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In this article I consider the significance of the New World African slave to Marx's Capital. Although Marx frequently refers to slaves, the products of slave labor, and events centered on slavery like the American Civil War, and although he deploys the rhetoric of enslavement to describe the exploitation of wage laborers, he never acknowledges the slave as essential to his analysis. This is because Marx, for the sake of his analysis, accepts the widely held view in the nineteenth century that slaves lacked agency. I argue for the necessity of the slave to Capital, demonstrate how taking this seriously alters some key concepts in Capital, and re-read Marx so that the slave's agency can be traced from within Marx's theoretical apparatus. Adapted from the source document.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic Politics -- one. Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eigh teenth Century -- two. An African Diasporic Critique of Violence -- three. Rousseau: Vital Instinct and Pity -- four. System and Subject in Adam Smith's Po liti cal Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life -- five. Vitalism's Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics -- six. Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Politi cal Economy -- seven. William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny -- eight. Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Pres ent Moment -- nine. The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin's Entangled Bank -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index