Re: AUT: strategy/ies

[Montyneill@xxxxxxx]

A few thoughts on this question of race and class strategies.

Ted Allen (in _Radical America_  May-June 1975 "Class Struggle and the Origin
of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race") pointed out that in
Virginia it was after Bacon's rebellion (which united exploited, black and
white) was defeated that the beginnings of the "black codes" began clearly
separating African (and descendants) from English (and descendants),
including banning intermarriage, more careful distinctions from indentured
servitude, etc. Race was thus constructed politically to attack class unity
-- a point apparently in accord with Balibar's quoted remarks in Angela's
post. Other work has shown constructions of race and civilization to be tied
to colonialism and imperialism in 19th century capitalist scholarship (c.f.
articles in Federici, ed., _Enduring Western Civilization_).

Noel Ignatiev in _How the Irish Became White_ has traced the lengthy
processes from African-American and Irish immigrant class unity to Irish race
riots against blacks. Clearly they were pitted against each other in labor
competition. The tragedy is not that the bosses tried this, but that they
succeeded so well here in the US.

It is the centrality of race in class relations in the US that makes
addressing it so essential. Thus, as Bill remarked, class unity against
capital requires addressing racism within the working class. Of course the
whole issue gets used opportunistically, as Angela remarks -- but what does
not, by someone(s)?

I concur that often class-race-sex/gender get treated as self-contained
entities (Weberian style) when they are social relations which have developed
(and continue to) conjointly within capitalism in enormously complex and
contradictory ways.

Politically, failure of "white" working class to deal with racism and the
relative advantages from not having to compete with African Americans for
some jobs or advancement occupationally (and it has worked that way in the US
at times) and from social status means a crippling weakness in possible class
unity. This, in turn, encourages black nationalism of often reactionary forms
(although by no means always -- there are strains of "nationalism" among
African Americans that point toward revolution for black working class, tho
such are these days hard to find) and also leads to class alliances within
the "race" as it has been constructed (and in which "lightness" is usually a
very desirable attribute and associated with class). But this black reaction,
even of the very vile Farrakhan style, is the secondary problem.

There has always been a "black and white, unite and fight" aspect. Sometimes
it has worked. Mostly it has been betrayed by white racism, making blacks
ever more suspect of white workers, more vulnerable, and thus more prey to
blandishments from the upper class (finally, this time, you folks can get on
the train...). So, whatever the complications with the analysis or the
distortions of opportunist practice, failure to address racism within the
working class guarantees defeat in struggles against capital.

Here in the US, "race" gets ever more complex. "Latinos" -- and obviously
varied population -- will soon surpass African Americans in size; some are
from conquered Puerto Rico or what was once Mexico; others are recent
migrants from a host of nations. Most of course are lower levels of the
working class. Asian imigration from many places is also increasing quickly.
In California, some black leaders have pushed for exclusionary laws against
immigrants, fearing -- perhaps quite correctly, tho I don't support them --
that the immigrants will step over them up the job ladder. Meanwhile, "mixed
marriages" grow in number as well, and who are the children in these socially
powerful but bizarre categories of race?

Angela then says:
< 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.  it seems
to me that capital is contradictory, that it is moreover, not simply an
economic category, 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.>

I am not sure what the first sentence means, but race and sex are
contradictory evolving relations within capitalist social class relations,
and thus not externalities -- tho we all know that capital has used and
transformed patriarchy (I don't follow the discussions in detail, but on the
surface I do not think it would be hard to make a case that capitalism is a
stage in patriarchy, presuming certain definitions of patriarchy). And while
ethnicism, localism, etc. long predate capital, it is within capitalism that
race gets constructed as identity, as being, as categories of superiority and
inferiority associated with surface body features, and conceptualized as
genetic.

Yes, capital is assuredly contradictory and more than an economic category..
but "hence..."? Labors as I think we know are equalized only abstractly, as
quantities -- neither the amount of quantities nor the qualitative
differences through which they must be produced are equalized or equalizable.
I think there is a tendency in capital to erase cultural variation into a
homogenized being (producer and consumer) -- that is a form of equalization
in which more elements of humanity are commodified and treated as abstract
quantities, but in a way that is headed toward cultural homogenization even
as occupational differentiation continues and perhaps intensifies. Even
within that, structural racism continues only mildly abated in the US, as
judged by statistical criteria around wages, employment, housing, education,
medical care, mortality, etc. Inequality within inequality.

What has been somewhat reduced is the equation of certain labor with physical
characteristics -- women change diapers and are nurses, blacks cut cotton or
sweep floors, etc. -- the racialization and gendering of work. And
concommitant a growing number and percentage of higher waged and
"professional" workers who are women, blacks, Latinos, etc. But these don't
erase continuing racism and sexism, which are deeply profound and in which
the working class in the US remains largely enmeshed.

Any "strategy/ies" to eradicate capital/ism must confront these issues,
gender everywhere, race in some places, certainly in the US.

Monty Neill


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