27 Social Text 128 • Vol. 34, No. 3 • September 2016 DOI 10.1215/01642472-3607564 © 2016 Duke University Press Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment. . . . My fellow apprentices very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and talk about the “niggers taking the country,” saying we all ought to be killed. —Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life (1845) When we look at social relations which create an undeveloped system of exchange, of exchange values and of money, or which correspond to an undeveloped degree of these, then it is clear from the outset that the individuals in such a society, although their relations appear to be more personal, enter into connection with one another only as individuals imprisoned within a certain defnition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf etc. or as members of a caste etc. or as members of an estate etc. In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, the distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up; . . . and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference). . . . The defned-ness of individuals, which in the former case appears as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in the latter case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual by relations independent of him and suf fcient unto themselves. . . . A closer examination of these external relations shows, however, . . . [that] On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation Nikhil Pal Singh Social Text Published by Duke University Press