>many writers and activist see the white race as a biologically empty
>and socially destructive but hesitate to become anti-white for fear
>of social alienation, so they settle for "anti-racism."
"White people have not always been 'white,' nor will they always be 'white.' It is a political alliance. Things will change" (Amoja Three Rivers, _Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White_, ed. David R. Roediger).
This, too, shall pass.
>if what you mean is that europeans were not, in and of themselves,
>more prone to repressive tendencies, then yes, i would agree.
That, too, but, more importantly, I'm saying that the ensemble of social relations labeled "Europe," "Europeans," & "European culture" -- like "the White Race" -- is very new, very modern, created through the process of primitive accumulation (enclosure + enslavement) & recreated in the process of the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism created the ensemble of social relations -- the Market created & maintained by the State, namely warfare & law enforcement, supplemented by extra-legal violence -- that gave rise to "Europe" & the "White Man." "Europeans" did not create capitalism; capitalism created "Europeans." Pre-capitalist denizens of the area now called "Europe" did not think of themselves as "white," "European," etc. "Negroes" did not become enslaved; enslavement created "Negroes."
***** Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are utilised in order to produce new raw materials, new instruments of labour and new means of subsistence. All these component parts of capital are creations of labour, products of labour, _accumulated labour_. Accumulated labour which serves as a means of new production is capital.
So say the economists.
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. (Karl Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital," _The Marx-Engels Reader_ 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, NY: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 207). *****
> > This kind of attributional error that puts the cart before the horse,
>> so to speak, is rooted in commodity fetishism; recall Marx's analysis
>> of "the eighteenth-century Robinsonades" in _Grundrisse.
>
>have not read it...
***** The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's _contrat social_, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism....It is...the anticipation of "civil society"....In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc.,# which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual -- the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century -- appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. (Marx, _The Grundrisse_, _The Marx-Engels Reader_ 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, NY: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 222) *****
# On "natural": Keep in mind that in Marx's later works, the word "natural" is best understood to mean "spontaneously grown, not consciously determined, etc," in contradiction to the commonsense understanding of "nature" as eternal, unchanging "essence" beneath the artificial "appearance."
>the modern notion of race would not have developed if it were not
>for capitalism
Right you are.
>race could go away now without their being a corresponding fall of
>capitalism, but it hasn't yet
And I doubt that it will without the abolition of capitalism.
> > While slavery existed in the
>> American South, ideology characterized slaves as "happy darkies";
>> with the Civil War & emancipation, the old idea of "happy darkies"
>> receded while a new idea of "dark criminals" emerged. Criminal
>> justice became a part of reaction against Black Reconstruction.
>> Similarly, in reaction against the partial success of the Civil
>> Rights movement & other social movements of the 60s, criminal justice
>> expanded to reproduce "persistent patterns of multi-faceted social
>> inequalities that correspond with ethnic differences."
>
>phew. i understand the components of your arguments but they seem to
>contradict. can you simplify it for me?
Chattel slavery created race; after the emancipation, the _primary means_ of the production of race in the absence of chattel slavery became _criminal justice_ (with support from extra-legal violence such as lynching); the partial success of the Civil Rights movement (voting & civil rights + affirmative action) made many secondary means of the production of race either inoperative or inefficient (mostly the latter); hence the wars on crimes & drugs since the mid-70s, for racism (as well as sexism, heterosexism, & other oppressions) helped (& helps) to manage the reserve army of labor & intensify labor discipline, both of which have been necessary to reverse the trend of stagnant profit rates (they have succeeded in reversing them to a certain extent -- hence the "boom" of the Clinton years).
No criminal justice, no race.
However, no criminal justice, no capitalism either.
Hence the difficulty of abolishing "whiteness." To be "white" now is, in the main, to be a cop or cop lover (by cop lovers I mean those who do not actively resist the wars on crimes & drugs). There are too many cops & cop lovers today, & some of them aren't even "white" out of uniform.
Yoshie