Internationalist Perspective

A failed coup d’etat or a succesful coup de theatre?

Was what happened in Washington on January 6 a failed coup? An armed insurrection against the state? A terrorist attack of the caliber of 9/11? A sacrilege in the temple of democracy? A slap in the face of America like Pearl Harbor? The equivalent of the Nazi Crystal Night? Was it “one of the darkest days in American history”? The media and politicians were not lacking superlatives to describe the event. Even the Murdoch press (Fox News etc.) participated (reluctantly).

But a coup d’etat is something else. If thousands had caught the Capitol by force and taken politicians hostage as part of a coordinated plan to seize power, it would have been a coup attempt. But that was not what we saw on January 6.

Terrorists or tourists?

“Surreal” is a word that comes to mind when describing the circus. Trump set it in motion, exhorting his jamboree of thousands of hardcore followers to go to the Capitol to pressure Congressmen to reject the election results. “I will walk with you!”, he promised, after which he quickly returned to the White House to watch what happened next on TV. But even without him, the Trumpists arrived in an excited and determined mood at the Congress building where the undermanned police could not stop them. They pushed aside the barricades and entered, many amazed that this was so easy. This “victory” had an euphoric effect. But even though they were later all collectively labeled as terrorists, many behaved more like tourists. They lined up obediently in the rotunda between the velvet ropes that are there for tourist tours. They took countless selfies. They live streamed to their friends. They took souvenirs. And when it was no longer clear what else there was to do, most of them were led out with no resistance.

The occupiers of the Capitol were a mixed bag, including some whose images traveled the world. The “Q Anon shaman”, with his painted face, bare torso and bison helmet, shouting “Where’s Pence? Show yourself, Pence! ” (the vice-president who, according to the Trumpists, betrayed Trump). The man who grins broadly and waves at the cameras, a torn pulpit in his arms. The Proud Boy leader smoking a cigarette in the democratic sanctuary and crushing the butt on the gleaming marble floor. The guy who in Nancy Pelosi’s office snuggled in her chair with his feet on her desk. They are now all world famous and arrested.

The Hard right

Not all of the roughly thousand people who entered the Capitol behaved like tourists. Some were police or military veterans trained in war tactics. Proud Boys, 3-Percenters, Boogaloos, Oath Keepers, KKK, Nazis and other ultra-rightist militia had come to fight. And they fought hard. One agent did not survive their attack. Some carried weapons and handcuffs. But only the police fired, resulting in one death1, and no one was taken hostage. Small time bombs were found at the headquarters of both parties, but they did not explode. Which is not to say that those groups are harmless folklore. Their resolute action changed a rowdy protest into a rebellious riot. For a brief moment, they were the masters in a principal center of power. “Let’s make some laws”, one of them proposed in the Senate chamber.

In the last five years, the Trump movement has given the ultra-right wind in their sails. But the cause of their growing appeal can’t be reduced to Trump-devotion alone. It feeds on the same fear, anger and longing to be part of a community that inspired the anti-police riots of last year, but it captures those feelings in a web of vicious lies.

They hate the Republican establishment as much as the Democrats, but they follow Trump, because he seems to despise the establishment too (the ‘swamp’, the ‘deep state’, which are at the same time real and conspiratorial myths), because he brazenly breaks rules, and in all his ugliness comes across as more real and sincere than all those formatted and shape-shifting political pros, even though he lies whenever he opens his mouth.

Embedded in the victorious Trump movement, the ultra-right gangs became more and more aggressive. Fighting with Antifa militants became an end in itself, an extreme sport like for football hooligans in Europe. During last year’s protests, they fought on the side of the police, now against it. The storming of the Capitol is now celebrated in ultra-right circles as a great victory. Even if it did not bring them anything, they are very proud of it. It reinforces the idea that ordinary people can have a major impact through determined collective action. It makes them even more militant. And now that the government will no longer be the government of their idol Trump, they can unambiguously go against it. But it remains a marginal milieu, with no common goal or strategy. Compared to the US government with its immense powers it is a thorn on the paw of a bear. There was zero chance that last Wednesday it could overthrow that government, and it hasn’t tried to.

How the hell …

The question remains how the invasion of the Capitol was possible. This was not a secretly planned action; the “storm” was announced in advance in thousands of posts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Parler and other “social media”. The preparations were open, the intention to storm the Capitol was explicit. Blueprints of the building were openly posted. Trump had called on his followers to come, urging them to be “wild” and to “fight for our country.” Could the warnings be any clearer? Moreover, Washington is full of security forces. They were all posted during the anti-police protests: the metropolitan police, the (military) National Guard of DC, Virginia and Maryland, agents of the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA, BATF, FBI, DOC and other acronyms. Four federal military units had been put on alert, and the Air Force sent a combat helicopter to circle low above the protesters’ heads. We did not see that on 1/6. Major government offices in Washington have their own police forces. The Capitol Police has 2,000 officers. Manifestly, only a minority of them was deployed on January 6. They asked for the National Guard but the Pentagon stalled the request.

The “storm” was clearly announced and could have been stopped without much difficulty. That did not happen. Why? An investigation will be launched which will conclude that misjudgments were made, that bureaucratic misunderstandings arose, but many will be skeptical. Given the extent of the state’s power in regard to what’s called “intelligence gathering”, and the ample warnings of violent actions, suspicions will remain that this was no ordinary fuck-up. The capitalist state is macchiavellian by its nature. There are not one, but thousands of ‘conspiracies’ that permeate capitalism, thousands of overlapping covert agreements between companies, banks, politicians, media and other power brokers, that are kept out of the public eye, and whose aim it is to manipulate markets, prices, currencies, wars and more, but most importantly, people. The capitalist state has proven itself more than capable of setting events in motion with the purpose of shifting public opinion. But it’s also true that explanations based on a secret conspiracy behind the scene, are often lazy substitutes for a real analysis of the events. They are very popular these days. Some, like Q Anon, are outright crazy, many are wildly speculative. There is always an element of speculation in a suspicion, otherwise it wouldn’t be one. But some suspicions are more plausible than others.

If indeed there was a conductor of this cacophony, who was it? Trump is suspect number one, since he set the show in motion. Did he really think he could change the election results that way? According to insiders, he had long since given up hope of staying in power. What he did in recent weeks was fire up his base. He cannot be a “loser” to his followers, that clashes too much with his image, so he must be the winner whose victory was stolen by the “deep state”. Trump needs his base, to remain a factor in the years to come, to protect his own interests. But because of the invasion of the Capitol, that base has suddenly become much smaller. That could not have been his intention.

It is not Trump who benefits from the results of 1/6. Who then? Regardless what one thinks of the odds that the weak defense of the Capitol was deliberate, it is clear that the event played in the cards of the capitalist state, and of the incoming government in particular.

What are the results?

Trump is marginalized. For many in his party, the Capitol invasion and the outrage it caused, cranked up by the media, was the long-awaited opportunity to escape from his grip. Trump was already defeated at the ballot box, but most of his voters believed that he won and was cheated. He remained the leader of the party, a party that is a pillar of the state, that he could force to oppose the legitimacy of the government and sabotage its attempts at “normalization”. Trump has not been entirely eliminated as a political obstacle to the Biden administration, but his influence has diminished significantly. The event left a stain on him that he can never remove. The business world and much of the media treat him as a pariah.

The opposition party is divided. The pro- and anti-Trump factions face each other with drawn knives. The Trumpists may still be the majority but big capital abandoned them, the media silence them. The fight within that party between the Trump cult and those who longed for the restoration of “normality” in the management of the state was inevitable anyway, but 1/6 has triggered it and changed the rapport de forces. The party-top seeks a break with Trump but the party-base resists it. The anger and frustration which Trump captured, are not disappearing. His “brand” is still strong in the party. Because of the American two party-system, this conflict will probably not lead to a split, but it will take time to settle the dust. A divided opposition is a weak opposition. So a civil war between the Republicans is convenient for the Biden government.

It also creates an opportunity for Biden to work with the anti-Trump Republicans and thereby reduces his dependence on the support of the left wing of his party.

The “storm” has spread a soft bed for the new government. It has strengthened the democratic myth and created a false mood of national unity and support for the state. Biden can now navigate a steady centrist course without being blocked by the right or the left. Political order has been restored. We can return to “normality”. But that normality was the problem in the first place.

A liberal 9/11

In recent days, the media bombarded us with alarming reports about the actions that the far right would be plotting on the occasion of Biden’s inauguration. The danger is inflated to keep us in the right mood. In the meantime, a manhunt has started for participants of the ‘storm’ and more than a hundred have already been arrested. Even nonviolent protesters who had entered the Capitol in the wake of others risk prosecution for terrorism. On the day itself, only 14 were detained. Some agents let the so-called terrorists pass through and posed for selfies with them. But now they are hunted wherever they are. They will be severely punished. The state wants to set an example. When later new protests and riots break out in reaction to the impoverishment and violence that the capitalist crisis will bring on, they can be punished just as severely.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald compares the atmosphere in this country to the one after 9/11. Then, too, there was general horror at what had happened that gave the state an opportunity to strengthen its hold on its citizens. The comparison is not entirely correct, of course. The casualties and material damage were immeasurably greater then and the enemy was foreign, which was used by the state to start a few wars and spend many trillions on the army and police. It was also the excuse for introducing the “Patriot Act”, which significantly expanded the powers of the various police forces. Anything was possible in the name of 9/11, in the name of the fight against terrorism.

It is astonishing to see how the rhetorical tactics used during the “War on Terror” to attack civil liberties are now being reapplied, Greenwald argues. He sees the same aggressive exploitation of emotions, the same scare tactics and exaggeration of the danger, the same demonization of incorrect opinions. While it was the Republicans who led the offensive then, now it is the Democrats who are pushing for more repression. 1/6 is, according to Greenwald, “in so many ways, the liberals’ 9/11 “. And indeed, it will not surprise us when, in the name of democracy and the war against ‘domestic terrorism’, the repressive capacities of the state will be expanded even further, in preparation of social struggles that will be a real threat to the capitalist state.

The newest form of repression is social media banishment. Not only Trump, but tens of thousands of other Americans are no longer allowed to use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etcetera. This is justified on the grounds that those platforms are private companies which have the right to decide autonomously who they allow on their property. As if they are newspapers sovereignly determining their own content. But they are not. They are infrastructure companies. Five American companies – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and Amazon – together control most of the conversation on the internet and determine what is allowed and what is not. That is an enormous concentration of power. A perfect osmosis between state power and private industry, in which the latter’s virtual police supplements the repression of the physical police.

Left-wing Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who applaud the silencing of their worst opponents, don’t think it’s censorship, because there are still other channels where right-wing rebels can express their opinions. Which is the same as claiming that you will not hinder someone’s freedom of movement if you prohibit him from entering the city, because he can still go to a village. If the village is not destroyed. Parler, a platform used by more than 15 million that is popular in ultra-right circles for not censoring, was effectively killed by Google and Amazon, supposedly because it had been used to plan the Capitol storm. This while the platforms that were by far the most used for that purpose, were Facebook and YouTube (owned by Google).

I admit to some gloating about Trump losing his megaphone. And it can’t be denied that there are many propagators of lies and hatred among the social media exiles. But if you want the state and the big companies to silence their opinions, don’t claim to be in favor of free speech. The concentration of power of the state and the high tech companies is much more dangerous than the ultra-right. Those who call themselves anti-capitalists and approve of what is happening now must realize that tomorrow they themselves could become the target of the measures being taken today, in the name of democracy, against the demonized right wing ‘insurgents’.

A false sense of relief

The relief that Trump is gone is palpable, but there is a danger that the focus on Trump will not just burnish Biden’s credentials and credibility, but also obscure the culpability of capitalism itself. Its imperatives will shape the Biden administration’s policies. That sense of relief that many now feel will help pursue capital its domestic and foreign policy goals; and Biden will execute those goals more intelligently than Trump did. An intelligent steward of capitalism is no less dangerous, indeed more dangerous, than an incompetent one.

Those who dream that the Biden government will be a step to a more peaceful world will be in for a rude awakening. The deepening of capitalism’s crisis, the impoverishement it entails, will continue to foment social conflicts, the scarcity of profit will inflame inter-imperialist tensions. The main threat to the power of US capital is China, that focus doesn’t change from Trump to Biden. But confronting China will require mobilizing allies in Europe and Asia, in contrast to the Trumpian America first, and most of the time America alone, vision of foreign policy. The renewal of American commitment to global alliances and renewed American participation in multilateral agreements and agencies, will put real teeth in the global alliance to confront Beijing. Trump’s foreign policy was heavily based on rhetoric, but Biden’s foreign policy may very well be more confrontational in reality.

Despite its toothy smile, its incense for racial equality and green technology, its support for LGBTQ-rights and the ‘MeToo’ movement, the Biden government has to be seen for what it is: an agent of capital, determined to maintain and protect its system of exploitation against all threats. Wrestling a crisis for which its has no solution, and wrestling a working class that longs for a better world.

Sander

1/15

1The woman who got a bullet in her head was a military vet, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sad irony: on her Facebook-page, she had called for the return of firing squads. More sad irony in the other deaths: a woman carrying the “Gadsden flag”, which features the words “Don’t Tread on Me”, was trampled by the crowd. A man tasered himself accidently in the balls and had a fatal heart-attack.

A caste system

Slavery in Roman times was not racial. Slaves were not considered subhuman, not even a different kind of human. Their skin color didn’t matter. It could be the same as their masters or not.They were exploited, obviously, but their workload was limited by the needs of their masters. They, and more so their progeny, could often become ‘free’ citizens. By contrast, in capitalist slavery, skin color was all important, the visual justification of the treatment of people as beasts of burden. Only Africans were enslaved, ‘black’ became a synonym for slave. Profit was the driving force. Unlike slaves in antiquity and the middle ages, the modern slaves were exclusively bought as a means to the production of other commodities. As long as the demand for the products of their labor was high, their workload was only limited by their physical strength and often went beyond it.

And the demand was very high. Capitalist slavery was very profitable and so it expanded. The construction of racism, its indispensable ideology (see part 2), created a rigid caste system in the western hemisphere. It was a complex, blood-based hierarchy of Others that dictated that for each caste member, the ceiling was the floor of the caste above his. At the bottom was the African slave. His skin color condemned him to a fate worse than that of the pariah in the Hindu caste system, for he was a mere commodity, a thing.

But a caste system conflicts with capital’s modus operandi, which is based on the commodification of labor power, not of laborers. Capitalism requires labor power to be free to move around like other commodities in search of a buyer. Industrial capitalism is continuously changing, shifting work forces in its many technological revolutions to where they are in demand and spewing them out in times of crisis. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them whole relations of society.” They considered all pre-existing economic forms, whether feudal or slavery-based, family farming or tribal (so-called primitive communism), as obstacles to capitalism’s expansion that were doomed to be annihilated by its overwhelming power and by the cheapness of its commodities.

The original sin

Modern slavery was a part of what Marx called the primitive (or original) accumulation of capital. By that he meant the process through which capitalism gathered the means – the capital – it needed for its industrial take off. It is “an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”1 An accumulation based on theft, coercion, dispossession, rather than on the contractual relation between capital and labor and the surplus value extraction it implies. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation”.2

Colonial plundering provided the monetary growth (gold and silver) and the raw material (in the first place cotton, since the textile industry was the initial motor of capitalism’s expansion) it needed. But what capitalist industry needed most of all was labor to exploit. In the colonies, chattel slavery and other forms of coerced labor was its solution. At home, in the first place in England where the industrial revolution began, it obtained its workforce by violently taking the farmland away from those who lived and worked on it, thereby creating a class of landless proletarians, forced to sell their labor power to survive.

Violence was the hallmark of primitive accumulation. As Marx summarized, “From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for the purpose of exploitation, ransacks the whole world. It procures the means of production from all the corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization and from all forms of society.”3

Marx was acutely aware of the role of slavery in the expansion of the world market and industrial capital. In The Poverty of Philosophy he wrote that “direct slavery” in the Americas is “just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.” 4 But he considered it a transitional form on which capitalism was still dependent but which soon would be abandoned like a useless crutch. In Grundrisse he stated: “As long as capital is weak, it still relies on the crutches of past modes of production… As soon as it feels strong, it throws away the crutches and moves in accordance with its own laws ”. On several instances he insisted that the most developed countries, where the capital-wage labor relation was rapidly destroying what remained of previous social formations, showed the lesser developed countries what the future had in store for them.

In 1850, in a jointly written article, Marx and Engels repeated that the “crucial sector of British industry” depended on slavery in the American South, but they predicted that “ As soon as the free labour of other countries provides industry with its cotton supplies in sufficient quantity and more cheaply than the slave labor of the United States, American slavery will have been broken at the same time as the American cotton monopoly, and the slaves will be emancipated because as slaves they will have become unusable”.5

Capitalism by its own laws is compelled to reproduce itself continuously on a larger scale, compelled to transform the world in its image. Its full development, Marx and Engels expected, would lead to the generalization of wage labor and the tendential disappearance of all other forms of exploitation.

Looking at what happened since, and at the world today, we can see that reality has confirmed their expectations, but not entirely. It’s true that capitalism has spread to all corners of the earth and in this process has made the vast majority of the world population into proletarians, free to sell their labor power if they can find a buyer, free from ownership of means of production. But it’s also true that other forms of exploitation have persisted and even have grown in recent decades. Contemporary expressions of serf-landlord as well as slave-owner relations.

The permanence of plunder

Marx himself became more nuanced on this question. In his Manuscripts of 1861–1863, speaking of forms in which labor is already exploited by capital before it has taken on the form of wage labor, he writes that such forms are not only transitional or remnants of social formations which precede the capitalist mode of production, but that they also “constantly reproduce themselves within the latter and are in part reproduced by the latter itself”.6

Some Marxists (David Harvey, Loren Goldner and others) consider ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ accumulation a misnomer since it suggests that all forms of accumulation not based on the exploitation of wage labor end, once the capitalist mode of production is fully developed. Instead, they argue, capital accumulation based on coercive dispossession has been a permanent feature of capitalism, which they call “permanent primitive accumulation”. Although these writers tend to stretch the concept of primitive accumulation so wide that its meaning gets lost7, they have a point. Plunder and violent dispossession as means of accumulation never ceased. And neither has coerced labor. The assumption that wage labor is always more profitable (lower cost/ higher output) is demonstrably incorrect. There were never as many slaves as there are today 8 and their number is growing. There is a clear connection between the crisis of capital and the growth of coerced labor. The first command for every capitalist is to make a profit, by any means possible. The lack of opportunities for capital to obtain profit from normal exploitation on a globalized market dominated by giants who have raised the threshold of capital formation for everyone, has increased the incentive to seek profit by other means, any means. Slavery is illegal in every country but enforcement varies and has loosened because it is profitable, because it creates capital where otherwise none would have been created. In fact, the illegality itself yields surplus profits. Capital formation based on coerced labor does not stand outside the bloodstream of capital, it is an integral part of it.9 It expands where ‘normal’ capitalism retreats, and compensates for the latter’s shortage of surplus value creation. Capital does not let any opportunity to make profit go to waste. Like corruption, coerced labor expands where the ‘normal’ rules break down. But its growth is limited by the resistance it provokes, by the general hostility of the working class to it, and by the cold fact that ‘free’ workers are more productive for capital than slaves, whose only incentive is to avoid punishment.

In the treatment of contemporary slaves, caste-based ideologies play an important role. In India, the majority of the slaves are Dalits (Untouchables) and Adivasis (indigenous tribes people). In China the racial otherness of Uyghurs and other minorities justifies locking them up in forced labor camps. There are many other examples all over the world. Including in the most developed countries, the racial otherness of those whose entrapment in poverty makes them victims of extreme exploitation, is used as a barrier to solidarity.

In regard to the slave plantations, historian Robin Blackburn and others use the term “extended primitive accumulation” 10, to indicate that they continued to exist after the industrial take off, and indeed expanded as a result of it. This was especially true for the cotton plantations in the southern US, whose pace of development was closely tied to that of machine industry in England. Compared to other sources of cotton, such as India and Turkey, they were unrestrained by feudal customs and other barriers to market pressure; the maximal extortion of surplus value was all that counted.

Slaves and wage earners

Labor historian Marcel van der Linden11 rejects the assumption that capitalist development and a linear extension of “free” wage labor go hand in hand. Unfree labor has been a permanent feature of capitalism and will not disappear, despite the efforts of NGOs , as long as capitalism exists. To the contrary, it will increase, as the deepening systemic crisis bars more normal paths to profit. Van der Linden turns Marx’s prediction around: today, it’s not the ‘Rest’ that is becoming like the ‘West’, but the other way round. Collective bargaining is being replaced by precariousness. The dividing line between ‘free’ and forced labor is thinning.

An exclusive focus on wage labor implies a reductive concept of the working class that does not account for the variety of social forms in which surplus value is extracted from labor. Instead, van der Linden proposes a focus on the interaction and combination between practices of exploitation and social struggle of “free” and unfree laborers.

This is something Marx was very much concerned with, especially in the last decades of his life. While he never lost sight of the differences between social forms of different modes of production, he also emphasized what they had in common, the continuity of the exploitation of labor throughout the history of class society. In regard to the forms of exploitation in his own time, rather than seeing slave production and wage labor production as two entities inhabiting their separate spheres, he stressed their similarity, their combination and interaction. For Marx, the apparent freedom granted by the market to the worker to choose which capitalist will exploit him, results in the collective subjection of the working class to capital in general. The relationship between the capitalist and the worker during the production process is not one of equal interaction between two free agents, but one of “despotism.”12 As is the case in slavery, the function of this despotism is to minimize the time in which the laborer produces the necessary goods (or their equivalent in money) for his or her own upkeep and that of their family, and to maximize the time worked “for nothing” for the master/employer. In both cases, capital extracts surplus value from labor performed in commodity production. So workers and slaves face the same enemy whose drive to increase their exploitation can only be checked by collective class struggle.

As Marx witnessed in his time, the actual difference between free and unfree labor can become quite narrow in capitalism. He considered child labor, prevalent then and still existing today, a form of slavery. Young children and pregnant or nursing mothers had to work long hours. Hunger rather than the whip was the goad to labor. Engels documented the misery of the factory proletariat in Manchester and Liverpool in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and even made the claim, that, in the early wave of industrialization, “the fate of the slaves in the worst of the American plantations was golden in comparison with that of the English workers.”13

That may sound outrageous, even racist today, but it was not that wild an exaggeration. The value of wage labor is determined, like that of any commodity, including slaves, by the value of its reproduction cost, and thus by the needs of the workers. But when it can, capital pushes the wage below that value, below the cost of survival conditions. This is not in its advantage when it has incurred a substantial cost in training the worker or slave, or when the supply of workers/slaves is tight. But that was not the case in the early days of the industrial revolution when there was a plentiful supply of dispossessed from the depopulating countryside to feed the factories. They were easily replaceable at no extra cost, so capitalists made them work as long as possible for as little as possible. Working 14 hours a day, lacking food, being forced to live in disease-spreading conditions is a recipe for premature death. In Capital Vol 114 Marx points out that, if not forced to accept some limits to exploitation, capitalist production tends to extend the working day to the point of killing workers. In this, he argues, the capitalists behave like slave owners, who, as long as the transatlantic slave trade provided an ample influx of new human chattel, valued an increase in productivity above the length of the life of the easily replaceable slaves.

The owners of the English textile factories and the owners of the cotton plantations thought in exactly the same way. They made the same cost-benefit analysis with the same murderous results. Nothing personal, just business.

In the early 19th century the transatlantic slave trade became illegal15, which didn’t stop it, but did put a big dent in the supply of slaves while the demand was rising, as the cotton plantations were expanding to meet the growing demand of industry. Hence the price of slaves rose steeply, which changed the calculus. Since slaves became more valuable possessions, the cost of replacement was much higher which gave their owners an incentive to lengthen their productive life, and therefore to improve their conditions somewhat. It also made it in the planters’ interest to encourage slaves to have children and thus to treat expecting women and new mothers better. Consequently, infant mortality was lower on the cotton plantations than in the industrial districts of England. The average height of slaves rose because of better nutrition, while the average height of recruits of the British army declined in the early industrial period (1780-1850). So Engels may have been right concerning the material conditions of survival. But his hyperbolic statement ignores that there remains a fundamental difference between having to sell one’s labor power on horrible terms and being reduced to a thing, owned forever.

But the wage laborers in the factories and the slave laborers in the plantations were part of the same process: the accumulation of capital. Marx was very interested in their combination and interaction. “Just as the nature of slave labor changed when it came under the indirect (through the market) or direct (through the ownership of plantations) control of the capitalist, so wage labor absorbed practices that had been developed in slavery. This is clearest in Marx’s treatment of the role of superintendence or “labor for the exploitation of labor” in factory production. While Marx again does not let go of the fundamental distinction between wage labor and slavery, he stresses that the role of the supervisor in the factory is closer to that of the slave supervisor than to that of the master of the workshops that dominated urban production in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. In the latter case, discipline was enforced through the master’s own participation in the work process. By contrast, a sharp division of labor between the capitalist and the overseer would come to characterize the factory hierarchy. More than that of the workshop master, the “relations of subordination” and “regimentation” of the factory were a continuation of the relations between the “working Negro slaves” and the “slave-driving Negro slaves” on the plantation.16

The plantations existed before the factories and inspired the latter’s organization. Blackburn writes: “By gathering the workers under one roof, and subordinating them to one discipline, the new industrial employers were able to garner the profits of industrial co-operation and invigilation – as it were adapting the plantation model (which is why people came to speak of steel ‘plants’).”17

The same struggle

The limits to exploitation forced upon capitalism have but one cause: resistance of the working class. It’s true that the development of capitalism itself brought changes in the conditions of the working class, even without any struggle of the latter. Consumer goods became cheaper, more accessible. Capital became increasingly dependent on (more valuable) skilled labor. Technological change shifted its focus from lengthening the work day to the intensification of the labor process (in Marxist terms: from the extraction of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value). But the shortening of the work day, eventually to 8 hours, where it got stuck, was the result of fierce battles of the industrial proletariat (more on those later).

Comparing themselves to industrial capitalists, the owners of the slave plantations thought they had one big advantage: a docile workforce. The docility was violently imposed, of course, and despite the odds stacked against them, slaves often resisted 18 The docile slave was a racist stereotype, a myth that conflicted increasingly with reality. Slave acts of rebellion, sabotage and escape were growing in the early 19th century. The 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt started with a slave rebellion on one plantation. The speed in which slaves from other plantations rushed out to join them when they marched on New Orleans must have been scary for all slave owners. The rebels burned plantations, crops, and storehouses before eventually being defeated.

The distance between the plantations, in contrast to the proximity of the factories in the industrial cities, was a big obstacle to common struggle. An even bigger obstacle was the racial caste system, splitting the proletariat. As long as that endures, Marx wrote, labor will never be emancipated.19

Despite these obstacles, acts of slave resistance became more numerous. After the defeat of the workers revolts and radical movements in 1848-1849 in Europe, Marx pinned his hope on the struggles of the serfs in Russia and of the slaves in the southern US. In 1860 he wrote to Engels: “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement—on the one hand, in America…, and in Russia, on the other… Thus, a “social” movement has been started both in the West and in the East … This promises great things”.20

By then he was convinced that the southern slave-based economy, and the caste- system that went with it, fitted so well into the capitalist production chain that it would not be automatically extinguished by its development, not any time soon. That made him an enthusiastic supporter of the North in the American civil war.

Sander

In the next part of this text we’ll examine how class and caste evolved during and after the civil war.

1 Capital, Volume 1, chapter 26, p.875 (Penguin ed.)

2 Ibid, chapter 31, p. 915

3 Capital vol 3, p. 257

4 MECW 6, p. 167

5 MECW 10, p. 500–501

6 MECW 34, 117 / MEGA 2II.3.6, 2152.

7 See our critical review of Goldner’s position in RAPING THE WORLD TO FEED THE BUBBLE

8 The estimated number of slaves today range from around 22 million to 46 million (1 in 4 of them children), depending on the methods used to estimate and define slavery. The higher number includes all forms of coerced labor, including those limited in time, thus similar to indentured service rather than chattel slavery (but the latter persist as well). Slavery exists in every single country in the world. According to the Global Slavery Index, the countries with the highest absolute numbers of people in modern slavery are India, China, and Pakistan, countries with large numbers of hungry people superfluous to capital. But forced labor also exists in Europe and America, like in the US prison system, both the government-run and the private prisons. The prison labor industry makes over $1 billion per year in the US. So-called “communist” countries also score high on the slavery-scale. The Global Slavery Index estimates there are 3.8 million slaves in China and 2.6 million in North-Korea. Globally, forced labor is estimated to generate $150 billion each year. The sectors in which it is most prevalent are agriculture, construction, mining, fishery, textile factories, domestic work and sex work.

9 More on this in RESURGENCE

10 See : Robin Blackburn: The Making of New Wold Slavery, Verso 1997, chapter 12: New World Slavery, Primitive Accumulation and British Industrialization

11 Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays towards a Global Labor History (Leiden and Boston, 2008)

12 MECW 35, 362.

13 MECW 10, 291.

14 Chapter 3, Section 4

15 More on this in part 4 of this text.

16 Pepijn Brandon: “With the Name Changed, the Story Applies to You!”: Connections between Slavery and “Free” Labor in the Writings of Marx”. ( An essay that informed this article )

17 Robin Blackburn, op.cit., p.565

18 More on the history of slave struggles in the next part of this text.

19 “Le travail, tant qu’il est flétri dans la peau noire, ne sera jamais émancipé dans la peau blanche” (labor in white skin will never be emancipated, where in black skin it is branded]).Marx to Lafargue, and Capital, vol 1, MEGA 2II.5, 239.

20 Marx to Engels, 11 January 1860, MECW 41, 4.

American workers have been on the receiving end of an onslaught of astonishing proportions, all of it caused by the bourgeoisie which considers the rest of the population to be a free-fire zone.   In past months, the extra-juridical executions of black people by the police, the deaths of a quarter of a million people from Covid-19, the accelerated impoverishment brought about by the economic crisis and the refusal to send relief to the unemployed and hungry have intensified social distress.    Added to which the elections and events around them have seemingly bludgeoned the population into the most extraordinary mindsets.

Clearly, faced with this barrage, the workers have been on the defensive.   So, how do we assess their ability to fight back?   To do this we have to unravel several themes in the social situation;   in so doing we encounter its several unusual features.

Racism, Plague and Poverty

Throughout American history, racism has been an integral part of the social reality and as capitalism developed so this poison was used to divide the working class.   The US party system with its Republican and Democratic organisations have each had what we might label their progressive and reactionary wings.   But, especially since the Nixon era, their alignments have moved.   For decades up to the early ‘70s, the Democrats were strong in the South with their support for segregationist policies, their high mark personified by Wallace of Alabama.   However, the Johnson administration’s policy of desegregation, enforced by federal troops and agencies acting against the segregationists, changed the political landscape and weakened the Democrats among white supremacists.   In their campaigns, first Goldwater’s and then later and most explicitly in Nixon’s Southern strategy the Republican Party decided to forego the black vote.    Together with the predominantly white suburbs developments across the country, the combined effect led the Republican Party to move to the right and to monopolise the political projection of overt racism.

Although racist dog whistles have been used for years (such as in the elder Bush’s Willie Horton advertisements) Trump and his acolytes have weaponised it.   The street murders of George Floyd and others have brought massive protests that were corralled and attacked by police and national guards.   Inevitably, there were reactions leading to rioting and looting, these giving the government the opportunity, as always, to justify state violence by the need for law and order to defend innocent citizens and their property.   It also gave Trump staging for photo-opportunities.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created the backdrop for the strangest propaganda.   In the face of appallingly high and increasing infections and deaths, Trump started by saying it was a Democratic hoax, later that it would just disappear, then that it could be dealt with by injecting bleach and finally, during the election campaign, he just ignored it – despite being hospitalised himself.   All this from the man who has admitted publicly that he knew early on how dangerous it would be but decided to play it down.   His lies have been intensified by several Fox News commentators, supplemented by further conspiracy theorists like QAnon and TV channels such as One America News.   The deliberate neglect of the disease by the executive has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.   And, most bizarrely, we see the internalisation of the denial of the very existence of the disease across swathes of the US population – a mental pandemic in itself.

In the first half of 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services ran a simulation exercise, entitled Crimson Contagion, – involving many branches of the American state, including health authorities and private companies, and established the state of readiness for a pandemic.   Despite the findings showing clearly how unprepared the government and many agencies were, nothing was done; and this led to – among many other things – the almost universal lack of personal protective equipment.   Consequently, the bosses put many workers between a rock and a hard place:   either turn up for work and risk infection or stay home and don’t get paid.   It was not only health workers in hospitals and care homes that were put at risk:  many others such as delivery drivers and supermarket staff risked heightened exposure.    This negligence was massively criminal, though not illegal in the eyes of this ruling class.   Indeed, Trump went so far as to mandate some industries – including meatpackers – to keep production going.   (And at one such plant, the bosses had a sweepstake on how many workers would contract Covid-19.)

How did the working class respond to all this?   As individuals, workers of all colours were involved in the protests against the police murders of black people – and not just in the US but all over the world.   This was in stark contrast to previous eruptions of only or mainly black people, such as in the Watts riots or after the Rodney King assault by white policemen.   In various factories and depots, there were wildcat – and sometimes union-supported – struggles demanding PPE or danger money.   But, collectively, the American workers have not gone into the fray despite the pandemic triggering a tsunami of layoffs across the country.

And then there’s democracy

Elections in bourgeois democracies do not provide measures of class antagonisms – none of the parties stand for the interests of the proletariat.   However, they can provide some insight into major sentiments inside the class, which Marxists need to analyse.   Many elections are characterised by an indifference to outcome as people appreciate how little one or other candidate will change their lives.   Not this time.   On this occasion, Trump’s behaviour over four years was a galvaniser.   He had taken a stand – against the views of the majority of Americans – against gun control, health care options for all, and on the path to citizenship for the undocumented, including the ‘dreamer’ DACA children.   On the other hand, and significantly, he oversaw the passing of the 2018 First Step Act which took legislative measures to dismantle consequences of the 1994 Crime Bill, sponsored at the time by one Senator Joe Biden, which contributed to mass incarcerations of black people.

The democratic process in the US has become something that every strongman in every tinpot dictatorship would have been proud of (Mugabe, eat your dead heart out).   In addition to the customary gerrymandering that the parties always engineer, the Republicans have also gone flat out for voter suppression against blacks, false advertising campaigns, removal of drop-off electoral boxes, campaigns against mail-in voting, alt-right threats and armed demonstrations.   Trump has topped this off with a denunciation of  the entire electoral process as being rigged against him.

The bulk of the election campaigning was over the choice between Trump and not-Trump, rather than between Trump and Biden.   There was little in the way of policy debated between the parties – neither between the presidential candidates nor between congressional candidates.   In the outturn, many more people voted for Trump than in 2016 –  even knowing what he stood for now rather than when he was a non-politician vowing to drain the Washington swamp.   Yet, he was beaten by a record-breaking not-Trump vote.   Overall, the Republican Party did better than Trump did himself and the Democratic Party as a whole weakened slightly from the 2018 mid-terms; they did retain the House majority – though we still have to see the outcome of the Georgia runoff on 5 January to see who has control of the Senate.   We see again the long-term paradox of the Republican Party’s electability that, although it campaigns to give working people more post-tax money in their pay cheques, it always gives huge tax benefits to the wealthy.

A full sociological analysis going into which demographic voted for whom will not be available for some time.   So, all we have for now are studies based on exit polls all with flaws.   Nonetheless some broad statements can be made.   Larger cities and urban areas tended to vote Democrat; rural and rustbelt areas tended towards the Republicans.   Except for two areas (South Florida and southern Texas) Latinos tended to vote Democrat, as did Asians.  Black voters tended to vote Democrat.   White voters were split.

Of these latter voters, who did the white working class vote for?   Even given that not everyone voting for Trump was a worker, there is little doubt that a substantial proportion of workers voted for Trump.   Clearly, his rhetoric was effective in maintaining his base:  against the Washington elite, against the exporting of jobs to China, demanding that allies pay their way, in broadcasting their fears, and showing that their voice was heard.   All this, for many white workers, over-ruled Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy, his attack on health care for the working class and the poor, his deliberate avoidance of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and the blocking of a second relief package in the autumn.

And in his rhetoric, Trump’s dog whistle racism was a landmark issue for many white voters and the rest of the Republican party candidates for the House and Senate had to use Trump as a lodestone to get votes from his base.   Even taking into account the presence of other strata in this voting category, this is a hell of a statement about the penetration of toxic and divisive ideologies into the working class, one that the ruling class has been pushing since American capitalism began.    One can see the decades-old clashes between minorities and the police again being the excuse for the often-used ‘law and order’ mantra of the ruling class and that this plays to the fears in the American population about the police being the thin blue line separating Order from Chaos.

This intensity of belief (in Trump) and disbelief (in the mainstream news media) has a religiosity to it that can’t be dealt with on a rational terrain; an intensity capitalised on by the evangelical Christian churches.   At least part of the explanation is that these people have been lied to all their lives by the spokespeople for American capitalism which is itself built on the biggest lie: its denial that the activity of the proletariat is the sole source of social wealth in the capitalist system.   And supporting the big lie are other lies:  that in bourgeois democracies the people are in charge; so, we are supposed to conclude, the rulers are really the servants of the population.   This lie is embedded in the constant propaganda churned out by the print and broadcast media that aims to defend the existing order;  over time journalists and politicians have become the two least respected occupations by society at large.   No wonder that Trump’s denunciation of ‘fake news’ has been so effective among his base.

Also, the incredulity of a sizeable proportion of the population on matters such as the reality of the coronavirus needs serious consideration:  even in the ICU of a South Dakota hospital dying patients have refused to accept that they had Covid and demanded to be told the truth.  The distrust of the mainstream news media is, in some quarters, total.   Any questioning of Trump’s victory leads to denunciation by his crowds – to the point where Fox News is now coupled with CNN in derogatory chants.

The ability to live in denial can persist through strong experience to the contrary; and history provides plenty evidence.   The question for us is to determine how can events unfold so that the reality of exploitation and of shared working class interest becomes undeniable?   There are two dimensions to the answer:  one is the immanent tendency to crisis in the capitalist economic system, and the other is in the ongoing struggle between the two great classes over the trajectory of that system.   However, capitalism is not going to collapse by itself no matter how crisis-ridden it is.   Capitalism can only by brought down by a social force – and that requires a revolutionary subject, the working class, that consciously and self-consciously struggles against its enemy, the bourgeoisie.   Despite the forceful protestations against racism and police violence we have seen this year, there was no powerful mass, class action.   The way was left open for a massive bourgeois assault using their democratic machinery.

To denounce any racially-motivated campaigning for the Republicans does not imply any support for the Democratic Party.   Bernie Sanders, much less Biden, no more speaks for the American worker than Trump.   And it was both Democrats and Republicans who could not agree to a second relief package … so they dropped it and went home for their fully paid holidays.   We only point out that while both parties have toxins to prevent the workers from seeing their enemy, at this juncture, it is the Republican Party that is injecting most of the divisive toxins into the working class.

The situation is very serious for the proletariat.   We have noted elsewhere the international development of social struggles, their connections, and the growth of class struggle within it.   These augur positively for future struggle.   But, alongside, there are many dangers and containment by bourgeois democracy is a major trap.   As well as confronting the ruling class, the proletariat must look to itself to deal with the fractures that result from the stressors of bourgeois society.   Most important is the racism that aims to divide workers.   And in the US, as elsewhere, we can see the damage it causes.

Marlowe

30 November 2020

Like in their earlier text on the site Ill Will , “Theses on the George Floyd rebellion” , in their more recent essay “The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising “, Shemon and Arturo describe the social unrest of this year as a big step forward towards revolution. Less because of the mostly peaceful daytime mass protests than because of the nighttime violent insurgency. “Riots, looting, and arson have accomplished more in one summer than what activists have been able to accomplish in decades”, they write. And: “Experiencing this has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before. In the nerve-centers of the American empire, disparate fractions of the proletariat came together to attack the police and storm the commercial corridors of dozens of cities. In the “Theses,” we argued that the self-activity of the Black proletariat is the driving force of this revolutionary trajectory. In this essay, we explore the role of the white proletariat in this process.”

The authors are apologetic for even addressing this subject. They expect resistance from non-white proletarians “who cannot, on principle, stand any discussion of poor and working class whites”, who “think that it [the white proletariat] is eternally lost to racism”. They find this “an understandable position to have in this racist country” and think there is no point in trying to convince those folks otherwise, but they point to the fact that 60.1% of the US population is white, and only 13.4% is black. In short: black proletarians can’t make a revolution on their own. “A revolutionary alliance must develop between all sections of the proletariat”, they insist. Otherwise, there is no path to overthrow the present racial capitalist order.

“There is nothing more dangerous to the American bourgeoisie than a multi-racial proletarian struggle”, they rightly assert. They give several examples of such struggles and state, “if there is any group that has fought and died alongside Black people in this country, it is white people”. And on the present struggles, they observe that “majority white cities have witnessed the most militant rebellions of this cycle so far”. Most big cities in the US are majority white of course, yet it’s a fact that no social mass struggle in this country was as multi-racial as the movement of this year.

Yet in the same breath they assert: “there is nothing more dangerous to the class struggle in the US than the treachery of the white proletariat, which, over the course of its history, has forged an alliance with capital and the state. While the material basis of this alliance is deteriorating, and fissures are emerging, whiteness continues to be the glue that holds bourgeois society together in the U.S.”

So what to do? “Black Marxism positions itself in relation to whites in a strategic manner”, they profess. Non-white insurgents use the divisions between whites to their own advantage and welcome white “race traitors” to their side. Examples include the Haitian war of independence against France, in which “ an insurgent army of ex-slaves played different (European) colonial powers against one another”, and the Algerian National Liberation Front, which welcomed the support of whites. In all the examples, no distinction is made between European workers and capitalists. They’re all white. No distinction is made between black proletarians and black bourgeois and would-be bourgeois either. So no words are spilled on the fact that Haitian and Algerian proletarians are still ruthlessly exploited and repressed, albeit now by a bourgeoisie with the same skin color as they have.

A contradiction runs throughout this text: on the one hand, they are clear that systemic racism and capitalism are inseparable, that capitalism and equality exclude each other, that only the working class as a whole can abolish exploitation and discrimination. On the other, they often seem to reduce the very goal of the struggle against capitalism to black liberation. They warn that, if you might think they are “arguing for some essential class unity, nothing could be further from the truth”. Not essential class unity, but a strategic alliance between the black and white proletariats is what they propose, so that each can achieve its own goals. Their destinies are sealed together, they write. “This is the paradox of Black liberation in the United States.” (as opposed to liberated South-Africa or Nigeria, where black proletarians, as I’m writing, have the solace that those who kill them are black?)

They treat the black and the white proletariat as two different classes, accepting the division that capitalism imposes on the working class. “As a class, the white proletariat is slow to learn”, they write.

And: “As long as the Black proletariat is convinced that the white proletariat isn’t willing to fight racism to the finish, the horizon and possibilities of struggle will remain limited. The white proletariat has much to prove on this front.”

But as long as the white proletariat is convinced that the black proletariat’s struggle is about black liberation alone, the horizon and possibilities of struggle will remain limited as well. These are not two classes, they are segments of one huge class, the vast majority of humanity, whose interests are irreconcilable with those of capitalism. That is what purveyors of identity politics (white and black) are trying to hide.

Shemon and Arturo emphasize the divisions. The white proletariat, they write, “is a stubborn class that must be dragged into learning the truth.” “It has a lot of work to do to convince other workers that it is committed to revolution”.

“Historically, the white proletariat has only figured things out when objective circumstances dragged it through mud and blood. The US Civil War forced it to fight against slavery; the Great Depression forced it to join black proletarians in the CIO; World War II forced it to shoot fascists in Europe; the Vietnam war taught it the cruel lessons of American imperialism. The pattern is the same. Left to its own devices, the white proletariat will not figure out the riddle of America. Only crisis educates it.”

The examples aside – obeying capitalism’s order to go fight and die in its wars is hardly an advance in consciousness in our opinion – it is undoubtedly true, as the authors claim, that “it is only through the bitter experience of more crisis and more struggle that the white proletariat will succeed in becoming revolutionary”. But isn’t that true for all segments of the working class? There isn’t any that, “left to its own devices”, will figure out “the riddle of America” (or shouldn’t we say: the riddle of capitalism) without being pushed to do so by objective circumstances.

But it seems that, for Shemon and Arturo, the black proletariat1 has already figured out the riddle. It’s true that black proletarians have been dragged through more mud and blood than white ones, so that their collective memory and experience can give them a clearer view of the enemy. But have they collectively figured out the riddle? Churches and other reformist black institutions still wield enormous influence. The belief that the existing social order can be improved by participating in the democratic state to impose better laws and money allocations is still very strong across the board. Even among participants in the riots. Some of them saw their actions as pressure to obtain reforms like “defunding” the police. We explained before why this is a dead-end . Black Lives Matter (BLM), arguably the most influential organization in the “George Floyd rebellion” (which was mostly spontaneous) has recently been focusing on elections. It has launched a political action committee to support candidates, campaigns and legislation. It has been hosting pandemic-safe rallies, text-banking voters and running ads to increase the Black vote. That is a vote of confidence in the system. Do you think that the billionaires and corporations who gave BLM many millions of dollars did so out of the goodness of their hearts?

It’s true that BLM does more than election campaigning, and that its reformist illusions are shared by many millions of proletarians, black and white and in between. We’re still at that point. What Shemon and Arturo wrote about the white proletariat, that “only the bitter experience of more crisis and more struggle” will educate it, fits all segments of the working class. None of them is homogeneous in its understanding of the world. In any case, it is not their ideas which define them as a class. As long as the system retains credibility, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the dominant class. What constitutes the proletariat is its objective position. As a class, it collectively reproduces human society, but for the needs and goals of capital. When capitalism generates crisis after crisis and starts to break down, the proletariat can see, and realize, the possibility to ground the reproduction of human society on another base than the despotic capital – labor relation. There’s no guarantee that it will, and it won’t if the recognition doesn’t grow that it is indeed the collective worker, connected despite all the differences in culture and skin color. There’s no guarantee but only the proletariat has, potentially, the power to save itself and, thereby, all of humanity. It has nothing to lose but its chains. But not all chains are equal, the ruling class made sure of that.

Whiteness

Let’s be clear: Race does not exist. Racism exist, but race does not. The classification of human beings based on the presence of a chemical compound in their skin is patently absurd. We’re all descendants of the same tiny group of homo sapiens in Africa, with only minor genetic differences, none of which is saying anything about who we are as a person.2 No “race” can claim a moral superiority. All of them have practiced war, genocide, torture, cannibalism, slavery, patriarchy, xenophobia. But not racism. That has been a modern invention, introduced by emerging capitalism. It found out it could make fabulous profits selling sugar, tobacco and cotton by establishing plantations in the newly discovered continent, if only it had the necessary labor power to do so. Indigenous people were no solution, in the first place because they were dying in great numbers from the germs the Europeans brought with them. And there was little surplus labor power available in Europe. The vast majority of the population still consisted of serfs, tied to the land. Famines and epidemics had created a shortage of hands in the farms. So the only solution was forced labor, captured from elsewhere. The prior existing slave trade in Africa provided the opportunity. Emerging African states made the capture of human commodities the driving force of their development. It was a win-win situation in the eyes of the ruling classes on both sides of the transaction and millions of captured humans were shipped across the Atlantic for commodity production. The fact that they were so tightly packed that scores of them died (which could not be done with white passengers, not even with indentured servants, making their transport more costly) testifies to the abundant supply and thus cheapness of African human commodities.

The reintroduction of slavery required ideological justification. Slavery, which had its apogy in Roman times, had become marginal or non-existent in most of Europe. Not in the least because the feudal serf had more incentive to raise productivity than a slave: the more he produced, the more he could keep for himself. Central state power was expanding, not yet conquered by the bourgeoisie but finding a commonality of interests with it. Its wars and conquests promoted loyalty to the nation. That was a relatively new ideology as well, based on the idea that the community of people is defined by the borders of their competing rulers’ possessions. That defined their identity as citizens of the nation. Slavery was not acceptable in that framework. But exploitation was. Religion was another ideological tool, merging with nationalism to tie the oppressed to their oppressors, to divide the former and to provide a scapegoat when one was needed. So that the Jews could be persecuted because they were not catholic and the Irish could be starved because they were catholic and so on. But the reintroduction of slavery required another herculean ideological effort.3 Because of the need for African forced labor, skin color was introduced as the criterion of human essence, to dehumanize blacks so they could be enslaved. Again, religious institutions played an important role in spreading this myth. There was resistance against this horrible innovation. But at every step, the drive for profit won.

Not everyone agrees on the modernity of the race myth. Cedric Robinson argued in his influential book “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition” (1983) that capitalism was not racist because of its need to divide workers and justify slavery and dispossession, but because racism had already permeated European feudal society. Western European civilization was already thoroughly infused with it before capitalism emerged. His evidence includes the persecution of Jews and Roma and the contempt of English feudal lords for their Irish serfs. However, persecution of minorities and oppression of the ruled by their rulers were hardly unique to Europe. All “races” have a bloody past (and present). While it’s true that racism had roots in the violence, ethnocentrism and xenophobia that existed prior to capitalism, there are no examples of other societies where humanity was measured by melanin content in the skin.

Robinson challenged Marx’s concept of class struggle as the motor of history. In his view, the categories of class can’t be universally applied outside of Europe. Instead he characterized black rebellions as expressions of what he called the “Black Radical Tradition” which, in contrast to the European legacy, is infused with empathy for all the down trodden, regardless of race. Robinson wrote: “Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence that they (the Westerners) have understood the situation required.” Shemon and Arturo quote this approvingly and give several examples that show a “deep ethical commitment that, in opposition to the pathology of race, orients itself instead around the transformation of humanity”. The examples they give are real but there are also many of solidarity of whites with black victims. They all show an implicit recognition of a common humanity, of a class bond against oppression, which is is our only hope.

Sander

In the next part of this text, I will examine the racial caste system.

NOTES:

1 Or should I write “the Black proletariat”? It gets a capital B in their texts, while the melanine-deprived proletariat must do with a small w. Like in the New York Times. This is one concession that was easy to make for the political correct bourgeois media.

2 As the historian Dante A. Puzzo wrote: Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that a correlation exists between physical characteristics and moral qualities; that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist. To prevent misunderstanding a clear distinction must be made between racism and ethnocentrism … The Ancient Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as Gentiles, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not in racism. … So it was with the Hellenes who denominated all non-Hellenes—whether the wild Scythians or the Egyptians whom they acknowledged as their mentors in the arts of civilization—Barbarians, the term denoting that which was strange or foreign.[ Dante A. Puzzo, “Racism and the Western Tradition”. Journal of the History of Ideas. (1964) ]

3 On the role of the Enlightenment in the creation of race, see Loren Goldner: Race and the Enlightenment From Anti-Semitism to White Supremacy Part 1 -1492-1676 and part 2:The Anglo-French Enlightenment and Beyond