Internationalist Perspective

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.  

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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.    

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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”.  

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This text is, in part, a reply to the previous one on this site.

During the last four years the crisis of capitalism has steadfastly worsened. The climate disturbances created by its growth addiction and environmental rape have intensified, the spurt of growth and booming stock markets could not hide the growing sickness of the economy, social inequality and class conflicts increased, as well as international frictions. A general sense of dread and insecurity spread around the globe. The pandemic brought the simmering tensions to the surface, exposed the weaknesses of the capitalist global social order.

This would have happened, regardless who the leaders are. This doesn’t mean that there are no choices for the bourgeoisie, only that their choices are bound by those conditions. They can do nothing to solve the crisis, so their choices are essentially limited to how to manage it, how to deal with the tensions it creates. On this, the ruling class is divided. Trump represents a management style that is increasingly popular in the capitalist class around the world. Giving the population enemies to blame and a “he talks like us” strongman to follow, is a proven method of dealing with rising frustration and anxiety.  

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In September we posted The Rise of Black Counter-Insurgency, a text by Shemon originally published on the website Ill Will. It made a sharp analysis of the “George Floyd rebellion” of past summer and of the efforts to contain it and make it harmless for capitalism. We introduced the text with some critical comments, to which Shemon reacted on the (non public) discussion list Meltdown. We repost his comments below, with his permissioni.

The IP intro raises a lot of good points and shortcomings of what I have been writing.

Some brief comments:

1. No doubt that the struggle has to spread to the workplaces. The question is why hasn’t it in the mass way that it has spread to the streets? The struggle cannot remain at the level of riot and fighting the police. I 100% agree. The question is why do people fight in the streets and not in the workplace? Even if we tell most people of striking at the workplace, they just shrug their shoulders and move on. It must reflect NOT a false consciousness, but their real materialist analysis of where they are strong and where they are weak. Perhaps that is too generous. I would be curious to hear from others what they think?  

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Trump, Xi, Putin, Kim, Johnson, Assad, Erdogan, Netanyahu, bin Salman, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Maduro, Lukashenko, …. this is only the start of the list of today’s global kakistocracy: the government of the worst, the most unscrupulous national leaders. Their military, economic and political interactions drive the direction of today’s global capitalism. The most pivotal at present is Trump.

The US President’s behaviour can be stupefying; but we must not be mesmerised by his repugnant personality and miss what is going on in the American bourgeoisie as a whole. Despite a minority popular vote, he entered the White House through the electoral college vote. His campaign had rubbished the Democratic Party in its entirety and the Republican Party elite, and to this he added an exhibition of an astonishing level of narcissism, buffoonery and indifference to the usual norms of behaviour of his class, Trump has been able to thwart the customary functioning of the institutions of state, political parties and the media – and maintain to a considerable degree the affection of his core electoral constituency.

Domestically, his first three years built on his predecessor’s economic policies, the bringing home of a considerable amount of American investment capital through which he hoped for significant job creation.  

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We publish below an article by Shemon that originally appeared on the website Ill Will. It is an astute analysis of the recuperation of what it calls “the George Floyd rebellion”, which merits reflection and debate.

The movement ignited by the murder of George Floyd is not quite over, but a relative calm has returned. However, in this period, many struggles do not lead to either defeat or victory, but don’t go away entirely. The flames die down, but the embers keep smoldering. And the fuel for the fire keeps building.

At this moment, a lot of attention and energy is being sucked away by the US elections, which offer us the choice between Trump’s naked iron fist and Biden’s iron fist in a velvet glove. The first uses the movement to evoke a specter of chaos and ruin, even provoking battles to underscore its point as in Portland, and being helped by police departments of some large cities which seem to have decided to let more criminal activity (especially gang killings) occur. The second sucks up to the movement and makes promises which he neither can nor wants to keep.

Of course, the election spectacle is not the only reason why the movement lost strength.  

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Events over the past months have been breathtaking.   The global Coronavirus pandemic has, at the time of writing, infected 16 million people worldwide with over 630,000 associated deaths.   Many governments took lockdown measures which have had direct, adverse impacts on the world economy and, specifically the standard of living of the working class has been hit hard, not least through massive hikes in unemployment, the worst of which lie ahead.   And then, the grotesque and brazen murder of George Floyd in Minnesota inflamed the entire country and led to extraordinary confrontations between protesters and town, state and federal repressive forces.   Important though these latter events are within the American context, the protests have reverberated across the world and, unlike many other police murders over the years,  led not only to solidarity actions but also to explicit tie-ins to the treatment doled out to other racial groups by colonialists and home-grown exploiters, past and present.

These recent protests have not come from nowhere.   A series of social eruptions has been going on for more than a decade now and have emerged from the specific developments of the capitalist world over the past decades in which the onslaught of the ruling class against the working class has heightened through increased exploitation and accompanied by the most widespread attack on humanity and all aspects of its humanness.    

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No need to recount those awful images. Everybody saw them. They instantly became a powerful symbol that resonated all over the world: “We’ll keep our knee on your neck until you die”, they seemed to say. It soon appeared that many felt that knee pressure on their necks: The pressure of disrespect and discrimination; the pressure of being robbed of a future; the pressure of brutal repression and control. For the second time, the desperate cry of a man being murdered by the police for having transgressed the rules of commerce, was taken over by thousands: “I can’t breathe!!!”

But now the cry is much louder, resounding in seven hundred American cities and around the world. Its symbolism too is powerfully resonating. “We can’t breathe” is a particular apt slogan for today.

We can’t breathe because you stoke hate and violence, racism, nationalism and xenophobia to divide us so you can rule;

We can’t breathe because you take away our means to make a decent living and our hopes for the future while you make the rich ever richer;

We can’t breathe because you poison our environment, as you destroy life on earth for your profits;

We can’t breathe because you facilitate pandemics, and then lock us up and send the lowest paid amongst us, more often than not black or brown men and women, to work in dangerous conditions;

We can’t breathe because, while exalting freedom, your state is an octopus extending its arms into all aspects of life; you spy on us, your police are armies, trained to harass, hunt and kill and most of all, to intimidate us, to keep us small;

We can’t breathe because while you claim to be devoted to justice, you sweat injustice from every pore.  

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The global health crisis is a true revealer of human nature and its contradictions. By partially blocking fundamental aspects of ordinary social life, such as work, human contact, transport, leisure, it throws a different light on many of the ideas, beliefs and practices on which the established order is based. This creates a “void” where reflexes, “natural” human impulses, come more easily to the surface, free of the many shackles and ideological masks behind which they live more or less repressed or disguised. This crisis has many unique characteristics compared to all the pandemics of the past. The simultaneous paralysis of essential sectors of world production is by no means the least. But for the question which interests us I would like to underline its simultaneously planetary and “wired”, character. Despite the control and limits imposed by national states, despite the great inequalities that persist between countries, the vast majority of the world’s population is connected to the rest of the humans by new information and communication technologies. More than 5 billion people owned a phone in 2017, including 3.3 billion a smartphone. (1) This gives a new dimension to the understanding of what human nature can be. I do not pretend to deduce here everything that follows from this reality.  

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