The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean

by Nick Nesbitt

Overview

The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx’s critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx’s key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx’s analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813947082
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	03/24/2022
Series:	New World Studies
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Problem of Social Form in Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery
2. Reading Capital in the Caribbean: Marx and the Nature of Capitalist Slavery
3. The Reinvention of Social Form: The Necessity of Revolution in C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins
4. Slavery, Postcolonial Labor, and Social Form from St. Dominigue to Haiti
5. The Caribbean Critique of Social Form: Aime Cesaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Suzanne Cesaire
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Rachel Douglas

This is a brilliant study of how Black Jacobin Marxist thinkers tropicalize and transform Karl Marx. With forensic attention to detail in the examination of Marx’s writings, Nesbitt proposes an original theory of the relation of slavery and capitalism. A must-read for anyone who works in Caribbean studies.

Charles Forsdick

Ranging from plantation slavery via the Haitian Revolution to the neocolonial present, Nesbitt analyzes both Marx and the Marxist Caribbean critique of social structure and enslavement in meticulously argued and highly suggestive ways. Nesbitt’s innovative and thought-provoking scholarship, combined with the genuine originality of his argument, means that The Price of Slavery is eagerly awaited by readers in Caribbean studies, slavery studies, and Marxism studies more generally.

Editorial Reviews

A timely, provocative, and magisterial intervention...into the contemporary debate over slavery and capitalism, a meticulous exegesis of the Caribbean critique of social form, and a stirring defense of the moral imperative of justice as equality.

L'Esprit Créateur

Nesbitt provides a rich and generative study that compels us to rethink several important theoretical, economic, historiographical and political questions and debates which are of relevance to more than just the historical and contemporary Caribbean.

Against The Current

This is a brilliant study of how Black Jacobin Marxist thinkers tropicalize and transform Karl Marx. With forensic attention to detail in the examination of Marx’s writings, Nesbitt proposes an original theory of the relation of slavery and capitalism. A must-read for anyone who works in Caribbean studies.

Rachel Douglas

[A] transformative work of scholarship that offers a compelling framework for understanding the relationship between Antillean slavery and the capitalist mode of production . . . The book is an example to contemporary scholars of how Marxist critique of political economy, far from being reductive or distracting, can both enrich our understanding of post/colonial forms of domination and sharpen our analyses of literary and other cultural products. 

H-France - Christopher Bonner

Nesbitt masterfully unites themes of critical theory, capitalism (and, more precisely, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or Capital), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Caribbean literature, and possibilities for revolutions in the future into a coherent piece on the history of slavery.

This book will serve as a useful guide for advanced graduate students andscholars of capitalism and slavery. And despite such a brutal subject, this book is a subtly hopeful one. In the end, Nesbitt hints that a new social form, one based on egalitarianism and justice, is "the living legacy of the Black Jacobin imperative" (p. 190).

Grant Kleiser

Ranging from plantation slavery via the Haitian Revolution to the neocolonial present, Nesbitt analyzes both Marx and the Marxist Caribbean critique of social structure and enslavement in meticulously argued and highly suggestive ways. Nesbitt’s innovative and thought-provoking scholarship, combined with the genuine originality of his argument, means that The Price of Slavery is eagerly awaited by readers in Caribbean studies, slavery studies, and Marxism studies more generally.

Charles Forsdick