Re: AUT: strategy/ies

[billbartlett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Bartlett)]

rc-am wrote:

>bill wrote:
>
>> I wouldn't go that far, though the two probably have a lot in common.
>> Racism is based on race, nationalism is based on nationality.
>
>books worth reading, if you haven't already, would be Benedict Anderson's
>_Imagined Communities_; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, _Race,
>Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities_; and Agamben's _Homo Sacer_.   not
>always what i might conclude, but they're an indispensible place to begin
>some of this discussion.

Post them to the address below. ;-)

>here's a passage from Balibar's essay in the latter volume called "Class
>Racism":
>
>"Several historians of racism ... have laid emphasis on the fact that the
>modern notion of race, in so far as it invested a discourse of contempt and
>discrimination and serves to split humanity up into a 'super-humanity' and
>a 'sub-humanity', did not initially have a national (or ethnic), but a
>class signification or rather (since the point is to represent the
>inequality of social classes as inequalities of nature) a caste
>signification.

Racism was a later and more sophisticated justification. But so what? It is
still a significantly different rationalisation of the same thing. I
suppose it's progress in a way, in that at least some philosophical
justification is seen as necessary. In earlier times the mere fact that
another nation was conquered was seen as sufficient justification for their
enslavement.

> From this point of view, it has a twofold origin: first,
>in the aristocratic representation of the hereditary nobility as a superior
>'race' (that is, in fact, the mythic narrative by which an aristocracy,
>whose domination is already under threat, assures itself of the legitimacy
>of its political priveliges and idealises the dubious continuity of its
>genealogy); and second, in the slave owners' representations of those
>populations subject to the slave trade as inferior 'races', ever
>predestined for servitude and incapable of producing an autonomous
>civilisation.  Hence the discourse of blood, skin colour and
>cross-breeding.  It is only retrospectively that the notion of race was
>'ethnicised', so that it could be integrated into the nationalist complex,
>the jumping-off point for its successive subsequent metamorphoses.

But it is still a different concept. So I don't buy the notion that is is
the same thing.
>
>... Aristocratic racism ... is already indirectly related to the primitive
>accumulation of capital, of only by its function in the colonising nations.
>The industrial revolution, at the same time as it creates specificaly
>capitalist relations of production, gives rise to the new racism of the
>bourgeois era (historically speaking, the first 'neoracism'): the one which
>has as its target the proletariat in its dual status as exploited
>population ... and politically threatening population.
>
>...It is at this point, with regard to the 'race of labourers' that the
>notion of race becomes detached from its historico-theological connotations
>to enter the field of equivalences between sociology, psychology, imaginary
>biology and the pathology of the 'social body'.  ...From the first time
>those aspects typical of every procedure of racialisation of a social group
>right down to our own day are condensed in a single discourse: material and
>spiritual poverty, criminality, congenital vice (alcoholism, drugs),
>physical and moral defects...  Through these themes, there forms the
>phantasmatic equation of 'labouring classes' with 'dangerous classes'...

Yes, but I'm thinking that this new concept of "class" probably wouldn't
have been readily acceptable to the early Roman proletariat, incompatible
with their self-image of "citizenship". Racism surely has its origins in
slavery? Slavery pre-dates it I imagine and is justified by the concept of
inferior (conquered=inferior) peoples which gives rise to inferior races.

This is to all intents and purposes a class society of course, with chattel
slaves being the lowest class. But I think that former citizens were also
included in the ranks of slaves and slaves could also sometimes move out of
slavery into citizenship. So racism would seem difficult to square with
that, it must have developed later?

Just as today we have anachronistic concepts lingering, no doubt the
earliest class societies had to contend with outmoded concepts of
egalitarianism lingering from the pre-class society of the people's recent
ancestors.
>
>class racism is connected with a political problem that is crucial for the
>constitution of the nation-state.  The 'bourgeois revolution' -- and in
>particular the French Revolution, by its radical juridical
>egalitarianism -- had raised the question of the political rights of the
>masses in an irreversible manner.  ...The idea of a difference in nature
>between individuals had become juridically and morally contradictory, if
>not inconceivable.  It was, however, politically indispensible, so long as
>the 'dangerous classes' ... had to be excluded by force and by legal means
>from political 'competence' and confined to the margins of the polity -- as
>long, that is, as it was important to deny them citizenship by showing and
>by being oneself persuaded, that they constitutionally 'lacked' the
>qualities of fully fledged or normal humanity."
>
>> I wouldn't know "weber's ideal types" from a bar of soap.
>
>the reason i mentioned vayba in this context is because instead of thinking
>of racism and sexism as social relationships, we are left with sets of
>discrete units of identity (women *have* gender, blacks *have* race, etc),
>and being *discrete units*, it remains to think of any relationship between
>them in terms of a pluralism, an additive politics: add race, gender and
>class and you apparently get an exhaustive political vision.

Nice try Angela. I believe I *nearly* understood that. ;-)

>> However, that isn't what I was arguing at all. I wasn't saying that
>ending
>> capitalism would magically end racism and sexism, at least that isn't
>what
>> I intended. Rather, I believe that racism and sexism will have to be
>> largely defeated before it is possible to achieve the level of collective
>> purpose that is necessary to ever defeat capitalism in the first place.
>
>i'm not averse to the argument that sexism and racism are used to divide
>the working class in the sense of its practical consequences on political
>action; but there are a few problems with it, not least at the level of
>political action.   it depends of course, but too often i see this position
>get reduced to a stoush over leadership claims, authenticity claims and the
>levelling of guilt at relative privelige.  that could be a problem with
>leftist practice generally, but i have a sense that it stems from the
>original question as to whether racism and sexism are functional or
>dysfunctional to class relationships.   i really can't pick any moment in
>class relationships where it's possible to extract the dimensions of racism
>and sexism as if they are externalities imposed from elsewhere.

We have a failure to communicate here again. I just don't undestand that.
What do you mean by "can't pick any moment in class relationships..."? In
what sense can a class relationship, which must surely be a relationship at
a particular time, have a time dimension? Similarly, "functional or
dysfunctional to class relationships" seems to be referring to the concept
of something which is compatible to actual existing methods of sociual
organisation, but again there is something to do with time inserted in the
the sentence in a way that baffles me.

The words seem to be put together in a way that doesn't convey any meaning
to me.

>  it seems
>to me that capital is contradictory, that it is moreover, not simply an
>economic category,

Capital is "contradictory" in what sense? What do you mean by  "an economic
category", in the context of referring to a system of economic
organisation?

> hence each moment in its formation it manifests the
>contradictory elements of equality and inequality or, in other words, the
>equalisation of labours and the domination of the law of value.

Nope, I can't even think how to approach understanding that statement.

I'm starting to get a headache now. ;-)

>> Shutting millions of potentially highly productive workers out of the
>> labour market may benefit a few capitalists, but most will squeal like
>> stuck pigs at the resulting higher labour costs. You can already see this
>> in Australia, with employers bleating about the damage being done to them
>> by the restrictive immigration policies.
>
>i haven't seen any employers squealing in australia, though if you know of
>any i'd appreciate the references.

I'm afraid I don't keep any records of things I read in the popular press.
But I'll keep my eyes open and refer you to any future examples.

>   but the presumption that a labour
>shortage is ensured by border controls is shaky on so many grounds,

I wouldn't presume it would necessarily result in a shortage, but any
reduction in supply of labour has an effect on the supply and demand
dynamic.

> not
>least because the very illegality of some migrants provides a significant
>reserve for hyper-exploitation,

Illegal woirkers of course are perhaps a good indicator of undisguised and
unregulated market price for labour? The "free market" in a pure form?

Of course illegal migrants also have to compete with people on Social
Security benefits seeking opportunities in the same "black" economy. So a
reduction in the former can be compensated by an increase in the latter.

Be interesting to ask if anyone has ever done any comparisons between legal
minimum wage levels, and black economy workers?

> not to mention the two-year waiting period
>for welfare for newly-arrived migrants which has been a real boon for
>employers.    there have been no significant increases in labour costs in
>australia (if you factor out exec salaries) in the same period that
>migration has been subject to increasing controls.  it just doesn't work
>like that, contrary to the ALP's refound committment to the white australia
>policy.

Is that all wage levels, or just the above-ground economy?

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tas




     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---