Lucia Vitale
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Human capital in its most basic form can be defined as skills confined within the body. For the purposes of the larger history of the political economy, one might define human capital as the purchasing of humans and the degradation of their labor for capital gain. This particular form of domination has arguably been the major factor determining which countries are labeled, from a Western perspective, “developed” and “undeveloped”. Often denied or given little explanatory significance by literature on development in the liberal political economy cannon, centuries of human capital(ism) had led to drastically divergent paths for former colonizers such as France, and former colonized slave societies such as Haiti.
More normative ideas around human capital are often attributed to Gary Becker, especially to his 1964 publication Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education in which he develops a framework for human capital investment. By building towards a general human capital theory, Becker investigates phenomena such as the sunk costs of on-the-job training, and the return-on-investment that an individual receives if they decide to pursue trainings or education outside the workplace. He defines human capital as the acquisition of skills or abilities which are accumulated through training and education in order to yield future monetary returns to the individual worker. In Becker’s mind, human capital is a means of production in that investment yields additional output, and is subject to similar calculations of rate-of-return. In this way, it is not a fixed capital, but rather can be substitutable.
While this is one of the more normative ways to understand human capital, the skill set of workers can be traced back to Adam Smith’s (1776) Wealth of Nations where he differentiates between circulating capital and fixed capital. The fourth type of fixed capital that Smith defines is the set of ‘useful abilities’ found in the members of a society. He writes that “the acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person” (368). This particular type of capital, that exists as skills confined in the body, is one component of Adam Smith’s fixed capital.
Becker and Adam Smith may disagree on whether human capital might be fixed or unfixed, but they share the basic view that human capital is confined in the body of the laborer and that more of it can increase productivity yields for whomever purchases the labor. Alternatively, in the examples of unfree and slave labor we turn to next, we see how labor is not always rented out, but rather can be purchased and owned by, for example, a 21st century company using prison labor, or a 16th century slave master. As Goldin (2016) notes in her entry on human capital in The Handbook for Cliometrics, “Slavery provides the most extreme form of the market for human capital. Human beings were rented and they were sold” (63). Considering the term ‘human capital’, then, from a subaltern perspective, we are met with a distinct understanding.
Invoking Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am), decolonial thinker Ramón Grosfoguel (2007) explains how Descartes attempted to claim a non-situated, universal, God-eyed knowledge. Using Santiago Castro-Gómez’s (2003) “point zero”, Grosfoguel critiques the notion of so-called universal knowledge, writing that it “…hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this “god-eye view” that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism” (8). While Gary Becker’s rational choice-informed theory on human capital (in some ways informed by Adam Smith’s early thoughts on fixed capital) is perhaps the most well-known, engaging epistemically with the subaltern side of the colonial perspective, as Grosfoguel urges us to do, decidedly points “human capital” as a term in a different direction. Using the term “coloniality of power”, Grosfoguel considers how the persistent centering of Western thought has given rise to a colonized globalization studies, political-economy paradigms, and world-systems analysis. For example, centuries of centering a European colonial analysis has privileged economic reasoning and the logic of making profit via the extraction of surplus value over all other power relations. Grosfoguel makes the point that the contemporary world-system would look different if the locus of enunciation was an Indigenous woman in the Americas (9). Or, as Eric Williams suggests, a slave stolen from the commons and sold as a unit of human capital to be not just exploited for capital gain, but to be violently dominated.
Indeed, Eric Williams sets out in Capitalism and Slavery to explain how slavery made British industrialization, and therefore capitalism, possible and highly lucrative. Indeed, Williams argues that the economic circumstances of the sixteenth century were such that slavery was a necessity for large-scale production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton (6). Britain faced a labor problem in both the Caribbean and the New World, argues Williams, to which the enslavement of Africans was the answer (29). The need for a labor force large enough and cheap enough to benefit seventeenth century capitalist endeavors led to the development of what Williams refers to as the “triangular trade,” that involved England, France and Colonial America supplying the exports and ships, “Africa the human merchandise; the plantations the colonial raw materials” (51). Williams uses the Royal Africa Company to support his argument. The Royal Africa Company was created in 1672 and had a monopoly over the English slave trade until 1698 when the slave trade was opened to free trade among Englishmen (Williams, 31-32). Wool was the leading export (akin to what cotton later became) used to justify the slave trade (Williams, 65). The Royal Africa Company was a major player in the wool trade to the extent that the debates about whether the slave trade was necessary or not were fought between the Royal Africa Company and all the other smaller wool traders (Williams, 65-66). In addition, the Royal Africa Company also had a monopoly over the iron and gun trade that led to similar petitions from other traders both for and against the company’s monopoly over these industries (Williams, 81-82). Though he does not discuss nationhood explicitly, Williams does discuss how conceptions of nationhood played a role in broader societal support of the slave trade. Williams explains that while the shipping industry differed on their opinion as to whether the Royal African Company should continue to monopolize the slave trade or whether free trade should be allowed, “on the question of abolition the industry presented a united front, arguing that abolition would strike at the very roots of Britain’s naval and imperial supremacy” (59).
Though the slave trade has been abolished and slaves emancipated from their forced labor conditions, unfree labor continues to play a role in the capitalist labor market. LeBaron and Philips articulate a compelling argument that states have played a central role in creating the conditions that have allowed for the “emergence and persistence of unfree labour” globally (2). Neoliberalism has shaped the forms that unfree labor has taken as well as the mechanisms that allow for its profitability in recent decades (5). As Lebaron and Philips argue, states, as the “key architects of neoliberalism” nationally and globally, they create the conditions necessary for the flourishing of unfree labor (5).
Along with Williams, historian Edward E. Baptist (2014) also argues that slavery was part and parcel of the development of capitalism in the United States despite the construction of a national historical narrative that states otherwise (3). By showing historically how slavery made it possible to transform the Cotton Kingdom of the Southern states into a global market economy – the returns of which modernized America through development of the capitalist economy and industrialization – Baptist is telling the half of the story that has never been told (7). In addition to telling the half of the story that has never been told, Grosfugel also urges us to place the subaltern (in this example the body of the African slave) at the center of history. By doing so, we get a different understanding of not only political economy, but also its related terms, such as human capital.
The Black Jacobins, written by Trinidadian Marxist historian CLR James, complicates The French Revolution with his account of the Haitian Revolution. While they occurred during similar times, 1789-1799 and 1791-1804, respectively, and each fought for liberty and equality (and to complete the famous slogan “fraternité), from the time of their respective independences, the two countries have followed remarkably divergent paths. Due to a confluence of factors stemming from their opposing positions of “colonizer/slave owner” and “colonized/slave”, the accumulated labor from human capital has produced two nations on opposing sides of the “development” spectrum in contemporary times. Writing on the Haitian Revolution from the 1940s, CLR James titles the first two chapters of his book The Black Jacobins, “The Property” and “The Owners”, and gives a visceral account of the market for human bodies, and the capital that was extracted from them. In contemporary times, this capital is being claimed in the form of reparations by fourteen Caribbean nations, Haiti included. In 2013, regional organization of the Caribbean community, Caricom, brought a series of lawsuits against England, France and the Netherlands before the UN’s International Court of Justice for the “lingering legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade”. When the lawsuits were announced in a 2013 United National Assembly meeting, then chairwoman of the national reparations commission in Jamaica remarked: “Our ancestors got nothing,” Shepherd said. “They got their freedom and they were told ‘Go develop yourselves.'” The lawsuits have not reached a conclusion.
Bibliography
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Becker, Gary. Human Capital; a Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 211–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162514.
Goldin, Claudia. “Human Capital.” In Handbook of Cliometrics, edited by Claude Diebolt and Michael Haupert, 55–86. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40406-1_23.
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Random House, 1938.
LeBaron, Genevieve, and Nicola Phillips. “States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour.” New Political Economy 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1420642.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One, The Process of Production Capital. 1867.
Mullins, Dexter. “Caribbean Nations Sue European Countries for Slavery Reparations.” Al Jazeera: America, 2013. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/27/14-caribbean-nationssueeuropeancountriesforreparationsoverslaver.html.
Smith, Adam. “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” Vol. 13. Accessed via https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/251119, 1904.
Wilkinson, Bert. “Caricom Demands Slavery Reparations from More European Nations.” The Philadelphia Tribune, 2019. https://www.phillytrib.com/news/caricom-demands-slavery-reparations-from-more-european-nations/article_9fbdc2c1-ad38-53a9-b9b9-05538f7124b4.html.
Williams, Eric Eustace. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.