Abstract

Excerpted From: Anthony Paul Farley, Infinite Justice: A Critique of Capitalism & Capital Punishment, 23 University of California Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice 3 (March, 2026) (241 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Law does not progress. It begins and ends with slavery.

Slavery is death. Slavery is not just any death. Slavery is white-over- black. Segregation is white-over- black. Neo- segregation is white-over- black. The “motionless movement” from slavery to segregation to neo- segregation, from white-over- black to white-over- black to white-over- black, is not progress, it is repetition. Slavery is the sentence that repeats. The sentence that slavery repeats, white-over- black, is death. The capital sentence, slavery, is the origin of capital, the “concrete inversion of life,” the source of law’s mystical authority, and the cause and consequence of the repetitions.

The capital sentence, death, is also all those things. The law of the death penalty, as announced in McCleskey v. Kemp, is white-over- black. Attending to the ruling order’s ““uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,” its white-over- black to white-over- black to white-over- black repetitions, we go, it seems, “From harmony” to “Heav’nly harmony,” but this charade cannot go on forever, nothing does, not in real time. In real time, in historical time, there is a “last and dreadful hour.”

Capital reduces time to exploitable labor time. Historical time is made into myth as capital systematically represents itself as an eternal present. The eternal present of capital, set above historical time as an authority over what should happen within historical time, is law. Law’s mystical authority over historical time is to be found, like the secret of the commodity and its fetish, in law’s here-and-now ability to make what is unequal appear to be equal.

Law produces its peculiar product, unequal equality, schizophrenically. First, the world is shattered by genocide, colonialism, and slavery. Second, the fragments of the gone world, traumatized, mistake the shattering force itself for instructions on how to reassemble, how to find the shape of their lost unity. Because the second step is a blind repetition of the first, the atomization of original accumulation goes on and on and on, seemingly forever, forever as spectacle, until the death of the real.

The fragments of the original accumulation, atomized individuals, oriented as white-over- black and mistaking the shattering force of the original accumulation for the unity that was shattered, build an entire system, a legal system, out of their repeated error, out of repeating the same error over and over and over, “snow on snow on snow,” endless apparitions of the same traumatic event. “But that’s getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” Before the last and dreadful hour, before the execution, there is the sentence of death.

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The slave does the work of enslaving itself by dreaming that it is equal in essence and will one day, if only it manages to balance the equation, become equal in fact to the master. The slave struggles to balance the equation by struggling for equality within the juridical horizon, within the world created by the original accumulation, and the slave’s struggle is therefore foredoomed to last forever. This is how spectacular time, the time recorded in the legal archive, is created. Law is “an interrogation without end.” The slave can never balance the equation. “[T]he end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” The slave’s juridical striving is, will be, and was always already the master’s forever, the essential immortality of Blind Justice, the goddess created and sustained only by the slave’s pursuit. ***

Anthony Paul Farley, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School and Gretchen Hoadley Burke '81 Endowed Professor at Colgate University 2023-2024.