“Capital Sin:” Benjamin Lay and Marcus Rediker’s Red Atlantic

We can be grateful that the mainstream debate about structural racism has not only directly targeted, with renewed energy and breadth, the state violence lurking under the name of “criminal justice.” It now increasingly attends to racism and racialization as products of predatory economic forces and global historical processes.

In, for example, the recent New York Times Magazine reparations essay “What is Owed” Nikole Hannah-Jones, prominent architect of the iconoclastic (if hyperbolic) 1619 Project, seeks to expose the material interests and methods that drove and sustain racism in the USA, asking, in effect, “Where is the money?” In answer, she historicizes: it has been blocked or stolen from African Americans through “centuries of meticulously orchestrated inequities.”¹ Nonetheless, although Hannah-Jones (hereafter NHJ) recognizes that “the actualization of justice” demands “economic repair,” her essay suffers from the familiar liberal tendency to flee from the discourse of class. More worrisome, despite the authority that she has garnered on this subject of the utmost political urgency, she leaves us at an impasse with her case for reparations: who will be the agents of that program and what, ultimately, would it resolve?

A seeming anomaly of colonial history, the life of Benjamin Lay (1682–1759) offers us a different path. White, English-born, but of common-dirt origins, Lay was overshadowed—and illumined—by the turbid legacy of the Civil War that had generated so many forms of nonconformist, sometimes millenarian, Christianity—including the Quakerism to which he clung. Oddity though he was—a “dwarf,” author, autodidact, prophet, curmudgeon, street-agitator—Lay embodies much of what is missing from the current debate about tackling racism: in two words, class struggle.

He also concentrates central strains in the work of Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, a scholar whose family goes back to the laboring people of the multiethnic cauldron of the Appalachians. As he explained in a 2015 interview, his ancestors’ examples pulled him toward the applied intellectual tradition known as history from below, which compels him to consider “ordinary working people, not simply for what they experienced in the past but for their ability to shape the way history happens.”² Rediker’s largely colonial-era research, conceived for the everyday reader, is therefore essential to the robust revision of “American” history that NHJ should be advocating. 

Benjamin Lay represents radical emancipatory struggle—abolitionism foremost—as the work of the marginalized, the embattled, and the informally educated. Lifelong witness to the unequal distribution of power, Lay struck at the tough roots of oppression rather than pruning among the accidental outgrowth. According to Rediker, politics as trenchant social struggle was encoded in Lay’s thin, four-foot-tall frame, the target of much scorn, which inclined him to identify “with enslaved people, with animals, and with the natural world.”³ And from the matrix of his physical smallness (compensated by outward fierceness) he “arrived at an uncompromising position on the issue of slavery—one that would see him through ridicule, resistance, and repression” (71).

Central to Lay’s perspicacity, Rediker argues, was class-consciousness—not the temporizing liberalism that blunted the jagged edge of the abolitionist cause in his time and after. No evidence certifies that Lay actually tried to liberate enslaved Blacks while in Philadelphia, but he was an unwavering antagonist and torturer of the bourgeois Quaker conscience. And he had been close to the savage profit-making machinery that he wanted to shatter. Having toured the Mediterranean and Caribbean as a sailor (1703–17), Lay “would never forget the desperate hunger of the enslaved nor the vicious violence of the masters. Amid the gilded depravity of the Barbados, Benjamin found a new Babylon” (36). Confrontation with the exploitation that fueled global maritime trade and that damaged all touched by it (including the bold men and women who turned to piracy in those same decades⁴) engendered in him a Buddha-like identification with creaturely subjection.

Sympathy, however, can cost little. Lay had the acumen and courage to detect strains of the inhumanity of the British imperial economy even among The Society of Friends, which he saw “being undermined by wealth and its profanation of values as it moved from its plebeian origins to a more prosperous, bourgeois Quaker conscience” (41). That is, Lay brought the conflict home, into the heart of his spiritual community, jeopardizing his respectability and well-being by showing up the “better sort” for their hypocrisy. Consequently, his life would be full of friction. Once set on his path Lay “expected vicious, unremitting attacks” (73). That he got. Self-sacrifice and ascetism, however, quickened Lay’s purpose and practice. Mentally steadied by the example of the ancient Cynics (he owned editions of Epictetus and Seneca), he followed their commitment to simple living and to “parrhesia: free, frank, blunt, candid speech, uttered with indifference to worldly authority” (103). Lay attacked iniquity in a way that was both personal and cosmic, as shown in a jotting in a book’s margin: “Money—the love of money,—the destruction of nations—the fountain of evil” (105).

NHJ, likewise, acknowledges that “racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father” (35), but she does not treat this relation causally or demographically. Any surplus must be exacted, and that exaction—which generates resistance—must be made invisible. One or another form of dehumanization on various pretexts usually does the trick. Just as important, only the smallest minority can ever lay hold of the riches that confer such monstrous levels of power over peoples; therefore, the casuistry and calculation that serve exploitation are never generalizable (let alone universalizable). Whatever the technical limitations of his economic analysis, Lay understood some of the elements of what we could call reification. Centrally, he sensed how monetary abstraction and accumulation implacably shape and distort human social relations, making it ever easier for the comfortable few to dwell in propertied prestige while vilifying—so as to abuse—others. As we know, the very insularity of the ruling class reinforces the conservative fantasy that the world is largely comprised of discrete individuals whose basic needs and desires threaten others’ freedom and happiness.

Lay explored such ideas in an idiosyncratic work published as All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1738). It advocates abolition while diagnosing slave-keeping as categorically contrary to reason, well-being, and peace. Writing through the lens of the Book of Revelations (which he had carefully annotated), Lay was able “to account for the formation not only of slave owners in particular but of an evil, covetous ruling class in general” (88). The dracocentric phantasmagoria of Revelations 12–13, containing the ominous warning that “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity” (13:10), was for Lay a coded condemnation of elite self-aggrandizing, both ideological and material. (John of Patmos’s creepily precise designation therein of both “the number of the beast” and “the number of a man” to be “Six hundred threescore and six” [13:18] uncannily suggests the connection of evil and seriality.) 

Having seen the Quaker splendor solidifying all around him in Philadelphia, which the mercantilist-minded viewed as the expression of meritorious earnings, he rejected any association of wealth with betterment. It was mortal sickness. In contrast, and revealing the narrowness of our own day’s emancipatory horizon, NHJ lends the same phenomenon almost spiritual power:

Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America. Wealth—assets and investments minus debt—is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute. It is what ensures what every parent wants — that your children will have fewer struggles than you did. Wealth is security and peace of mind. (34–35)

With its suburban preoccupations, the passage indicates that the task for NHJ is not collective struggle against a system that necessarily concentrates power into a slender apex while assaulting and degrading communities (and their planetary home) everywhere: the task is the growth of a proportion of non-whites within the USA who can cross over the “chasm” separating white and Black Americans and enter the category of “affluence” (35) possessed by a growing minority (still majority-white). But what remains? How many “catastrophes” can be anticipated and averted amidst multi-pronged wage suppression and unrelenting climate change–related crises? More tangibly, how many “under-funded” schools can be abandoned? This sort of reparations is not redemption, but alchemy. The veneer will rub off this coinage quickly.

NHJ’s implicit affirmation of the status quo is troubling not just for its imagining that “wealth” can simply and innocently be repossessed within a ruthless economic (anti)social order that remains in every respect pathological. She addresses expropriation, but this is crucially not framed by class, and consequently her essay effectively erases the generations of working people of all shades victimized by (but best positioned to destroy) their oppressors. In a revealing moment of idealist racialization, NHJ grotesquely collapses the roost of “the white planter class” upon the broadest human substrate comprising “all the ancillary white people from Midwestern farmers to bankers to sailors to textile workers who earned their living and built their wealth from free [i.e. unpaid] black labor” (35, emphasis added).

A sign, perhaps, of her own social position, NHJ refers to these last two professions offhandedly. And yet, in a remarkable coincidence, Lay was both sailor and textile worker. He would have refuted any comparison of a laborer’s small earnings under capitalism with the aggregated asset pool that compels the condition of wage-labor itself. Seamanship was hard, hierarchical, and dangerous.⁵ The life meant harsh living conditions and disadvantageous wage contracts. As Rediker detailed in a seminal work, “The seaman’s experience foreshadowed that of the factory worker during the industrial revolution. New patterns of authority and discipline were crucial to the process of industrialization.” Indeed, the forms of surveillance and terror meted upon seamen were often just like that used by the slaveowner, with the cat-of-nine-tails “the legendary emblem of maritime brutality.”⁶

As for textile work, weaving was for Benjamin Lay a bloodless means of self-sufficiency (he became a vegetarian) and, along with nonconformism, part of his political sensibility: “Benjamin’s home region was dominated by the textile industry and Benjamin was himself a spinner [… who …] used to make his own clothes, suggesting a history of skill and familial involvement in textile production.” Moreover, Essex, England, was a region of popular and violent resistance where “commoners protested the enclosure of common lands, unfair elections, the allocation of grain, weavers’ wages, and the authority of ministers and the church” (14).

These are the kinds of political energies to celebrate at a time when a sadistic US Senate, enjoined to deliver basic social protections, functions like Minos’s labyrinth. But if, for argument’s sake, and as NHJ presents it, our white-dominated Congress actually approved reparations legislation, that would mean at best that more Black Americans “rise” to the status of whites. But the population as a whole has grown poorer, sicker, and sadder, with ecological collapse and more health threats looming (even as stocks bloom). To put NHJ’s fantasy into perspective, three centuries ago Lay castigated those among his fellow “men who ‘poison the World for gain’” (149), understanding how a big moral vision granted strength and bonded together seemingly rare and distant voices.

Lay never made the egoistic mistake of taking credit for his anti-slavery views as signs of superior morality or intellect. Since apologists for the crimes and contradictions of the past often employ argumentum ad populum to assert that “the people” spoke with one voice and that that voice is actually audible, setting himself apart might allow others to claim that Lay defied uncontested cultural “norms.” Lay was not, however, casting off his contemporaries or his predecessors with his provocations: he sought reinforcement for his project by composing his own history from below (and thus preventing a supposedly monologic past from naturalizing the present power structure): “One of the many roles [that] Benjamin played in his book [All Slave-Keepers] was that of chronicler—of an incipient antislavery movement” (78).

That movement had arisen alongside slavery itself, in Pennsylvania in the 1680s, producing the 1688 Germantown Petition against slavery—a first. Rediker continues: “Upon arrival in 1732 Benjamin made it his business to learn as much about the antislavery struggle in Philadelphia as he could,” a mission that would result in his discovering that “a small, embattled, but resilient group of Quakers had by the 1730s established a core set of arguments against slavery. Debate among Quakers on the subject was serious and sustained although not always recorded in written documents” (83). So, Lay performed a formidable political act by substantiating and socializing abolitionism, protecting it from reactionary forces eager to silence the rumble of subversion. By contrast, even as NHJ summons us to imagine massive redistribution within the heart of Empire, she can devote no space to any of the efforts by multiracial movements of socialists and communists to build inter-ethnic solidarity—or to their crushing by Jim Crow and the Red Scare. Even the word abolitionist is left out.

Which leaves us with another thread of Rediker’s work: the multifaceted and ultimately dialectical nature of revolutionary, class-based politics. There, subjective agency and effective strategy intersect in complex, unforeseeable ways. This is perhaps the uppermost insight of Rediker’s retelling of the famous 1839 Amistad incident, which involved a shipboard slave revolt that led to liberation before the US Supreme Court. The story testifies to how the Africans’ bold escape, slaughter of the Spanish captors, and commandeering of the vessel to New England, where they fell into the net of transnational property claims, was just one step. The driving force, the self-freed slaves “worked with abolitionists such as Louis Tappan and political figures such as John Quincy Adams to keep their case before the public and to mount a strong legal defense of the freedom that they had won by arms aboard the Amistad.”⁷ Artists, journalists, and activists of all kinds magnified a local story into a sensation that spread across the world, to be performed on stage and debated in the halls of monarchs. But the act aboard the ship also reflected back to the Black militancy of L’Ouverture and Nat Turner. For Rediker, the Amistad was a true odyssey, long, twisting, and episodic,

in which an autonomous action of seizing a ship ramified into a much broader social movement, and in the process helped to radicalize that movement by making it more real. There were a lot of abolitionists who had never met Africans before, who had never met someone who had taken the brave and dramatic action of seizing a ship; these abolitionists were quite impressed…. History from below leads to unexpected outcomes: no one expected such a small event in a distant place to produce a huge international reverberation, but in this case it did.⁸

The danger to the established order posed by disparate but embryonic acts of resistance might be a central theme of the most monumental and poetic of Rediker’s works, published two decades ago, and not coincidentally in collaboration with Peter Linebaugh.⁹ In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the authors frame their study of two centuries of struggle within the symbolic binary of Hercules and Hydra. The former, slayer of the reptile (among his many labors), was for the “classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy” “a symbol of power and order” and, as with the Romans, an icon of “vast imperial ambition.” Hercules’s persecution of the almost unvanquishable Hydra “expressed the fear and justified the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executioners, of plantations, ships, and factories.”¹⁰ But on behalf of the working people who were identified by their oppressors as the tentacular malady, Linebaugh and Rediker redeploy the unstable signifier:

The hydra became a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection, the long waves and planetary currents of humanity. The multiplicity was indicated, as it were, in silhouette in the multitudes who gathered at the market, in the fields, on the piers and the ships, on the plantations, upon the battlefields. The power of numbers was expanded by movement, as the hydra journeyed and voyaged always banished or dispersed in diaspora, carried by the winds and the waves beyond the boundaries of the nation state. Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds made new and unexpected connections, which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous. (6)

Lay was one of these.

With the same attention to small moments that concatenate, Rediker opens his biography of Lay with another “autonomous action”: his inflammatory stunt, in 1738, meant to shock and outrage the slaveowners at the Quakers’ Burlington, New Jersey, meetinghouse, of plunging a sword into a Bible in which he had secreted a bladder of blood-red chokeberry juice. To the scandalized, bespattered congregants Lay then announced that “Quakers who failed to heed the prophet’s call must expect physical, moral, and spiritual death” (2). The disruptor was forcibly evicted, an assault that he endured without resistance. It was civil disobedience avant la lettre, but he was no organizer in the modern sense. As with the Amistad captives, Rediker understands that a unique act of anger or desperation, even of such freakish singularity as Lay’s, does not amount to mobilization. The “event” is easily fetishized—but it remains a sine qua non of any concrete emancipatory situation. Although a small man, generally operating alone, who might not have been or felt capable of executing outright manumission himself, Lay was linked into a process that, not fully visible to him, was as winding, incremental, and potent as ocean swells.

According to Rediker, when Lay was ousted from the meetinghouse after the Bleeding Bible spectacle, he returned and lay down at the door as an obstacle to the departing worshippers. Not content to be a voice crying in the wilderness, Lay physically enacted the kind of stubborn immobility that would serve any subversive well, whether in a criminal court, a prison cell, at a barricade—or an oil pipeline. It is for the rest of us to come to the side of such a one.