The WSWS's shit-slippery telescoping of the complex issues surrounding the 1619 Project into some adolescent outcry against eternal "racial hatred" is, as one would expect, and Louis Proyect demonstrates, a load of disingenuous, ill-intentioned nonsense. Michael Meeropol does a terrific job of anatomizing the complexities of race and capitalism.
Without too much duplication (one hopes), I would like to make a few high-level summary points: 1) Racism, however emotional, is at bottom a conceptual structure and a entails a continual process of structuring that evolves historically and continues to reproduce itself wherever it appears. 2) If racism were not useful to capitalism, it could disappear--initially through a process of "white people" beginning not to listen to its insidious voices, and then through the disappearance of the voices themselves. 3) In order for 2 to happen, a process of reeducation and cultural change aimed specifically at race would be necessary. Cuba--and insanely jingoistic Russia, which rolls in its racist imperial heritage like a dog in fish guts--show that racism and masculinism can easily survive purported socialist revolutions and "reseed" themselves if not addressed specifically. The fact that racism itself developed historically is no argument against this. 4) In the United States, racism is the biggest single bulwark, after consumerism, against the questioning of capitalism. Do you "white people" want to be like those "shithole" people? The neoliberal ideology that has developed recently around a handful of phrases from the Floundering Bothers is greatly weakened if there is no n* threat to keep the minimally privileged awake at night. A Yellow Peril makes a poor substitute. Masculinism proves itself through racial murder in addition to rape and abuse of women and weak men in general, and is the passive-follower little brother of racism, though it can infect all races, and thus undermine the critique of racism. Settlerism--a vehicle for racism and masculinism and a further distracting ideology that functions to obfuscate capitalism--is impossible without a racial "other" to colonize and kill in pursuit of manly "liberty." 5) The process of development of racism under capitalism IMO reflects--to use a now highly unfashionable terminology--a process of bricollage, the adoption and adaptation of previously existing cultural and ideological materials to suit new circumstances. The driving engine of class struggle, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to a latticework or syntax of intersecting ideological topoi. It is not at root a matter of semiotics but of observable and quantifiable material reality, but it can't move forward without the concealment, distraction, and access to the manipulation of the mass psyche made possible by multiple intersecting ideologies that can seem to move together independent of class struggle and to some extent independent of each other. This independence is crucial to the functional effectiveness of these ideologies--to be convinced of racist ideology, you must first see and feel as an integral mental object the inferiority of blacks and other racial groups--as well, of course of queers and women in general. This must have the force of revelation, of plain-daylight self-evidence, and must inoculate the convinced racist against placing anything before race--for example, social equality. So racism is in reality a separate evil, intricately intertwined with the class system, but capable of surviving outside it. To achieve a classless society, we must eradicate this intellectual and emotional pathology like any other virus or obstacle to socialist reconstruction--as a problem in its own right, not a mere function of class struggle. 6) The indentured servant entered into a compact but was precisely not a "free" laborer selling her labor power on the open market. The amount of coercion, reinforced by mental and physical cruelty, was vast. In reality, indentured servitude at its worst was almost chattel slavery and differed sharply from capitalist wage slavery or anything we would now understand as a "legitimate" contractual arrangement--however fraudulent our modern ideology around work contracts and "free" labor may be (or how terrible the unrestricted atrocities of "free labor," as seen for example in Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England , certainly were and are). Richard Hofstadter (quoted, I admit it, in Wikipedia) pointed out, "Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]." There appears to have been a very significant difference, but the distance from indenture to slavery was perhaps far smaller than people nowadays may think. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1864): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1864 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77034114/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
