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 Forced labor is an example of the experience that slaves might have, but not all slaves were forced to work. So if you then move by saying that slavery is social death, by that very definition, then what is social death? Social death has three constituent elements: One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. 

This vulnerability is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated, which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and afilial relations—the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations—may exist very well in your head. 

You might say, “I have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family. And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one: because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or someone like that. 

And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say, you are dishonored in your very being— and I think that this is the nature of Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance of dishonored actions. So it takes a long time to build this but in a nutshell that’s it. And so that’s one of the moves of Afro-pessimism. 

If you take that move and you take out property relations—someone who’s owned by someone else—you take that out of the definition of slavery and you take out forced labor, and if you replace that with social death and those three constituent elements, what you have is a continuum of slavery-subjugation that Black people exist in and 1865 is a blip on the screen. It is not a paradigmatic moment, it is an experiential moment, which is to say that the technology of enslavement simply morphs and shape shifts—it doesn’t end with that.

CSS: forced labor is not a defining characteristic of slavery, if he says that naked violence is one of the key elements of social death, which is slavery, and if the violence directed at Blacks is not based on, as you said, this person transgressing in some way, being disobedient in some way, refusing to consent in some way to what the ruling class thinks or does, then why is violence freely directed at Blacks? What is the reason that the non-white or the master in the master/slave relation treats Blacks violently?

FW: The short answer is that violence against the slave is integral to the production of that psychic space called social life. The repetitive nature of violence against the slave does not have the same type of utility that violence against the post-colonial subject has—in other words, in the first instance, to secure and maintain the occupation of land. It does not have the utility of violence against the working class, which would be to secure and maintain the extraction of surplus-value and the wage. 

We have to think more libidinally and in a more robust fashion. This is where it becomes really controversial and really troubling for a lot of people because what Patterson is arguing, and what people like myself and professor Jared Sexton and Saidiya Hartman at Columbia University have extended, is to say that what we need to do is begin to think of violence not as having essentially the kind of political or economic utility that violence in other revolutionary paradigms have. Violence against the slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.

CSS: When you say that—and I’ve read some of your writings on the subject—it seems like you’re suggesting that only if some population perceives another population as inferior, or so degraded that anything can be done to them—unless they have that other in mind that somehow, psychologically and psychically—they can’t have the integrity that they want. Is that correct? And why would that be the case psychologically? Why would somebody need to have some other person seen in that light in order to feel actualized, in order to feel worthy of life?

FW: It’s a very good question and we could spend several hours on it, but what I’m trying to do is give you short-hand answers that have integrity and hopefully your listeners will do some more reading and research to actually see how these mechanisms work. But let’s take it for one second outside of the way in which I and other Afro-pessimists are theorizing it. 

One of our claims is that Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness—that is a very controversial claim; that claim is actually the fault line right now of African and Black Studies across the country, the claim that Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart. 

But I can’t argue against everyone who disagrees with that right now. One of the points that Patterson makes at a higher level of abstraction is that the concept of community, and the concept of freedom, and the concept of communal and interpersonal presence, actually needs a conceptual antithesis. In other words, you can’t think community without being able to register non-community. 

His book Slavery and Social Death goes back thousands of years and covers slavery in China and all over the world and he says that communal coherence has a lot of positive attributes: this is my language, this is how I organize my polity, these are the anthropological accoutrements of how we work our customs—but at the end of the day what it needs to know is what it is not. 

So the idea of freedom and the idea of communal life and the idea of civic relations has to have a kind of point of attention which is absent of that or different from that. This is the function that slavery presents or provides to coherence so that prior to Columbus, for example, the Choctaw might have someone inside a Choctaw community who transgresses the codes of the community so fiercely that they’re given a choice, and the choice at this moment of a transgression, which is beyond-the-beyond, is between real death—“We will kill you in an execution”—or social death. 

Nothing changes in the mind of that person tomorrow or the day after he or she chooses social death. He or she still thinks they have a cosmology, that they have intimate family relations, but the point that Patterson is making is that everything changes in the structure of that person’s dynamic with the rest of the tribe. So now that that person is a slave, that person is socially dead. 

This is bad for that person, obviously, but what he is suggesting is that that type of action regenerates the knowledge of our existence for everyone else. Now where I and some others take Patterson further is to say that Black, Blackness, and even the thing called Africa, cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart from that smaller scale process that he talks about with respect to Chinese communities or the Choctaw. In other words, there is a global consensus that Africa is the location of sentient beings who are outside of global community, who are socially dead. 

That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625 and it’s passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to that global consensus you can’t think Black. You can think Uganda, Ashanti, Ndebele, you can think many different cultural identities, but Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from the global consensus that decides here is the place which is emblematic of that moment the Choctaw person is spun out from social life to social death. That’s part of the foundation.

CSS: This is really provocative. Are you saying then—let’s just focus on the U.S.—that every African American, regardless of income or wealth or status, can and should be understood in the figure of the slave who is socially dead in relation to the master, who I presume is white?

FW: Well, the master is everyone else, whites and their junior partners, which in my book are colored immigrants. It’s just that colored immigrants exist in an intra-human status of degradation in relation to white people. They are degraded as humans, but they still exist paradigmatically in that position of the human. So yes, I am saying that. 

Now part of the reason is that one of the things that we are not doing is talking about the different ways in which different Black people live their existence as slaves. I’m willing to do that, but what’s interesting to me is the kind of anxiety that this theory elicits from people other than yourself. I mean this is the calmest conversation that I’ve had on this subject [laughter]. 

You could say to someone that you are a professor at UC Berkeley and there is a person in a sweatshop on the other side of the Rio Grande. This person in the sweatshop is working sixteen hours a day, cannot go to the bathroom, dies on the job from lack of medical benefits... and you are a kind of labor aristocrat. And they could say, “Okay, well that’s interesting.” 

And you could say to that person, “But if you read the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian communist, you come to understand that even though you live your life as a proletarian differently than a sweatshop laborer, you both stand in relation to capital in this same way, at the level of structural, paradigmatic arrangement.” That person would say, “Oh yeah! I get that, I get that.” You say to someone that all Blacks are slaves and that we’re going to change the definition of slavery because the other things are not definitions, they are actually anecdotes, and your teacher in third grade told you that you don’t use an anecdote to define something. 

And that person says, “Oh wait a minute, I know a person who’s richer than me and also Black and they live in the Tenderloin...” and it just goes off to the races. It’s a symptomatic response primarily because they understand that what Black people suffer is real and comprehensive but there is actually no prescriptive, rhetorical gesture which could actually write a sentence about how to redress that. 

Most Americans, most people in the world, are not willing to engage in a paradigm of oppression that does not offer some type of way out. But that is what we live with as Black people every day.

CSS: Let me take us on what sounds like a bit of a detour, but I think it will help you clarify certain concepts that you’re forwarding, and that’s to go to Antonio Gramsci’s work and think about a word that he had a very specific definition of, which is “hegemony.” And of course Gramsci, coming out of the Marxist tradition, was very interested in workers and capital and the struggle between capitalists and workers, although he was also interested in a lot of other things. What did Gramsci mean by the word hegemony?

FW: In 1922 Antonio Gramsci was working for the Comintern and he asked Lenin the following question: “How did you create this successful revolution and I can’t get it off the ground in Italy?” Lenin said, “Well there is no trough of civil society between our working class and the command modality of capitalism, the violent manifestations of the capitalist state. 

We go on strike and the Cossacks come out.” And Gramsci began to theorize: between working class suffering and state violence and state institutionality there’s this thing called civil society which captivates the workers—in other words, induces a kind of spontaneous consent to the values of capital. Guild associations, schools—today it would be talk shows, but not this talk show of course [laughter]—and he began to theorize that what Lenin meant by hegemony, which is the domination of imperialist countries over countries that are trying to evolve into a kind of revolutionary dispensation, is different than what he needed to develop his theory of hegemony and so he came up with three constituent elements: influence, leadership, and consent. 

By influence, leadership, and consent he means the influence of the ruling class—not the influence of one person or another, but the influence of a class—the leadership of its ideas—which is to say the idea of meritocracy, which was a very bad idea for a Marxist—and the consent of the working class to that influence and those ideas. What he sought to do was to find ways to break the spontaneous consent to those ideas. 

Once he could break the spontaneous consent to those ideas, then the working class of a Western, so-called devout country like Italy would be able to see what Marxists think of as the antagonism between them and the ruling class. 

Then it would move from a passive revolution to a real revolution, which would be a violent overthrow of the state. The European Gramscians actually leave out that last part, the violent overthrow of the state, but that was actually his dream.

CSS: Okay, so then we have on the one hand force and on the other we have consent. We have the force of the ruling class and we have consent, which you’re suggesting if it is withheld, if it is abrogated to such an extreme degree, there might be social and political revolution. But how does, in Antonio Gramsci’s conception, hegemony normally work in terms of the relationship between force and consent in a nominally stable society?

FW: When a state is stable in a capitalist dispensation, such as Canada, then there is an equilibrium between force and consent. In other words, one of the things you have in a “good” (for capitalists) dispensation is a smooth situation. So for the hundreds of years it took to develop capitalism, there was all this violence. Once people have been remolded from peasants and whatever else into workers, then in a capitalist dispensation, just as in a patriarchal dispensation, the violence goes into remission. That’s what Gramsci means by equilibrium. Violence goes in remission and it only needs to rear its ugly head in those singular moments, which hopefully are not global for the capitalist, when the working class refuses or transgresses those symbolic codes that it has consented to.

CSS: Such as general strikes, mass aggression against the capitalist order... FW: Exactly.

CSS: So then this equilibrium between force and consent, which constitutes