Slave/Animal/Labor: Marxist Incapacity and The Direction Analogy Flows Sara-Maria Sorentino The Comparatist, Volume 46, October 2022, pp. 29-51 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/869752 29 sara- maria sorentino Slave/Animal/Labor Marxist Incapacity and The Direction Analogy Flows This series of meditations takes as its starting point Frank B. Wilderson III’s “ruse of analogy” (35–53) to reconceptualize slave, animal, and labor relations under capi- talist and Marxist signs of human capacity. Wilderson’s “ruse” is often read as a tran- scendental objection to analogizing slavery in social contexts, from the tyranny of British taxation to the drudgery of housework, that spin away from actually existing slaves and the concrete black experience. Against the brush of rhetorical conceal- ment, an Afro-pessimist orientation might be expected to respond to Marjorie Spie- gel’s collapse of animal and slave in The Dreaded Comparison , for example, with defense and disaggregation. Spiegel’s variety of animal activism would protest that forms of shared suffering—the loss of freedom of movement, sociality, and kin- ship—between animal and slave are so “numerous” (28) that the comparative im- pulse can be considered “offensive only to the speciesist” (25). By presupposing the effective abolition of racial slavery, however, “animal enslavement” has in turn been charged with instrumentalizing black suffering. When the ruse is read carefully with the project of “political ontology,” Afro- pessimism can be understood as oriented towards a more expansive problematic— the impossibility of relating to the slave as anything but analogy (see Garba and Sorentino). The critical migration from “the human-animal dyad, the human-slave dyad, and the slave-animal dyad” to “the more fundamental human-slave- animal triad ” (Kim 29) is only tenable because projects of animalization and humaniza- tion continue to draw from the slave as “infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter” (Jackson 81). This Afro-pessimist orientation is interested less with de- fending the slave figure’s specificity, which would contextualize slavery as one mode of subjection among others, than it is with the slave’s burdened singularity: slaves as the ground for context, negated in-themselves and only appearing as the infi- nite source of value for-others. The difference between specificity and singularity is another way of cutting the difference between “the experience of slavery (which anyone can be subjected to) and the ontology of slavery, which in modernity (the years 1300 to the present) becomes the singular purview of the Black” (Wilderson 18). Afro-pessimism thus charts an ontology that is political and historical : though slaves are not necessarily transcendental figures, they appear to be so because of 30 the comparatist 46 : 2022 the dynamics that have “materially and symbolically soldered” (Sexton 308), or in Wilderson’s terms “cathedralized” (18), slavery through race. The ontologized slave becomes uniquely empty in an infinitely convertible way, constituted by relational availability for capital and the imagination, and not through the actualization or deactualization of powers appropriate to animal or laborer. The latter option, pre- senting a range of (de)actualizing moments contingent on social-historical circum- stances, retains at its core an open-ended conceptualization of the capacities of crea- tures in question; whereas the slave’s only capacity is to be a slave. The realization of the fungible slave was Aristotle’s dream, as I have written elsewhere, made manifest through race (Sorentino “Natural Slavery”). To expand this reading of the ruse as it modulates human/animal capacity and slave inca- pacity, I embark on a seemingly circuitous route through Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ and the species-being [ Gattungswesen ] concept as mobilized by Karl Marx, re- interred in “labor,” and grounded socio-ecologically. Reading what Marx did to Aristotle through this lens—his integration of history and process in the form of laboring activity—reveals just how entangled animal, slave, and laborer are, and how onerous it is to disentangle the material-conceptual thicket that makes it so “The slave-owner buys his worker in the same way as he buys his horse” ( Capital 377). The actualization of labor under capitalism precipitates a version of species- becoming, whose open potentiality conditions comparative thought across species- lines. Organic analogies hold for the historical materialist because they encompass all life forms and give way to the contingencies that animate Marx’s historically open form of Aristotelianism. Species-being, then, is historical possibilization, understood through the human capacity realized by the laborer, and not the moral ground for arbitrating inclusion or exclusion. Capitalism plays a contradictory role in positively humanizing the species, spurring the individuation, universality, and technology that accompany misery and alienation in Marx’s sensibility or what Afro-pessimism approaches as “time and space coherence” (Wilderson, Red 181). As I recompose the laborer, animal, and slave through Afro-pessimist interven- tions, I hope my route through what Ruth Groff calls Marx’s “thin Aristotelianism” will begin to seem less circuitous than it first appears. Though Wilderson does not directly investigate the terms of species-being, his human-slave antagonism is ac- companied by a principled rejection of Marxist class solidarity, elaborated else- where in Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle and in Afro-pessimist inflected cri- tiques of transhumanist theories of becoming, that cuts through what he appraises as “the matrix through which possibility itself—whether tragic or triumphant—can be elaborated” ( Red 43). While critics of Afro-pessimism often deride its sweeping generalization and neglect of historical materialist methods, getting inside the philosophical presuppositions it seeks to dislodge affords offers a critique of the cri- tique of political economy and its ecology. “The Argument here,” as Wynter frames Slave/Animal/Labor 31 her parallel intervention, “redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a ‘politics of being’ ” (319). Instead of advocating for a positive encounter between Marxism and Afro-pessimism (otherwise known solidarity or comradeship), I point to how the failures of these encounters expose a need for slave incapacity that mediates the possibility for critical Marxist ecology. The ruse begins when slave analogies take capacity as their baseline—the capacity to suffer, to resist, to be (de)humanized— and it does not necessarily end with new beginnings. lab or “Capacity” is a neglected keyword in Afro-pessimist thought, appearing alongside “incapacity” in Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black 192 times. The capacity of the worker—labor-power—remains Afro-pessimism’s most graphic foil, posited in the gap between laboring “exploitation and alienation” and slave “accumulation and fungibility” (14). Exploitation enshrines the bare capacity for self-ownership, a ca- pacity even if incapacitating. This contrast enlivens Marx’s critical project too, ex- posing an internal contradiction often underappreciated by his readers: the simul- taneous actualization and deactualization of species-being under capitalism. What is often reduced to an intellectual trajectory from young humanist to mature sci- entific Marx might better be understood as the internal unfolding of a basic line of questioning: is there is a human form underlying the laborer, an essence ( wesen ) of the species ( Gattung ) to be recovered? What is the relationship between essential and historical forms of capitalist domination (“exploitation and alienation”)? If the “standpoint of labor” is itself an historical achievement immanent to capitalist social forms (Postone 56–58), from whence comes critique? These questions illuminate the radicality of Afro-pessimism, which asks how the historically emergent human can find tools to destroy this world if its pleasures and purpose, its capacities, are derived from the self-same world. This section engages how Marx rescripts ancient meditations on form and history to liberate capacity in emancipatory directions, in order to provide some methodological headway into how Afro-pessimism renders these same features the core of its critical theorization. Capacity in Marx’s species-being is dynamic. Its predicates emerge in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 through a fourfold estrangement from 1) the process of labor, 2) products of labor, 3) cooperation with other beings, and 4) historical possibilities of species-being (74–78). It is the latter that grounds Marx’s critical anthropology in these pages, given that estrangement not only re- moves man from a wider social ensemble but also seemingly cordons off the ca- pacity to produce in reflexive relation to the whole. If capitalist critique only iden- tifies man as animalized and enslaved to their objects—reduced to “crude practical need” ( Manuscripts 109) or an “extremity of . . . bondage” (72–73)—the ground for 32 the comparatist 46 : 2022 liberation would seem to require catapulting out of degraded positionality and back into some preestablished essence, namely those reflective and productive capacities characteristic of species-being. What we can, following Marx, call the “deactual- ization” ( entwirklichung ) of laboring potentialities under capitalism ( Manuscripts 161)—the capitalist driven more and more compulsively in pursuit of profit, the laborer into bare and privatized existence—are doubled in the specific ways the capacities of social being are nonetheless developed (albeit one-sidedly) through the mediating quality of exchange-value.1 The laborer suffers on the brink of death through the ongoing reduction to pure capacity, to be sure, forced to offer up for sale a use-value that is “not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity” ( Grundrisse 267). This actualization of capital at the expense of labor’s reflective capacity accompanies a less familiar dimension of Marx’s critique: the role of capitalist development in enriching universal capacity by internalizing individuated measures of freedom and equality that, while illusion- ary, take on objective appearances. “[O]ne of the civilizing aspects of capital,” one of Marx’s more inciting formulations goes, is that “it extorts this surplus labour in a manner and in conditions that are more advantageous to social relations and to the creation of elements for a new and higher formation than was the case under the earlier forms of slavery, serfdom, etc.” ( Capital , Vol. 3 958). Rather than dismiss Marx for bad stadial history, I approach these reflections as part of a multidirec- tional invocation of species-being critically immanent to the valorization process.2 Through the historical inversion by which appearance comes to drive essence, Marx can reimagine social relations that both obstruct and actualize human capacities in an open-ended, practical telos that is as much ecological as it is economic. Aristotle’s theorization of potential presages historical materialism, paving the way for Marx’s reflections on labor as a social form that incorporates animality and maintains natural slavery as its beguiling residuum. If life is “two ways”— potentiality and actuality—Aristotle considers the life of energeia (translated as both actuality and activity) to “be called life more fully” ( Nicomachean Ethics 1098a5–7). Despite the apparent causality that would make potential prior in time to the actual it substantiates, for Aristotle, “actuality is prior to potentiality” ( Meta- physics 1049b5). This priority builds telos into a doctrine of form—the activity of building a house is only meaningful because of the house’s finished idea ( eidos ); the child is the incomplete but not inconsequential form of a fully rendered human ( Politics 1334b22–25). The Aristotelian political animal, irreducible to plant-based living, animal-based perceiving, or, even, labor, is also given definitional ground in this constellation. Geared towards action ( praxis ), a human’s complete activity is best fulfilled through inward ends: “the activity of the soul in accord with virtue” ( Nicomachean Ethics 1098a17). And because production ( poiêsis ) potentiates exter- Slave/Animal/Labor 33 nality, virtuous activity is thought to transcend household management and bio- logical necessity ( Nicomachean Ethics 1140a1–18). Aristotle does recognize that force and chance can prohibit and deform actu- ality.3 A child might not grow to adulthood and a building project might fail to materialize but because the import of philosophical reflection comes from defini- tions of determinate forms, particularly at a species level, individual instances of historical change or variability are inevitably marginalized. Lack and incapacity re- turn, however, as powers which activate the recognition of contradiction. In Aristo- tle’s theory of “scientific knowledge,” those souls endowed with reason ( logos ) have the capacity to provide an account of incapacity ( adunatos ) ( Metaphysics 1046a36– b24).4 Aristotle might imagine himself as producing precisely such knowledge, as the theory of substance holds together the separation between what is accidentally and what is by nature.5 Indeed, we might say Aristotle needs impotentiality (what Giorgio Agamben calls the “cardinal secret of the Aristotelian doctrine of potenti- ality” ( Potentialities 215, 245)), for by reintegrating lack as a rational power, he can guard against a full-scale slide into either chaotic indeterminacy or stasis. These openings for potential, force, contingency, and externality are, Mladen Dolar writes, instances of Aristotle letting the “spirit out of the bottle and squeez- ing it back into it again” (226). They are also ways Marx detects the making of his- tory and decodes political elements of Aristotle’s “first philosophy”—ontology—in emancipatory directions. At the same time, impotential remains the formal crevice through which natural slavery sneaks into Aristotle and Marx’s metaphysics. Some slaves, Aristotle admits, are contingently deformed political animals, constrained from their species-form by conquest, force, and accident ( Politics 1255b11–15). The category “slave” takes on a natural hue not through these contingencies but by virtue of negative capacity: lacking deliberation ( Politics 1260a12), spirit ( Politics 1327b27– 8), and rationality, if not reason ( Politics 1254b22–3), slaves dialectically provide negative potential for political virtue without Aristotle having to cede too much to the unpredictable power of history. Once natural slavery escapes from the bottle as the unfulfilled promise of incapacity it leaves a lingering spirit that sediments in the body of race (Sorentino “Natural Slavery”). Keeping our sights on the natural slave as we intensify Marx’s Aristotelean innovations, we can say that natural slaves are not merely incapacitated, as by accident; they materialize incapacity by repre- senting a double negation, lacking even the capacity to make meaning of their lack. If Aristotle’s potential means “to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity ” (Agamben, Potentialities 182), the slave, in becoming a body governed by the master’s soul, gives the master material for the formal play of incapacity in perpetuity. We might thus interpret the work of race in history through this lens. By targeting capacities that do not become actualized, Marx promises certain methodological advances over his peripatetic predecessors. With production no 34 the comparatist 46 : 2022 longer consigned to a virtue-less externality, labor and labor-power can be con- sidered integral to creatively unmasking the capacities of species-being. Likewise, methodologically activating labor through a dialectical philosophical anthropology leads to contingency (and hence movement, temporality, and dynamism) being thoroughly integrated into the ground of possible knowledge and the open deter- minism of the social world (Jaffe 58). Marx’s capital deactualizes labor in quasi- Aristotelian turns by developing the mere potential of labor for its own ends, such that “labor does not appear as an end in itself, but as the servant of the wage” ( Man- uscripts 81). Aristotle likewise seems to read early glimmers of accumulation as un- natural, particularly production for exchange which, by proceeding “without limit” ( Politics 1257b24–25) and developing external ends ( Nicomachean Ethics 1096a6–8), interrupts the “necessary and commendable” telos of oikonomos ( Politics 1258a41– b6) and forecloses “living well” ( eudaimonia ) (McCarthy 18–20). If production re- sembles something more like bare life than it does human flourishing, then Aristo- telian frameworks would find it incomprehensible that labor could itself facilitate free spontaneous activity or meaningful reciprocity. But Marx does not sever flour- ishing from labor, freedom from natural necessity, internal ends from exchange. Freedom is instead actualized in metabolic and social interchange with labor, which is always also interdependent with nature. Thus, while neither laborer nor slave can directly inform Aristotle’s virtuous human, Marx can repatriate “labor” by liber- ating virtue from its ossification in Aristotle’s definitional priority, re-scripting the relationship between actuality and potential, and comprehending labor as a social praxis that mediates emergent capacities, even as it comes to inadvertently lord over its own incapacitation. When Marx complains that Adam Smith has “no inkling whatever that this over- coming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity,” he could be writing of Aristotle. Though conceding that in its “historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage- labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour ,” “ex- ternal aims” can be more than mere necessity and become “posited as aims which the individual himself posits—hence as self-realization, objectification of the sub- ject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour” ( Grundrisse 611). What is produced in exchange is irreducible to the external end of products (use-values) insofar as the development of value can also facilitate “a praxis with an internal end, an energeia of the human species-being” (Pickford 34). Because capital exceeds arti- ficial limits, its expansion of social networks of production and exchange prefigure possibilities for “a less restricted form of human development, both socially and vis- à-vis nature” (Burkett 154). Alienation, then, restricts open-ended currents; it is the one-sided way that reason conceals from critical inquiry its own more spontaneous potential. Freedom emanates from those socio-historical developments of natural life forms adequate to an ever-expanding range of capacities in a totality of given Slave/Animal/Labor 35 relations. Givenness and capacity, in this Marxist reading, straddle the line between what is possible and what we imagine to be possible, what nature affords and what consciousness can transform. The way Marx gathers resources to critically attend to what Iain Macdonald en- gages as “blocked possibilities” (21) continues, in my estimation, to be informed by slavery and animality. Comparisons have their conditions of possibility in the historical categories we critically and uncritically inhabit. For Marx, capital is best presented through a series of conjectures that aim towards identifying the “general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity” ( Grundrisse 107). In this relational prism, animalization and enslavement are offered as plastic figures for labor’s general form. Emancipated in its indifference to specific productive content, labor becomes an achievement, albeit an ambivalent one, rela- tive to more static and immediate tropes like the enslavement to nature.6 By virtue of being underwritten by instruments of wage and contract, the laborer is thought to resist that fate of being converted “from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity” ( Capital , Vol. 1 271). This possibility banks on a double movement away from natural dependency, for “The immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the soil, and ceased to be the slave or serf of another person” (875). At the same time, labor is cast in turns as more deprived because its condition becomes worse than the animal’s (“Light, air, etc.—the simplest animal cleanliness—ceases to be a need for man” ( Manuscripts 117)), and more enslaved because the source of en- slavement is more opaque.7 This doubling helps us form a retrospective protocol for deciphering ways Marx’s generality, as following sections develop, might fail to grasp the animal and slave in their own network of relations. Marx would be the first to admit that his meditations on capacity are condi- tioned by socio-historical developments. This means, too, that the condition of possibility for Marx’s conceptualization of species-being (and the human more ex- pansively) is the historical determinants of the capital-labor antagonism. The “great philosopher” Aristotle could realize neither the secret of value ( Capital , Vol. 1 151– 52) nor the unfixed, potentiated, and productive secret of “species-being,” despite his dazzling “half-steps” towards dynamism (Jaffe 64–67). If we pull the slip from the knot, there is reason to suppose the emancipatory potential of capitalist critique to be nearly as constrained as the problems it diagnoses. Exploitation may effec- tively appear as incapacity, but its appearance is one-sided, and not only from the vantage of species-being potential: “when looked at through the eyes of the Slave,” Wilderson writes, “the worker’s essential incapacity (powers which cannot accrue to the worker, suffering as exploitation and alienation) is the essence of capacity, life itself ” (8). In Wilderson’s double-sight, the laborer’s experience of deactual- ization only formally resembles ontological deactualization, for the creative quali- 36 the comparatist 46 : 2022 ties of species-being remain, as we have seen, the potential of species-becoming. In the next section, I sketch conditions that lead to non-human animals, as much as human animals, retaining the (blocked) capacity to develop species-life, if not their reflective relationship to lack, in ways that appear foreclosed for the slave. I likewise begin to leverage these insights in favor of a speculative displacement of capitalism as the de facto critical comparative frame. animal The idea that animals operate on a radically different basis of mind can be consid- ered a relatively “exceptional mode of thought in the history of man” (Renehan 240). Even the ancient Greek anthropocentrism from which this division finds root is more internally complex and ambivalent than it might seem: the contemporary turn to human and animal language as differences of kind and complexity, with a vast array of what we might consider speech, sociality, reason, and politics ob- servable or inferred in animal social structures, adheres more closely to Aristotle’s theories of mind in his zoological writings (Zirin). Among the wider array of the gregarious birds and fish that populate Aristotle’s History of Animals , we encounter particularly social creatures—“man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane”—who cooperate with “some one common object in view” (487b32–488a10). Aristotle has no trouble accepting that “just as in man we find knowledge, wisdom, and sagacity, so in certain animals there exists some other natural capacity akin to these” ( History of Animals 588a30–b3). Because all living creatures are animated by a soul, they pos- sess matter and form, potentiality and actuality, in varying combinations and pat- terns. Aristotle’s zoology is much more interested in deciphering these creaturely combinations as traits than he is in ranking them as kinds in a hierarchical system (Depew, “Humans” 162–65). This method, however, creates something of a parallax between Aristotle’s open zoology and his practical philosophy that drives towards hardening systematicity of kinds (Fortenbaugh 157). Marx works to overcome this gap by approaching Aristotle’s philosophy as truly “dialectical” instead of “merely formal” (qtd. Depew, “Aristotle’s De Anima ” 137). On the one hand, humans transform nature through their work: “Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of Nature, are in their present form not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual trans- formation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by means of his labour” ( Capital Vol. 1, 287). On the other, labor itself is trans- formed in the process—capitalist abstractions activate qualitatively new means by which the laborer “develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and sub- jects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power” ( Capital 284). Aristotle’s forms mandate human management of the household and city—it is not only better Slave/Animal/Labor 37 for both animals and humans to be tame than wild, he writes, “it is better for all of them to be ruled by human beings, since this will secure their safety” ( Politics 1254b11–13). Marx, in turn, reconstructs a history of self and other-directed social alienation that does not abandon the reproductive and gratification drives Aristo- tle’s ethics impute to animals; rather, as David J. Depew observes, “the intellective and sensitive functions in man” make possible a “distinctively human way of con- ducting that function” (“Aristotle’s De Anima ” 135; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095b19–22). For Marx, distinctively human power is manifest through the repeated effort to make our own vital activity an object. This transformation effects a quali- tative intervention in the relationship between production and life that is the work of history, and contains the germs of Marx’s critical presupposition of so-called primitive accumulation and enclosures ( Manuscripts 154–57). The human-animal dualism is thus addressed as a reification, one that Marx’s human-animal dialectic, with the human part of the natural world and with non-human animals engaging in life activities that also develop and differentiate their social history, is meant to point to immanent possibilities for transcending. Those who accuse Marx of a more pernicious dualism, or in the words of first- stage eco-socialist Ted Benton, a “species imperialism” (42), usually ascribe to his historicization of “labor as such” a universal prohibition of animal productive ca- pacity—the intentionality given to humans over bees. In part, this reading is made possible by the failure of Marxist interpretation to properly ground what appear to be the positive contributions of capitalism (freedom, individuation, equality) in a dialectical anthropology, thus leaving little room to elaborate the conditions of our deactualized present or critical consciousness without falling prey to natural- izing freedom and equality (Burkett 147–74). Marx readily acknowledges that non- human animal species also produce and objectify themselves in nature ( Capital 286), pointing to social and industrious animals like the “bees, beavers, ants” whose household production in the form of nests and hives spring from immediate need “for themselves and their offspring.” But even the most gregarious of animals pro- duce “one-sidedly”: the preservation of animal existence works inadvertently to preserve the species, but this is rarely the explicit reflected goal—“An animal pro- duces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature” ( Manuscripts 76–77). Humans, meanwhile, have come to produce their own generality in an interface with nature, which is also a way of saying “simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” ( Manuscripts 76). Put differently, “Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality” (Agamben, Potentialities 182). When Marx distinguishes the best of bees from the worst of ar- chitects, then, the actual grasping of the object by intention—the reproduction of the species—is not a value judgement; it is the critical expression of socio-historical 38 the comparatist 46 : 2022 determinants of life forms from which we might identify features of human domi- nation as well as human freedoms, those possibilities and impossibilities that come to aggravate the human as a self-distancing component of nature. Humans act as if they are different through how they objectify nature and this as if is repeatedly materialized in extended webs of exchange that generate a social world (capitalism) which renders human nature (for Marx, the minimalist norm of creative capacita- tion) particularly unnatural, i.e., alienated. If Aristotle’s account of animals drifts from dualism to dialectic, it is this dia- lectic that Marx is most able to animate from the perspective of capitalist critique Abstract labor, posited by capital, focuses Marx’s inquiry but also supplies the meth- odological ground for conjuring categories past and present. Marx’s evolutionary schema, “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” ( Grundrisse 105), is reconstructive, both suggesting that Aristotle could not fully articulate his biological musings without the development of capitalist labor and supplying a retroactive causality for historical meaning, for “The so-called historical presenta- tion of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself . . . it always conceives them one-sidedly” ( Grundrisse 106). Marx’s critique of capital is indeed “capitalocentric” (Gibson-Graham 6–9) and “anthropocentric” (Benton 32), but this is its strength not its weakness; without this critical focus, and the socio-practical comparativism it enables, critique turns transcendental, smuggling in “ bourgeois relations . . . as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” ( Grundrisse 87). While Marx is not immune from this sneaking transcendentalism, his critique of capital does provide a self-reflective method for explaining nature’s own unnatural alienation from itself: It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic con- ditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital. ( Grundrisse 489) “Metabolic rift” concretely expresses this one-sided world-denial on the part of capital (Foster and Clarke; Marx, Capital Vol. 1 638; Capital Vol. 3 949). Producers become separated from conditions of subsistence (thus below the animal), but their creaturely existence is required for the appropriation of labor power. Human needs (wealth), meanwhile, become subordinated to exchange in ways that autonomize the distance between labor and nature (Burkett 62–63). Value posits its existence through natural laws, even as it is structurally unable to represent the particularity Slave/Animal/Labor 39 of what it produces, exchanges, and depends upon as its life force. If the abstract difference between natural and political animals represents a social activity of separation that feeds back onto nature and transforms it, these abstractions can be used to theorize other ways of life (even as their extension to the outside and be- fore of capitalism is best understood as composed by their articulation within the commodity-form). Marx’s studies after Capital, Volume One suggest that ecological crises could have had increasing significance for the completion of following volumes, as both Marx and Engels came to incorporate emerging scientific studies of animal consciousness and production (Saito 141–255). Their engagement still raises questions for how the animal is related to the value-form. Should the non-wage work of slaves and ani- mals be integrated into a capitalist totality as productive of surplus value (Murray)? Are those animals confined to “food production, vivisection, sport and entertain- ment, and pet production” slaves (Murray 95) or the “working class” (Hribal)? The “linguistic partnership” found between chattel-cattle-capital appears to confirm a deeper root to the slave, animal, and laborer triangulation (Gunderson 261–62; Hribal 5): both cattle and chattel were instrumental in jumpstarting the agricul- tural revolution and stimulating what become circuits of capital. And the shared technologies of industrialization and labor management, particularly “probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within” (Smallwood 36), were honed on the ship, plantation, and global slave- system. But for Marx, homologies are not themselves explanatory. Adam Smith had already made the error of putting “the labour of the worker on the same level as that of draught cattle” ( Capital , Vol. 2 292), and the cost was a critical absence of insight into the valorization process. It is not simply that the laborer engages in conscious work, whereas the animal does not. It is that the laborer engages in work that, in the process of interrupting the full flourishing of capacities (an interruption that can be said of many historical contexts), mediates the forms that dominate the social and natural world (Postone 59). This social mediation is the limit to the laborer-animal comparison: animals do produce social use-values, material wealth being the content transformed by labor, but they do not, and here I follow the refusal of Christian Stache, produce value or the conditions for their own domination (409–15). The animal, like the slave, is socially grasped as constant capital, an “appendage of the soil” ( Grundrisse 413), though “when being fattened for slaughter they are raw material that even- tually passes into circulation as a product, and so not fixed but circulating capital” ( Capital , Vol. 2 241; Wadiwel 535–36). Insofar as animals form the natural conditions of production, their life processes are appropriated by labor-power and subjected to selective breeding, physical restraint, and genetic engineering, but without recourse to labor’s emancipatory potential. While pigs, chicken, and cattle become food and 40 the comparatist 46 : 2022 fiber through valorization, their work cannot be represented by the social labor time necessary for the appropriation of surplus value and thus their particular form of domination in capitalism is not that of Marx’s working class. This does not mean animals are not oppressed by capitalism nor that their ac- tivity is bereft of revolutionary content (see Hribal), simply that the generalized class critique that unites all animals, slaves, and laborers under the banner of ex- ploitation reintegrates staid metaphysical idealism into Marx’s more radical con- jectures.8 We cannot idealize a way into socio-ecological continuity or commu- nion unaccompanied by the violence of human social relations—for a Marxist ecology, the destruction that evacuates natural substances of meaningful content and develops only one side of the human capacity for unnatural nature. Finally, though not laborers in the Marxist sense, animals are wrapped up in the process of being “de-animalized” in ways that have consistently been called “animal alien- ation” (Noske 18–21; Stache 415–18). Disembedded from their ecosystems and social worlds, animal bodies and functions have been put to use for the single goal of the productive process but the Marxist purview could condition the world to actualize animality otherwise.9 What is distinctive about animal labor, for capitalism, is a will against incorporation and an ultimate resistance to being subsumed by the contract relation and its characteristic modes of subjection—as might a slave or a reproduc- tive laborer in Marxist accounts. Given that human animals seem to increasingly be interjected by conditions mandating them to desire their own contract-bound servitude, the wild resistance of animals, whose will remains indeterminate, marks what is distinct about non-human animals, and thus retains a specific sort of pos- sibility (without telos ) as a species-marker (Wadiwel 529–32). For those who think with the animal, abolitionist practice tends to run with what Che Gossett identifies as a stadial account of liberation—“first slavery was abolished and now forms of animal captivity must be, too”—that composes the animal as the “new black,” despite the powerful layers of sediment through which “blackness has already been racialized through animalization.” To grasp how this priority creates a “boomerang effect,” as Claire Kim puts it, that infinitizes the project of black lib- eration by remanding anti-blackness to “the past only to return to the present with greater force” (24), the next section underscores the way socio-ecological capacity sidelines its own reliance on the negativity blackness incarnates. The structure and form that animates the return of anti-blackness is not addressed by a Marxism for which the comprehension of “mutual suffering under capitalism” can have practical-philosophical outcomes along a spectrum that can unite workers and ani- mals (Gunderson 266), progress “toward a sustainable utilization of society’s life- forces” (Burkett 143), or anticipate communities of possibility beyond the shared reduction to bare life. These horizons (overcoming scarcity or species divisions) dis- avow their desire for impotentiality fulfilled by “the Negroid physiognomy and its Slave/Animal/Labor 41 continent of origin, Black Africa” as what Wynter calls the “actualized embodiment” of “a dual mode of Natural Scarcity—that is, a scarcity of fully genetically selected human beings, on the one hand, and of material resources on the other” (325). What the embodiment of incapacity means for animal-slave encounters cannot be ex- hausted by the Marxist ecological turns of actualization and possibility. slave The animal designates a space of difference from the laborer but also a placeholder for differentiation more broadly—the human being incorporated into the animal as a specifically alienated actualization of species-life. With the animal brought into the critical Marxist fold, the slave nonetheless remains a problem: in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words, a “tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life” (64). Du Bois situates this tangle in the “ tertium quid ,” “the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid , and called it a Negro—a clownish, simple crea- ture, at times even loveable within its limitations, but strictly foredained to walk within the veil” (63; Bennett 6–7). In the language this essay has developed thus far, the tertium quid is the vanishing mediator between both Aristotle’s political and non-political animal and Marx’s labor as actualization and deactualization. The animal expresses differences i