Blood in the Bank: Hidden Profits of American Slavery and the Call for Reparations

By Youhanna Haddad

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders declined to support reparations. He instead proposed instituting programs to help “distressed communities” in general, believing this indirect approach to compensation to be superior. “There are better ways to [repay blacks] than just writing… a check,” Sanders insisted.

But the patchwork of social-democratic reforms that comprised the Senator’s presidential platform are wholly insufficient to this task. To see why, we must scientifically analyze the role chattel slavery played in the construction of the United States. Doing this leads us to an obvious and inescapable conclusion. As Karl Marx himself observed, “Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

Origins of Bondage

In what is now the United States, chattel slavery developed primarily to produce agricultural commodities. Europeans constructed race to justify the creation of a class in permanent bondage, forced to work the vast estates they’d amassed through genocide of the indigenous population. Millions of slaves kidnapped and transported to the New World harvested cash crops like cotton, coffee, sugarcane, and tobacco. They did so, of course, under unimaginably toilsome and oppressive conditions. Sugarcane production, for example, entailed such dangerous conditions that deaths among slaves outnumbered births. Slaves were forced to produce sugar until their health crumbled, necessitating constant importation of additional slaves to keep plantations profitable. 

The need for labor pervaded the colonial economy. Even large portions of white immigrants came to address this demand through the system of indentured servitude. Nearly half of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came in this manner. Upon arrival, they began a stint of hard and often degrading labor for paltry wages. However, within several years of starting their contracts, these servants would become free citizens. They were then entitled to “freedom dues” from their masters, which typically included land or money. Despite the unsavory terms of the contract, servitude was largely an opportunity for Europeans seeking access to land and wealth unavailable in their homelands. Their contracts allowed them to become settlers without needing capital as a prerequisite.

Despite the exploitative character of indentured servitude, it is utterly incomparable to chattel slavery. Only the former included an element of voluntariness, and the chance to improve one’s economic situation. Indentured servants typically chose to sign their rights away. Of course, this was often done under coercive conditions. Nevertheless, indentured servants had opportunities that slaves were never granted. And the option to leave for the New World is one servants would have only chosen if they believed their life would improve in the colonies. Marxist historian Christopher Hill alludes to this in his 1967 book Reformation to Industrial Revolution:

“For many of the early settlers servitude was a temporary phase through which one worked one’s way from freedom to land-ownership.”

Indeed, many emancipated servants would go on to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. In 1629, for example, nearly 17% of members in “Virginia’s House of Burgesses [were] former indentured servant[s].” This mobility led Marx to remark that classes in early America “continually change[d] and interchange[d] their elements in constant flux.”

The ability to ascend economically, however, was enjoyed almost exclusively by whites. Conversely, Africans in the New World faced maximal exploitation, generation after generation. Aside from limited exceptions, until 1865, they could not escape enslavement and subsequently died in shackles. Europeans benefiting from this racial caste system were well aware of its titanic productive capacity. As British merchant Malachy Postlethwayt noted in 1745…

“Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce?”

Calculating the Theft

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to estimate the dollar value of labor stolen from black slaves. Considering the breadth of industries involved, and the interconnected nature of markets, such a figure is exceedingly difficult to calculate. However, by summing the hours of labor performed by American slaves, policy scholar Thomas Craemer produced an estimate. He concluded that “the present value of U.S. slave labor… ranges from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion.” in 2009 dollars. Adjusted for 13 years of inflation, the range is $8.2 to $19.6 trillion in today’s money. The upper limit of Craemer’s estimate is therefore roughly equivalent to America’s entire gross domestic product!

If we utilize Craemer’s upper limit and think that black Americans today should be compensated for the value of their ancestors’ labor, they’re each owed a whopping $467,000. Even the lower limit still comes in at around $195,000. And this by no means covers all of the profits derived from the institution of slavery.

Banks, for example, lent vast sums of money to productive plantations and profited off the interest. The shipping industry got rich from building and selling slave ships. Insurance corporations grew wealthy from insuring the shipments of slaves and the products of slave labor. Furthermore, the explosion of the textile industry was facilitated by the abundant supply of cotton picked by slaves. Great Britain was considered the titan of textiles in the early industrial period with over half of British cotton imports produced from American slave labor.

We must recognize the variety of ways in which capitalist development benefited from chattel slavery. Ignoring them suppresses proper academic investigation of questions pertinent to racial justice. The colonial project as we know it would’ve been impossible without the forced labor of millions of African slaves. And that has strategic implications for how society should try to rectify the historical and ongoing oppression of black people.

Ramifications of Ignorance

Particularly since the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr., the American political establishment has tried to co-opt the black liberation struggle. Every February, school children are taught that black leaders look down from heaven with approval at a nation that never went beyond piecemeal reforms to address gross historical injustices. This mischaracterization of the black liberation struggle and its leaders is only possible due to misunderstanding the function of slavery. From Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, American politicians do not wish to see the reappropriation of stolen wealth to black people. To do so would acknowledge the incredible economic benefit slavery provided to the nation and, more importantly, force the beneficiaries to pay compensation.

In essence, the effort to downplay the role of slavery in American development is a matter of legitimacy to the United States regime. Obscuring the role of slavery in American development allows liberals to falsely assert that “liberal-democratic values” are the root of American exceptionalism. This erroneously whitewashes history with the self-congratulatory implication that European ideologies, rather than African labor and Native land, built the world’s most successful empire. In order to eradicate capitalist pseudo-history from the realm of fact, we need to tirelessly examine how exploitation is the real engine of growth in capitalist development.

While reparations alone would not end global capitalism, it is always necessary and beneficial to explore the economic contributions of every exploited group. The unrecognized domestic labor of women, the wage slavery in factories of the Global South, the historical theft of trillions of dollars in assets from the Global South — this is the hidden life force of capitalist states. Without recognizing these contributions, it is impossible to materially analyze history to the benefit of the masses.

In our mission to end capitalism, the vast majority of our allies are the highly exploited masses of Africa and Asia. Their exploitation is still financed through the reinvested wealth created by African slaves. Connecting these struggles is an essential prerequisite to building the durable, international, class solidarity of the colored masses needed to end capitalism once and for all.

The Hidden Violence of Immigration Bureaucracy

By Daniel Melo

There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.

The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.

Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.

The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.

By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.

The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).

To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.

Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.

Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.