MJ
I am not clear on what you are trying to get at. Slaves in the South were not proletarians, the abolition of slavery enabled them to become proletarians though. This is one of the reasons by Marx and the workers movement support the North in the Civil War, Marx also points out in Kapital Vol 1 that it was only with the abolition of slavery that the workers' movement would be able to struggle for and gain the 10 hour day.
In South Africa there was an existing proletariat and the anti-apartheid movement worked to drag the struggle of the proletariat onto the terrain of nationalism.
Thus, there were two different historical circumstances (and I said that without mentioning decadence, Opps!)
Jul 3 2007 17:48
Jul 3 2007 18:30
ernie wrote:
MJ
I am not clear on what you are trying to get at. Slaves in the South were not proletarians, the abolition of slavery enabled them to become proletarians though. This is one of the reasons by Marx and the workers movement support the North in the Civil War, Marx also points out in Kapital Vol 1 that it was only with the abolition of slavery that the workers' movement would be able to struggle for and gain the 10 hour day.
In South Africa there was an existing proletariat and the anti-apartheid movement worked to drag the struggle of the proletariat onto the terrain of nationalism.
Thus, there were two different historical circumstances (and I said that without mentioning decadence, Opps!)
Sorry, I don't think slaves in the South were proletarians. The plantation system was not a feudal mode of production, it was a capitalist mode of production. And chattel slaves -- despite their formal legal status, the specific methods of social domination that kept them cheap, and the different set of techniques concerning the management by capital of their reproduction as a class -- formed the bulk of the working class within that capitalist mode of production. They were proletarian. (Either that or, for example, workers under the USSR weren't proletarians.)
Marx wrote:
In the second type of colonies--plantations--where commercial
speculations figure from the start and production is intended for
the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although
only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free
wage labour,which is the basis of capitalist production. But the
business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The
method of production, which they introduce has not arised out of
slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is
capitalist and landowner. And the elemental existence of
the land confronting capital and labour does not offer any resistance
to capital investment, hence none to the competition between
capitals. Neither does a class of farmers as distinct from landlords
develop here. So long as these conditions endure, nothing will stand
in the way of cost price regulating market value.
"[T]he capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, " -- isn't this though why we now regard workers under the USSR as proletarians? Hasn't this distinction Marx made been discredited by communists as part of his blind spot about the state? Isn't this what the state-derivation debate was all about?
Marx wrote:
... as soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, the corvee, etc. are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc. Hence the Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.
Marx wrote:
Where capitalist conceptions predominate, as they did upon the American plantations, this entire surplus-value is regarded as profit
etc.
Jul 3 2007 18:54
I'll say at the outset that I am not well read on South Africa.
But as apartheid roughly means seperation (I think), wouldn't the struggle to end it bear more resemblence to what is called the "civil rights era" in the usa of the 50's and 60's that ended formal segregation, than the nineteenth century war that resulted in the abolition of chattel slavery? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely asking what folks think.
Jul 3 2007 19:03
I'm not drawing a direct parallel, I'm trying to understand what defines the proletariat for baboon et al.
Jul 3 2007 19:15
MJ wrote:
I'm not drawing a direct parallel, I'm trying to understand what defines the proletariat for baboon et al.
And I'm sure you have your reasons for that. Carry on.
Jul 3 2007 21:23
Randy wrote:
But as apartheid roughly means seperation (I think), wouldn't the struggle to end it bear more resemblence to what is called the "civil rights era" in the usa of the 50's and 60's that ended formal segregation, than the nineteenth century war that resulted in the abolition of chattel slavery? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely asking what folks think.
I think it would, yeah.
MJ: I'm not well-versed enough in how the plantation system worked to be able to argue any specifics, but I think the question would be to what extent chattel slaves differed from those in previous non-capitalist civilisations (i.e. Rome) - and how much compared to the condition of industrial proletarians and agricultural labourers elsewhere.
To an extent, I see proletarianisation as something which began in the manufactures and factories (and with the dispossession of the peasantry), then later extended to other forms of work. As such, I think there's an argument to say that the definition of proletarian has (rightfully) been expanded as capitalism has developed, and although you might call Southern slaves working class, they weren't proletarian as such (otherwise what did they become when they were freed - to be migrant waged agricultural labourers, and what difference was there?).
ps. this has been interesting, and I'll look out for the Aptheker, thanks
Jul 3 2007 22:02
Mike Harman wrote:
I see proletarianisation as something which began in the manufactures and factories (and with the dispossession of the peasantry), then later extended to other forms of work.
Right -- but they were enslaved because there was an expanding demand for (e.g.) cotton based on the development of manufacturing techniques. As the emerging capitalist mode of production extended into agricultural production, one of the results was the plantation system and chattel slavery in the Americas.
Mike Harman wrote:
I think the question would be to what extent chattel slaves differed from those in previous non-capitalist civilisations (i.e. Rome) - and how much compared to the condition of industrial proletarians and agricultural labourers elsewhere.
Precisely so...
Pashukanis wrote:
Opinion holds that the basis of the competition dominant in the bourgeois-capitalist world does not provide the possibility of connecting political power with the individual enterprise in the way that under feudalism this power was connected with large landholdings. “The freedom of competition, the freedom of private property, ‘equality’ in the market and the guarantee of existence for one class, create a new form of state power-democracy, which places in power the class as a collective.” [48] Although it is most true that “equality” in the market creates a specific form of authority, however, this connection between these phenomena is not entirely how Comrade Podvolotsky sees it. First, authority may be unconnected with an individual enterprise but nevertheless remain the private affair of capitalist organizations. Associations of industrialists, with their war coffers, blacklists, boycotts and strike-breaking patrols, are undoubtedly agencies of authority existing along with the public, i.e. state authority. Second, authority within the enterprise remains the private affair of each individual capitalist. The establishment of the rules of internal order is an act of private legislation, i.e. a true piece of feudalism, however bourgeois jurists may have tried to clothe it in modern dress. Introducing the fiction of the so-called contract of adhesion (contrat d’adhesion) for the extraordinary authorization which the capitalist owner receives, reportedly, from the agencies of public authority for the “successful fulfilment of the functions of the enterprise necessary and expedient from this social point of view”.
However, the analogy with feudal relationships is not unconditionally exact here, for as Marx indicates:
Quote:
the authority which the capitalist enjoys as the personification of capital in the direct process of production, and the social function with which he is invested as manager and master of production, are essentially different from the authority which emerges on the basis of slave, serf, etc. production. On the basis of capitalist production the mass of direct producers is confronted by the social nature of their production in the form of the strictest regulating authority, as the social mechanism of their labour process developed in a complete hierarchy; however, the bearers of this authority use it only as personification of the conditions of labour, in contrast to labour itself, and not as political or theocratic masters as happened in earlier forms of production. [49]Thus, under the capitalist means of production, relationships of subordination and authority may exist unalienated from the concrete form in which they appear as the domination of the conditions of production over the producers. But the very fact that they do not act in masked form, as under slavery and serfdom, makes them elusive for the jurists.
The state apparatus actually realizes itself as an impersonal “general will”, as “the authority of law” etc., to the extent that society appears as a market. In the market each seller and buyer is, as we saw, a legal subject par excellence. For the categories of value and exchange-value to appear on the stage, the prerequisite is the autonomous will of those engaging in exchange. Exchange-value would cease to be exchange-value, and a commodity would cease to be a commodity, if the exchange ratio is determined by an authority situated above the inherent laws of the market. Coercion, as the command of one person directed to another and supported by force, contradicts the basic assumption of exchange between commodity owners. Therefore, in a society of commodity owners the function of coercion may not appear as a social function, because it is neither abstract nor impersonal. Subordination to the person as such, to man as a concrete individual, signifies for commodity-producing society subordination to arbitrary power, because it corresponds to the subordination of one commodity owner by another. Even coercion, therefore, cannot appear here in its unmasked form as an act of expediency. It must appear as coercion proceeding from some abstract, general person, as coercion exercised not in the interest of the individual from whom it proceeds – for each person in commodity society is an egoist – but in the interest of all the participants in legal transactions. The authority of one person over another is exercised as the authority of law itself, i.e. as the authority of an objective impartial norm.
Bourgeois thought, for which the framework of commodity production is the eternal and natural framework of all societies, therefore declares abstract state authority to be an attribute of every society.
Needless to say the Stalinists eventually executed Pashukanis for writing things like this. From a juridical perspective I don't think it's very plausible to look at the political structures plantation capitalists built up around their introduction of chattel slave labor as a factor of production of commodities simply as a holdover of "the authority which emerges on the basis of slave, serf, etc. production". Which is not to say there's no relationship between the two. And many of the forms of labor control, on the "shop floor" of the plantation and elsewhere, weren't entirely unlike what came later.
I think that this post is an interesting discussion of what's involved:
Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
[...]I'd pause before drawing too firm a line
between chattel slavery and many post-emancipation forms of coercion.
Including, for instance, France's cute scheme of buying slaves off the
African coast, ritualistically declaring them "emancipated" on the spot,
and then shipping them off to the Antilles as "free immigrant" contract
workers. Or the experiences of Asian contract laborers, so many of whom
had no choice but to sign on to be shipped to the West Indies, where their
"contract" could be sold to a third party without their consent, where
refusal to work would land them in prison with hard labor, where physical
punishment was commonplace, where there was little chance of returning
home...But in general, I worry far less about share-cropping and the like being
conflated with chattel slavery than the reverse: the conflation of other
historical forms of slavery to chattel slavery. And boy does it happens a
lot. Since slavery is the "before" and the "other" of our current ideology
and system of labor control, it's still the category that animates our
master one, freedom [....]In a similar way capitalism's freedom/slavery dichotomy drains
non-capitalist forms of slavery, in all their variety across time and
space, of their specificities. It becomes a catch-all category, radically
set apart as a form of social subordination. This despite the fact that
slavery's common denominator, "subordinate outsider," has ranged from
horrendously cruel and exploitative forms, to relatively benign ones that
were non-labor intensive, transitional statuses on the way to full group
membership, etc.
I guess what worries me is the idea that there's that firm, neat line between "pre" proletarian and proletarian working classes. I think it leads revolutionary politics into the mistaken assumption that the entire proletariat is defined in character by the figure of a pure proletarian, with "nothing to lose" through anticapitalist struggle, "nothing to gain" through reforms, and so on.
Jul 3 2007 22:23
MJ wrote:
I guess what worries me is the idea that there's that firm, neat line between "pre" proletarian and proletarian working classes.
Well I'm all for looking at the German peasant revolts, diggers, levellers, sans culottes (and yes slave revolts) etc. - it's important to note the differences as much as the similarities though.
Quote:
I think it leads revolutionary politics into the mistaken assumption that the entire proletariat is defined in character by the figure of a pure proletarian, with "nothing to lose" through anticapitalist struggle, "nothing to gain" through reforms, and so on.
I think that's best dealt with on another thread.
Also - I think it might make sense to change the title of this to "Apartheid - and slavery" - make it easier to find for people interested in the diversion. No objections I'll do that later.
Jul 4 2007 04:22
Mike Harman wrote:
MJ wrote:
I think it leads revolutionary politics into the mistaken assumption that the entire proletariat is defined in character by the figure of a pure proletarian, with "nothing to lose" through anticapitalist struggle, "nothing to gain" through reforms, and so on.
I think that's best dealt with on another thread.
But it's relevant to the discussion of apartheid/anti-apartheid -- I'm open to the idea that reforms in legal status, however drastic, might now function only as a diversion from the fight for communism; I'm just wondering how far back in time that line of thinking would apply.
Jul 4 2007 07:17
OK. Well there seems to be three basic reasons for abolition:
* bourgeios legal rights (abolitionism)
* fear of slave revolts
* expansion of capitalism
I'm not sure how much slave revolts were simply for legal rights in American society, I suspect not so much, or not only. Bourgeios legal rights are pretty much necessary for modern liberal capitalism and its relative stability in some areas.
Clearly the change in legal status had a material effect (even if it was temporarily worse for some freed slaves when their relationship with their employer suddenly had absolutely zero paternalistic element whatsoever, and waged labour wasn't available for whatever reason). It'd be interesting to see what kind of struggles occurred in the 20-30 years afterwards, but loads of people didn't know about the slave revolts (I didn't know half the detail on this thread), so that would probably be even harder to find.
Whether you agree that slaves were proletarians or not, I think most would agree that even if it can be considered a form of capitalism, it was a very inefficient one, and for the development of capitalism proper, and generalised wage labour it had to go. I still don't think it was just a reform under capitalism, it was ultimately a change in mode of production in the same way there was still massive enclosures going on in the West, and Japan had hardly got started (hopefully I'll get round to writing up something on the Japan rice riots).
I'd disagree that we have "nothing to gain" through reforms - better wages, nicer housing are good. However I don't think there can be meaningful, permanent reforms under capitalism, - they're 100% contingent on militancy at any one time, making reformism worthless.
Am I right in thinking you're trying to have the "was communism possible at any time argument"? I think there was a potentiality for communism in many of the revolutions of the past - i.e. had certain factions won (sans culottes, diggers/levellers) you wouldn't have had instant communism, but we might have had it by now kinda thing, but that's the "what if" school of history.. back later.
Jul 4 2007 10:12
MJ, I see what you are saying now: that capitalism was dominant even in the South and if this was the case what did that mean for the form of slavery in relation to wage labour i.e., the transitional condition of the slaves given that capitalism dominated. Is that correct?
I agree with much of what Catch says in reply. I do not agree that communism was potential in may of the past revolutions, the material conditions were not present. However, and this is what I think catch is saying, the actions and aspiration of the san culottes (Babeuf) and the diggers expressed a rejection of exploitation, class and money and the desire for a society from from them, which prefigured the future proletarian movement. There is also the aspect of the dream of communism, which has always been present in the revolts, for example the Ananbabtisits (a quick plug for our book on Communism, which takes up this in more detail)
Jul 4 2007 11:21
Apartheid belongs to an entirely different historical era to slavery. That has enormous implications for the class struggle.
I agree with Terry that there is no Land Reform in South Africa - it's a fraud, just like Venezuela's. And Randy, I think there are similarities with the 50s and 60s civil rights movement.
Terry, you're posing the development of the general condition of the working class in South Africa by way of reforms granted by the capitalist state. No one is arguing against the struggle and fight of workers in South Africa, nor that this was vital element of the elimination of apartheid. Actually, to be more accurate, not elimination,but apartheid's fine-tuned integration into the democratic state. Things have got worse for the working class (I showed you the state's own figures - which 95% of the time underestimate the real degree of how bad things are - that you said were interesting but pointless). The worker's struggle was hi-jacked, taken over and their heads filled with illusions in democracyand a new order. Apartheid was "overthrown" (not really) in the general interests of imperialism by American imperialism and room was made for an element of the black bourgeoisie. Was this what workers, defending their conditions and all that went with it, is this what they were fighting for? Today in South Africa unemployment rremains the same as the worse years of apartheid at 50%, wages are cut against inflation and the hot air ballon of reform, "change" and nationalism is falling flat.
The vector for the adaption of apartheid was Consolodated Goldfields, the Anglo-American Corporation, De Beers diamonds, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, all within the overall direction of the American administration.
Jul 4 2007 13:13
baboon wrote:
Apartheid belongs to an entirely different historical era to slavery. That has enormous implications for the class struggle.
Why? How so? What conditions were different about history then, and how exactly do those differences have enormous implications for the class struggle? You can't just say that. Especially now when we continue to see pockets of resurgent slavery in response to the capitalist market. Do those increasing numbers of slaves have any agency in fighting capital or are they supposed to toil away waiting for a "determined struggle by the urban proletariat for the social revolution, without flinching at sacrifice," etc.? Whey they fight for legal freedom have they succumbed to craven bourgeois manipulation, or is theirs a specific moment in an overall circulation of sometimes disparate struggles which constitutes the proletarian struggle against capital?
baboon wrote:
I agree with Terry that there is no Land Reform in South Africa - it's a fraud, just like Venezuela's. And Randy, I think there are similarities with the 50s and 60s civil rights movement.
Yeah guess where & when else there was a complete fraud of a Land Reform...
Jul 4 2007 13:28
Mike Harman wrote:
...It'd be interesting to see what kind of struggles occurred in the 20-30 years afterwards, but loads of people didn't know about the slave revolts (I didn't know half the detail on this thread), so that would probably be even harder to find....
As I understand it (and there are likely holes in my knowledge) the trajectory went something like this:
Throughout slavery there were insurrections of various size and scope that kept the plantation owners on edge (as already noted). This can be taken as evidence of constant latent discontent, contrary to the myth of happy slaves toiling down on the farm. (As a side note, it is interesting that in the aftermath of slave insurrections, there always followed a witch hunt to identify the "outside agitators" behind it. Which white men sold them guns, etc. To believe slaves desirous and capable of planning their own revolt, was to deny the myth of inferiority that was the moral foundation of the slaving institution itself.)
With the coming of war, slave discontent moved into the open on a mass scale, with the "general strike" that Du Bois ably describes (slaves abandoning the plantations and flocking to Union lines.) The discontent was not new, rather the slaves simply saw an opening, and made for it.
After the war, during Reconstruction gov't, former slaves formed the Union Leagues, predominantly (but not strictly) black groups that were political in nature, but also served as organs of self defense against Klan terror. Blacks were claiming political rights, citizenship, but more importantly, from New Orleans to the Sea Islands they also claimed the land of their former masters. To be mercilessly succinct, struggle ensued.
So the Klan representing the planting ruling class, was squared off against the Union Leagues. With the slaves now being "free" (and in fairness, with a large portion of the country laid waste), the steam was out of the abolition movement; the abolitionists were not communists prepared to push for landowner expropriation. Northern white labor never had supported the slave struggles in any significant degree. So when the US gov't pulled out of the South prematurely-- the Northern industrial bourgeoisie having strategically used black labor for what it was worth, they swung a deal with a newly subservient white Southern planter class, so that business as usual could resume-- with Reconstruction ended, the planter class was back in command, both owning the land and controlling the local and state governments.
A new era began, certainly better than that of chattel slavery, but a far cry from liberation. I am still reading about how it all played out. I am not certain about the time line, but I feel sure that 20-30 years down the road, blacks saw that the moment of opportunity had passed and-- having played it well and pushed as far as they were able-- they returned to a relatively low level of struggle under the conditions of segregation and sharecropping.
To this day, the US goes through periods of relative racial calm during which the bourgeois press celebrates the manner in which the great republic overcame its former divisions-- and then some urban ghetto will burn to the ground, complete with "looting" and all the rest.
Jul 4 2007 17:31
Thanks Randy. Not many comments because like I said much of this is new information.
ernie, I wouldn't say it was never possible, simply because that absolves us of looking at the other reasons why these revolutions failed (or at least why the working class failed to take full advantage of them).
I can't remember which group it was, but maybe Mouvement Communiste? Either way that have this "post-facto determinism" schtick which says if it didn't happen, it wasn't possible, that's interesting as well.e
Jul 4 2007 20:28
While I find the discussion on slavery in all its aspects fascinating, and it's taught me a great deal, I'm worried by it. In some ways I find it a deflection from the original post (which, I repeat, is not to say it does not have merit 'in itself'.)
That's because I agree, esentially, with Baboon. We're talking about two linked, but different issues. Two linked, but different eras.
For whatever reason, there can be very few - if any - of us on this forum who think the 'ending of slavery' in the south', or at least, the 'normalisation' of capitalist relations of exploitation, was a 'bad thing'. On the contrary, it's widely regarded - and was regarded at the time by figures as diverse as Lincoln and Marx - as a progressive move. Rightly so, IMO.
It's not the same with the 'official' ending of apartheid in South Africa.
What both eras, both events, share is the fact that racial discrimination did not, in either instance, end. In both eras, it continued under different guises.
What's different is that in modern capitalist society, in an epoch when the proletariat had already, concretely demonstrated its capacity to confront and overthrow the capitalist sate, Anti-Apartheid became a movement, orchestrated by both local and international factions of the ruling class, which in effect rescued an important regional 'outpost' of capitalism.
Unlike the 'abolitionist' movement' in all its variants, anti-apartheid did not represent the objective interests of the proletariat, either locally, or internationally. On the contrary, it was a means of subjugating the proletariat to a 'reformed' bourgeois state.
So to pose the original question of this thread on its head: how many groups, organisations, individuals, campaigned for the anti-apartheid movement and how many welcomed, with whatever reservations, its result: the coming to power of the ANC?
And what do you think now?
I suspect that herein lies the reason that this thread on apartheid is quite happy to dwell in discussions on 19th century slavery in the American south.
Jul 4 2007 21:07
Lurch wrote:
...I suspect that herein lies the reason that this thread on apartheid is quite happy to dwell in discussions on 19th century slavery in the American south.
I have been as active as anyone on the slavery in the South discussion, and it is no diversion. I just don't know enough about South Africa to say much. Though I would like to. Enlighten me, please.
Jul 4 2007 22:17
No, I'm just playing devil's advocate -- going back to the abolition of slavery and working forward to tease out the distinctions you guys are making.
Lurch wrote:
What's different is that in modern capitalist society, in an epoch when the proletariat had already, concretely demonstrated its capacity to confront and overthrow the capitalist sate,
This distinction is one of the first real ones made in the thread -- can you expand on this? Is this in terms of the composition of the class as it relates to the technical composition of production? What is present in production in South Africa in the 1980s that wasn't in the US South in the 1860s, and how does this enable the proletariat to build communism? In terms of exports & imports, which was more dependent on its position in the global market of goods? What's your opinion on this kind of dependency and whether it hinders the ability of workers to build communism? What do you imagine could have happened if South African workers hadn't fallen for the anti-apartheid movement, and had broken the bourgeois state through strikes and so on? How would the relations between black and white workers have progressed? How would the relations between South African workers and workers elsewhere have progressed?
Lurch wrote:
I suspect that herein lies the reason that this thread on apartheid is quite happy to dwell in discussions on 19th century slavery in the American south.
Nah just moving slowly with this thread, having now established some consensus around an instance in which reform was progressive. I promise I'm participating in good faith. I agree the post-apartheid bourgeois state has been "bad," that this was prefigured by the ANC, transnational capital et al during the splitting of the reform struggle from class struggle, etc. What I'm skeptical about is whether pushing an "all or nothing" line depends on having a model of the class struggle that's overly dependent on the existence of a huge mass of "pure proletarians."
Jul 4 2007 23:14
OK: given that we're all assuring each other of our good intentions to clarify the issues, and that the title of this thread has changed (according to the general direction of the discussion - fair enough) and given that we're "moving slowly" with the flow, I'll return to some of the latest points raised by MJ in due course. To Randy, I'll just say my comments on 'diversion' weren't really aimed at US participants in this debate (my localism) but at the vast swathes of the UK 'revolutionary' milieu who for almost two decades mobilised in support of the 'anti-apartheid movement'.
Jul 4 2007 23:50
Quote:
"the vast swathes of the UK 'revolutionary' milieu who for almost two decades mobilised in support of the 'anti-apartheid movement'."
...and none of whom are involved in this discussion on this thread...so it is a major achievement of theirs to successfully divert it.
Jul 5 2007 02:36
I grew up in a Pan-Africanist household. My parents idolized Nkrumah and Senghor and all the heroes of the independence struggles. It wasn't just about creating the United States of Africa. Some pan-Africanists developed the concept of Negritude. They believed in a shared cultural heritage of the entire black diaspora. My dad still talks about the negritude stuff (imagine how he felt when I became a commie and then married a white girl).
I don't know if it is because of my upbringing, but there's a huge disconnect between my feelings about apartheid and the segregation in the U.S on one hand, and my intellectual left communism on the other. I sometimes find myself asking: is a struggle against racism a struggle for workers living standards?
On a related topic, today's proles, at least in the rich countries, are less racist, less sexist, less religious etc than sixty years ago. What is the materialist explanation of all this? Is it part of the ascent from the counterrevolution (a phenomenon I'm still struggling to grasp)?
Jul 5 2007 03:27
Well how do you interpret Negritude? I've heard a couple different takes on it... the Black Atlantic, Dessalines' constitution, and all that. Also -- I'm interested in reading Cesaire's letter to Maurice Thorez post-Hungary, any idea if it's online?
Jul 5 2007 05:24
My interpretatioin of negritude? The emerging new bourgeoisies needed a "native" ideology I guess. The author and poet Senghor became the first president of Senegal. He joined the French army voluntarily in '39 and spent most of the war in a German POW camp. He's also known for his idea of "African socialism" (I still have that book somewhere I think). The poet Cesaire was elected to represent Martinique in the French Parliament. So today I have no real love for these folks. (It's funny how the creators of negritude had to write their poetry in French.)
It was an artistic/cultural (mostly literary) movement besides being political. (My dad says that basically all the great music from the Americas is black music, from Samba to Jazz.). Whatever.
Last time I read Senghor was like ten years ago when I was like seventeen. I don't remember much. No idea about Cesaire's letter, sorry.
Jul 5 2007 08:07
alibadani wrote:
On a related topic, today's proles, at least in the rich countries, are less racist, less sexist, less religious etc than sixty years ago. What is the materialist explanation of all this?
making this up as i go along ...
on the 'objective' side i think capital pulls in two directions. racism divides (and rules) the working class, but migration is necessary for a functioning labour market, racism impedes 'meritocracy' (i.e. some black people make good bosses) and foments urban unrest. Another way of looking at it would be the tendency to reduce all labour-power to the abstract; generic interchangeable labour. of course there is an opposing tendency to particularise labour, which means that most of the office staff in the factory i work in are white western europeans, most of the production line staff are polish/eastern european and most of the canteen staff are black/east asian.
i guess which of these opposing tendencies gains the upper hand is a result of the 'subjective' side, class struggle tends to overcome such divisions (there's all sorts of social psychology studies on this kind of thing), where there's low class struggle groups like the BNP try and pull the other way.
Jul 5 2007 11:50
Joseph K. wrote:
of course there is an opposing tendency to particularise labour,
Why does this "tendency" exist?
Jul 5 2007 12:07
good question. certainly in the case of polish assembly line workers it's to do with migration and the wages migrants will work for (since they send some home where it's worth a lot more); the offices are probably fairly representative the region as a whole. as for the canteen staff, not sure if they're migrants - i think some are at least because one i spoke to had rudimentary english and i saw another reading a 'learn english' book. why female filipino migrants are caterers and polish migrants are assembly workers i don't know. one manager told me the other day he wanted to hire more hot polish girls for assembly because the way the seats on the line are set up he can see their thongs.
Jul 5 2007 21:20
MJ: There’s no real need to play devil’s advocate: just say what you believe, are prepared to defend, and hopefully everyone else will do likewise. Also, you don’t have to ‘tease out’ the positions of Baboon et al: I’m sure he/we are perfectly happy to explain them at great length!
Having said that, I’m off for a week, so just a few highly synthesised points.
On the US ’Civil War’: In accordance with his general approach, which was to champion critically the spread of bourgeois social relations as the necessary foundation for communism, Marx saw the North in the US civil war as the more progressive faction. Furthermore:
“The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour.” The Civil War in the United States, Die Presse, Oct 1861.
True, his ‘journalistic’ articles (often in any case written by Engels) are hardly the most developed form of his thought, however...
You want to know what, in our view, has changed since Marx’s time, why we no longer see one faction of the ruling class more progressive than another: it’s this: with the development of mass strikes at the turn of the 20th century, and in particular with the experience of the Russian revolution on the one hand, and on the other, conditioning the appearance of the former, the development of capital into a dead end of imperialist wars and crises, offering no other perspective than barbarism, the working class no longer has a ‘choice’: its programme is socialism or barbarism, and all that flows from this. Could I expand further? Yes, lots. Right now? No.
Terry: You say that no-one here today is supporting the ANC. Fair enough. My point is that virtually everyone 10 years ago was. Including the majority of the anarchist currents (correct me if I’m wrong). Which is why it’s easier to have a discussion about the US Civil War (worthwhile though that is, I repeat).
Regarding South Africa, either you are with Flint, who argues that the workers and the ANC had a congruence of interests, that the former should have supported the latter, or you are with the struggles of the proletariat against repression, massacres, the degradation of their living standards and denounce the anti-apartheid movement which saw the coming to power of the ANC as an answer to such issues rather than an attempt to subvert the class's response to them.
No-one’s denying – on the contrary, we are insisting on it – that the struggle of the proletariat played a big part in the decision of the ruling class to ditch a form of bourgeois government it had long supported for another. Capital is indeed a social relation, a balance of forces, and the strength of proletarian resistance in part caused capital to change tack in South Africa. Open, murderous repression was no longer enough to quell the workers. Where we differ is in calling the result, the coming to power of the ANC, ‘a victory’ for the working class.
When MJ appears to dismiss Baboon’s assessment of today’s real situation of the South African proletariat as ‘factoids’ already well known to him; when you say, in effect, that these worsening material conditions of the working class in South Africa are irrelevant, then we’re really straying into the territory of abstract moralising.
The proletariat gained a ‘victory’ because the colour of its exploiters’ skins changed? The proletariat’s real victories – the lasting ones - aren’t just at the level of its ability to temporarily hold off capitalism’s attacks, indispensible though these struggles are. They are fundamentally at the level of its class consciousness. Not national consciousness. Not black consciousness. Class consciousness. Communist consciousness. It’s a victory when the proletariat understands – and demonstrates its understanding in practice – that it is only struggle on the terrain of its own class interests that produces results, that produces a strengthening of the class’s solidarity and sense of confidence in itself. In this sense, the recent – apparently failed – strikes in South Africa against the ANC can be seen as a far greater step forward for the struggle than the illusion that throwing your lot in with one set of exploiters against another is a ‘victory’.
Of course the proletariat in South Africa had, and still has, illusions in the ANC, in the idea that they can make lasting gains without confronting capital in its totality, without making a revolution. Sometimes it’s necessary to argue patiently against such illusions, not to flatter or to cave into them.
Alibadani: I suspect it’s difficult to measure whether racism ‘in general’ has really declined since the Sixties: I’d like to think so. For me, racism and nationalism are strongly linked, and I do defend the idea that the generations since ’68 are by no means as willing to swallow the idea of patriotism, of dying for ones fatherland; are so held in thrall by the idea of ‘defending a socialist fatherland’ or ‘defending democracy’ as was the case in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Such ideas and their 1001 varieties ‘aint disappeared, won’t disappear until the period of transition is well underway. But if you’re right about a certain diminution of racism, then yes: it is an undefeated working class that’s at the root of it, IMO.
Jul 5 2007 21:51
Lurch wrote:
Regarding South Africa, either you are with Flint, who argues that the workers and the ANC had a congruence of interests, that the former should have supported the latter, or you are with the struggles of the proletariat against repression, massacres, the degradation of their living standards and denounce the anti-apartheid movement which saw the coming to power of the ANC as an answer to such issues rather than an attempt to subvert the class's response to them.
No, that is not what I wrote.
Jul 5 2007 22:00
Lurch wrote:
When MJ appears to dismiss Baboon’s assessment of today’s real situation of the South African proletariat as ‘factoids’ already well known to him; when you say, in effect, that these worsening material conditions of the working class in South Africa are irrelevant, then we’re really straying into the territory of abstract moralising.
I'm not "saying that the worsening material conditions of the working class are irrelevant."
Clearly they are getting worse. But I'm not convinced that they are worse than they would be at this time under the dual attacks of neoliberalism and apartheid. And I'm also not convinced that if the aparthied movement had lost steam the black and white workers of South Africa would now be arm and arm leading us all toward communism.
Can comment on articles and discussions
Just as the capitalists of the Northern states overthrew slavery?