From, "We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism," by Clarence Walker. (Blurbed by two leftish historians, David Brion Davis and Richard Slotkin.) Pgs. 115-117.
"The North American slave plantation, for all it's horror qand misery, was not a death camp. It's purpose was to produce commodities for the world market. Commenting on the distinction between the concentration camp and slavery, Wolfgang Sofsky says:
'The concentration camp was not a slave factory. Nonetheless, a comparison with the social form of slavery has heuristic value. It helps to elucidate the transformation of human labor into terror labor. Slavery is always a social relation of domination and production. Slaves are part of the physical property of masters, working for them under coercion, and totally dependent on their personal arbitary will. In contrast with wage labor, labor power is not a commodity; it is the human being himself or herself. The slave is a human being, but, qua slave, he or she is a thing, an object like all other objects at the master's disposal. By social definition, the slave is therefore not a member of human society. Slaveholders have total power to dispose of their property as they wish. That power is unlimited in every respect. Slaves are deprived not only of control over their labor, but also over themselves as people. The owners can force them to work without a break, beat them, torment them, or hound them to death. Nonetheless, unlike the concentration camp, the world of slavery is not geared to terror and death, but to exploitation. the slave , especially under the conditions of commercial slavery, has a value and a going market price. The master does not acquire slaves in order to kill them, but to put them to work for the masters benefit. Power remains a means to exploitation. Slavery is primarily a system of labor. 89 '
Sofsky then moves on to the crucial distinction betwen slaves and the concentration camp inmates, a difference that is not accounted for in Afrocentric victim envy:
'The personal dependence typical of slavery was lacking in the concentration camp. The prisoners were also exposed to arbitrary ill and whim, yet they...belonged to no one. They were controlled by an appparatus that hunted them down and incarcerated them. It forced them to work, and in the final years of the war also leased out their labor to external beneficiaries. The SS did not operate as a slaveholder in the marketplace. Rather, as a formal agency, it defined the status of the prisoners by decree and violence. For that reason, the prisoners had neither a value or a price.They were not traded a s commodities or sold. What private companies were required to pay for prisoner labor was not a price, but an administrative leasing fee. the prisoners were subjected to far more radical reification than any victim of slavery ever experienced. In terms of status, a slave is not a person but a thing. Yet a s a kiving creature, the slave is a person who has a certain property value. By contrast, the prisoner was actually depersonalized by humiliation and misery, stripped of humanity, transformed into an animal-like bundle of reactions and ultimately killed. As barbaric asthe owners often were in dealing with their slaves, the death of a slave was a loss. For power, however, the vegetating and death of a prisoner was a victory.
Apparently being the decendent of slaves is not in and of itself horrible enough for some Negro Americans. Black Americans do not need to appropriate the Holocaust to understand their own suffering, however. The Middle Passage, slavery, and and the limited freedom that came with emancipation have an autonomy of their own; American Negros do not have to jump into the furnices with the Jews to understand or legitimate their suffering. What Black Americans ought to appeciate is the particularity or specificity of their own history...
In the footnotes these works among many others are cited: "Is The Holcaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide, " ed. by Alan S. Rosenbaum, Westview Press, Boulder, CO., 1996 "Subjugation and Bondage, " ed. Tommy L. Lott, Rowman and Littlefield, lanham, MD., 1998.