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Also known as stigmatising, branding consists of burning a symbol or a decorative pattern into the skin of a living being, with the aim of producing a permanent scar. Human branding was used in Ancient Greece and possibly earlier still¹, to mark the bodies of specific groups – servants, soldiers, convicted criminals and of course slaves – although by most accounts it wasn’t a widespread practice (Dauge-Roth & Koslofsky, 2023: 7; Ray, 2016). It is generally thought that branding began as a method to identify animals, ‘livestock’, as property; in other words whether applied to oxen or humans, this clearly was a means of oppressing and subjugating living creatures, bringing them into the realm of commodity, before being ‘refined’ as a specific form of punishment or a way of marking a person as enslaved (which essentially amounted to life-long punishment and also fixed his or her status as a commodity). The Ancient Romans branded runaway slaves with the letters FVG or FUG (short for fugitivus). Portuguese colonial power was particularly partial to the practice, with multiple brandings being undertaken: markings for the Portuguese crown, private owners, an additional Christian cross after baptism, and sometimes prior marks by African slave catchers. Indeed, as Dauge-Roth and Koslofsky recall, “branding became ubiquitous in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, adapted to the needs of new labor regimes in European colonies (…). As the Atlantic trade in enslaved men and women gained its devastating momentum (…), African captives found themselves tracked and identified through signs painfully burned into their skin (…).” (Dauge-Roth & Kolofsky, op. cit.: 8) Historically contiguous to the emergence – and the meteoric rise – of this vile practice, the minting of currency constitutes a similarly bewildering development – if one pauses to consider it, as noted in part 2 – and one that bears a clear material analogy, in terms of the very technique employed and the empirical ‘reality’ of abstraction that it conjures. The sinister dominion of commodity takes on a new and dazzling intensity following the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Its central drive is as ever tied to the exercise of institutionalised brute force, systematic practices of exclusion and discrimination against increasingly broader swathes of human (and non-human) beings, now more thoroughly – and later, ‘scientifically’ – identified as Others, whether in the guise of African or Asian slaves, Indians or, closer to home, that of the burgeoning proletariat that sprung from the enclosures (which the bourgeoisie would later name ‘the dangerous classes’). In the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese had indeed shifted from seeking gold to zealously participating in the slave trade, using manillas – brass rings, with a small opening – as currency in this commerce. In less than a decade, the Portuguese were overtaken by the British, French, and Dutch, who established plantations in the West Indies, all fully relying on slave labour. A typical trade route involved transporting manillas to West Africa, shipping slaves to the Americas, and bringing cotton back to Europe. In eighteenth century Britain, Bristol and Birmingham became major centres for brass manufacturing, producing various types of manillas. Captain Birdseye² reminds us how pretty little bronze ones were produced in great numbers in Birmingham, England, where there is still to this day a Manilla Road. African chiefs and nobility had specific preferences for different types of manillas, which were used as currency in West Africa for various purposes, including market transactions, paying fines, and burial practices.³ During the reign of dubious and reckless James Stewart (1685–1689) the value of tin collapsed; to support British mine owners facing financial collapse, the government intervened by minting tin coins intended for circulation in the West Indian plantation settlements and in parts of the North American colonies⁴: a ‘Royal Grant’ was issued in 1688 allowing one Richard Holt, representing several tin mine owners, to strike tin coins – also called tokens – from nearly pure tin, on behalf of the Crown.⁵

As Fred Célimène and André Legris remind us, one of the specificities of the plantation system was its unfinished production; sugar refining was almost always carried out in the metropole (at least before the mid-nineteenth century), hence perpetuating the myth of colonial dependence on the imperial centre. The absence of monetary incentives was another key problem, since variations in production efficiency depend solely on labour (Célimène & Legris, 2012: 141). Moreover, a French royal decree of 1726 mandated inheritance of plantation rights to be passed to a single child, in order to prevent the fragmentation of plantations, thus requiring compensation for other heirs. This is turn led to the structural indebtedness of the Caribbean economy (Ibid.). Other European colonies were no better off; in his work on Cape Verde plantations of the same era, Rudolf Widmer recounts how the Treasury, the sole source of metallic currency, was perpetually short of cash: “On the island, the canons of the cathedral were the only ones who consistently had coins and paid local producers for goods in hard currency.” (Widmer, 2002: 363). Hai-Quang Ho describes a similar state of financial scarcity in the French colony of the island of La Réunion, which was also structured around sugar monoculture; during the period when plantation owners were gradually forced to transition from slavery to wage labour between 1828 and 1853, over thirty metallic currencies from various countries around the world were legal tender in La Réunion, but the existing money supply was woefully insufficient to pay the former slaves who had legally been transformed into indentured labourers (Ho, 2012: 157).⁶ The French State granted masters 711.59 francs per slave, of which 4.76% was paid in cash and the remainder as a locked-in capital yielding an annual return of 5%. An initial instalment was paid in October 1849, with the rest transferred in 1852–53. Throughout this period, the masters lacked the cash to pay the now ‘free’ labourers (Ibid.: 165). The situation led to widespread vagrancy and fierce repression against former slaves who had gone against the terms of their new ‘contracts’ and were equally wary of the paper currency that spread across the island following the establishment of the Banque de la Réunion in July 1851. These elements illustrate how the profound instability of the plantation system was passed on to those Others, who consisted of enslaved humans and, in some cases, indigenous inhabitants of the colonies. As Victor Schoelcher famously said, “the slaveholding society can only overcome its own fear by imposing an even greater fear upon the very object of that fear.” (

Slave tokens, alternatively known as plantation tokens, were indeed employed in the American South during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They served as a substitute for currency within the plantation economy, typically issued by landowners or local merchants when official coinage was in short supply. Enslaved individuals might be awarded these tokens for ‘good behaviour’ or as an incentive for labour, but they could only be redeemed within the plantation or its immediate vicinity, further restricting their ‘economic autonomy’. Crafted from base metals such as brass, copper, or lead, plantation tokens often bore the names of slaveholders or distinctive estate markings. They functioned as a tool of financial control, as enslaved people were unable to convert them into legal tender or spend them beyond the confines of the plantation. This system mirrored other exploitative currencies of the era, including the manilla tokens used in West Africa and the Bristol brass or tin tokens produced in Europe for colonial trade. It is generally considered that following the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, plantation tokens gradually fell out of use and survive today only as scarce historical artefacts that might at best offer some sort of merciful insight into the financial mechanisms of slavery and the ways in which humans were subjugated through this particular form of monetary coercion.

Similarly scant research has been conducted on this specific form of currency, as indicates Karin Lurvink, a historian specialising in colonial labour systems in the former Dutch Empire: “Despite the almost global distribution of the use of tokens, systematic research into plantation tokens is rare. (...) The subject is often called an ‘unexplored territory’.” (Lurvink, 2018: 151). Lurvink concedes that, even well after the official abolition of slavery, those poor, insecure plantation bosses faced a lack of cash to remunerate their workforce; tokens thus became “a practical solution (...) to proceed with some form of payment” (Ibid.: 171), predictably allowing them to fix prices at company stores, “the only places where plantation tokens were redeemable” (Ibid.: 153). She also illustrates how these now neatly forgotten tokens were a worldwide phenomenon, although her work admittedly only covers the period after slaves became ‘free’:

“In addition to plantations, tokens were used for payments in the Americas on, among others, strawberry farms, coffee plantations, in the timber industry and by coal and nitrite mining companies. (…) In the Belgian Congo and some other African colonies, tokens were used as receipts for tax payments and as customer queuing tokens and employee identification medals in banks and railroad companies.” (Ibid.: 156)

Pause now to consider the hundreds of human hand mutilations that Belgian king Leopold II’s rubber terror inflicted in this still not now so peaceful part of the world, and tell me that there were at best no tokens ever used in that unheralded genocide. Lurvink’s solitary work provides more cheerful accounts of these currencies, reflected in the diverse array of names they were given: “in Louisiana, ‘plantation scrip’ and ‘brozine’, probably derived from the word ‘bronze’, were the most common terms in addition to ‘tokens’. Occasionally, the names ‘doo-ga-loo’ and ‘cherry balls’ were used in Louisiana” (Ibid.: 157) – and such a variety of shapes and sizes too:

“Sumatra tobacco plantation Toentoengan used several types of octagonal-shaped copper tokens. Tandjong Alam used eye-shaped copper and nickel tokens, and Tanah Radja used triangle-shaped copper and nickel tokens. Tenom Rubber Company from British North Borneo used octagonal-shaped copper, nickel and metal tokens as well as round tokens. Shaped tokens of Herrings & Co. differed by plantation, enabling people to identify easily which plantation was involved.” (Ibid.: 157-158).

As Lurvink gently notes, most analyses of this phenomenon have represented it as an attempt to ‘re-enslave’ labourers after the formal abolition of slavery (Ibid.: 173-174), as these last were generally unable to exchange tokens for cash given that “their whole life took place on the self-sufficient and isolated plantation and they had to ask for permission.” (Ibid.: 175). She quotes two other scholars, who contend that ‘rice tokens’ in the Dutch East Indies compelled plantation workers to buy this staple food rather than opium, which happened to impair productivity: they note a parallel in nineteenth-century Dutch peat and textile industries, where similar systems were implemented in order to discourage alcohol consumption. These non-cash payment methods therefore served as tools to regulate worker behaviour and maintain productivity – not only by restricting access to narcotics, but more fundamentally, as Lurvink points out with regard to Dutch-run plantations in the East Indies, by preventing the unauthorised absenteeism of ‘coolies’ (Ibid.: 152). This is a significant observation, as it confirms the token’s function as an extension of the human branding technique, enabling the identification of the human being as a subjected Other and controlling his/her movements and physical trajectory. This happens to be one of the precise aims ascribed to plantation tokens in French Caribbean settlements, as illustrated by a collection of ‘coins’ that can be seen at the Musée du Nouveau Monde (Museum of the New World) in La Rochelle, France. This publicly owned institution is located in the former hôtel particulier of the Fleuriau family, a prominent Huguenot dynasty known for their role in maritime trade and colonial ventures – particularly in the Atlantic slave trade and the sugar and coffee plantations of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Issued between 1743 and 1787, the tokens bear the initials ABF, standing for Aimé-Benjamin⁷ Fleuriau inherited and expanded the Habitation Fleuriau plantation in Saint-Domingue’s Plaine-du-Nord region, a notorious sugar-producing area where exploitation was particularly severe. Archival evidence reveals that his primary plantation relied on the forced labor of hundreds of enslaved Africans, with additional coffee estates bringing the family’s total human chattel to an even greater magnitude. While their operation was not the largest in the colony, like all ‘planters’ he sought to establish and uphold relations of material production entailing constant brutality, relentless demands and deadly conditions, requiring a continuous influx of newly trafficked individuals to replace those who perished from exhaustion, disease, and violence

But let’s not jump too far ahead; rest a while longer in the early modern period, with all our fine masters and merchants – for it’s interestingly there that we also encounter another ‘technical’ innovation striving “to create knowledge which bypasses human subjectivity” (Fisher, 2020: 1) and consubstantial to the production of earlier and contemporary tokens: the ledger. Eran Fisher notes that the first hand written accountancy ledgers constituted “a novel means to record business transactions, which allowed owners to create a new type of knowledge about their business by objectifying transactions and following them over time. This innovative method assumed that the analysis of accumulated data registered in real-time over time will lay bare a new type of knowledge which had hitherto remained inaccessible” (Ibid.: 11). He thus argues that like bourgeois personal diaries, which appeared at the same period, the ledger was essentially a means of improving the self, and that this dynamic was fuelled by “the break-up of the church and the emergence of Protestantism, particularly Calvinism and its doctrine of pre-destination” (Ibid.: 15). He asks why the self-examination of diaries and the meticulous book-keeping of business ledgers were so important for this group, whose belief in this doctrine essentially inferred that they were unable to change their destiny:

“Without the promise of amendment and salvation, believers could at least hope to calm their anxiety by knowing their expected destiny; ‘They who know not themselves to be God’s peculiar people will be tortured with continual anxiety’ (Calvin). Rather than encouraging fatalism, says Heehs, pre-destination drove believers ‘to inner examination’ (...). Importantly, self-examination required a technique, a way to overcome the deceiving self, to lift the disguise over the truth that lies in the heart of believers: ‘Self-scrutiny was necessary because “the heart of man has so many recesses of vanity, and so many retreats of falsehood, and is so enveloped with fraudulent hypocrisy, that it frequently deceives” itself’ (Calvin).” (Ibid.)¹⁰

Fisher goes on to suggest that “in the pages of their business ledgers, Puritans could confess their sins directly to God” and that this technique stemmed from the will to know “economic reality” while simultaneously “acknowledging the difficulty to obtain that knowledge” (Ibid.: 16):

“The ledger facilitated the objectification of economic life. What had been haphazard instances of commerce and exchange, embedded in personal relations and specific circumstances, became on the ledger a uniform entry of fund entering or leaving the business. The ledger has been a symptom of the rationalization of the economy as well as a means to achieve that rationalization.” (Ibid.)./small>

In sum, the adoption of ledgers by 17th century merchants might best be understood as a means to rub up with the Eternal: the ledger operates as a link to absolute knowledge, divinely accredited pre-destination, while further intensifying the abstracting drive of commodity exchange, the reification of living beings. It’s insightful to connect these proposals with the research that Tim Corballis and Max Soar have devoted to a particular DAO, sure enough named Colony and presented by its founders as an Ethereum-based protocol “designed for creating, hosting and running organizations” (Corballis & Soar, op. cit.: 3-4). Corballis and Soar’s work analyses the “utopian promise” of Colony’s white paper, which according to them offers “an abstract, contextless and scaleless organizational solution (…) reminiscent of the settler colonial situation: the assumption of an empty social space to be filled, and the promise of sovereignty and riches for those occupying it.” (Ibid.: 1). The authors draw a clear parallel between the contents of this white paper and what Antonis Balasopoulos analyses as “explicit tropings of Utopia in expansionist terms and of expansionism in Utopian ones” (Balosopoulos, 2004: 4) in early modern texts such as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Thomas More’s Utopia. Quoting Balasopoulos they write:

“This combination of belief and self-interest allows us to regard the digital organization white paper as a very distant ideological descendent of those early modern texts that display, according to Antonis Balasopoulos, a ‘convergence between other-worldly idealism and mundane will-to-power’ (...). Balasopoulos notes ‘the interplay between Utopian desire and a peculiarly self-effacing kind of colonialist ambition’ across utopian texts – the ways in which they model the establishment of a new society on land that is both idle and occupied, and in which indigenous people might be remolded into proper utopian subjects (...). This association of utopia and colonialism suggests a supplement to the more usual accounts of digital colonialism, which define colonialism explicitly in terms of extractivism (...). It shifts the focus, that is, onto utopian ideology, the imagination, establishment, and imposition of a new order, rather than extractive practice, and onto the specific logic of the settler colony as opposed to the franchise colony (…) – however much the two can in practice coexist.” (Corballis & Soar, op. cit.: 9).

These reflections illustrate once more the dynamic and evolutive relation between the social forms of relations of material production and cultural forms, whether in the guise of white papers or literary “utopian episodes” (Balosopoulos, op. cit.: 4), organisational rules “defined in code and enforced by a blockchain mining process” (Corballis & Soar, op. cit.: 2) – i.e. “agreements between parties that are not only recorded on the ledger, but automatically enacted when triggered by their conditions, usually by distributing tokens” (Ibid.)¹¹) – or ledger entries recording funds leaving Fleuriau’s flourishing business in exchange for a few hundred Senegambian slaves, or the minting of the same number of tin tokens. What Corballis and Soar refer to as a “utopia of abstraction” is all about those cultural forms that repeat “a logic peculiar to the settler colony – the logic of entering a space (in this case with a technological foundation) to lay claim to it, to educate and organize, and to speculate on imagined future returns, all the while failing to confront the human and environmental costs of such speculation” (Ibid.: 9); they’re seemingly unaware of that more fundamental abstraction which pervades all these examples of cultural forms. Hence their perception of “a frontierist utopia (…) not only because it aims to extend the bounds of neoliberal governance into new geographical territory (...) or make deterritorialized claims over the potentially stateless (…)”: “It is also ideologically frontierist even before it is enacted, in the sense of its participants’ flight from the state, or indeed imagined extra- or prestate location, and their desire for position and opportunity in a newly self-organized world.” (

“The historical circumstances surrounding the American Industrial Revolution emphatically amplified this providentialist discourse about the creation of a new, networked society destined to illuminate the world. The mid-19th century, marked by the advance of settlers westward, was also shaped by a fervent religious revival movement (the Second Great Awakening, which laid the foundations of contemporary American evangelicalism). Technology, evangelicalism, and ‘civilizational’ expansionism appeared to converge within the same millenarian teleology, driven by divine providence. (…) By 1858, the monumental undertaking of the transatlantic cable (linking the New World to the Old) had already given decisive momentum to America’s technological imagination, extending the frontier beyond the limits of the continent. A clear theme emerged in the rhetoric of politicians, religious figures, and technologists alike: the idea of a global ‘technological conversionism’. This notion transposed the ‘redemptive westward movement’ that had fuelled the conquest of the West beyond U.S. borders.” (Ibid.: 29).

Yet the shining myth of “civilisational expansionism”, which Corballis and Soar perceive as the ‘dark side’ of the colonial epic, is best understood only if you carry on all the way down to the nexus of its slave tokens, and begin to grasp how their contemporary offshoots are wholly infused by the same frontierist mantra, one which now lays claim to a flight from the very constraints of material relations of production. A layer 2 project like Colony operates on what Vitalik Buterin himself describes as “a Turing-complete programming language [meaning] that arbitrary contracts can theoretically be created for any transaction type or application” (Buterin, 2014: 34) – a mechanism financialising dozens of digital use cases with the explicit aim of increasing the computational industry’s “efficiency” and providing “a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer” (Ibid.). What we have here is a ‘technical’ apparatus aiming to bypass human subjectivity on a far greater scale, and simultaneously taking the abstractness of exchange value to newer heights; at their core, ‘trustless’ smart contracts are inherently spewing ‘pure’ capitalist cultural forms in the shape of code-based tokens, while claiming to spare humans of the burden of the squabbles and justifications and arrangements of what was formerly known as ‘politics’. It’s now easier to understand why one encounters an admiration that borders on the eager worshipping of divine-inspired serendipity among those more technologically astute Web3 agitators, such as this chief educational officer at a Web3 promotional agency:

“Frankly, I’m just astounded… Like, all of this stuff was sitting out there, and Satoshi put it together. There really was nothing new, but it’s amazing how he put it together. (…) There’s a lot of problems that were solved by Vitalik and Gavin and the rest of the Ethereum team. So I do find that, like, really amazing. Someone thought not just ‘Okay, we can do this’, but that it actually would be practical to do it.” (i52)

Of course, if you understand jack-shit about the fundamental workings of the commodity form, it’s all very well to wax lyrical, like Vitalik Buterin, about a some particular pedigree of tokens that mysteriously escape the realm of value:

“On-blockchain token systems have many applications ranging from sub-currencies representing assets such as USD or gold to company stocks, individual tokens representing smart property, secure unforgeable coupons, and even token systems with no ties to conventional value at all, used as point systems for incentivization. Token systems are surprisingly easy to implement in Ethereum. The key point to understand is that all a currency, or token system, fundamentally is is a database with one operation: subtract X units from A and give X units to B, with the proviso that (1) X had at least X units before the transaction and (2) the transaction is approved by A. All that it takes to implement a token system is to implement this logic into a contract.” (Ibid.: 19).

More seriously however, upholding belief in something that does not exist in order to “incentivise” – or in other words, to exert power, to dominate – is quintessentially the meaning of the token, of all its “many applications”; subtracting X units from A and giving X units to B is moreover the very essence of the exclusionary and discriminatory drive of the token, how it interpellates humans as private individuals thinking separately from one another, to return briefly to Sohn-Rethel’s analysis, how it consecrates the separation of nature and society. It might incidentally be pointed out that this “logic” of the smart contract that Buterin extols – all “it takes to implement a token system” – is really nothing more than an extension of the ledger and its uniform entries of funds entering or leaving a business. In its contradictory, elegiac naivety, Buterin’s white paper echoes another emblematic cultural form celebrating this group (un)consciousness of common adventure, the assault on the Frontier: “Don’t Fence Me In”, a song originally written in 1934 by Robert Fletcher, a poet and engineer with the Department of Highways in Helena, Montana¹². It so happens that the songwriter Cole Porter bought the rights to the poem for 250$, reworked the lyrics and composed the song that was subsequently made famous by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in 1944; it purportedly took them and Vic Schoen thirty minutes to produce the recording, of which more than a million copies were sold, thus topping the US charts for eight weeks in 1944–45:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above Don’t fence me in Let me ride through the wide open country that I love Don’t fence me in

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees Send me off forever, but I ask you please Don’t fence me in

Just turn me loose Let me straddle my old saddle Underneath the Western skies

On my Cayuse¹³) Let me wander over yonder Till I see the mountains rise

I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses And I can’t look at hobbles¹⁴) and I can’t stand fences Don’t fence me in

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies Don’t fence me in Let me ride through the wide country that I love Don’t fence me in

The evocative lyrics are quite the veil, with their staccato of blatant untruth. The blend of simple, descending melodies and harmonic ambiguity (borrowed minor chords) creates a sort of ‘frontier wistfulness’, a sound both expansive and bittersweet – a tune with which it is agreeable to confuse a genocidal mass-rampage and the insane cult of commodity, with neo-Adamic dominion. Indeed, as old Calvin said, in an earlier version of his Institutes than the one quoted by Peter Heehs (and bearing somewhat more corporeal metaphors), “the human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood works, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.” (Calvin, 1536 / 1960: chap. 2, section 10). The subtle resonances and ricochets of mediations of material relations of production can be just as fraught with recesses and retreats (or crannies and holes). Ian Kershaw notes how elementary-school Hitler “became gripped by the adventure stories of Karl May, whose popular tales of the Wild West and Indian wars (though May had never been to America) enthralled thousands of youngsters” (Kershaw, 1998 / 2001: 15):

“Most of these youngsters graduated from the Karl May adventures and the childhood fantasies they fostered as they grew up. For Adolf, however, the fascination with Karl May never faded. As Reich Chancellor, he still read the May stories, recommending them, too, to his generals, whom he accused of lacking imagination.” (Ibid.).

As Carrol P. Kakel’s work (2011) has finely illustrated, Hitler was anything but lacking in imagination when it came to dealing with his own ‘Indians’ in the East, in what he deemed a far more ‘economically’ efficient manner. Johann Chapoutot’s study of the almost seamless transition to Nazism in the early 1930s recalls the importance of the cultural forms that Hitler dished out to capitalist forces, during his 1932 grand tour of German business leaders, whose climax was “the quasi-rally organized by Germany’s foremost industrial think tank and lobbying group, the prestigious Düsseldorf Industry Club (…) on January 26, 1932.” (Chapoutot, 2025: 212).

“Hitler understood how to speak to the deepest recesses of the German industrialists’ psyche – who, like their French, British or American counterparts, held an inherently territorial conception of economic expansion. Across the Western world, racism and social Darwinism had blended into a synthesis that justified both the most inhuman capitalist practices and the most aggressive colonialism. The former was, in any case, inextricably linked to the latter: from Jules Ferry to the House of Commons, the lofty justifications for colonial projects – presented either as Christianising missions or, in keeping with French secular ideals, civilising endeavours – always served as window-dressing for a far more brutal materialism. Colonisation invariably meant the conquest and domination of a hinterland – that backcountry which German geographers and geopoliticians would define and label for the benefit of their colleagues at the Sorbonne or Harvard, and from which one extracted mineral resources, raw timber, primary materials, and a labour force whose enslavement drove costs towards zero. (…) In Düsseldorf, after retracing the history of the ‘white race, which had risen to the summit of the world since antiquity in roughly a thousand years’, Hitler warned: ‘It is sometimes said that the world can be conquered from a purely economic standpoint. This is one of the most colossal and terrible errors that exist (...) The current state of the world – and the white race’s domination – can only be understood by recognising that the will to political power and the will to economic power are one and the same’. In other words, securing spheres of economic hegemony will be achieved by force – for the greatest benefit of all. German industry will gain hinterlands and markets; the Germanic race, its Lebensraum. But beware: this systematic plundering of conquered and colonised European territories will follow inegalitarian principles that are the only valid ones from a racial-anthropological standpoint (a Slav is not worth a German) – but also in economic terms. The treatment of peoples, trade conditions, wage levels and living standards – everything must remain strictly hierarchical (…) Having demonstrated that industrialists and Nazis inhabited the same mental universe (inequality, performance, the Führerprinzip), shared the same values (private property, hierarchy, competition) and ideological references (principled opposition to democracy, social Darwinism, racism), Hitler unveiled a horizon of limitless prosperity and profit: with German rearmament and the project of a colonial empire on European soil itself, the NSDAP promised nothing less than an orgy of dividends.” (Ibid.: 217-219).

Gallimard is in the business of selling books, and in this case one that describes the process by which a lovely little republic became a sodding horrible dictatorship (interestingly, the explanation given is that all the forces of that republic – bar the stalinist KPD – one way or another gave Hitler a leg-up). Thus the madman’s sobering cry that “the current state of the world (…) can only be understood by recognising that the will to political power and the will to economic power are one and the same” becomes a token of “the most inhuman capitalist practices and the most aggressive colonialism” – a quick booster shot in case we were to forget that under liberal democracies there are decidedly more human capitalist practices and gentler forms of colonialism. Or worse: that we might question the essential distinction between old super villain of the twentieth century there, and that defiant bulldog of a leader Churchill – another vain and hypocritical falsehood (oops, Calvin again) that would crumble like stale cake, were the spell of commodity to break.

“The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic.”

Marilyn Manson, “The Fight Song”, 2000 (yet often attributed to Joseph Stalin)

¹: The Ancient Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi bears some mention of barbers marking slaves with a sign to indicate their status as property for sale, but it’s not clear whether this involved hot-iron branding. See §227, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp Accessed 08/07/2025.

²: https://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php?topic=15417.0 Accessed 08/07/2025.

³: As the transatlantic slave trade waned in the 19th century, the production of manillas decreased significantly. By the 1890s, their primary use had transitioned to the palm oil trade. In 1948, the British government launched Operation Manilla to phase out these objects in favour of British West African currency, ultimately gathering over 32 million pieces, which were later sold as scrap. The manilla was formally demonetised and ceased to be legal tender in British West Africa on April 1, 1949.

⁴: https://understandingslavery.com/artefact/plantation-token-1688/ Accessed 08/07/2025.

⁵: https://learn.apmex.com/coin-guide/guide-to-colonial-values/american-plantation-tokens-1688/ Accessed 08/07/2025.

⁶: In this regard, the formal abolition of slavery or the shift to indentured labor reflects an evolution in the social form of relations of production – one that cultural forms didn’t ‘mechanically’ replicate, and still have not in many cases. This persists one hundred and one years after the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium outlawed slavery in Sudan, as Fatin Abas notes in the June 2025 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique: “In the high society of Khartoum, it is not uncommon for the families of an engaged couple to investigate the ancestry of the bride- or groom-to-be. The purpose of these inquiries is to determine whether the fiancée or fiancé has irq – a ‘vein’, meaning slave ancestry. Such a discovery can derail a marriage, as families of ‘pure’ blood seek to avoid ‘contaminating’ their lineage. These notions of purity and contamination, which shape the behavior of northern Sudanese, stem from divisions and legacies that continue to fuel violence in today’s Sudan.”

⁷: The name itself is a reminder of how colonial value and atrocity was sanitised through genteel nomenclature, blending devotion and patriarchal tradition: Aimé comes from the Latin amatus (“beloved”), a name with Christian connotations, typical of Huguenot taste for virtuous or pious meanings, while reflecting a subtle assertion of moral superiority following religious persecution. Benjamin is of course a Hebrew biblical name (“son of the right hand”), also common among Protestants who favoured Old Testament references.

⁸: Note the etymology of this term: it comes from the Spanish cimarrón (feral, untamed), originally used for escaped cattle, then applied to runaway slaves in the Americas.

⁹: https://www.reddit.com/r/argentina/comments/1isnjmo/el_creador_de_libra_alardeaba_controlar_a_javier/?tl=en Accessed 09/07/2025.

¹⁰: The final quote and references to Calvin’s doctrinal teachings are from Peter Heehs book, Writing the Self.

¹¹: Here, the authors are quoting Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum white paper, “A Next Generation Smart Contract & Decentralized Application Platform”.

¹²: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Fence_Me_In_(song)

¹³: The Cayuse (or Waiilatpu) are a Native American people originally from the Columbia Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest, in what is now northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman established a mission among the Cayuse, aiming to convert them to Christianity, and within ten years a deadly outbreak of measles had killed half of their population. They were skilled equestrian hunters, known for breeding horses; the term by extension can refer to a small horse, or a pony – as it would appear to in this song.

¹⁴: A hobble is a rope or a strap used to impede the physical progress of an animal.