Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 18:53:01 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-FEM: Re: Barbara Fields on Racism and Ideology


Some very interesting things in Yoshie's notes:

>Fields's emphasis on the distinction between insiders and outsiders when
>she says that ideology is what allows insiders to make sense of day-to-day
>experiences seems to tilt her analysis toward a sort of functionalism.
>Wouldn't ideology sometimes produce "bad subjects," insiders who are
>alienated from and rebel against the ideology that makes them insiders,
>especially, as Fields notes, when ideology makes room for struggles and
>contestation? I think that her desire to contest a "propaganda" model of
>ideology >sometimes makes her use of the terms "experience" and "insiders"
>a little too monolithic >and functionalist.


Not just one lot of insiders, either, but many -- just compare the
bourgeoisie today with its many factions, from the free-traders to the
protectionists, and then all the rest. And there was also the rivalry
between the aristocratic landowners and the low but powerful manufacturing
bourgeoisie -- anti-slavers such as Lord Salisbury were doing it to spite
their upstart new-rich masters, as Marx never tires of telling us.


>Isn't Fields's analysis too US-centered? If slavery and the need to explain
>and rationalize its existence in the face of the doctrines of
>liberty and natural rights that come with a bourgeois revolution produced
>racism as ideology, shouldn't we also take into account the fact that the
>slave trade (along with the trade in commodities produced by slaves) was a
>multinational undertaking? Fields say, for instance:

Globalization as an inseparable feature of capitalist expansion.


>	"Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for perpetual
>	slavery in a way that English servants were not. Indeed, Virginians
>	could purchase them *ready-enslaved and pre-seasoned*; and so they did
>	in the earliest years of the traffic. Only much later did this become a
>	a matter of what we now call race. It took time, indeed, to become
>	systematized as slavery." (Emphasis mine)
>
>This passage is a problem in itself. If Virginians could buy
>"ready-enslaved and pre-seasoned" Africans and Afro-West Indians, slavery
>*was* already institutionalized and systematized on a transnational scale,
>which must have made Virginians either invent or make use of an
>already-existing racial ideology to make sense of this transnational
>phenomenon. So Fields's analysis that dates the emergence of race much
>later holds only when we think that ideology is a purely or even primarily
>local or regional affair, which I don't think is the case here, given the
>nature of the object of ideological mystification. What Fields could have
>said, instead, is that the new form of racism that came into existence with
>the systematization of slavery *within* the U.S. differed from what had
>existed before, but she inexplicably insists on the (relative) novelty of
>race. For the same reason, I think her explanation of different fates for
>white English indentured servants and enslaved Africans is rather shakey.
>The rights of "free-born Englishmen," I believe, were elaborated not only
>in their struggles against their "betters" but also through the processes
>of England's own slave-trading and empire-building.

We shouldn't forget that all this glorification of a nation's own power and
"civilization" at the expense of those actually producing its foundations
has a very long history and had already been well and truly ideologized by
the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. The very fact of being someone else's
property is dehumanizing. No wonder the greatest gift a Roman slaveholder
couild bestow was to grant liberty to a favourite slave. With a wave of his
idle hand, he bestowed humanity on the freedman.

The mechanics of slavery and the legal niceties involved differed from
period to period and epoch to epoch of course, as Yoshie hints, but the
chattel relationship was the same (serfdom and bonded labour of various
kinds loosen up the dehumanizing as compared with outright slavery, but
the lack of freedom to dispose of labour at will or to purchase others'
labour was there).

And it wasn't until the sixties (I can't remember the exact date offhand)
that married women in Britain were allowed to dispose of their own
property. Previously it went straight to their husbands to do with as they
liked. And women were long considered the property of their husbands if
married and their fathers or male guardians if not. Dehumanized.

And ideologized against. Strindberg, who was just one of many similar
voices at the end of the nineteenth century had a whole hierarchy of more
to less human categories worked out, with well-off intellectual males as
the humans, and male workers, peasants and paupers as the next step down,
the slightly subhuman. Much more subhuman were all women (with gradings
according to class there too, but not so much), and kids were angels till
they got their real teeth, and then they became devils.

And this kind of drivel was considered respectable opinion at the time, and
still is where the bourgeoisie can speak its "mind" in private.

Cheers,

Hugh