Re: [Marxism] IWW and anti-imperialism

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> this race versus class thing.

>From Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United
States of America," New Left Review, May/June 1990:

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among
otherwise sensible scholars that race "explains" historical phenomena;
specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been
set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others.[12] But
_race_ is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more
explains than _judicial review_ "explains" why the United States Supreme
Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than _Civil War_
"explains" why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.[13]
Only if _race_ is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does
its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the
question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises:
since race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be
genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise
historically. The most sophisticated of those who invoke race as a
historical explanation -- for example George Fredrickson and Winthrop
Jordan -- recognize the difficulty. The preferred solution is to suppose
that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical
phenomenon and becomes instead an external motor of history; according
to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it "takes on a life of its
own." In other words, once historically acquired, race becomes
hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus offers camouflage for a
latter-day version of Lamarckism.

=======

12. Inseparable from this conviction is the reification of race that
impels many scholars to adopt and impose on others, as a pious duty, the
meaningless task of deciding whether race is more "basic" to historical
explanation than other -- and similarly reified -- categories;  a waste
of time to which I draw attention in "Ideology and Race in American
History," p. 158. Someone might as well undertake to decide in the
abstract whether the numerator or the denominator is more important to
understanding a fraction, instead of settling down to the more sensible
task of trying to define and specify each one, recognizing their
difference as well as their relationship and their joint
indispensability to the result. A recent example is David Roediger,
"'Labor in White Skin": Race and Working-class History," in _Reshaping
the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1880s_, ed. Mike Davis and Michael
Sprinkler, Verso, London, 1988, pp. 287-308. Roediger apparently
believes that distinguishing analytically between _race_ and _class_
necessarily implies "privileging"  one over the other (to use his
slang). And, in defending the identification of racism as a "tragic
flaw" that helps to explain American history, rather than as a part of
the history that needs explaining, he confuses a rhetorical device with
a historical explanation.

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