In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe.

Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe.

Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the promise of the worker’s formal freedom and the imperative of capital’s needs. Despite the cant about the universal freedom of all of society’s members, in both Western Europe and the American South, the employing classes were allowed considerable freedom not only to restrict the worker’s freedom but also to assume and publicly declare that the worker still belonged, somehow, to the employer.

The difference between the two societies, these passages show, involves both language and practice—that of racism versus that of economics—but also questions of ownership, of whom precisely post-emancipation workers belong to: a dominating individual or a dominating group.

Here’s Marx, in chapter 21 of Capital:

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.

Reproducing the working class also implies the accumulation of skills and their transmission from one generation to the next. The capitalist treats the existence of such a skilled working class as one of the conditions of production that belong to him, viewing it in fact as the real existence of his variable capital. How far he goes in this is revealed the moment a crisis threatens to take that class away. The American Civil War and the accompanying cotton famine put the majority of cotton workers in Lancashire out of work, as is well known. From deep within members of the working class and other social strata, too, there came a cry for state support, or voluntary national subscriptions, that would allow the workers made “superfluous” to emigrate to English colonies or the United States. Edmund Potter, a former president of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, responded with an open letter in the Times…Below readers will find a few characteristic passages, where capital’s proprietary rights over labor-power are frankly asserted.

[Marx quoting from Potter’s letter]: “Public opinion urges emigration. . . . The master [cotton manufacturer] cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound…I allow that the workers are not a property, not the property of Lancashire or the masters; but they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot be replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it be beneficially replaced, nay, improved, in a twelvemonth. Encourage or allow [!] the working power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?”

And here’s Du Bois, in chapter 6 of Black Reconstruction, quoting Carl Schurz:

Aside from the assumption that the Negro will not work without physical compulsion, there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the South which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution of the problem. It is that the Negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice and sugar for the whites, and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way…Although the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of society, and all independent state legislation will share the tendency to make him such….The reason of all this simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President’s emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.”