many challenging points, but the nub of the argument I think is the following two disagreements:
First disagreement. I wrote, critically of Roediger and Allen
>I would say the core of their belief is
>> that white people as a whole gain from black people -
>
To which Christopher replies
>historically without a doubt but the current situation is more complex:
>sometimes they do marginally, sometimes quite a bit, frequently in not
>necessarily in obvious material ways, and increasingly (at least for the
>moment), less so viz "globalization." can you cite some evidence to the
>contrary?
It depends on your analytical approach. If you mean that white people have higher incomes, better jobs access, better representation in the state, less police repression, then plainly white people have a differential advantage over black. But a differential advantage is not the same thing as directly gaining from black people (unless one starts with the distributionist assumption that there is only so much to go around, so that whatever white people get, black people lose).
My point is that as long as the white working class is exploited then it cannot be said to be gaining from black people. On the contrary. The white working class loses. It gets less back in the form of wages than it gives in labour. Indeed, support for race discrimination amongst white working class people enhances the condition of their exploitation. As long as they support ruling class racial thinking they lack the ideological independence to assert their own interests. Consequently their own organisations are fatally weakened. Racism is not a gain for white working class people, it is a loss: it undergirds the condition of their exploitation.
For the white working class to gain directly from black people they would have to be exploiting them - in the strict sense of annexing black people's surplus labour as their own. But until such a time as the white working class's income falls short of its efforts then it cannot be said to be exploiter, but remains exploited.
(At the risk of provoking, the white working class is *more* exploited than the black, as long as it occupies the more productive industrial jobs, giving up a greater share of its surplus labour time to capital. All this from Marx's chapters on wage differentials internationally, in Capital 1. Which is not, of course, to say that the conditions of existence of white people are more onerous, which they are plainly not.)
>
>which is
>> incompatible with the analysis that the working class is exploited:
>
>i don't get it. are you arguing that all we need to know is that the working
>class is exploited? are you arguing that some in the working class have not
>benefited from others in the working class? are you one of those folks who
>thinks that real labor history started after the civil war?
Second disagreement. I wrote
>More to the point, may I suggest that forcing such distinctive
>> historical events into the ahistorical category of racism robs them of
Christopher replies
>
>aaarggh! so capitalism is a historical category and race isn't? what happened to
>your above point that race emerges out of the social conflicts of capital? did
>it emerge out of those conflicts only to become a historical epiphenomenah?
>
(sorry to drive you to 'aaarggh') Yes, I think that the category of 'capital' (I mean it as historicised by Marx) is indeed specific, while that of race tends to an abstract universal.
Considered as epiphenomena of the ideology of race, real conflicts assume a timeless quality. Fixing on such a formal characteristic, many social scientists discover the same conflicts throughout history, without differentiation. I could cite Daniel Goldhagen, for example, who forcibly conflates the discrete points of German history, of Enlightenment and Fascism to the same underlying trend of anti-semitism. In his mind no difference exists between the goal of eighteenth century assimilation and twentieth century extermination. All is part of the same continuum of anti-Semitism, which is wrongly taken as the principle motivation of German history. Behind Goldhagen's thesis is an eternalisation of the Jewish people as a subject outside of history. (Not surprisinlgy Marx's statement that liberation of the Jews comes with their own liberation from Judaism, appears in Goldhagen's mind as at one with Hitler's final solution).
I wrote
>>
> their specificity. After all there are many distinctive enslavements,
>
Christopher wrote
>yes, but we are talking about racial slavery. but then, you don't seem to think
>race is a historical category.
No, I don't think it is. Slavery in the ancient world, for example appears to have the same naturalised qualities (as in Plato's republic, for example). But despite the formal similarity too racial slavery in, say, Bristol in the eighteenth century, ancient slavery was without doubt a great advance on the alternative (the killing of captives), whereas no such claim could be made for the British slave trade.
>
>> and the Nazi holocaust had quite distinctive features from the
>> annihilation of the Indians.
>
>yes, but that does not mean that race had nothing to do with these events...
>>
Well, 'something to do with' leaves all of this rather undetermined. The formal similarities in the exterminationist ideology rather leaves the differences out of the picture. First, the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of the decadence of German society. By contrast it was the robust health of the colonies that set them on a collision course with the Indian tribes. Furthermore, Britain and France armed native Americans against the colonists, formalising their land tenure in largely fictitious treaties whose purpose was to hem the colonists in. The support of native Americans for French and British imperialism against the colonists indicates that something rather different was happening in America than in Germany.
-- James Heartfield