Date: 12 Feb 2001 12:56:36 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: Linebaugh and Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra_


>>> cwright-AT-21stcentury.net 02/12 6:09 AM >>>
Chris: Racial struggles can
become national struggles and vice versa.

Tahir: In South African political discourse the two have tended to be simply conflated as 'race-nationalism'. ANC and other tendencies often regarded SA as being made up of four 'nationalities' (African, White, Coloured and Indian). This has become further reified in post-apartheid SA. The struggle around affirmative action then gets influenced by 'coloured nationalism', 'Indian nationalism' etc. It goes without saying that in such a situation there's not much room for critical thought about these categories. Everyone's too busy doing headcounts.

in ancient Greece it came down to the
question of citizen and non-citizen. This provided a model for apartheid,
where black people were regarded as as non-citizens of SA, but as
'foreigners'.
Chris:  Not sure where you are going with this last bit.

Tahir: It's just one of the ways in which an 'inferior race' is kept in its place in the division of labour. If you are non-citizen in such a situation you are only entitled to certain forms of labour and to certain other limited social and political rights. 

It is interesting to think that affirmative action is also a juridical solution, ostensibly opposite to the above, but based on the acceptance of the reality of racial prejudice.

My more general point is that racism proper (as opposed to 'exterminate the brutes') is a way of incorporating the worker into the society without recourse to forced labour. To me only this option is appropriate to capitalist society, which is based on formal equality. So under apartheid's relatively crude dispensation, there was still formal equality: The African has full political rights within his or her designated homeland, just as the white South African does within the Republic of SA. (The fact that the independent homeland is really just a little dustbowl in some godforesaken spot and that the worker will not find any work there and will have to be a migrant worker does nothing to diminish the formal and juridical equality - admittedly this is an extreme and stark example)

>From this it can be seen why one should always oppose the 'establish-the-separate-nation' solution to racism, whether in Palestine, the USA or Australia. It does nothing to combat racism - in fact it is based on racist premises. And the fact that it may find some appeal amongst the victims of racism only shows that they themselves have internalised the racist premise, Malcolm X et al notwithstanding.

Chris: The relationship of the irish to the English from say the 1400's
through the 1850's could be discussed as a kind of religio-racism.  Ted
Allen's book has a pretty interesting discussion of this possibility and it
deserves consideration.

Tahir: OK I don't know this book, but the term 'religio-racism' seems to me to obfuscate. In particular it hides the specifically socio-biological dimension of racism. After all one could argue that one opposes a religious group only because of their repugnant doctrines. If one says the they have repugnant doctrines just BECAUSE they are racially inferior (which might be an assumption in some cases - I have no doubt that in Israel this notion might be quite real) then of course it is a different matter.

>  I dont think
> its enough to say that the ruling class find it convenient, or that
playing
> on otherness is a simple strategy  WHY is this a simple strategy? Why are
> proletarians so susceptible to being divided by skin colour? Why is the
> notion 'race' able to become a tool of the ruling class?
>
> Tahir: Take the
example of xenophobia as an interesting case. Today in South Africa there is
huge prejudice against Africans from other parts of the continent which
often leads to violence. These are black people discriminating against other
black people, who are identified easily due to the fact that they don't
speak a local African language. Clearly this is the effect of nationalism,
and here, my friend, it must be said that nationalism is deeply enmeshed
with capitalism.Chris:  Again, the problems of form and fetishism get lost.  Race is one
fetishized form of the separation of doing and done, or rather of the
fragmentation of life that results from the avsolute separation of doing and
done, of producing from owning, of creating from controlling, of creating
separated from the means of creating.  Race is a fetishized form of the
capital-labor relation, just as the state is.   The particulars of that
however, how that particular form comes into being, how it is destabilized,
restabilized, altered or maintained cannot be separated from that aspect of
the problem.

Tahir: I'm afraid I didn't really understand how this response related to my example. I would need some more explicit clarification.

Chris:   I suppose I
will keep hammering away at this until I get it right, but I cannot insist
enough that looking at previous forms of prejudice gets us into hot water
quickly when we try to equate them with current forms of social relations
with historically unique dynamics connected to the capital-labor relation.
No racism ever existed like the one we have under capitalism.  But no
religion existed like what we have now, either.  Protestantism, Catholicism,
etc. all look very different now than they did ever before.  Some of the
dogmas have remained the same, but how people live them, how they impact us,
how we shape them, that is all very different.  Protestantism and
Catholicism did not even exist prior to capitalism (I cannot speak with much
authority about other religions, but I do know that islam also looks very
different today, so that Islamic fundamentalism is very much a capitalist
process.)

Tahir: No disagreement here. Except perhaps that you downplay the way in which an earlier discursive element is transformed by its insertion into a later context. Or, to put it another way, a present ideological stance is validated by claiming continuity with a more venerable tradition. The case of Islamic fundamentalism is extremely instructive in this regard - yes it is absolutely a modern phenomenon, but its power derives from harking back to a primal source of truth. See the opening paragraphs of the Eighteenth Brumaire for Marx's wonderful characterisation of this.

Tahir: Again, what Marx did was mainly present a critique of capitalism,
so it's not very fair to charge him with failing to do something that he
didn't set out to do. But, crucially, Marx gave us a very useful way of
thinking about these things - call it historical materialism - and you
should check out Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State to see how this same approach can be applied to a the question of
sexism, for example.

Chris:  Here we have a major difference of approach.  Marx did not set out a
'method' which we can 'apply'.  

Tahir: Sorry Chris, but I didn't say that. You're too quick to shoot down one of your favourite bogeymen here. All I am trying to say - and I'm not terribly attached to the term historical materialism - is that the critique of capitalism demonstrates a way of thinking that has become indispensable to those who aspire to think in a revoutioanry WAY. Rowan seems to demonstrate an unfamiliarity with it and that to me accounts for his lapses into non-revolutionary thinking on the topics that were under discussion.

Chris: As for Origin of the Family..., I would not recommend that work to anyone.
Aside from a blatant dualism between class society and gender, it also
overlooks many things.  Marx's Ethnological notebooks, though sketchy, offer
a rather different view of the transition from pre-class to class society.
for example, Marx saw class society as arising organically from the
contradictions of pre-class societies in a way that totally contradicts
Engels' approach.  

Tahir: Well this is interesting, but I suspect overstated. I always found that Engels's text provided a way of understanding how class and gender were in fact mutually implicated and that it precisely does show the contradictions of pre-class societies leading to the way in which domesticity is integral to class society. I know that many people do have this sort of breakthrough when reading that text. But then I don't know Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, so I'll have to keep an open mind. Who publishes them or where are they to be found?

Tahir


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