In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade had Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery make a medallion: a kneeling man in chains, and the line Am I not a man and a brother? The argument is right there. Being a man is what makes you count. This one is a man. Let him in.
It worked. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery across most of the empire in 1833. It also hardened the thing it went through. After it, what mattered was being on the list: human, a check; non-human, an x.
The missing piece arrived in the same family. Josiah Wedgwood, whose pottery made the medallion, was Charles Darwin’s grandfather. In 1871 The Descent of Man supplied the fact the medallion’s argument lacked: kinship is not a feeling but a lineage, and it does not stop at the species line. Draw it as biologists now do, as a cladogram, and the species line is not a wall but a fork: every branch meets every other somewhere back along the trunk. One family, eighty-four years apart. The medallion let enslaved people in on the ground that they were men, and so made being human the price of admission. The grandson’s evidence showed that line was a fork, not a wall, and could have ended the price. Descent commands nothing by itself; it is an is like any other. What it does is take away the fact the wall was said to rest on. It did not. Darwin and many after him read descent as a ranking, and the same science was soon sorting humans by skull and skin, a new list drawn inside the species. By the time the fact arrived, the list had set, and it took the fact in as one more way to sort.
Adding to a list does not dissolve it; every addition confirms it. Everyone who comes after has to come the same way, one group at a time, asking. That is why the 1830s produced a second medallion for a second group — Am I not a woman and a sister? If the first had broken the boundary, nobody would have needed to make another one.
A third petition is already forming, and decent people will make it — some by argument, some by how they live, refusing to eat or wear animals, and some by direct action, breaking the locks on the cages. Am I not a creature and a cousin? That petition will fail the way the others did, because a petition that wins leaves the list standing.
And it is worth asking whether the list is for humans only, because it never has been. Dogs are on it and pigs are not, in the same country on the same day. Corporations are on it — they own things, sign contracts, sue and are sued. Some rivers are on it. Meanwhile people have been kept off it: the Constitution of 1787 counted an enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for apportionment, and when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865 it did so except as a punishment for crime, wording that is still in force. Within a few years Southern states were using that exception to lease prisoners, many of them freedmen arrested under the new Black Codes and vagrancy laws, to mines, railroads and plantations. It was a human rental, except that the fee went to the state, not to the worker.
The list is still being redrawn among people. Someone without papers is human by every measure the medallion used, and can still be detained, deported, or worked with fewer protections than the person beside them, because a border says where the line ought to fall and that they fall outside it. The border presents an ought as a fact of geography. What is being done to them goes unexamined; the question is closed by asking where they belong.
A rule that sorts like that is not tracking species, or reason, or anything else. It is a decision, redrawn wherever redrawing is convenient. Which is the clearest sign it does no work. A line that measured something real would move too, but it would move when the evidence did. This one moves when convenience does: dogs on the list and pigs off it in the same country on the same day, with nothing learned about either in between.
None of this says the harms are the same. Slavery is not a crate, a crate is not a bad job, and a bad job is not a deportation; they differ in kind and in degree. What they share is the step that stopped anyone from asking about them. Some were eventually let onto the list. That did not start the asking. It only changed the reason for not asking.
The comparison has been made before, and its critics are worth hearing. Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison(1988) set the practices side by side (branding, chaining, transport, the auction) and argued that one logic of use runs through both. Aph Ko and Syl Ko answered in Aphro-ism (2017) that setting “human slavery” beside “animal slavery” treats racism and speciesism as two separate things being compared, when the line between human and animal was itself one of the chief tools used to dehumanize Black people. This argument sides with the second point. The question is not how closely one harm resembles another. It is what the category animal was doing all along, whoever was placed inside it.
How the question lost
Abolition should have opened the question for the other two, and for a while it did. In the 1830s and 1840s the phrase wage slavery, a charge workers made about their own conditions, was in wide use. New England mill workers walked out singing that they would not be slaves, and Orestes Brownson argued in 1840 that the wage worker was in some ways worse off than the slave. Even Lincoln’s free-labor creed treated hired work as a stage a man passes through on the way to working for himself, not a place to stay. A generation later the Knights of Labor set out to replace the wage system with cooperatives. On the other side of the line, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in London in 1824 and now the RSPCA, counted Wilberforce and Buxton, two of the leading abolitionists, among its founders. The question was asked, loudly, by people who had just watched the medallion’s question answered once, for the enslaved.
It lost, and it lost through the list. Once freedom had been defined as not being owned, the free man’s contract became the proof of his freedom, and the case against wage work had to argue against the very thing emancipation had won. Historians have traced the turn: Eric Foner in the free-labor ideology, Amy Dru Stanley in how contract became the emblem of freedom after emancipation, pressed even on freed people signing their first labor contracts. In one signature they passed from the first exclusion to the second: no longer owned, now rented, and for the hours paid, directed as though they were still owned. The asking did not stop. It was answered in advance by the terms of the victory: he is free; he agreed. The animal question met the mirror answer. Cruelty could be limited, but the animal stayed property, because the list had already said what it was. That is what foreclosure means here. Not silence, but a question that could be raised and could not win. Won another way, the first abolition could have been a lever for everyone still being used, human and non-human alike.
It lost from the other side as well. Marx attacked the wage system, but on terms that granted the rental. In Capital the worker sells his labor power, a commodity, at its value, and the sale itself is an exchange of equivalents; the wrong is placed later, in the surplus the buyer extracts in production. David Ellerman’s objection is that this concedes the very thing in dispute. On the rental itself, Marx stood with the defenders of capital: both treated the hiring of a person as a legitimate sale, and argued over its price and its proceeds, never over whether it could be made at all. Agency is not a commodity, and a contract to sell it fails however fairly it is priced. And the rental hands over more than hours. Whoever holds it takes the whole product, everything made and everything used up in making it, along with the direction of the work, so that in law the employer stands as the one who produced it. The workers did it; the contract assigns it elsewhere.
What matters is not a labor theory of value, about what sets prices, but a labor theory of property, about who should own what is made: the people who made it, because they are the ones who did it. Having put the wrong in the price rather than in the contract, Marxism aimed at who owns the factory rather than at the rental itself, and where it took the factories, the rental survived with the state as employer. The argument was over the terms: what the wage should be, who keeps the surplus, whether capital or the state, even a state calling itself the workers’, should do the hiring. Whether a person could be hired at all was never part of it. A firm run by the people who work in it hires no one. Its members are not rented; they are the firm, the new built in the shell of the old, past both Marx and the defenders of capital.
Sources and further reading
- The Wedgwood medallion, “Am I not a man and a brother?” (Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1787), and its later counterpart, “Am I not a woman and a sister?”
- Slave Trade Act 1807 and Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (UK).
- U.S. Constitution, Art. I, §2, cl. 3 (the three-fifths clause), and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865).
- Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. XVII, footnote on animals. The sentience criterion, in print two years after the medallion: the better argument that was available and lost.
- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871).
- Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1988; preface by Alice Walker).
- Aph Ko and Syl Ko, Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters (Lantern Books, 2017).
- Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes” (1840).
- Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford University Press, 1970).
- Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- David Ellerman, Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy (Springer, 2021). The case that the employment contract is the rental of persons, argued from inalienable rights, the labor theory of property, and democratic theory.
- David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (Blackwell, 1992). The labor theory of property set against the labor theory of value, and the critique of Marx’s treatment of labor power as a commodity.