[Marxism] Marxism and the Roots of Whiteness

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it is a shame that Carlos has been unsubbed. If slinging the
accusation of 'white skin privilege' at someone is nothing more than
unfounded doggerel, it should be opposed. But it is by no means always such,
and to exclude this vocabulary from the Marxist idiom altogether is to leave
the latter pale and metaphysical.

LOUIS PROYECT WROTE:

> Things have gone from bad to worse with the interjection of accusations
> about "white skin privilege". This charge and charges like it helped to
> destroy the radical movement in the 1970s and 80s. The last place we need
> to hear such things is on Marxmail, where we are making every effort to
> transcend these divisive and destructive sectarian tendencies. Accordingly,
> Carlos A. Rivera has been unsubbed.


History Cooperative Fall 2004

Roots of "Whiteness"
John Munro


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BEHIND THE RECENT EMERGENCE of "whiteness" as a prevalent category of
scholarly analysis lies the story of two intertwined intellectual traditions
and their belated acceptance in the American academy. One of these
traditions is antiracist Marxism, the other is the black antiracist
tradition. Both have commented on white identity and white racism in ways
that presage the insights of the explosion of whiteness studies that
followed David Roediger's key text, The Wages of Whiteness.1 In this essay,
I will provide a brief overview of the two aforementioned traditions before
proceeding to evaluate the post-Wages scholarship. Hopefully, my discussion
will contextualize the whiteness phenomenon by pointing to its roots. I also
hope to demonstrate that although some of the whiteness scholarship is less
than perspicacious, the work of Roediger et al. constitutes a meaningful
intervention into the historiography of race in American history. 1
     Finally, my intent here is to build upon and respond to Eric Arnesen's
helpful survey of the whiteness field.2 For their Fall 2001 issue, the
editors at International Labor and Working-Class History asked Eric Arnesen
to review the expansive whiteness literature; an assemblage of prominent
scholars issued responses in the same issue, and Arnesen in turn answered
criticisms and made some concluding remarks about the debate. Rather than
repeat Amesen's overview exercise, I will focus on some central texts in
order to indicate how they contribute to our understanding of race in
American history, or the extent to which they confirm Arnesen's contention
that "the category of whiteness has to date proven to be an inadequate tool
of historical analysis."3

2
I begin, then, with Marxist tradition. In many ways, Marx's materialism, as
perhaps most clearly spelled out in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, set the tone of left thinking about race
for the next three generations.4 Among the much quoted passages of the
preface, Marx posits that regarding material economic forces, the "totality
of these forces of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social
consciousness."5 In this classic statement of base and superstructure,
racial relations are clearly of the superstructural variety. 3
     This approach to race, combined with the temporal linearity of Marx's
theory of "primitive accumulation," and his journalistic analyses of
"modernization" in India, have earned him latter day critics who have
convincingly pointed out the Eurocentric limits of his analysis.6 These
critics have paid less attention to the addendum to the base and
superstructure model buried near the end of the third volume of Capital,
where Marx specifically mentions race, but it is true that for European and
American Marxists of the 19th century and the first three decades of the
20th, race was generally held to be of a secondary, if not epiphenomenal,
order.7 4
     With the partial exception of the Industrial Workers of the World,8
the tendency to put economics far before racial concerns was true of such
diverse Marxists as Karl Kautsky and George Plekhanov,9 as well as Georg
Lukács and V.I. Lenin. For instance, at the very outset of his famous
analysis of reification and proletarian consciousness, Lukács rules out the
possibility of non-economic explanatory categories, commenting that "there
is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question [of
capitalist economics] and there is no solution that could not be found in
the solution to the riddle of the commodity-structure."10 In an equally
representative essay, Lenin's outline of imperialism situates
empire-building as a response to the exigencies of finance capital, but is
totally silent about the racial dynamics of imperial rule.11 5
     In the United States, Eugene V. Debs promoted an equally reductionist
line.12 In the 1880s, he realized that white racism in the labour movement
hampered organizing efforts, but he always looked at racism as a byproduct
of class exploitation rather than as structured oppression in its own
right.13 He exemplified this approach in his 1903 comment that "there is no
'Negro problem' apart from the general labor problem."14 Debs' biographer
Nick Salvatore shows that although Debs' thinking about the relationship
between race and class became more sophisticated by the 1920s, he continued
to perceive white supremacy and black oppression as secondary issues.15 6
     This situation finally began to change during the interwar period as
the Euroamerican Marxist tradition encountered black antiracism. The black
radical tradition, as Cedric Robinson calls it, came out of an enslavement
that could never be total: "Slavery altered the conditions of their being,
but it could not negate their being."16 As white Marxists, compelled by the
admonitions of black comrades, began to think more deeply about the
autonomous force of white supremacy in the United States, their earlier
insistence on the centrality of economics became increasingly untenable.

..................

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/54/munro.html

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