif does not lay the manipulations we are subjected to within the epistemic soup of the socius, but in ‘revealing’. Its revealing is not manufacturing, but bringing forth. Money as the apparatus concealed our dispositif within its epistemic closures and guided history through ‘modernity’. It has reined us through the conventions of valuing exerting unreasonable demand on fellow humans, ecology using the most powerful stuffs created out of human imagination such as God, religion and the free - market. For the unconcealment of dispositif to happen, it is essential that we begin our correspondence with what dispositif actually is rather than being caught into the web of networks that conceals and forbids its potency. It needs opening up to the a-signifying questionings than being contained in the signifying answers. Unlike declared by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the God of tradition is not dead, but merely went through metamorphosis and reborn as the ‘modern’. The meta-discourse of the epoch of ‘modernity’ is mediated by the apparatus of money that is naturalized by the historical ontology of subjectivations recreated through internal currents of dispositifs producing the network of social relations. In other words, the simulacra of dispositifs resonate to produce the discursive meshwork of socius mutually reinforcing their vibrations. Except by invoking active praxis aspect counter-modulating the resonance one is retransmitting the vibration of 20
discourse across the network. The external appearances of multiple forms of dominations in their renewedly justified forms are manifestations of the vibrancy passes through the strings of network. Life is not subjectivation. To be alive is to be free. It means not subjecting life to the vibrancies of discourses. Nurturing the counter-dispositif active aspect of life against the current is empowerment. Empowerment reclaims the subject and truth (Badiou, 2007). We emerge as subjects by repelling subjectivations. One does not know which trepidation would torpedo the simulacra of the current unfreedom.
Notes 1. The socius is the social ‘body without organ’. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari first used the word in their book, “Anti Oedipus” (2004a: 153-159) to indicate liveliness of the social, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects and movements. Socius is the terrain of coding, recoding and decoding. 2. Dispositif is sometimes translated as despositor, that which influences dispositions. Dispositif is a particular constellation of heterogeneous elements and the system of relations between them which are according to Foucault are the relations of power and knowledge that constitutes humans as the subjects of knowledge, which is power itself (Foucault 1980:94) 3. Result of practices 4. Mode of practices 5. State forms are ‘states of power’ that makes production a "mode."( Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 429) 6. A wide variety of wholes constructed from heterogeneous parts (Deleuze, 2004b:554556) 7. The intersection happens in players, Burk qualifies, “ but where it occurs is distinct from the causal force released by its occurrence. People and organisations are not so much the source of action as the vehicles for structurally induced action” (Burke, 1992:181 8. Structural holes as defined by Robert Burt is, “disconnections and non-equivalences between players in the arena”. “The causal force of structural holes”, for Burts, “resides in the pattern of relationships that intersect in a player's network”. (Burke, 1992: 1-2, 181) 21
9. Relations of nonredundancy visible only by their absence; Burke observes, they connect invisible pieces of players (Burke, 1992:181) 10. The ‘natural law’ of early modernity and enlightenment has its genesis in Thomas Aquinas’s (c. 1224–1274) doctrine that holds, it is the dictate from the ruler, the God for the community he rules (Aquinas, Summa TheologiaeI-IIae, 91, 1; Hochstrasser 2000). The natural law is universal, immutable (Fox 1910). The Natural Law of Catholic faith belongs to different origin, genealogy and historical context than that ascribed to Plato in the history of ideas. Plato’s nature is the ideal, what the world is not, the ideal presupposing a rupture from existence; the Catholic version is “embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning, albeit in a form diminished by the Fall of Man” (Hochstrasser, 2002:1607-1610). Badiou opens us to the interpretation that Plato’s idealism unlike the ‘natural law’ of the enlightenment morality, is a gateway to ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ that expands ‘the question of being today’ beyond the ontology of ‘One and the many’ (Badiou 2012) 11. Natural instincts 12. Drawn from observed from the patterns and conventions. 13. The laws learnt naturally by all animals, including humans. Natural Law (ius naturale) for early Romas is what nature teaches the animals (Datson and Stolleis, 2008:6) 14. Determined by the divine providence from above 15. Abstracted from the total 16. Laws of the nobility and civilised 17. Superior rationality 18. Nomos vs Logos; Nomos = arrangements of a surface; Logos = Laws of depth. Laws as they emerge in the context (Lefebvre, 2008:236) 19. Scientism is an attempt to treat substances, including human society and its history as if it were a decisive ingredient measurable through tenets of positivism. Scientistic abdication, Bourdieu argues, ruins political conviction. 20. Interestingly, the fairy tales too have arisen in coterminous with the enlightenment morals of work and fortune. For instance, see the collection of fairy tales of Marcet, Jane Haldimand (Marcet, 1833). They are discursively different from the tales of aborigines or the stories and mythologies prior to the enlightenment era. However, 22
the ‘minority’ of fairy tales that resisted those justified natural law as that of Oscar Wild (Killeen 2007). 21. Money as numismatic objects traced back to the ancestry are objects of different discursive constellations different from economic rationality of keeping an account of dues and debts. Kurke distinguishing modern money with that of ancient Greek suggests, “in a strictly controlled gift exchange circuits… there is no place for money as a means of exchange” (1999: 11). The modern money is a consequence to the idea of measuring the worth of individuals in relation to net-worth of one’s gain or lose vis a vis the other in an environment where their worth is constantly accounted. The logic does not extend beyond enlightenment modernity and hence the ancient coins are discursively of different category than modern money. Kurke further states, “if we are to properly understand the meanings of money we must situate coinage squarely in the frame of political and social contestations…” (1999:22). The ancient money it is suggested is a symbolic value, a ‘pure sign’ to which even the its ‘amount’ is irrelevant and hence had no transactional value in the everyday economic exchanges (1999:238). 22. Foucault discovered that the ‘Man’ as an entity of constant double-essences (on the one hand, as natural individual and object in the natural world obedient to indiscriminate dictates of its laws and on the other hand, as a free-willed agent uniquely capable of comprehending and altering his world around) is a consequence of the discursive formation of the enlightenment modernity (Foucault, 2002:309). Paradoxically, the free-willed creature, Foucault observes, nevertheless is thrown into the status of das-man (Heidegger, 2008: 164-168), subjected to the dispositif . The ideas of man, money and natural laws share the same set of dispositif that had its expression in colonial expansion, chattel slavery, abolition of slavery, idealization of free labour, the formation of nation states, industrial revolution and the rest followed. 23. The idea of ‘property’ shares its genealogy with other related words: ‘nature’, ‘quality’, ‘one’s own’, ‘special characteristic’, ‘proper’, ‘intrinsic’, ‘inherent’, ‘regular’, ‘normal’, ‘genuine’, ‘thorough, complete, perfect etc., from the etymological root ‘proprius’ John Locke (1689), see sec.25, Chapter V, On Property; (Madhu, 2010: 94). 24. Franklin (1907): In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.
23
25. Writing about money, Weber (1978:287) writes, “its acts are determined by its own financial interests and those of important economic groups” 26. Oeconomy (Oikonomia) is the Upward continuum of activities; i.e., from micro level economic or administrative activities to the economy of the state and administration through multiple domains. For Agamben, Oikonomia (oikos= house) is an economy conceived as an immanent order emerges out of a complicated system of relations, the dispositif (Agamben 2007) 27. Papal Bull of the year 1455 destined captivity and slavery upon the infidels. 28. Du Bois documents that the slave trade was a lucrative practice by the British Colonialists as early as in the first half of the seventeenth century (2007:6-13). The trade practice intensified by establishing “The Company of royal adventures trading to Africa” charted by Charles II in 1662. The slave trade was then held, “highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and to the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging”. Du Bois observes, “the slave trade was the very life of the colonies had, by 1700, become an almost unquestioned axiom in British practical economics”. 29. An event for Badiou (Badiou 2007) is the burst of the ‘truth’ that breaks the prevailing set of routine. A counter event on the contrary, is a burst, but that makes a subject subjected to a new mode of inauthenticity, the untruth. 30. Manumission is generally understood as the goodwill gesture of the master towards their slaves. However, research findings also suggest, slave owners acquiring more slaves after manumitting the older and weaker slaves, the incidences of forcing the slaves to buy their manumission through additional hard work for a period. (Whiteman, 2000: 4, 52, 60; Walker, 1963: 263). Manumissions converted the chattel slaves into wage slaves. It is argued that it enhanced master’s power and control over slaves (Kleijwegt, 2006: 14, 20) . 31. “The slavery of the Ancient World had been far more diversified, both in the pattern of employment and in its ethnic composition, ... New world slavery was a curse that even the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original African captive found it exceedingly difficult to escape. This was a strong, even unprecedented, species of enslavement… Slavery existed in Africa prior to the Atlantic trade, and long continued to have a social meaning there which was very different to that prevailing in the Americas”. (Blackburn, 1998:3-5) 24
32. Genealogy is a methodological approach by which we trace first occurrences of a phenomenon in its historical context. It is a method of tracing the heterogeneity of ethological complexities out of which a new phenomenon is synthesized. 33. Other forms servitudes and discriminatory orders such as caste discriminations in India, Mainty in Madagascar, Osu in Nigeria, Burakumin of Japan etc., do not share the same genealogy as the slavery of the new world. 34. Holonarchies are interlocking hierarchies. Arthur Koestler, coined the word Holonarchy to represent hierarchical arrangement of social holons. Holons are Janus faced nodes of the hierarchical architecture, which behave partly as a whole and wholeness as part, according to the way we, look at them. Koestler coined the term holon by adding Holos (= the whole) with On (= particle or part). Holonarchies are relations of ‘holon’ic hierarchies (Koestler, 1989: 45-58). Caste as presented by Gupta is multiple and contesting hierarchisation that is being shaped by emerging social milieus (Gupta, 2004:4). Holonarchies are multiple faceted hierarchisation variously networked transitions of contestations and complementarities. 35. "For centuries slavery was 'imagined' as an immutable part of natural social order. Hence it was utopian to advocate its abolition” ( Kim 1984:81) 36. For Marxists slavery gave way to feudalism in a natural progression because of internal contradictions in the slave system (Daviss 1966). Historians of the Church and missionary held that slavery had to be abolished owing to Christian values (Roberts 1833). For UNESCO (2014), “The first fighters of slavery were the captives and the slaves themselves”. It is also observed the abolition of slavery is a reaction by the British Parliament to absolve ill reputation of having been in transatlantic slave trader for over three centuries. The mood of the British is captured, it is said, by the statement of William Pitt the Younger, in the House of Commons in April 1792, “No nation in Europe has plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain” while he was talking in favour of abolition (Thomas1997: 235-261). For some others, abolition was purely a government action (Blouet 1991: 391-409). 37. “Britain was the site …mass movement to abolish the slave trade within its own jurisdiction. [Towards] the end of the British transatlantic trade in 1807, the scope of the movement’s ambitions quickly assumed global dimensions…. Britain’s leadership also engendered an element of national triumpalism in British historiography” (Drescher, 2002:3-4). 25
38. Abolition was equated to proselytising the potential free labour of into Protestant Christianity. Abolitionists pressurized ministries all over the world to free labour from whatsoever unfree labour relationships. Samuel Roberts notes in his historical account of ‘abolition of slavery’ notes, “With the Ministries themselves it was foolishness [to abolish slavery] for they did it from compulsion.. but with God’s wisdom, for it was right, and it will be beneficial in the end to all parties” (Roberts 1833: Townley 1800). The abolition of British Slavery, “is but one step— an important one, I grant—in the prosecution of the great work assign … is …destined to be an instrument in enlightening other Gentile nations” (Townley, 1800:22). 39. The discursive transition made Church, its subject, thoroughly controlling its collective unconscious, which the Church ‘reflexively’ appropriated as if it were sheer goodness flowing from divinity 40. Dresche and Emmer show how most of the rebels themselves had slaves and assisted the colonial forces in putting down slave rebellions. 41. For instance the Church history document, states conversion was at the empire building because “a strong and friendly Christian community will be a support for the British power in Malabar” (Jeffrey, 2014: 6; Thomas, CY, 2014) 42. For instance, enslavement of Africans perpetually was justified as “the ordinary punishment of such idle vagrants” (Hutcheson, 1840: 202) 43. The idea of ‘free labour’ is an oxymoron. Etymologically labour is exertion of the body; trouble, difficulty, hardship, pain, fatigue; a work, a product of labour originated from the notion of notion of "tottering under a burden- in other words- it is slavery. Free labour is a labour can be extracted freely. It is free because it can be freely bought or sold (Simmel, 2004:285). Free labour is the freedom for the investor to hire labour. Labour, which otherwise creates interdependence, is freed of the obligation by the instrument of money. Free labour is servitude free of further obligations.
References Anonymous. 1830."An Essay on Gardens with Reference to The Prize Question in the Gardener's Magazine." In The Gardener's Magazine: A Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement, edited by John Claudius Loudon, 198-208. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Greene. 26
Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. "The Power and the Glory." Published electronically on 6/28/2010. Available at: http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1566. (Accessed October 16, 2014) Agamben, Georgio. 2005. "What Is Dispositif?", Available at: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-dispositif/ (2005). (Accessed October 16, 2014) Anderson, Benjamin. 1917.The Value of Money. New York: The Macmillan Company. Badiou, Alain. 2007. Being and Event. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters. 2012.Translated by Susan Spitzer. Cambridge: Polity. Bellenoit, Hayden J.A. 2007. "Missionary Education, Religion and Knowledge in India, C.1880–1915." Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 2: 369-94. Blackburn, Robin. 1998. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern- 1492-1800. New York: Versa. Blouet, Olwyn M. 1991."Earning and Learning in the British West Indies: An Image of Freedom in the Pre-Emancipation Decade, 1823-1833." The Historical Journal 34, no. 2: 391-409. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1991. [1975]The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. California: Stanford University Press. Brewer, John, and Susan Staves, eds. 2007. Early Modern Conceptions of Property. London: Routledge . Burgh, James. 1775. Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors. Philadelphia: Robert Bell & William Woodhouse. Burke, Edmund. 1795. Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv4c4.html. (Accessed October 16, 2014) Burt, Ronald S. 1992.Structural Holes, the Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bussolini, Jeffrey. 2010. "What Is Dispositif." Foucault Studies 10: 85-107. Cairnes, John Elliot. 1862. The Slave Power. Its Character, Career and Probable Designs. II ed. New York: Carleton. Camilleri, Joseph A, and Jim Falk. 1992. The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of the 27
Shrinking and Fragmenting World. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Cohen, Benjamin J. 1998. The Geography of Money. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Collier, Stephen J. 2007. "Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems." In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier. Oxford: Blackwell. Crowe, Michael Bertram. 1977. The Changing Profile of the Natural Law. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Daston, Lorraine, and Michael Stolleis, eds. 2008Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe. Surrey: Ashgate. Davis, David Brion. 1989. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Delanda, Manuel. 2005. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New Delhi: Continuum . Deleuze, Gilles. 1998."What Is a Dispositif?". In Michel Foucault Philosopher, 159-68. New York . Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. . 2004a [1972] Anti Oedipus. Continuum: New Delhi ———. 2004b.A Thousand Plateaus. Continuum: New Delhi. Drescher, Setmour. 1987. Capitalism and Anti Slavery: British Mobilisation in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labour Versus Slavery in British Emancipation. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drescher, Seymour, and Peter C.Emmer, eds. 2010. Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638 - 1870. New York: Dodo Press. Ferguson, Niall. 2009. The Ascent of Money. London: Penguin. ———. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. 2006. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, Michael. 1998a. "Different Spaces." Chap. 2 In Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, 175-85. London: Penguin. ———. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. 1998b. Vol. I, London: Penguin. ———. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. Power/Knowledge. 1980. New York: Pantheon Book. Fox, James. "Natural Law." 1910 New York: Robert Appleton Company. 28
Fracer, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Franklin, Benjamin. 2007."A Letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789." In The Works of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Albert Henry Smyth. New York: Macmillan, 1907. (Reprint). Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ganssman, Heiner. 1988. "Money- a Symbolically Generalized Medium of Communication?". Economy & Society 17: 285-316. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Harvard University Press. Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New Delhi: Penguin. Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2001."At the Mountain of Madness: The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming.". Chap. 85 In Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessment of Leading Philosophers, edited by Gary Genosko, 1372- 93: Routledge. Greene, Jack P, ed. 1987 The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778 by Landon Carter. Vol. 2. Michigan: Virginia Historical Society. Gupta, Dipankar, ed. 2004. Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy. New Delhi: Sage. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. Heidegger, Martin. 2008 [1926]. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. ———. "The Question Concerning Technology. 1977." In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, edited by William Lovitt, 3-35. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Hochstrasser, T.J. 2002. "Natural Law." In New dictionary of the history of ideas. Gale: Thomson. ———. 2000. Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honnefelder, Ludger. 1995. "Rationalisation and Natural Law: Max Weber's and Ernst Troeltsch's Interpretation of the Medieval Doctrine of Natural Law." The Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 2: 275-94. Hutcheson, Francis. 1840. A System of Moral Philosophy. Vol. II, London: Folis Printers. Ingham, Geoffrey. 2000. "'Babylonian Madness': On the Historical and Sociological Origins of Money." In What Is Money?, edited by John Smithin, 16-41. London: Routledge. 29
Jeffrey, Robin. 2014 [1976]. The Decline of Nair Dominance. New Delhi: Manohar. Kanne, Marvin E. 1979. "Saint Thomas Aquinas' Division of the Sciences." Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences 7: 145-48. Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. "Treatise on Money." In The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan. Killeen, Jarlath. 2007. The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. Hampshire: Ashgate. Kim, Samuel S. 1984. The Quest for a Just World Order. Colarado: Westview Press. Kleijwegt, Mark. 2006. The Faces of Freedom the Manumission and Emancipation of Slaves in the Old World and New World Slavery. Leiden: Brill. Koastler, Arthur. 1989. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Arkana. Kurke, Leslie. 1999. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John. 1994. Organising Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Alexandre. 2008.The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leyshon, Andre, and Nigel Thrift. 2005. Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformations. London: Routledge. Locke, John. 1969. "Treatise on Property.” Published electronically . Available at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html (accessed October 16, 2014). Loudon, John Claudius. 1830. The Gardener’s Magazine London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Greene. Madhu, P. 2010. "Business Ethics: Should It Remain an Oxymoron?". MES Journal of Technology and Management 1, no. 1: 83-98. Major, Andrea. 2012. Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772-1843. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Marcet, Jane Haldimand. 2014. "John Hopkins's Notions on Political Economy." Library of Economics and Liberty, Available at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Marcet/mrcJH1.html. (accessed October 16, 2014). Marx, Karl. 1954. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. 30
———. 1973. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1964. Karl Marx Early Writings. London: McGraw Hill. ———. 1844."On the Jewish Question." (1844). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. (accessed October 16, 2014). ———. 1847." The Philosophy of Poverty. On 30th August 2014.", Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Poverty-Philosophy.pdf. (accessed October 16, 2014). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1992 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mateer, Samuel. 1883. Native Life in Travancore. London: W H Allen & Co. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. "The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies." New York: The Norton Library. McCloskey, Deirdre N. 1998 [1985] The Rhetoric of Economics Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. II ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1882. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. New York: D.Appleton and Company. Newman, Simon P. 2013. A New World of Labour: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Patnaik, Prabhat. 2009. The Value of Money. New York: Colombia University Press. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2012. "Law, Space, Bodies: The Emergence of Spatial Justice." In Deleuze and Law, edited by Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee, 90-111. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2014.Capital in the Twenty First Century. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pope, The. 1455. "The Papal Bull 1455." Published electronically. Available at http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/indig-romanus-pontifex.html. (accessed October 16, 2014). Raman, Ravi. 2010. Global Capital and Peripheral Labour: The History and Political Economy of Plantation Workers in India. New York: Routledge. Reckord, Mary. 1971. "The Colonial Office and the Abolition of Slavery." The Historical Journal 14, no. 4: 723-34. Roberts, Samuel, and Joseph Read.1833. Omnipotence : As Exemplified in the Abolition of 31
Slavery. Sheffield: Saxton and Chaloner. Schall, James V. 1993. "Natural Law and Economics." Religion and Liberty 3, no. 3. Simmel, Georg. 2004. The Philosophy of Money. III ed. London: Routledge. Smith, Adam. 2007. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Hampshire: Harriman House. Smith, H. 1862. "The Reports of Joint Commission from Bengal and Bombay Appointed to Inspect the State and Condition of the Province of Malabar in the Year 1762 and 1793." edited by H.Smith. Madras. Smithin, John. 2000. "What Is Money?". In What Is Money?, edited by John Smithin, 1-15. London: Routledge. Swedberg, Richard. 2005. "Towards an Economic Sociology of Capitalism." L'Année sociologique 55: 419-49. Tailor, Overton H. 1929. "Economics and the Idea of Natural Laws." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 44, no. 1: 1-39. Tawney, Richard Henry. 1926. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Mentor Book. Thomas, C.Y. "History of Church of South India." http://csimichigan.org/CKD_Chapter1.htm (accessed October 16, 2014). Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Townley, James. 1800. "Abolition of Slavery, Wilson Anti Slavery Collection, Wilson Anti Slavery Collection." Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/60227882. (accessed October 16, 2014). Waldstreicher, David. 2006. Capitalism, Slavery and Benjamin Franklin's American Revolution. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania state University. Wanker, Eric Anderson. 1963.The Cambridge History of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1976. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations. London: NLB. ———. 1978. [1922]. Economy and Society. Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California. ———. 2012 [1930]. The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge. Whiteman, Stephen. 2000. The Price of Freedom. Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland. New York: Routledge. 32
Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hills: University of North Carolina Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Zimmerman, Michael.1986. Eclipse of the Self. Athens: Ohio University Press.
33
