From: "Chris Wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Linebaugh and Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra_
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 22:46:18 -0600


As always, Tahir, thanks for the commnets.  The point about Engles actually
goes back to a long-standing critique of Engels from the more sophisticated
feminists, but also has a linneage in the Marxist tradition (and not simply,
but also, Marxist feminism.)  I think it is pretty clear that while Engels
does set out to approach the problem correctly, he does create two systems
of exploitation/oppression existing alongside, with no immanent connection.
The relation becomes purely external.  Lise Vogel has a nice summation of
the failure in her work.

Um, on that one point... looking back on it... I'm not sure how it applied
to what you said.  I think I got lost in thinking out loud on paper, as it
were.  Um... oops.

As for the separation of genocide and race, I think it is important to see
how racialization is central to the animalization of a people, which makes
their murder something less than murder.  And it has a definite relation to
the subjugation of labor.  In the case of Native Americans, they stood in
the way of the general subjugation of labor from the 1600's forward, 1) as
an alternate, not easily subsumable body of people who could not easily be
made into subordinate labor, 2) as a source of rebellion, such as in Bacon;s
Rebellion, and 3) as a safe haven for runaway slaves, such as with the
Seminoles.  Native Americans, as non-labor, existed as a barrier to
accumulation and as a barrier to the expansion of the market.  This
certainly does not hold for every group, but I think we can sustain an
analysis of racialization in reference to Native Americans that does not
have anything to do with some pre-capitalist impulse.  The extermination of
Native AMericans makes sense only in the context of capital.

Thanks for clarifying the point about Greece and citizenship.  Now I see
where you were going.

Tahir: 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.

Chris:  Exactly!  There was nothing more repugnant about Catholicism than
Calvinism, but the separation of Protestant and Catholic became a way to
segregate the Irish as inferior (as some kind of heathen) and control the
Irish.  Not surprisingly, it also becomes a way to control Irish labor.  I
see no reason to make a fetish of biology, even though it does play a
central role in some respects in most discussions of race.

> 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.

Chris: Matter of emphasis.  I don;t think we disagree.

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: Again, a matter of emphasis.  If this is my personal hobby horse, it
is only because an instrumentalist notion of Marx's critique of capitalism,
as 'a method', seems so pervasive, and I felt that that element presented
itself in your formulation.  I like this way of making the point better.

Sadly, the Ethonological Notebooks have been out of print for two or more
decades.  A new edition is supposed to come out soon, a much revised,
fuller, more carefully put together edition, parts of which I have seen.

Cheers,
Chris



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