Servants and Slaves: Abolition in Classical Political Economy

Servants and Slaves: Abolition in Classical Political Economy

In this paper, Shilliam examines Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s intellectual relationship as part of a long duree wherein the abolition of slavery was the most politically charged of political economy issues. Shilliam will argue that in Smith and Marx’s times, rather than contract and exchange, status and servitude structured the legal, philosophical, and political disputes over the freedoms that labor might enjoy. Smith understood this perhaps better than Marx. Marx’s correction to Smith, eventuating in Capital Vol.1, obfuscated the concrete struggles over labor both in plantation economies and even in Britain. Addressing this obfuscation helps to clarify what is at stake in recent excavations of Marx’s interest in slavery and the American civil war. What is universal might not be the political consciousness on freedom that waged labor uniquely provides, but rather the consciousness that servitude impels.

Bio

Robbie Shilliam is a scholar of postcolonial politics and racial politics in the field of International Relations. He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press book series, Postcolonial International Studies. Robbie is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association, and has served as the association's Vice President. Currently, Robbie is working on two strands of inquiry: firstly, a collective project to rethink the discipline of Political Science and to retrieve and build alternative approaches to the discipline that more adequately explain racial politics; secondly, a critical consideration of the "free thinkers" of Black faith-based movements and their contributions to what we in academia call "political economy". A book - Move Outta Babylon: Rastafari Reason and Political Economy - will be published with Penguin Books. Robbie also works with community and academic intellectuals and elders of the Rastafari movement to examine its impact on global affairs. This work includes exhibitions as well as community-engaged research and teaching.

Host or Publisher SOAS Politics, University of London