From: "Chris Wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Linebaugh and Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra_
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 16:01:55 -0600


The idea that racism has an origin in the late 18th/early 19th century does
not necessarily have any bearing on whether racism as we know it is peculiar
to capitalism.  Then again, and i have not read the book so I am only
commenting on what I have read in this discussion, the idea of a starting
point in this sense, of an origin, has its own problems.  Part of the way to
unravel the problem requires us to understand that the form of the
oppression, its mode of existence, is essential to understanding why it is
different.  That mode of existence has to be connected to our history, as
well.  And racialization has to be understood as a process, an ongoing
process which did not "happen" in the 18th century but which continues to
happen today.

So... I think we need to connect racialization as we know it to the
development of slavery and colonialism in an emerging capitalist world.  It
also has roots in the way the Enlightenment thinkers developed a view of the
world.  In other words, slavery and colonialism come into being alongside
the peculiar separation of doing and done that is the capital-labor
relation.  The capital-labor relation not only exists as a binary
opposition, but a binary opposition that fragments the world (Marx's whole
discussion of fetishization and alienation) and fragments human relations.
This fragmentation gives rise to an instrumentalist view of life because all
of life becomes a thing to be bought and sold.  commodification turns human
relation into relations between things.  This means, in so far as human
creativity, doing, becomes a commodity, it too becomes a thing.  We become
things, or rather, we become people whose relations only appear as relations
between things.

That process begins well before 1800.  We can see wisps of it in
Shakespeare, in the Spanish Inquisition and the overthrow of the Islamic
empire in Spain.  The vague sense of difference, of physical appearances
marking borders of separation begins there, but how can we not see how
slavery and colonialism accelerate that process.  In "America",
racialization is in full swing by the late 1600's, but had already begun
earlier.  Racialization revolved around the need to subordinate the
insubordinate power of labor, labor which really did not yet know itself as
'black', 'white', 'red', 'yellow'.  But that kind of reduction has very
obvious roots in the Enlightenment notion of instrumental reason and
Cartesian reductionism, at least as possibility.

Does this mean that the Islamic or Greek worlds had a sense of race, a
process of racialization?  Maybe, maybe not.  But it could not have been the
same kind of racialization.  This is not a genus-species relationship a la
different kinds of racism.  We are not talking here of kinds, but of
distinctly different social relations, growing from distinctly differenet
worlds, with distinctly different consequences.  A slave could become a
general in the Islamic World.  The Islamic empires stretched across Eur-Asia
and northern Africa.  Islamic emperors, statesmen, scholars, etc. did not
have a 'race' in anything like the same way we understand it because race,
as we live it, existes as a form, a mode of existence, of the social
relations of our society, of that which is uniquely a part of the
capital-labor relation.  It is a peculiar response to the total
fragmentation of social relations caused by commodification of everything.
As a society with a high level of commodity exchange, the Islamic empires
might have developed some social relations, some fetishized notion of human
that opened up inklings, premonitions, of the notion of 'race', but we see
nothing equivalent to white supremacy, to whiteness, to racial privilege as
we know it.  In part because while commodity exchange existed, the
commodification of labor largely did not, and certainly did not dominate the
social relations of the Islmic empires.

If this seems like nit-picking, consider that the central feature of
bourgeois ideology is its desire to appear as universal and transhistorical
(in a way that pre-capitalist ideology never does), to present itself as not
only natural, but eternal.  To begin to see race (and the argument has long
been going on around patriarchy as well) as an ever-present category of
oppression not only risks naturalizing it, it ignores its historicity, its
connection to struggle, and the importance of it as a mode of existence of a
broader web of social relations.  In other words, we find ourselves not
asking how to destroy racism, but falling into a kind of inscription of race
as inevitable and immutable.

I realize that I say this at a very general level, but outside the
historical specifics, we have to attack the assumptions, the underlying
logic, that would justify a transhistorical racing of humanity.  Unlike the
liberals, the conservatives and the radical nationalists, I believe that the
form in which something exists makes all the difference if we want to
understand the possibility of its negation, of its overthrow.  I also think
we need to be alive to the fact that the process of racialization is not
simply the same everywhere: Black vs. white.  Racialization in Latin America
happens differently both between countries (Brazil vs. the Caribbean vs.
Central America, etc.), and in relation to racialization in China, Japan,
the United States, South Africa, South Asia, etc.  In that sense,
racialization under capital's domination seems both omnipresent, but also
heterogeneous.

So, not only do I find the timeline somewhat irrelevant and dubious, I find
the logic of an origin separate from the particular way in which capital
fetishizes human relations (polarity which gives rise to multiplicity, but
better understood as fragmentation), bankrupt.

Sorry if this is brief and schematic, but I hope it offers something anyway.
Cheers,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Schaap" <rws-AT-comedu.canberra.edu.au>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2001 7:23 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: Linebaugh and Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra_


> G'day all,
>
> >Linebaugh and Rediker seem to assert that racial differences only develop
> >towards the end of the 18th century/beginning of the 19th century, as a
> >discourse of race and nation is constructed (he points to the London
> >Corresponding Society moving from talking about the rights of humanity to
> >the rights of Englishmen). Was this really the case? Because the book is
> >quite polemical the contary evidence (assuming there is any, i don't
know)
> >isn't weighed up.
>
> Have long wondered about the claim that racism is relatively new.  I'm not
> taking issue with anyone, because I still don't really have a clue.  I do
> know the radical right use evidence (whether it be in context, I dunno)
> from the Koran to show a racism entirely recognisable from here and now.
> Typical of a European-educated type, I don't have the history to know what
> was going on in northern Africa at the time, but, if the following quotes
> are right, I'd suggest there was a certain bellicosity between black and
> non-black peoples.  Muhammed himself is often described as white, and
black
> faces are taken as markers of disbelief in Allah (after all, the
Afrikaners
> borrowed 'kaffir' - nonbeliever - from Arabic languages to tag blacks per
> se).
>
> "Abu Darda reported that the Holy Prophet said: Allah created Adam when he
> created him. Then He stroke his right shoulder and took out a white race
as
> if they were seeds, and He stroke his left shoulder and took out a black
> race as if they were coals. Then He said to those who were in his right
> side: Towards paradise and I don't care. He said to those who were on his
> left shoulder: Towards Hell and I don't care. - Ahmad" (Mishkat
ul-Masabih,
> translated by Karim, 3:117)
>
> "On the Day of Judgement wilt thou see those who told lies against God; -
> their faces will be turned black; is there not in Hell an abode for the
> haughty?" (Az-Zumar 39:60)
>
> "On the Day when (some) faces will be whitened and (some) faces will be
> blackened; and as for those whose faces have been blackened, it will be
> said unto them: Disbelieved ye after your (profession of) belief? Then
> taste the punishment for that ye disbelieved." (Al-Imran 3:106)
>
> In Hadith Sahih Al Bukhary (Vol. 1, 662; Vol.9, 256), Muhammad references
> Blacks as "raisin-heads." In Sahih Muslim (Vol.9, pp.46-7) there is a
> reference to Blacks as "pug-nosed slaves."
>
> If that lot is right, associations between 'black' and 'disbeliever',
> 'condemned' and 'slave'  go a long way back, and may have been lying
around
> to be rejuvenated/appropriated by the likes of the Chesapeake
> settler/invaders of the early 17th century (see
> http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/256/origins_of_racism.htm ) - who must have
> got their ideas, clearly already widely shared by 1620, else they would
not
> so readily have been trotted out as mere elaborations of the obvious -
from
> somewhere.
>
> That said, the direct and exclusive associations, if not discursive
> identity, between 'slave' and 'negra' was something that took form only
> later in the 17th century in Anglo-parts.  I quote Oscar and Mary Handlin:
>
> "Through the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, the Negroes
> . . came into a society in which a large part of the population was to
some
> degree
> unfree. . . . The Negroes' lack of freedom was not unusual. These
> newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held, as kinds
of
> servants.
> They were certainly not well off. But their ill-fortune was of a sort they
> shared with men from England, Scotland, and Ireland. . . . Like the
others,
> some
> Negroes became free, that is, terminated their period of service. Some
> became artisans; a few became landowners and the masters of other men.
Thus
> the
> status of negroes was that of servants; and so they were identified and
> treated down to the 1660's ...  In the early 1600s, "the word, 'slave' had
> no meaning in English law, but there was a significant colloquial usage.
> This was a general term of derogation. It described the low-born as
> contrasted with the gentry; to two hundred warriors, a sixteenth-century
> report said eight were gentlemen, the rest slaves. It was in this sense
> that Negro servants [in early seventeenth-century Virginia] were sometimes
> called slaves. Yet in not much more than a half a century after 1660 this
> term of derogation was transformed into a fixed legal position."
>
> Seems to me that, if race was an idea that depended on 'nation', even
> 'nation state', then it had had plenty of conducive circumstances in which
> to fester to full bloom.  'Frenchness', 'Englishness' and 'Spanishness'
had
> all become sensible ideas by the late 15th century, I think.
>
> >I would also have been interested to know ... how the racisms
> >that were generated by the ruling class were negotiated, overcome (or
not)
> >by the sailors, dock workers, etc.
>
> Well, the definitive job of a hegemony worth its salt is that there's
> something in it for the Great Unwashed to hang on to - racism does afford
> the white suddenly-landless-peasant-cum-nascent-prole the comfortable
> feeling that there's someone less worthwhile and less deserving than his
> own class.  Racism is just one of the 'isms' that offers this balm.
>
> >I think this issue is crucial, because the book suggests a revolutionary
> >fervour during the 17th century and the 18th century. But if there was
such
> >a fervour, why didn't the struggles develop into a more substantial
attack
> >on capitalism? If we don't accept the trot argument that 'the material
> >conditions weren't right' then what was limiting it?
>
> Well, the British rebels of 1649 still had their god sitting on their
> shoulders.  That many committed rebels were so awestricken by Charlie's
> beheading suggests that there was still a bit of the 'oh, shit, now we've
> gawn'n'dunnit - we've just topped the Lord God's bleedin' representative
on
> earth!' sensibility about.  Remember, many weren't moved to fury by
> Charles's material outrages against the people, but by his dalliance with
a
> Catholic consort and the consequent likelihood of a Catholic army on
> British shores.  They weren't rejecting the divine right of their betters
> so much as rejecting Charles's bemusing betrayal of his part as Defender
of
> the Faith.
>
> Anyway, for what that little lot is worth ...
>
> All the best,
> Rob.
>
>
>
>
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