A Very Strange Comparison

Building on the ‘very strange’ comparison of wage labour with chattel slavery that Étienne Balibar tells us is ‘central’ to Marx’s writing and that has animated the work of Black communists and organisers, this essay considers the relationship of blackness as a socially constructed category to the freedom and unfreedom of labour through two different white gazes: that of the manager (in the photography of Stephen Shore) and the organiser (in the photography of Paul Strand). In the first, blackness is funnelled into the anthropologists’ ever-proliferating ‘patterns of culture’ or, as Shore puts it, into ‘complexity’ arising from ‘an economic study of society’. In the second, blackness plays the role of the challenger or combatant fundamental to creative work and political being in Strand’s account of the artist as a figure who ‘only grows by being compelled to do certain things, whether he wants to do them or not’. Freedom, Strand’s mature work reminds us, is won rather than given; it arises only from solidarity, or, hammering out a common moral vision and political strategy. Unfreedom, as we can see in Shore’s work, arises from the cultivated production, recognition, management, maintenance and exchange of cultural differences.

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