Being and Becoming White vs. Black
Mary, Nelt, and Jax are in a coffeeshop at the edge of the river. Water laps at the pilings beneath them. A subtle plopping in the distance - a fish? - and the conversation continues.
Jax: But the advantage of the dialectical materialist approach - I keep hammering this, it's crucial - is that rather than just complaining about what's wrong or wishing for something different, we can plot a realistic course from here to there. When we can pay attention to the way a social system's own internal dynamics generate terrible contradictions, we can engage productively to transform the whole into a profoundly new level of organization, the aufhebung.
Nelt: Yeah, but a new organization of what? This is the point my black nationalist friends have been making, and it's pretty compelling, comrade. There's this way that communist revolutions - both the actually existing ones and the ones we all keep imagining and talking about - can really be just a different way of organizing the same basic white man's Eurocentric culture that screwed the world over in the first place.
Jax: You've got to be careful of those nationalists, Nelt. I know you know that race is an artificial category invented - or perhaps better, evolved - to divide the working class. A nationalist revolution generally just replaces the colonial masters with a neocolonial national bourgeoisie profoundly aligned with the global elite.
Nelt: Man, you missed the intersectionality lecture at 21st century radical boot camp. All these different oppressions - race, class, gender, etc. - are part of an intersecting system of domination, and need to be resisted equally. You can't just say "class" is the ultimate key, and once we get a properly anticapitalist revolution we'll have solved all the other problems too. I mean, after a traditional communist or socialist revolution, the self-appointed commissars are going to be "color-blind" - as long as you can quote the correct European political economists, as long as the economy continues to industrialize and to produce the same kind and "level" of civilization that the Eurocentric assume as everyone's goal. In other words, the white intellectual or technical workers still rule the roost - along with those so assimilated they might as well be. Like they do in neoliberal capitalism now.
Mary: Maybe you're making a category mistake.
Mary: Yeah, sure. I mean, you already said it, Jax. If race is a social construct, then it's part of an historical process. And of course, so is class. So they both change, and heaven knows we're in a pretty different situation than 150 years ago. Let alone 1000 years. Looking historically, both at our current moment and into the past, maybe we see that race and class aren't so much separate categories as different versions or moments or maybe "residues" of the same process.
Jax: What? What process do you mean?
Mary: Well - I'm thinking back to feudalism. Who were the nobility? Weren't they just the descendants of the last layer of conquerors, who established the new regime? So in Britain, the Saxons became the "ruling class" over the Romanized Celts - and then in turn became the peasants when the Latinized Norse of Normandy conquered. And of course you always have an accommodation between the old elite and the new, somehow, once the situation solidifies - and the old elite is given some kind of role, in exchange for becoming more like the new. Until ultimately they get pretty melded. I mean, this kind of thing has happened all over: the Yuen dynasty in China, the Aryan invasion of India, the Hellenistic period pretty much all over. And of course, the Germans and Rome...
Nelt: Oh yeah, Rome, the goddamn Empire we're still living, by another name.
Jax: OK, but what does this have to do with capitalism? I mean, the bourgeoisie takes over from the feudal nobility, not by conquering from outside but through the internal sublation of the political economic mode of production. There's no hidden ethnic conquest character that I can see.
Mary: Ah, but this goes back to the original point. When there's a "revolution" from one stage of class struggle to another - ie. from feudalism to capitalism - what changes and what stays the same? If you look at the character of the bourgeoisie during and after the transition, you can see how desperately they struggled to imitate and adopt the characteristics of the noble classes they were replacing. Obviously, according to many sharp-tongued critics they failed in many ways, so of course there are changes too, but there's still a very deep process of assimilation in which the "ethnic" or "cultural" - or "racial" character of the elite continues to be hegemonic in some way.
pause
Jax: And you're saying something like the same thing happens in the context of a communist revolution.
Mary: Well, yeah. I mean, that would be the default tendency.
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Jax: Not to be vulgar or anything, but this certainly is something transgressive from a "base/superstructure" perspective. Right? You're saying that even though there's a thoroughgoing transformation of the class relations and the political economy that reproduce them, that some essential core remains the same.
Mary: But this is pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, I'm not sure they ever addressed it directly but all the Marxists - Lenin, Engels, Marx himself - always assumed that it was the same western civilization in which the stages of development were happening, that it was at all points distinguishable from specific "asiatic despotisms" or whatever. Maybe it's part of the naturalized Eurocentrism of it all, the banal assumption that "of course" the white world is the telos of socio-historical development, that allows the blindness to the ethnic or racial specificity of the ruling classes.
Nelt: Hmmm. So I'm trying to understand how race comes in, then, I mean, as we normally understand it. I suppose that before capitalism, the difference between a conquering ethnic elite and those that have been conquered is pretty obvious: they're the ones with the titles and the rights to "lord it" over others. The heritability of power makes it unnecessary to invent new categroies -
Mary: But in a feudal context the role of the Church is a kind of destabilizing "democratic" force, in the sense that intellectuals of all classes/ethnicities are able to migrate into positions of more power within a parallel hierarchy - kind of prefiguring the education-linked class mobility of the present.
Nelt: Yeah, I mean isn't the Church kind of the link that continues the assimilative imperializing mechanisms of the Romans, during the regression into feudal ethnic warlordism of the medieval?
Jax: Y'all are straying so far from the political economic specifics that I'm afraid you're going to get lost in some kind of pan-historical structuralism. But I want to explore this, so let's get back to basics. The core social challenge of a class civilization is to keep the lower classes working on behalf of the ruling elites, right? And there are various ways to do this, that are connected with the modes of production and so on. And of course, one of them is outright conquest, which I gather is at the root of various forms of slavery and the like: I win at the point of the sword, and rather than kill you I own your labor for the rest of your life. Or at a social level, our ethnicity conquers your ethnicity, and then we collectively become the "masters" and you collectively become the "slaves".
Nelt: Yeah, you become the masters and we become the slaves. Geez, I get it. Mary, you're saying that capitalist class structure is just continuing this "master/slave" dialectic that originated in some kind of ethnic conquest, except that the racial or ethnic character has been forgotten and it's been naturalized as internal to a single social world.
Mary: Well, yeah. That's part of it. Of course, the details will always be different.
Jax: But, I mean, isn't it true that it is a single social world. After all, whatever happened between the Normans and the Saxons, when the English proto-industrialists started corralling peasants towards the factories, that was hardly an "ethnic" or racial process... They all spoke the same language, worshiped in the same religion, you know. They were all English.
Mary: Well, one might be surprised. The remnants of popular religions, the power of women in the peasant community, not to mention class-linked regional dialects - early capitalist England may well be much more of a cultural/ethnic pastiche than we're used to thinking.
Nelt: Right, but capitalism does a bang-up job of dissolving all those differences, turning everyone into generic cogs in the machine, yeah?
Jax: And it's just this efficiency that provides the motivation or material basis for race categories. In other words, under capitalism there's a strong tendency for a conquered people to just merge into the working class. So on the one hand, the conservative remnants of the old order nostalgically ossify the moment of conquest into a permanent category. On the other, an overly large and self-conscious working class is dangerously subversive, so maintaining well-defined categories that split the class and allow the ruling classes to play one off the other - race becomes very useful to the bourgeoisie.
Mary: I'm not sure it's quite this simple. After all, there's all kinds of different patterns of race formation, between the various European colonial powers. You know, the Portuguese protocol of training "assimilados" that were considered on a track to be fully internalized to the colonial regime, and replace the white overseers in running the colonies. Versus a more distant English model. Or the French ideal of merging everyone together into a Republican new humanity - as long as they revere la langue and sing the Marseilleise with gusto. Or apartheid's more profoundly explicit tribalism.
Jax: I'm sure we could trace the historically material conditions that afford such discrepancies. But I think what we're outlining here is a fascinating dialectic between transcendant and immanent imperatives of the political economy. On the one hand, to maintain racial differences in order to keep the white workers "voting" (literally or not, depending on the details that maintain the oligarchy) for one or another version of the capitalist class - the Reds or Whites, the liberals or conservatives, the Tories or Whigs. On the other, to dissolve all pre-existing allegiences and identities so that there are no barriers to the free movement of bodies into roles as workers as needed for the growth of profit.
Mary: But what about the postmodern proliferation of identities and identity politics?
Nelt: Well, we've been pretty old-school in this conversation, focusing on what the ruling class or the hegemony "needs" as if they're totally in control of everything. But I'm pretty convinced that most of the forward movement of history is driven by the creativity and energy of the workers, of the oppressed. Aren't identities and the politics of affirming and defending them an expression of resistance? Partially recuperated, doubtless, but still...
Jax: Well, another way to look at it is that, on the one hand, in a post-Fordist economy you have to constantly be creating new markets to avoid the old falling rate of profit, and also it's much easier to produce diversified products on a mass scale - so it's internally efficient to mobilize consumers as different identities, using consumption to fulfill or discharge the urge to be different (by being part of group).
Nelt: Well, that's the recuperation. But black nationalism, for example - I mean, it can be many things, but based on this conversation I see that one aspect is that at some deep level the nominal goal of standard civil rights - to be fully equal in the legal and economic and social dynamics of the white culture - is ultimately the final defeat, right? I mean, let's flip this around. Look at it from the perspective of the people who get conquered.
Mary: OK... So, at first, there's no question of "who am I"? It's just a question of a) whether I survive in a biological sense, and then b) whether my people survive, as a group.
Nelt: Yeah, as a group, but as a group that is itself.
Mary: Yeah, that quickly becomes the main issue. In order to survive in a bodily sense, what do I have to compromise in a cultural sense, right? Or vice versa. Something like that? And it's going to depend so much on the particulars. Not least of all, on the numbers. If we're much bigger than the conquering few, then even if they hold the guns or whatnot, we can wait them out and absorb them or adapt in a whole host of ways. Or alternatively, if they come and grab just a few of us, I'm so much more likely eventually to be assimilated, or my kids are, or whatever.
Jax: Doesn't this remind you of the great racial conflicts over spatiality - the danger of the ghetto, the desire to break up the knots of coherent, undigested difference?
Mary: My dear Jax! You're sounding like a postcolonial theorist after all! But the inverse is a danger too, right - if a subversive consciousness-as-Other infects more and more of the subaltern subjectivities, the core program of assimilation-into-subordination is at risk. So you want to quarantine the ghettos. I suppose the tension between quarantining and dissolving is constantly at play from both sides - Democrats and Republicans supporting first one, then the other - and black nationalism flipping between being a radical antagonism against the very core of the Empire, and a kente-cloth wearing, Kwanzaa-celebrating coping mechanism.
Nelt: Wow, Mary, I'm pretty uncomfortable with that kind of glibness, especially when all of us here have a ton of skin privilege, near as I can tell.
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Mary: Oh look, I didn't mean to...
Nelt: No, but I get the point, too. I mean, at some level coping mechanisms are all that colonized people have had to hold onto, for a long time. What this conversation is reminding me is that, especially as we trace the memory (nearer or further, depending on our ancestors) of the process of conquest and the push/pull of assimilation, I ... well ... (darkly, bitterly) I wanna fucking smash the whole fucking thing.
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Mary: Um, that's a bit of a macho attitude, no? Most of those that just rage and smash are the ones that get killed, and leave nothing for the descendants. Isn't it the hard, long, feminized work of "coping" that gives us the chance to be sitting here having this conversation?
Jax: Yeah, I mean I feel you Nelt, I really do, but there's a kind of futility in advocating for all the conquered races to separate from each other and just throw down in some kind of last stand. There has to be some kind of engagement with the living contradictions that actually make historical change...
Nelt: Fuck it, y'all, I am a living contradiction. This's all been pretty damn abstract. I'm not necessarily advocating some kind of dualistic "do or die" kind of racial armageddon. Man, I'm not really in a position to advocate anything too strongly, I'm just telling you how I feel. I think I need to go talk to some of my, um, my black friends to get some perspective on all this.
Mary: Look, I hear you. There's a deep question, here. On the one hand, are we just trying to make the Empire the best we can, since there's no going back to "who we were"? So, we re-organize the mode of production to be more in the hands of workers, or we have affirmative action to kind of help along the capitalist process of dissolving race. Or fucking "gay marriage and don't ask, don't tell", for crying out loud. Right? Or on the other, we're looking toward a profound change of "everything".
Nelt: But what does that even mean, right?
Jax: This is reminding me of the "revolution of everyday life". I mean, I'm sensitive to the critique that the traditional understanding of the mode of capitalist production hasn't been profound enough, that ultimately it maintains the class form in a new bureaucracy, because the very character of labor hasn't been transformed. So we need a communization right away, all the time, so that any larger-scale "political" process will just be an extension or even defense of already-existing communal political economic skills and tendencies.
Mary: So you're suggesting that this communization is actually transforming or disrupting the very fabric of the "white man's" imperial post-ethnicity, defeating the conqueror?
Jax: Well, maybe it could be that. No?
Nelt: It depends an awful lot on how things go. Is there really space to go beyond the chauvinistic limits of dead white men? Not just in an ideal sense of who we're reading, but in the very fabric of doing the work of being people. Right? Does communization make space for becoming profoundly different peoples, plural, in the sense that there are different ways that our political economies, our ideologies, our goddamn spiritualities make us who we are?
Jax: Well, that's kind of a problem with communization: it's hard to know exactly what counts and what doesn't. What is radical enough, and what is just going to get co-opted by a voracious authenticity market? I think this is where a deep analysis of patterns of production and consumption can really help counteract futilities.
Nelt: It's almost as if the same kinds of specific work can end up being either one ... depending.
Mary: Depending on what?
Nelt: Well, I don't know. The kind of rage and antagonism we feel inside? (abortive laugh) Or the clarity of our strategic vision? Or the balance of forces? Or, what, whether a miracle happens?
(Silence. Outside, the whistle of a train.)
Nelt: I think I really do need to talk to some of my black friends about all this.
Mary: Yeah. Good. Let us know, will you?