[lbo-talk] "Race, " Racism, & Politics vs Moralizing was Re: ... F-9/11 and racism Part 2

[Carrol Cox]

(Fields, continued)

The foregoing line of argument raises the question of how one group's
understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others
when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who
poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting
power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer
--force-- is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go
around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself.
If the slaveowners had produced white supremacy without producing
cotton, their class would have perished in short order. A colonial ruler
does not just want the natives to bow down and render their obeisance to
their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to
work in mines and estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to
hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the
natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few
cases in which submission _is_ an end in itself, force is never enough
in itself. Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards and the Shah's
police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains
except force, nothing remains--period. The rule of any group, the power
of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the
least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as
different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison
would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always rests on force in
the last analysis. But a ruling group or state that must rely on force
in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of siege,
rebellion, war or revolution.

It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and
minds of the less powerful, inducing them to "internalize" the ruling
ideology (to borrow the spurious adjective-verb in which this artless
evasion has so often been couched). To suppose that is to imagine
ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread
like a rumour, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would
presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by
the same means, which is impossible.

And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the
upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to stop (at least in
places where people tend to obey them) not by the exercise of
power--neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile--but by
the exercise of authority. Why? Not, surely, because everyone shares a
belief, an "attitude," about the sanctity of the law, or holds the same
conception of a citizen's duty. Many citizens who would unhesitatingly
stop for a red light, even at a deserted intersection at 2:00 a.m.,
would painstakingly calculate the relative cost and benefit of breaking
laws against environmental pollution, insider-trading of securities, or
failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service, and then obey
or violate the law according to how the calculation worked out.

It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a
red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take
for granted what everyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be
more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes
that discovery--by making people stop again and again for red
lights--without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc
calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the
demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment that
removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The
ritual repetition of the appropriate social behaviour makes for the
continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate
"attitudes." There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear
to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient.
Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can "have" as they have a
cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies
by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in
their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they
must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain
changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.

_Shaping the Terrain_

Let me pursue a bit further this analogy of terrain. But imagine a
physical landscape: trees here, a river there, mountains, valleys,
quicksand, desert and so on. And imagine an observer at the altitude of
an earth satellite, who for some reason can follow the paths of people
over the terrain but cannot see the details of the landscape. The
observer sees people tunneling under, climbing over, jogging to left or
right, moving with odd swimming motions, even disappearing
unceremoniously into the quicksand Given a modicum of training in the
orthodox tradition of American history, he might conclude that people in
this part of the landscape have "attitudes" calling for one kind of
movement, while people in that part have "attitudes" calling for another
kind--all of these "attitudes" possessing a "life of their own." Given a
modicum of wisdom, he would realize that the key to understanding the
people's movements is to analyse the terrain.

Therein, also, lies the key to understanding how one group acquires
authority, imposes order, or achieves hegemony. Exercising rule means
being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants
everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in
the forests to the west. Mission accomplished: everybody moves east.
Because they all share a conviction -- an "attitude" -- glorifying the
virtues of easterly movement? Not necessarily. All that order,
authority, hegemony requires is that the interest of the mass in not
getting burned alive should intersect the interest of the rulers in
moving everyone to the east. If easterly movement subsequently becomes
part of the routine by which masses organize their lives independently
of the rulers so that such movement becomes part of a constantly
repeated social routine, a vocabulary will soon enough explain to the
masses --not analytically, but descriptively -- what easterly movement
means. And that vocabulary need not and cannot be a duplicate of the one
spoken by the rulers.

Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose
terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and
natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines
seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority
lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an anomaly apparent even
to the least observant and reflective members of Euro-American society
did ideology systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along
for a hundred years after its establishment without race as its
ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some
people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely,
liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was
nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for
granted -- as the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of
colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical
explanation where everyone in society stood in relation of inherited
subordination to someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman,
vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord
of Lords.

It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation;
it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans
resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining
Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more
straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era
of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty
as theirs by natural right. [38] They did not originate the large
nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological
inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be
very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today
denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-
Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as
Frederick Douglass put it, "not _color_, but _crime_." Afro-Americans
invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not
troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary
to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who
petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore
Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the
language.  Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology
to be expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception
to a radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of
imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology
proper to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are
an anomalous exception. There is no paradox; it makes good, common
sense. Indeed, dare I go further. In the wake of the American
Revolution, racial ideology assumed its greatest importance in the free,
bourgeois society of the Northern states, where both slavery and the
presence of Afro-Americans became increasingly minor exceptions. [41]
The paroxysm of racial violence that convulsed the South during the
years after emancipation, and the ever more detailed legal codification
of racial proscription, represent the nationalization of race, an
ideology that described the bourgeois North much better than it did the
slave South.

[End of Extract from Fields]

The political implications of Fields's argument can be expressed in the
slogan: Racism does not cause the oppression of black americans; the
oppression of black americans causes racism.

Jenny's arguments are, I believe, quite consistent with this
perspective.

Carrol