In a message dated 5/29/02 1:11:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Chang, following Marx, also uses the Gemeinschaft vs.Gesellschaft distinction to >demonstrate that "a race or a racial groupcannot be a class in the strictly economic->relational sense of classes." While, in the U.S. priorto the Civil War it was true that >all slaves were Black and allplantation-slave owners were white, it was not true that >all Blacks were slavesor that all whites were plantation-slave owners. In other >words, the class polarization is not directlytranslatable into the racial polarization >and the racial dichotomy is notdirectly translatable into the class distinction."
Reply
It was my intention to respond to the above, which was lost in a moment of passion. I believe the dichotomy of which Chang refers blurs the specific development of economic relations on the land mass - country, generally called America and lacks a certain historical perspective specific to continental America. Consequently, the actual social relations revolving around and riveted to the color factor is incorrectly viewed as a static polarity, i.e., black versus white.
No one with a reasonable grasp of American history translates class polarization into racial polarization as a category. An interesting movie is playing on the Showtime network called Anne Rice’s “The Feast of All Saints.” “The Feast” is the fictional story of early 19th century New Orleans and its “Biracial society.” New Orleans was a French colony and its color factor evolved different from that of the slave holding plantation belt of the South.
In the general political and ideological sphere, the transition from a more than less patriarchal form of slavery to a system of slave labor production for the world market altered the politics of color in America. An American saying for betrayal is “being sold down the river,” or “you sold me down the river,” which is a slave expression for being sold to a master requiring transport down the Mississippi River to the areas of cotton and capitalist slavery. In these areas ones life span was 7-10 years of hardback breaking labor. The color factor – not race, and capitalism describes the Negro National Colonial Question.
The case of Dred Scott may perhaps illustrate this point.
Dred Scott was a Negro slave - meaning black skinned slave because I cannot ascertain the exact moment that the African American people emerged as a distinct people different from the Congolese or Ethiopian, who are different from one another. I can confidently state that this transition and formation of the Negro people took place during period of the transition from manufacture to industry on a world scale.
Dred Scott was held in slavery in Missouri. In 1834 he was taken to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in free territory and he remained there - in free territory meaning 'free" from slavery as an institution, for four years. In 1838, Scott was returned to Missouri and held again as a slave. That is the “branding in the black” called slavery in the South was imposed on him. Scott sued for his freedom and it went to the US Supreme Court. ChiefJ justice Roger B. Taney declared that Scott was not a citizen, but a slave. He ruled that Negroes were inferior to whites, that they could be justly reduced to slavery for their own benefit; that they "had no rights which a whiteman was bound to respect," and that they were not, and would not become part of the "Anglo-American" people, even when accorded the right to vote.
Although, there were varying forms of slavery in some of the Northern states, these states did not evolve in our history as slave states-geographic economic units riveted to the production of products that entered the world market and underwent conversion into capital and its return in the money form. There were isolated cases of blacks in the North facing a level of isolation and destitution during this period of history, where some sold themselves and their family into slavery in the South for survival. Nevertheless, in the South as a region there were a small segment of free slaveholding blacks people and in the case of Louisiana a class of “light skinned”Negroes of the wealthier class. (Notice the words “light skinned” Negroes versus “light skinned blacks. With consideration one can grasp why I use the terms Negro, Colored, Blacks and African American to establish context and historical periods when describing the same people.) Allow me to jump.
During the early 1980s while residing in Atlanta Georgia - a border region financial center that in history is said to be to far North to be Southern and to far South to be Northern, there is a historically evolved small community of African Americans developed from free blacks or rather the light skinned Negroes. To this very day they are referred to as the Mulatto aristocracy in whispers of polite conversation. In Louisiana this “Mulatto aristocracy” is called the “Creoles.” This small stratum of free blacks in Georgia has been Republican since Lincoln and is not by any stretch of the imagination, proletarian or semi proletarian historically.
Yes, it is true and understood by most people familiar with US history that all blacks were not slaves and to a large degree varying development took place between the free blacks of the North and the emergence of the Negro people as a historically evolved people, in the framework of 19th century America. Within the South as a region the color factor oscillates as asocial indicator based on proximity to the old slave holding South's plantation belt.
It is difficult for many of the ideologist to accept the fact that the whites and blacks of the old slave holding South have more in common in their psychological and cultural development, with each other, than blacks of the South and blacks of the North. This is so despite the fact that the pressure of the “whites,” legal and extra legal terror and isolation formed the African American people.
The whites of the North have to this very day more in common with the historically evolved Northern blacks than with the whites of the old slave holding region. Racial concepts within a description of the national-colonial question obscure this relationship and historical areas of slavery and slave breeding.
The Dred Scott case in the third decade of the 19th century is important as the ideological expression of a body politic and remained important until the completion of the mechanization of agriculture. Changes in the productive forces in society, literally remain our guild in history.
The North's dependency on the South economically and the strangle hold of the political South on the pre-Civil War United States dictated the economy of politics, which in turn appear as judicial rulings –man made laws, to stabilize social relations of production. The Dred Scott case remains the legal framework for the relationship of the colonial - no matter what his color, status in the imperial center. In Minnesota Scott was identified - using color as an index, and proven to have been a slave. The free black by definition were not slaves but subject to a lower status in society based on identifying them as potential slave material based on color.
My point is that race and racial theory prevents us from unfolding the economic logic of history and transitions from one mode of production to another. This of course makes it impossible to unravel the national colonial question from the Marxist standpoint. The standpoint of Marxist materialism and the dialectic of development.
I cannot and will not speak for Comrade Charles, but I have read nothing in his propositions that suggest he views the color factor as a rigid category that paints all whites as capitalist slave holders – plantation owners under conditions of capitalist slavery, and all blacks as slaves –proletarians in chains.
Taney’s ruling that Blacks "had no rights which a white man was bound to respect," is not a category of racial theory but a profound judicial ruling to stabilize social relations of production and shape the ideological sphere. Thus, we are not talking about “an authentic Marxist conception of race” or racial theory.
I have gone a tad bit "over the top" in condemning an "authentic Marxist concept of race" in the sense that there is perhaps a legitimate filed of inquiry where one can perhaps, be Marxist and properly speak of race. One can in my estimate speak of different races of "man" in the evolutionary sense, or what is called the transition to homo-sapien-sapien. That is, man before and in transition to the emergence of division of labor and mode of production. The difficulty I specifically face is a lack of scholarly study and a dislike of becoming drawn into the continually resurfacing debate on Darwin.
Yet, there has been advances in the unraveling of history on earth using modern scientific technique that traces the mitochondria of DNA to the "women called Eve" back - roughly, 350,000 years to Africa. I have run across literature periodically, speaking of the demise of "homo-erectus" some 50,000 or so years ago, and this most certainly could be classed as a distinct race of being. This is a vastly different question than the national colonial question in scope and content.
Thus, I do not believe that Comrade Charles is absolutel "wrong" for using race as a category. My critique of race is based on its application as an ideological category of imperial exploitation and oppression – after the era of the primitive accumulation of capital, because it prevents unraveling the people/class formed on the basis of the capitalist mode of production and Southern slavery in particular.
So, yeaaaaaaaaa . . . there is “an authentic Marxist conception of race,” – Perhaps, but not as it applies to capital imperialist exploitation during the rise and epoch of bourgeois production relations - in my opinion.
Melvin P
- Forstater: Text File Capitalist Slavery/Race Waistline2
- Forstater: Text File Capitalist Slavery/Race Charles Brown
