Some thoughts inspired by Kara Walker’s "giant sphinx made of sugar," an installation inside of Williamsburg's Domino Sugar Factory.

It is common for the standard critics of Marxism to point out how the communist experiments of the 20th century were a human catastrophe of the first order. This view of things is of course myopic. It sees the present as the state from which all conclusions must be drawn. It does not see a future whose climate is radically altered by capitalist growth, and what kind of impact that change might have on the humans of that time; nor does it look into the past. As a consequence, a convenient consequence, the whole history of American slavery (the transportation of millions upon millions of human beings from one continent to another to work and die on plantations) is placed outside of the history of capitalism (I mentioned this during my conversation with Kshama Sawant at Town Hall).

The American slaves, however, were indeed a part of a highly developed commercial civilization that had established capitalist relations, globally connected markets, stock market bubbles, and consumers whose preferences were manipulated by advertising. American slavery was not like European serfdom. It was instead a new form of labor, and so finds its related forms of labor in the kind of society we still have with us today, a society that privileges economic values above all else. And slavery was not a walk in the park; it was one of the greatest human catastrophes in the history of our kind.



The suffering caused by this form of capitalist labor might be as unthinkable as the one to be caused by climate change.