it is to better push an analysis that is neither overly optimistic about the redemptive power of the struggles of the past nor overly cynical about a totalitarian future. Some of our influences manifest subtly while, other times, we overtly use specific terminology, which we introduce below to help readers better situate those ideas before meeting them in the chapters.
On the Theory of Primitive Accumulation
In her seminal history Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes about the centuries of resistance to enclosures and empire and the witch-hunts that ensued across the Atlantic world. Her work is foundational for us in a few aspects, specifically in the way she reclaims the term primitive accumulation from the annals of orthodox Marxism.
Primitive accumulation is the term that Marx uses in Capital Vol. 1, to characterize the historical process upon which the development of capitalist relations was premised. It is a useful term, for it provides a common denominator through which we can conceptualize the changes that the advent of capitalism produced in economic and social relations. But its importance lies, above all, in the fact that “primitive accumulation” is treated by Marx as a foundational process, revealing the structural conditions for the existence of capitalist society. This enables us to read the past as something which survives into the present.1
Federici uses the theory of primitive accumulation to understand the vast array of processes that lead to the development of a capitalist society by highlighting the witch-hunts as a vital, often overlooked enclosure. Women were “disciplined” away from reproductive freedom and autonomy in their communities in order to force their transition to reproductive laborers for a burgeoning industrial society. Autonomous Marxists like Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh, alongside the tradition of Caribbean Marxists like Eric Williams and C.L.R. James, have insisted that slavery and colonialism across the Atlantic, from European colonizers and slave traders to planters in the Americas and industrial capitalists in Europe and the Northeast, all were part of enclosing and disciplining populations to accept and produce a new society based on a racialized and gendered division of labor.
This book also characterizes the forces of primitive accumulation in this way so as to contextualize a resistance to those forces that continues to the present. In viewing history as an ongoing process in conflict that survives into today, we attempt to weave together the ruptures that broke out in response to the changing political, economic, ecological, and social terrain. We believe, alongside the work of many autonomous Marxists who have written extensively on the subject, that there was not one discrete period of transition into a capitalist democracy, but that the entire maintenance of capital and empire relies on continually finding, exploiting, and destroying the commons. This is a process that continues today in the South—whether through resource extraction like coal and hydrofracking, the construction of penal colonies in resource deserts, or the continued enclosure of women’s access to reproductive freedom.
On Biopolitics, From the Spectacle of Lynching to Life Without Parole
Since the late-seventeenth century, when the first laws were passed in Virginia to differentiate the fugitive indentured Anglo from the fugitive enslaved African, each subsequent generation has been constituted through this legacy, with the intention of maintaining whiteness as a nonracialized, privileged identity. This has been written on the nonwhite body in numerous languages—of law and punishment, labor and discipline, science and reason, culture and taboo.
With regard to this racialized subjectivity and regimes of punishment, our writing is also influenced by historian and theorist Michel Foucault, who theorized the historical shift in the state’s tactics of control and punishment from the spectacle of public death to the later management of populations. He used the term “biopolitics” to distinguish between the regimes of death that characterized antiquity’s power (the slaveholder) to the contemporary regime of self-management and surveillance (the law-abiding citizen), where the state works from within the body of its subjects (biopower) amplifying the conditions of state and capital control accumulated by previous means.
Too often the haunting images of spectacular violence associated with southern history have brought with them the assumption that modern forms of control either do not work or even exist in the South. Anyone in this region who has visited a state prison, gone through public education, exerted self-control in front of a surveillance camera, or visited a museum dedicated to the Civil Rights era, however, has interacted with these mechanisms. Lest there be any confusion on this point: regardless of technological infrastructure, southerners today are no less constituted by evolving techniques of surveillance and management than metropolitan New Yorkers.
State and extralegal violence continue to reinforce the foundations of a racialized division of subjectivity, and should not be underestimated in their power to choose whose lives are literally disposable. The southern states contain the largest prison populations in the country; meaning that we live in a region that incarcerates the most Black men per capita in the world today. This turn toward the carceral state as a solution for economically “surplus” populations has its obvious roots in the histories of slavery and the early development of capitalism and the state.
Today we often see white, Black, and Brown liberals decry the property violence and self-defense tactics used by multiracial, disaffected youth who stand up when their peers are murdered by police. Liberals instead demand better education and job opportunities to keep youth safe from police and prisons. Those decriers forget that education and work are both the ancestors of prison and its logical descendants. Those who complain of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” for instance, forget that with regard to the invention of mass compulsory public education there has never been anything but a school-to-prison pipeline. In general, we hope that the history in these pages might make the totality of apparatuses that we face—school, nuclear family, prison, economy, state, race, gender—a little more apparent.
On Messianic Time and the Insurrectionary Rupture
Behind the curtain of much of the writing in this book is also the notion of “messianic time,” as used particularly in the later writings of Walter Benjamin. Our interpretation here is influenced by Benjamin’s political theology and philosophy of history. Writing much of this material during the Nazi takeover of Europe, and reflecting back bitterly on the failures of progressivism and Social Democracy to stem the tide of fascism, Benjamin’s “historical materialism” broke with both rational Marxism and Enlightenment history. The urgency of Benjamin’s writing on history and time is infectious and opaque, with the messiah referred to in the term “messianic” not as some higher force but as a precarious power we all possess or can conjure. For Benjamin, the revolutionary did not have to go through any series of transitions as a worker or self-conscious individual to revolt, and there was no waiting for the congruence of material conditions; every moment held the potential for the time of this world to end and another to interfere and begin. We invoke his historical theory not as scholars of his work but as comrades with shared enemies.
Messianic time can be seen as a window. It could appear as the window of escape for the deserter or fugitive, or the shattering of a window by youth in the streets, or the break of time that happens when women in factories decide they’re fed up and stop working. A “messianic cessation of happening” or “revolutionary chance” is any moment that bursts through to stop the time of work, social peace, and control.2 Every act of desertion, refusal, and attack in these histories, whether by individuals or groups, can be read as a moment when a slave becomes free, a worker stops reproducing herself as a worker, or a prisoner ceases to be an object of discipline.
The moment of refusal is the historical subject’s conscious coming to being. This is not to say that historical actors were not aware of their situations before rebelling, but that through the experience of breaking with the current of productive time, they found a possibility or experienced a moment of freedom that was
