Immortal Technique: Classism Facilitates Racism

[JahFocus CS]

The Roots of Racism.

Racism and capitalism are inextricably linked.

 

[thekingsmen]

The Roots of Racism.

Racism and capitalism are inextricably linked.

I agree but White Supremacy arms reach of Socialism and Communism.

 

[JahFocus CS]

I agree but White Supremacy arms reach of Socialism and Communism.

Please provide some reasoning or evidence for this assertion.

 

[thekingsmen]

Please provide some reasoning or evidence for this assertion.

http://sojournertruth.net/marxslavery.pdf

 

[JahFocus CS]

http://sojournertruth.net/marxslavery.pdf

What in there expresses White supremacist sentiment?

 

[thekingsmen]

What in there expresses White supremacist sentiment?

In Capital, Vol. III, Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859, which exposes the cruelty and conceit of the proslavery South:
“Now, gentlemen … to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature. He has strength and has the power to labor; but the Nature which created the power denied to him either the intellect to govern, or willingness to work. [Applause.] Both were denied to him. And that Nature which deprived him of the will to labor gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living, useful for himself and for the master who governs him. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him; nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labor in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labor and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and society.’”[9]

 

[JahFocus CS]

In Capital, Vol. III, Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859, which exposes the cruelty and conceit of the proslavery South:
“Now, gentlemen … to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature. He has strength and has the power to labor; but the Nature which created the power denied to him either the intellect to govern, or willingness to work. [Applause.] Both were denied to him. And that Nature which deprived him of the will to labor gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living, useful for himself and for the master who governs him. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him; nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labor in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labor and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and society.’”[9]

Breh... it literally says, "Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859..." Not that Marx himself made that statement, nor that he quoted the lawyer in agreement, since that quotation literally flies in the face of everything Marx wrote.

 

[thekingsmen]

etter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846: "As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World"

 

[thekingsmen]

Breh... it literally says, "Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859..." Not that Marx himself made that statement, nor that he quoted the lawyer in agreement, since that quotation literally flies in the face of everything Marx wrote.

Why is he quoting someone he supposedly disagreed with?

 

[JahFocus CS]

etter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846: "As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World"

That quotation explains the centrality of slavery to 19th-century capitalism. He isn't saying that slavery itself is good.

That being said, Marx wasn't a perfect thinker. He was a product of his time just like anyone else. And some of his language and the way he approached some things, I disagree with (e.g., all that rhetoric in your quote about how "progressive" North America is).

But to try to cast Marx as some pro-slavery thinker is simply intellectually dishonest.

 

[Madvillain]

In Capital, Vol. III, Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859, which exposes the cruelty and conceit of the proslavery South:
“Now, gentlemen … to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature. He has strength and has the power to labor; but the Nature which created the power denied to him either the intellect to govern, or willingness to work. [Applause.] Both were denied to him. And that Nature which deprived him of the will to labor gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living, useful for himself and for the master who governs him. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him; nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labor in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labor and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and society.’”[9]

Why is he quoting someone he supposedly disagreed with?

Breh, the reason he quoted the guy is in the beginning of your own post

 

[JahFocus CS]

Why is he quoting someone he supposedly disagreed with?

When you write, do you never quote someone you disagree with to demonstrate something?

I can't quote a white supremacist if I'm writing an anti-racist piece?

 

[Red Shield]

1. You were never looked down upon the same regard as blacks. Most people didn't know who a jew was unless it was addressed or announced.

2. Jews who got their money not giving a fukk about the system is a myth. They embedded themselves in every part of the system. The poor jews were left to defend themselves.

3. Tyler Perry doesn't own rights to his movies. He hasn't done a film independent of the major film companies. His net-worth isn't even close to any real major white actor out.

4. Every immigrant group has a rich and poor class. Even in this country. The difference between all of them and blacks, is black people gave up all their community foundations to join White Society.

really?

 

[Madvillain]

More on Marx & race/slavery/etc. because The Coli usually never knows any better:

http://www.internationalmarxisthuma...litionists-marx-slavery-race-class-salome-lee

The commercial buying and selling of African slaves transformed human laborers into fixed capital that produced the wealth enabling the Old World to develop the technologies for capitalist societies.


“Without slavery, North America, the most progressive country, would be transformed into a primitive country. You have only to erase North America from the map of nations and you will have anarchy, the total decay of commerce and of modern civilization. But to let slavery disappear is to erase North America from the map of nations” (Padover, 24).

Marx was not by any means arguing for the necessity of slavery for social progress here. In this context, Marx was not using “progressive” positively or “anarchy” negatively. He was simply attempting to depict the paramount importance of slavery for the American capitalist economy by portraying the way slavery’s absence would deflate the entirety of American society.

The categories “slave” and “Negro” were analytically separate for Marx in a way they were not to most of his contemporaries. An African was forced into the position of human fixed capital. Marx proclaimed, “A Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relationships.”[7] Marx is frequently misquoted out of context in the portion prior to it when he writes, “What is a Negro slave. A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other” (Padover, 13). But here he was only summing up Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in order to criticize him, not speaking in his own voice. Marx’s point, differentiating “Negro” and “slave,” is crucial to understanding that he did not succumb to the pseudoscientific racist ideology of his time.

Marx had also preemptively countered notions of Africans’ happiness in slavery and White slaveholders having innate abilities to govern effectively by noting that “50,000 slaves have vanished from Missouri, some of them having run away and others having been deported by the slaveholders themselves to the more southern states,”[8] in this way showing that slaves loathed their conditions and slaveholders were petrified of slaves revolting.

Elsewhere, Marx was scathing towards defenders of slavery who assert the interchangeability of the categories of “slave” and “African.” In Capital, Vol. III, Marx quotes an ice-cold statement from a pro-slavery lawyer in 1859, which exposes the cruelty and conceit of the proslavery South:

“Now, gentlemen … to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature. He has strength and has the power to labor; but the Nature which created the power denied to him either the intellect to govern, or willingness to work. [Applause.] Both were denied to him. And that Nature which deprived him of the will to labor gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living, useful for himself and for the master who governs him. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him; nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labor in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labor and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and society.’”[9]

In this part of Capital, Vol. III, Marx was drawing a parallel between how masters seek to justify their rule over their slaves, and the capitalists’ justifications for their domination over “free” wage labor. To this end, Marx added to the above in his own words:

“The wage laborer, like the slave, must have a master to make him work and to rule him. And presupposing the existence of this domination-and-bondage relationship, it is proper that the wage laborer be forced to produce his own wages and also the wages of supervision, as compensation for the labor of ruling and supervising him, ‘and afford to that master just compensation for the labor and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and to the society.’” (Padover, 26)

Here, without portraying slavery and wage labor as the same, Marx further connected the two labor systems.

This connection also implies the possibility of solidarity between these two groups of workers by introducing the master class’s similar perceptions of both. In addition, Marx thereby embarrassed the factory managers by comparing them to slave drivers. Marx considered it outrageous that factory managers defend their economic positions and higher pay based upon what they consider to be their innate superiority in terms of talent based on class grounds. Marx compared this to the outrageousness of slave plantation masters defending their socio-political and economic positions in terms of innate talent based on racial grounds. One is rooted in racist ideology based on pseudoscientific racism, while the other is classist in nature, but nevertheless functionalist and dogmatic.

Marx made this distinction in Capital, Vol. III, which, like his Civil War writings, has not been as widely read, thus helping to explain the misconception of Marx as a class reductionist by people who make too much out of passages like the one in the very widely read Communist Manifesto, where he uses the word “slave” in referring to the working class as “slaves of the bourgeois class.” As I have demonstrated, Marx was not so simplistic.

Marx to White Workers: Choose Race Solidarity over Class Solidarity at Your Peril!

Marx argued, “In the United States of North America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.”[10] By raising the floor as a collective with cross-racial class solidarity, Marx believed that the battle would be waged on a narrower front. Temporarily, Marx succeeded. As Kevin Anderson writes in Marx at the Margins, “In Marx’s view, the 1861-65 Civil War in the United States constituted one of the century’s major battles for human emancipation, one that forced white labor in both the United States and in Britain to take a stand against slavery.”[11]

It is clear that Marx was aware of other arguments against slavery, as seen in his reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe in an 1861 article for the New York Daily Tribune. He knew that White Americans were conscious of the subjective rationale for the abolition of slavery and there was that widespread empathy due to her Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[12] Because Marx believed that White Americans had heard that logic already, I argue that Marx was introducing another attack on slavery for the more empirical and unsympathetic. It was not that Marx disagreed with Stowe or felt that the devastating emotional and physical traumas of slavery were insignificant. He was simply aware of that discussion already being in circulation; thus, another argument had to be launched on another level that might appeal as more urgent to those who perhaps had racist convictions that formed an obstacle to their support of abolition or who perhaps could not understand how slavery affected their own lives. Marx was determined to reveal this connection in order to urge solidarity across racial lines. If White labor could see how they themselves were threatened by slavery, and thus why they had a stake in its abolition, perhaps it would stir a greater sense of urgency for them to assume the position against slavery.

In addition to insisting upon the abolition of slavery as a means for the proletariat’s emancipation, Marx had warned that if Whites were to try to push Blacks down into a caste within the working class, it would only widen the spectrum to which they could be pushed down. If Marx’s warning went unheeded, writes Anderson, “the result would be a new form of capitalism, openly structured upon racial and ethnic lines, in which immigrant whites would join Blacks at the bottom” (Anderson 90). There was the need to resist the seduction of the illusion of becoming part of the capitalist class, as Anderson writes, quoting Marx:

“This was accomplished by giving the poor whites’ ‘turbulent impulses for action an innocuous direction and, to tame them with the prospect of themselves one day becoming slaveholders.’ Thus, the sectional conflict over slavery operated in an ideological manner to deflect the poor whites from conflict with the dominant classes of the south.” (Anderson 89)

Not only was Marx calling for the White working class to abandon petty bourgeois fantasies; he insisted that they had only two options – allow a victory for the South and thus the expansion of enslavement across racial lines, or align themselves for the emancipation of fellow oppressed human beings to overthrow the Southern ruling class.

“The present struggle between the South and the North is therefore nothing but a conflict between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle broke out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side-by-side on the North American continent. It can end only with the victory of one system or the other.”[13]

In this statement, Marx was calling for an end of the assigning of Blacks to the lowest labor caste as fixed capital. He stressed that in order to even fathom a class-wide revolution in the United States, Whites must fight for the emancipation of Blacks from slavery into equals, to form a larger, unified working class, rather than attempt to perpetuate racial castes within the working class.

Marx & the North During the Civil War in the U.S.

Marx’s support of the North was not unconditional by any means. His support was only to the degree that there were abolitionists, and that he observed the Civil War as an opportunity for the working class to rise up in solidarity with fellow oppressed human beings. In her Marxism and Freedom, Raya Dunayevskaya cites Marx, who wrote in a letter to Engels, “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves … A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to conduct it constitutionally.’”[14] Marx urged early on that the Civil War be fought under the banner of abolition and to attack racialized slavery head-on. He sharply criticized non-Abolitionists in the North for skirting the matter.

“Anxiety about keeping the ‘loyal’ slaveholders in the border states in good humor, fear of throwing them into the arms of Secession – in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices, and sensibilities of these dubious allies – has smitten the Union government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half-measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the enemy’s most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil – slavery itself.”[15]

Calling out the war for what it was as “the Proslavery Rebellion,” Marx grew impatient with the sheepishness of the North in appeasing demands of the South and especially the Border States.

In August 1862, Marx published several critiques of Lincoln’s failures to abolish slavery. Asserting the voices of radical abolitionists in the North, Marx three years later advised Lincoln, in the 1865 Address of the First International congratulating him on his election victory: “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.”[16] While Marx was supportive of radical abolitionists in the North, he was critical of the government’s conservatism. The Union government had initially referred to runaway slaves as contraband, and the military had been ordered to return the property that had stolen themselves from their owners. Marx’s acclaim for the North was inspired not by the Union government, but by honorable acts of social justice by Northern abolitionists, who refused to view African people as commodities or “contraband.”

As Marx’s Civil War writings and his other writings on race demonstrate, his political agenda and his theory were not, as commonly misunderstood, limited solely to a focus on the emancipation of the White working class from factory labor, or to an exclusive concentration the destruction of capitalism. The destruction of capitalism was secondary; it was a means for a large-scale human emancipation that could restore labor from its alienated form back into its human essence. Marx’s primary concern was human emancipation, and the extreme degree of alienation of racialized slave labor and its role as the pivot of Western capitalist civilization marked it as the necessary place to start.

Contrary to accusations that Marx was a class reductionist, his Civil War writings reveal that race did not take a back seat to the class struggle; rather, the struggle against slavery was the harbinger that propelled the working class to join the struggle for human emancipation by identifying the different forms that oppression took.

EDIT: is this the whole article of the same thing Kings posted? Kings, why you twisting this up?

 

[thekingsmen]

That quotation explains the centrality of slavery to 19th-century capitalism. He isn't saying that slavery itself is good.

That being said, Marx wasn't a perfect thinker. He was a product of his time just like anyone else. And some of his language and the way he approached some things, I disagree with (e.g., all that rhetoric in your quote about how "progressive" North America is).

But to try to cast Marx as some pro-slavery thinker is simply intellectually dishonest.

The quote explains in his own words that without slavery, the economy of a nation would collapse. He said Direct Slavery was good. Marx was a Jesuit who supported an idea created by the Vatican. The same Vatican church that supported the slave trade of Africans. Now why would a religious institution support Marx atheist views?

Richard Owen, "Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx after Galileo, Darwin and Oscar," The Times Online, October 22, 2009.