Social Chauvinism as a Political Category in the French Metropolis posted by Richard Seymour

This is the paper presented at Historical Materialism 2013 by Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem.  I am grateful to them for allowing me to republish it here.

We would like to thank Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc and John Riddel for their precious advices and references. Of course, they cannot be blamed for the potential errors that may follow and they cannot be associated with the political views expressed here. 

What did we try, Stella and I? Two years ago, we were in HM London talking about “What the fuck is up with French feminism”. We then tried to answer to a quite understandable amazement over French feminist endorsement of islamophobia and colorblindnes. Now, we would like to tackle another complex phenomenon: the French left attitude towards race and its contemporary implications for political organization. We tried to see the French left attitude towards race and racism as a historical product, as a cumulative process that is not simply “traditional” but contingent on specific historical events and struggles. To do this we proceed as follows: first assessing the relevance of Lenin’s concept of “social-chauvinism” to the French left, and then, proceeding to understand how social-chauvinism can be, in a nutshell, associated with historical materialist theorizing of political categories and with racial formations. Finally, we will delineate the consequences of these concepts in the practice of the Third International in the early twenties-thirties France and in the theoretical failures of the last thirty years’ left to tackle race as a specific phenomenon. 

I

Social-chauvinism is a term repeatedly used by Lenin in numerous texts and speeches that accompanied his assessment of the collapse of the Second International. Social-chauvinism meant precisely one of the features of the crisis of social democracy. It referred to the alliance between major social democratic forces with their own imperialist State in the advent of the First World War. 

Social-chauvinism was not a political category clearly defined by Lenin. It is a blurry word, even a slur. However, this slur echoes to our present day. Social chauvinism referred in the past to an analysis of the positioning of social-democracy at a geopolitical level. However, the echo, the “todayness” of social-chauvinism is, from our perspective, a domestic political category. Social chauvinism designates a contemporary disdain of the French left for racial relations and even an endorsement of various strands of racism (islamophobia, law and order issues, warmongering against drugs) and an unclear stance against imperialism. Indeed, Mélenchon – and his “Left Party” [Parti de gauche] (among the most important organizations of the Front de gauche, Left Front) – is famously associated with a very harsh attitude towards minority self-organization, public expressions of religious identities, with women wearing the veil in associative nurseries, and an anti-imperialist impulse biased against mostly US imperialism, NATO (Mélenchon’s stance remains very soft on the French military and its imperial take on Africa, Afghanistan, merely calling for feeble reform. Front de gauche MPs have voted and supported the French war in Mali).

Social-chauvinism is therefore the name of an increasingly hegemonic political articulation of radical reformism in French left organizing. As revolutionary Marxists, this evolution is indeed very worrying to us and needs a careful longer-term analysis. Social-chauvinism is not without contradictions and countervailing tendencies. To introduce social-chauvinism, in our perspective, as a political domestic phenomenon more generally, we should emphasize several points, that we would like to relate in our opinion to the main defects of social-democracy that Lenin outlined in his famous texts about the crisis of the Second International:

First of all, a narrow and very domestically focused conception of the worker’s movement. It is a characteristic that can be termed: “internationalism in form, chauvinism in essence”. Today as yesterday, verbal appeals to “workers of the world” are overlapped with a form of cultural and political indebtedness to the French State and its legacies. It is related to an idea of the State as a somehow neutral apparatus that can be manipulated at will, to the interest of a class or another. The French Nation as an imagined community is associated with an imagined “progressive” popular history of France that can be counterpoised to a reactionary France. This is at the very heart of Mélenchon’s and the Front de gauche’s reappraisal of the national anthem and their very effective marches during the presidential campaign that mimicked the taking of Bastille of 1789. 

Second, we can outline a general hostility to minoritarian expressions of non-whites, often taken as potentially disruptive to French polity (either in the form of what appears to be “petty delinquency” or in the form of ostentatious display of religious belief). This chauvinistic emphasis on French unity and “vivre-ensemble” (“living together”) is covered by a socialistic call for class against identity. By contrast, in our opinion, it crucially relates to an age-long relationship between the French worker’s movement and parties to the workforce based in the colonies and the colonial movements that emerged against white supremacy and colonialism.

II

Analysis of contemporary social-chauvinism therefore needs to take into account age-long aspects of social democracy and working class consciousness in a French context. To assess the emergence of a social-chauvinist problematic, we have to focus on the First World War as a shifting point in the French social structure: it is a moment when, instead of mainly Italian and Belgian immigrants, subalterns from the French colonial empires are for the first time introduced in the metropolitan workforce on a large scale: notably workers from North-Africa, what we term “Black Africa”, and workers from Indochina (that is Vietnam). This change amounted to a growing relevance of anticolonial agitation in the metropolitan area for left organizations and a growing strata of intellectuals who were subjects of the colonial Empire. 

According to Lars Lih “Lenin’s political outlook and strategy from 1914 on stemmed from a definition of the situation that he took lock, stock and barrel from the writings of “Kautsky when he was a Marxist.”

What did Kautsky’s scenario entail before what Lenin saw as a betrayal of his very principles? According to Lars Lih, Kautsky’s analysis in the early years of the twentieth century was premised on a thesis of global revolutionary interaction, that is, interaction between a socialist revolutionary agenda in Europe and political and anticolonial revolutions  on the agenda in so-called “backward” or dominated nations. Meanwhile, this global interaction is inscribed within global imperialist rivalries, capital exports in the global South and increasing “world war” tendencies.

Therefore, Lenin’s point, after Kautsky, was to analyze the demise of social-democracy as failures to consider crucial aspects of this global revolutionary scenario, its pitfalls and challenges for the worker’s movement. And Lenin connects that failure to a social analysis of European workers’ movement:

The period of imperialism is the period in which the distribution of the world amongst the ‘great’ and privileged nations, by whom all other nations are oppressed, is completed. Scraps of the booty enjoyed by the privileged as a result of this oppression undoubtedly fall to the lot of certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the working class.

Well, these quotes are fairly known. There is a great deal of controversy against the labor aristocracy thesis, that is, the idea of a very small portion of the working class being bribed, bought off, with imperialist superprofits. Nonetheless, let me read a comment by a famous opponent of the labour aristocracy thesis, namely, Tony Cliff:

The expansion of capitalism through imperialism made it possible for the trade unions and Labour Parties to wrest concessions for the workers from capitalism without overthrowing it. This gives rise to a large Reformist bureaucracy which in its turn becomes a brake on the revolutionary development of the working class. The major function of this bureaucracy is to serve as a go-between the workers and the bosses, to mediate, negotiate agreements between them, and “keep the peace” between the classes. This bureaucracy aims at prosperous capitalism, not its overthrow. It wants the workers’ organisations to be not a revolutionary force, but Reformist pressure groups. This bureaucracy is a major disciplinary officer of the working class in the interests of capitalism. It is a major conservative force in modern capitalism. 

Well, there is a great difficulty in Cliff’s thesis that economic roots of reformism lie in “economic prosperity”. There is a mechanistic bias here that can lead to the dangerous idea of reformism being prone to disappear in the advent of crisis. However, what is interesting here is that economic privilege secured by imperialism can entice a section of the working class movement to support the State, even in its imperial aspects. Again, Cliff says, “If Reformism is rooted in Imperialism, it becomes also an important shield for it, supporting its ‘own’ national Imperialism against its Imperialist competitors and against the rising colonial movements.”

There is thus a clear connection between the crisis of social democracy on the one hand, and imperial rivalries notably around colonial possessions on the other. Actually, you can find in social-chauvinistic literature (in Lenin’s sense), socialistic colonial utopias – not only in Bernstein’s and opportunists’ speeches and writings, but also on the left of European social democracy. Paul Lensch, one of the early opponents of revisionism in the SPD, has later on written a book that was an open endorsement of Germany in the World War. In his plea for German imperialism, Lensch wrote: 

After the war, colonial policy will be of the nature of a social policy, for only if the colonial representatives of a government were conscious of their responsibilities as guardians of the interests of the colony, would there be any prospect of making the Colonies what, in the interests of our whole culture and material conduct of life it is essential that they should be: the pillars of that international, or rather intercontinental, division of labour by which the temperate zones are supplied with those indispensable raw materials and fodder stuffs, without which the maintenance of our industrial and agricultural development is impossible. In other words, the revolution which the war has brought about in the capitalistic world means a new epoch also for the colonial world.

Lensch, in his social chauvinistic approval of colonialism, envisions a future development of State Socialism where the colonies would be integrated in a global division of labor. Therefore, social-chauvinism can be told to arise precisely in an endorsement of the very position that imperialist countries and States do have in the international division of labor, that is, social-chauvinism means one form or another of integration into social democratic demands, strategy, analysis of the central tenets of a global division of labor (and, domestically, of metropolitan consequences of it, e.g. in the racialization of the workforce). 

What these developments show is that Lenin’s term, his slur, about social chauvinism, cannot be separated from a specific relationship that working class formations develop towards colonies. This relationship lies in the apparent link between capital expansion and accumulation on the one hand, and on employment and better-wage opportunities on the other. That association between accumulation and job creation is an illusory and fetishistic one, obviously. We know from Marx onwards that capital actually produces unemployment and surplus populations, industrial reserve armies, and drives wages down. However, the real appearance of capital, brought about by the separation between the workers and means of productions, produces the illusion that capital is the origin of wealth and jobs. Therefore the specific features of imperialistic accumulation – and one might add, the racial advantage of white workers in the labor market – can lead to a form of attachment of the worker’s movement to a national imaginary community. That form of attachment, linked to the global division of labour, carries with it a whole social and cultural racial formation. 

III

We would argue then that the Komintern’s policies addressing the question of the colonial question offer a crucial counterpoint to a longstanding political current in the worker’s movement that can be termed “social-chauvinistic”. Addressing France, it is interesting to see how the implementation of these policies has taken place. In the very early twenties, the French Communist Party established an “Intercolonial Union” that gathered several activists from the colonies. I cannot provide a comprehensive history of the colonial policy of the CP in France. However, one can pinpoint several aspects:

First, colonial policy of the CP was fuzzy and quite unfocused. There were very heroic campaigns for the independence of a region of Morocco that had made session in 1921 and with which France was at war. But that work was being done erratically.

This erratic developments led to autonomist tendencies in the Black communist movement that broke into a separate “negro” organization, the Committee of Defense of the Negro Race

That organization, CDRN has had a very complicated history, the CP gaining hegemony in it at once in the early thirties. What is remarkable is the way in which the CP was involved, often against its own will, in a very tortuous politics of collaborating with nationalistic Black tendencies, with building all-Black unions among Black toilers in Marseille, with tendencies more involved in cultural self-consciousness, with various strand of garveyism.

This is just to take as an example revolutionary Black organizing in France. It is a very complicated example. In this whole story, the CP scrapped many Black activists for being “too autonomist”, and it often sacrificed potential political advances to political lines decided in Moscow. For instance, more sectarian policies towards moderate or nationalistic “negro” organizations or figures were implied by policies of Class against Class in the International Communist Movement. What it amounts to, from our perspective, is that the way in which the Komintern outlined a global “negro question”, an early idea of the Black Atlantic, really contributed to a very rich culture of racial pride alongside with working class identity and solidarity, leading to a more complex tactics of class building. That kind of politics provide a compelling resistance to social-chauvinism in the way in which it ties working class politics with specific issues and oppressions. If the Komintern and the French CP gave credit to Black (or other non-white) autonomism out of pragmatism, that pragmatism teaches an important lesson for practice and theory. In practice, it meant that the racialization of the working class brought about during the First World War and after, meant for communist organizing that an important contradiction was at work in Black autonomist impulses. Indeed, as long as social-chauvinism is a bulwark to revolutionary consciousness, breaking the “white blindspot” (a term taken from Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen), breaking the white blindspot, integrating various strands of non-white organizing at the center of the predominantly white working class, can challenge working class focus on the stability and reformability of imperialism.

To elaborate on the disruptive aspects of autonomous organizing and its integration to a left strategy, we can focus on the politics of the revolutionary left during the French Popular Front of 1936. Daniel Guérin and his comrades of the left tendencies of the Socialist Party did uphold during this period the legacy of anti-imperialism and antiracism that the CP was embodying several years ago. Now, from 1937 onwards, the CP abandoned its stance for colonial independence, in order to secure the coalition of the left with the centrists in parliament and government, and also to avoid any interference with democratic France. In other words, the CP had become clearly social-chauvinistic, leading to their approval of the dissolution of the “North-African Star”, a revolutionary nationalist group strong both in Algeria and in the French metropolis among Algerian immigrants. 

Guérin and the left revolutionary current of the Socialist Party opposed on many occasions the colonial policies of the Popular Front as part of a general strategy of undermining the counter-revolutionary impulses of that government. Through this, they established an anti-imperialist center, creating links with British panafricans, George Padmore and Jomo Kenyatta. These currents were numerically weak, but no doubt that today’s trotskyst would better reread that story and how the idea of working along with non-white autonomous groupings can be part of a general struggle against social chauvinism, that is, a struggle against reformism.

IV

Now, theoretically, we will try to show that the consequences of the struggle against social-chauvinism are very relevant to our current situation. Through this, we will assess contemporary problems of the left and how its theoretical biases prevent it from tackling these problems. The following questions must be asked:

- how does the social chauvinist current has taken roots in the French situation and become hegemonic electorally and on the ground, even as far as silencing or even erasing a whole far left anti-imperialist commitment? We can clearly connect that hegemonic take of social chauvinists over the whole left as a consequence of an inability of the anti-imperialist far left to have a principled stance on race, theoretically, and we can further relate it to the far-left’s compromises with more mainstream theories of racism and antidiscrimination policies. It therefore lies in the radical left’s inability to grapple theoretically with its own legacy. 

- How did social-chauvinism evolve through the years and survive to the ’68 social unrest? The answer must lie in the way in which the left and the unions reacted to capitalist restructuring in the 1970’s onwards. For instance, the main lay offs that occurred in the deskilled sector of the working class during the 1970’s were politically organized to favour French workers in taking the workers from the colonies back to “their countries”. How did the left and unions react to these? They often accompanied the process, while the sections opposing it were not theoretically armed to tackle white privilege as a political construction here, and how autonomous immigrants, or immigrants’ sons and daughters struggles were connected to the racialization of the economic crisis.

- how can we conceptualize here and now race in France and fight social-chauvinism? There has been a unique contribution to a French theoretical approach to race in the practical work of Indigènes de la république and the theoretical work of their founding member Sadri Khiari. Really a historical analysis must begin there. Then, we can learn from their work a very important distinction to do between racial strands of the working class, that is, the idea of separate (while intermingled) Time-Spaces. This notion is connected to the idea of global worker historians of integrating geography, demographics and mobility studies into a framework of class, assessing the different temporalities of class formations. This would permit us to understand how different working class constituencies constitute different identities, different movements and different parties (including racially defined parties) and how to work out a real internationalist articulation of social demands. 

V

It means for us to be creative. To imagine the revolutionary subject as a process of self-reformation, of tensions and conflicts between parties, unions, movements, between white and non-whites (and at another level, between different non-white ethnicities). To imagine the “Modern Prince” as a broad subject that would coordinate out of a process of mutual correcting impulses. The revolutionary party of tomorrow may not be one unitary working class party, but several social movements, parties and associations, organic intellectuals, hegemonic apparatuses, that would collectively, and through fierce internal controversy and conflict, challenge reformism and social chauvinism (I do not mention “sexism” because it is not at the center of our focus here, but it is clearly to be integrated to our perspective). 

As a matter of conclusion, and to defend this perspective from an orthodox tradition, I would like to mention Trotsky’s late rejection of the One-party system in the Soviet Union, in The Revolution Betrayed:

Every word is a mistake and some of them two! It appears from this that classes are homogeneous; that the boundaries of classes are outlined sharply and once for all; that the consciousness of a class strictly corresponds to its place in society. The Marxist teaching of the class nature of the party is thus turned into a caricature. The dynamic of political consciousness is excluded from the historical process in the interests of administrative order. In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts” – some look forward and some back – one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found in the whole course of political history – provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.

Labels: 'race', chauvinism, france, racism

From the EDL to what? On anti-racism strategy. posted by Richard Seymour

This is a document I submitted for the bulletin of the last IS Network conference.  It is partially based on a post I wrote a few months ago.

I. The EDL may be finished, its method of street demonstrations having run out of steam according to its former orange eminence, Tommy Robinson.  The scattered forces of the far right may be declining - if still resourceful, still too numerous, still dangerous.  However sanguine our assumptions on this point may be, though, the wider situation is as toxic as it has ever been, fertile ground for a more effective populist-racist formation.  The strong performance of UKIP demonstrates this potential.  This new organisation Robinson intends to form with his wooden double act, Kevin Carroll, backed by his comprador allies, the state-sponsored ex-Islamist Qilliam Foundation, will surely seek to plough the same terrain.

II.  The EDL was formed in 2009, fusing a number of heterogeneous energies.  In one sense, it was a belated expression of a certain type of ‘war on terror’ politics, defending good old British boys against Anjem Choudary’s coffin-botherers.  In another, it represented a perverse reanimation of Ulster Loyalism in the English context - the slogan ‘no surrender’ being taken straight from the death squads of the dear six counties.  But it also represented the failure of New Labour’s ‘Britishness’ project.  Having English, Scottish and Welsh defence leagues was not merely a function of basing the organisation on football casuals and thus deferring to the national division of teams.  It underlined just how the axis of xenophobic nationalism had shifted.  It also very effectively drew upon and organised the popular mytheme of ‘the white working class’ - supposedly ignored by liberal elites, abused by multicultural politicians, and oppressed by political correctness.  This ideology initially began to be articulated under New Labour, and represented a right-ward shift within the Blairite section of the ideological-state apparatuses.  But as with so much material that begins life as part of a neoliberal triangulation strategy, it was far more potent in the hands of bovver boys.  At the core of it, of course, is the EDL’s contention that Islam is ‘extremist’, that it wages a genocidal war on all Christians, and as such represents an enemy within ‘Christian’ or ‘Western civilisation’.  The spread of this style of thinking, conspiracism, is linked to the rise of political paranoia in an increasingly competitive, dog-eat-dog social world.  At any rate, this interpellation of ‘culture’ - or a racialised conception of culture - into the political terrain of post-credit crunch Britain achieved one very salient effect.  It articulated the concrete experiences of decline - relative national, imperialist decline; economic decline; the declining living standards of workers and a section of the middle class - within a single narrative of resentment structured by Islamophobia.  The EDL’s narrative obliquely ‘mentioned’ real social facts, and provided a schema through which supporters could live their relationship to those facts.  And of course, it mobilised those supporters to address the ostensible ‘cause’ of those facts in what was at first a highly effective strategy of street mobilisations with football casuals at their core.

III.  This immediately posed a unique kind of challenge to traditional anti-fascist strategy in the UK, as the pivot on which a wider anti-racist politics turned.  The logic went something like this: fascists are both the most dangerous spearhead of racist reaction and potentially its weakest point.  We can and should mobilise the broadest possible unity against the far right; in doing so we have to challenge their racism and we can force our allies in this fight to adopt a more consistently anti-racist position.  Of course, even where we do not succeed in this wider objective, a conjunctural defeat for fascism is no small thing.  However, the EDL, for all that it knowingly drew in significant strata of the old far right, never became a fascist organisation.  This is why the formulations from the SWP and UAF were, some slips notwithstanding, generally very careful: for example, the EDL was “a racist organisation with Nazis at its core”.  It resembled a fascist organisation in some respects.  For example, its emphasis on control of the streets.  Or, its forms of alcohol-greased, macho solidarity, its rabble-paramilitarism.  Or, its focus on visual communication and symbolism invoking a cod national mythology (the crusades).  Or, finally, the fitful tendencies of the EDL leadership to try to broaden its range of targets (to include students, for example) so that its counter-subversive activities begin to vaguely resemble traditional fascist anticommunism.  Yet, it did not become a fascist organisation dedicated to the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the smashing of workers organisations.  In its overall make-up, its strategy, its ideological orientation, it was closer to Geert Wilders, a populist-rightist on the far right of liberal democracy, than to Nick Griffin.  And the existence of such an ambiguous, ‘contradictory’, hybrid formation posed, as I say, a challenge to the anti-fascist strategy.  The tactical response of antifascists, sensible in its way, was to treat the EDL as a kind of fascism-in-becoming.  Since fascism was its telos, it had to be dealt with as would any fascist organisation operating in the same way: broad antifascist coalitions harnessed, where possible, to a strategy of militant confrontation led by the radical wing of the antifascist movement.  This usefully limited the EDL’s physical advances, in part by forcing the police to adopt different containment strategies, and among other factors it helped prevent their demonstrations from acquiring a certain critical mass.  However, this was only ever useful as a holding response.  The underlying problem was that the EDL were building on ideologies that were profoundly mainstream.  This is why the media, and certain politicians, can often be found treating the EDL as if they were merely misguided and pursuing counterproductive strategies.  And a strategy of harassing the EDL without also doing work on the underlying political and ideological ground could only ever yield short term results.

IV. The fight against racism is a long-term fight that has to be conducted on many different levels.  It is not just a question of winning immediate political battles - a glorious victory in Walthamstow or whatever.  The tempo of political struggles is extremely rapid, and the half-life of a particular struggle can be very brief indeed.  But these struggles are fought on a terrain formed by years of cultural and ideological work, between forces shaped by that same work over a long duration.  The tempo of cultural and ideological battles is, compared to political fights, glacial.  But just because there are no immediate successes in these fronts doesn't mean they are of no value - they are absolutely central.  The intense racist backlash around the English riots, or that following the Woolwich killing, was not inevitable.  Such episodes take place on the basis of efforts by diverse forces to elaborate new racist ideologies over a long period.

V. We cannot fight the EDL without also combatting the other major forces of racism in society.  The EDL would be nothing without the tabloids, the police, the neoliberal parties in parliament, and so on.  The ideologies which legitimise the EDL's actions or at least render them as explicable reactions to extreme provocation, originate in Whitehall, the BBC, the press, parliament and the business funders of reaction.  And to defeat those forces we need a different range of tactics.  The EDL is primarily based on street violence, so the onus is on counter-mobilisation and self-defence.  The same tactics could not be deployed against UKIP, the Murdoch press, or the Home Office.  I don't propose a smorgasbord of alternative tactics here; I merely highlight the need for something more than counter-mobilisations.

VI. There is no future in attempting to collapse anti-racism into anti-austerity struggles.  Such attempts represent a strain of workerism, and have emerged from some surprising quarters - including Alexis Tsipras.  Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity.  Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on.  As I have suggested, one of the things that EDL racism organises is the experience of certain social classes in the context of crisis and decline.  And certainly, as a consequence, the struggles over the capitalist crisis and its resolution have a relationship to the struggle against racism: this means that initiatives such as Left Unity and the People's Assembly should take anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy.  But to understand the relationship between racism, economic crisis and emerging political subjectivities requires an analysis light years ahead of the lingering 'capitalist crisis = hard times = racism' model.

VII.  There can likewise be no attempt to collapse anti-racism into the antiwar movement, such as it is.  That is no less reductive.  For example, the analyses of the Woolwich killing that attempt to ascribe it to the 'war on terror', and therefore to orient analysis primarily toward antiwar activism, strike me as unconvincing.  Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale certainly seem to have responded to the context of the 'war on terror', and to have explained their actions in that context.  But the processes through which they decided to join the most marginal and militant of Islamist sects in the first place are likely to be rooted in the daily processes of British capitalism.  We need to fight and win that argument: that Britain is a profoundly racist and unjust society in which black people are humiliated and deprived in all sorts of highly visible ways.  More generally, the forces of racist reaction in our society are not monomaniacally obsessed with the categories of the ‘war on terror’.  UKIP, for example, is Islamophopic, but just as importantly it is anti-immigrant and xenophobically anti-European.  There is a rich brew of bigotries fusing together in provincial, parochial England, and their specific relationship to the daily workings of capitalism must be grasped as well as their imbrication with imperialist violence.

VIII. It's been obvious for a while, and it is more obvious now.  One cannot segment off different types of racism as if they are completely separate; they are mutually reinforcing.  The rise in Islamophobia, as we saw during the riots, and as is becoming clear from the intriguing raciologies arising from the Woolwich killing - the EDL speaker in Newcastle urged his audience to "send the black cunts back" - is not exclusive of a long-term regeneration of other types of racism.  Indeed, Islamophobia's role as the dominant form of culturalist racism permits the rehabilitation of the discredited elements of racial essentialism, while at the same time articulating them in a new form. What this means is not simply that Islamophobia is simply a cover for 'traditional' types of racism.  It used to be argued that it was merely a way of being racist toward Pakistanis.  No, current forms of racism do not simply reanimate older forms. As Stuart Hall put it, "Racism is always historically specific. Though it may draw on the cultural traces deposited by previous historical phases, it always takes on specific forms. It arises out of present - not past - conditions, its effects are specific to the present organisation of society, to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural processes - not simply to its repressed past."  The current forms of racism refer to and organise current antagonisms, expressed in complex political struggles, from the 2001 riots to the 2012 riots.  And there is something very specific about Islamophobia and its content - the obsession with religious identities, with the amateurish hermeneutics of the Quran, and so on - something very current.  The point is not that Islamophobia is a cover, but rather that there is a convergence in the techniques of racialisation, the political forces involved, and the ideational content involved in the types of racism in Britain today.  I think this means that it would a political mistake to try to identify one type of racism as the 'respectable racism' and simply campaign against that - the tendency is for racism in general to be made 'more respectable', and therefore we need a multi-pronged assault on racism in general.

Richard Seymour

Labels: 'british values', 'extremism, 'race', british state, edl, english defence league, islamophobia, New Category, racism, racists

Papists, secularists and capitalists posted by Richard Seymour

During the Pope's visit, amid some low key hysteria about Muslims plotting to kill his wholly holy holiness, there was some excitement among liberals and a few left-wingers, who took the opportunity to protest himself. The usual oblocutors of faith were there, among them Richard Dawkins and Johann Hari. We heard much of pontiffs and pederasts, papists and paedophiles, nuncios and nonces, as the Church's opponents outlined what they charge is a criminal conspiracy by leading figures up to and including Ratzinger himself to cover up the widespread beating and rape of children by appointed patriarchs in Catholic churches. In doing so, they allege, Ratzinger helped perpetuate the torture, when he ought to have stamped it out with the assistance of the police.

Labels: 'new atheism', 'race', atheism, capitalism, genetics, humanism, liberalism, racism, secularism, socialism

Class struggle and the invention of race posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'race', british capitalism, british empire, capitalism, class struggle, racism, united states, us capitalism

Locked up, locked down, locked out. posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'race', american working class, class, racism, us capitalism, US imperialism

Racism and the American class system posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'race', america, capitalism, obama, racism, us politics

Racism, anticommunism, and American exceptionalism posted by Richard Seymour

The question is this: why should it be that America's decisive turn to overseas empire in 1898 involved a dramatic worsening of the political status of African Americans and the explicit exporting policies of white supremacy to the new colonies, while the far more ambitious imperial grab after 1945 was not only non-colonial, but actually necessitated some concessions to African American struggles? Part of the strategic rationale for pursuing a non-colonial empire was discussed in Neil Smith's work on Isaiah Bowman, 'Roosevelt's Geographer', some of which I outline here. But there is another issue here.

This was Truman's problem. He was a racist from a segregated state who never abandoned his disdain for social equality, notwithstanding the pragmatic concessions he was willing to make in his political career (he supported anti-lynching laws throughout his time as Senator, for example - a stance that later helped win him the Vice Presidency). His close advisor George Kennan distrusted African Americans and Jews, and his anticommunism was bound up with his racism since, as he saw it in his 'Long Telegram', the Russian Revolution had overthrown "the Westernized upper crust" of the Tsarist elite, and revealed a population Orientalised by "a century-long contact with Asiatic hordes". As to the American polity, he had written in 1938 that the US should be turned into a "benevolent despotism" of upper class white males, excluding women, immigrants and blacks from the franchise. Truman chose segregationists and racists for his cabinet: his choices for Secretary of State were all racists in one way or another. James F Byrne was an explicit segregationist. Dean Acheson was, behind his smooth patrician veneer, of the same ilk. He disparaged Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, and was an open supporter of white supremacy in southern Africa. He reflected the attitudes of his class: "If you truly had a democracy and did what the people wanted," he once argued, "you’d go wrong every time". On top of that, the legislature was dominated by southern white politicians. These were not all open advocates of racist violence, as Senator Theodore Bilbo was, but most shared his basic outlook.

Even so, Truman wanted to create a broad, multiracial, anticommunist coalition domestically that excluded only the radical Left (which obviously had a vastly superior position on race), while allowing him to conserve the racial hierarchy with some modifications. To do so he had to somehow neutralise the threat from the radical left represented by Henry Wallace (who was successfully vilified as a communist agent) and also overcome the militantly left-wing and pro-Soviet African American leadership, exemplified by people like the Fabian socialist W E B Du Bois, and the New York City council communist Ben Davis. It turned out that anticommunism was quite useful for conserving segregation and keeping black people in their place. First of all, the attacks on the more racially inclusive and radical CIO unions strengthened the racist unions and helped drive African Americans away from the organised working class. This partially accounts for the later strength of more militant-sounding but sectarian groups such as the Nation of Islam. Secondly, the attacks on communism helped domesticate the extant African American organisations. The NAACP was witch-hunted, Du Bois driven from its leadership, and the organisation essentially reduced its criticisms to the meek claim that America's stance on race relations at home harmed its struggle against communism. Thirdly, the turn to the Cold War was coterminous with a sharp rise in violence against African Americans, and a wave of repression that was justified in part on the grounds that African Americans would have been perfectly happy were it not for the subventions of Stalin's local auxiliaries. The red-scares were of course not completely successful in mitigating such struggles since, in order to neutralise progressive opposition and replace popular front liberalism with vital centre liberalism, it was necessary to accomodate some of the demands of African Americans and indicate that desegregation was an ultimate goal of the US elite.

Globally, Truman also had to find a way to win over newly decolonised societies and particularly the indigenous elites without ceasing his embrace of European colonial powers. His administration did not, any more than Eisenhower or Kennedy administrations, favour 'premature independence' as it was called. The line was that the US supported self-rule for the colonies - eventually. This, of course, was also the line of many colonial powers themselves, including Great Britain. And here, anticommunism was also enormously useful. Firstly, it dramatically reduced the scope for anti-colonial criticism within the United States itself, associating it with communism. As late as 1960, the Reader's Digest pleaded with readers "Don't Decry Colonialism", complaining that "Communist mouthings about colonialism not only have poisoned public opinion in neutral nations but have affected some Americans", and assuring everyone that the system was being gradually and beneficially relinquished before the natives were even ready. Secondly, just as southern politicians justified repression of African American struggles on the grounds that the insurgency was the product of red agitation, so colonial systems and white power structures in southern Africa and elsewhere could justify their existence on the grounds that opposition was Soviet inspired. This was also true of US corporations overseas. In Robert Vitalis' book American Kingdom, we see ARAMCO defending its Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps by describing Arab strikes against the system as simply following the communist party line. Thirdly, of course, America's attempts to frustrate anticolonial movements in Korea and Vietnam were justified as attempts to frustrate Soviet expansionism, with Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung reduced to mere ciphers for the machinery of 'totalitarianism'. Official documents, such as NSC 68, recognised decolonization as a distinctive dilemma for the US, describing it as an increasing "absence of order among nations" that was becoming "less and less tolerable". And where anticolonial rebellions broke out against American allies, the US officials understood well what was at stake. America's representative in Nairobi knew that the Mau Mau struggle was motivated by the violent and exploitative racial hierarchy perpetrated by settlers. But such understanding was repressed in favour of explanations referring to what was and what was not alleged to be in the interests of "International Communism" as opposed to the "Free World" (of colonies and dictatorships).

The interpretation of its global hegemonic struggles as a battle with 'totalitarianism', the antagonistic negative ideograph of American democracy, was ratified by the exceptionalist discourse in which America, uniquely, was possessed by a messianic goal of exporting democracy. Like all exceptionalist discourses, American exceptionalism highlights real discongruities only to overstate them, while sidestepping more significant continuities. As Daniel Rodgers points out, exceptionalism involves more than just difference: it contrasts "one’s own nation’s distinctiveness to every other people’s sameness – to general laws and conditions governing everything but the special case at hand." You can still see this in operation today, even in critical histories. Thomas Borstelmann, one of the better writers on the Cold War and the colour line, spends a great deal of time demonstrating that for the American ruling class there was no tradition of recognising a right of self-government for non-white people - but then finally falls back on the assertion that on those occasions in which American policymakers did seek to undermine European colonialism, as with Truman's sanctions against the Dutch in Indonesia, it was partially the result of a "traditional political principle" arising from 1776 and all that. To service that myth, while also dealing honestly with the facts, Borstelmann simply gainsays himself. Mary L Dudziak similarly bases her assessment of 'Cold War Civil Rights' on the idea that America was intent on ensuring that democracy was appealling to those new nations emerging from decolonization. That doesn't exhaust her analysis, which is frequently insightful, but it does foreground what is supposedly taken to be unique about America. The precedents for African Americans appealing to American democratic traditions to support their political claims are outlined by Dudziak, including the stance of Du Bois and the NAACP during WWI (although I think it notable that such tendencies are most pronounced during authoritarian crackdowns and wars). Dudziak also recites the Myrdalian position that the conflict between racism and democracy is a distinctively American problem, and that America's experiences in WWII traumatically exposed that conflict. Myrdal was, for his part, confident that a distinctive "American creed" could overcome the atavistic cultural throwback that he took racism to be.

This exceptionalist language triumphed after WWII. It had its precedents, but leading American thinkers and statesmen were more apt in previous years to draw on European heritage than to reject it. Woodrow Wilson appealled to Teutonic bloodlines to explain the success of American statebuilding. The early basis of the 'special relationship' between Great Britain and the United States, after decades of wars and tensions, was precisely the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity (in his 'Iron Curtain' speech, Churchill would substitute for Anglo-Saxon, "the English-speaking world"). After WWII, however, it was suddenly extremely useful for the US to be seen as different from those nasty old European powers. And thus, a process of historical forgetting was introduced. A caesura, separating not only America from Old Europe, but also the America of the past from America post-1945, was energetically introduced. The official doctrine of colour-blindness also assured blindness toward America's previous obsession with race, its explicitly imperialist doctrines, its official promotion of eugenics and racial 'science', and so on. Suddenly, slavery and racial genocide was epiphenomenal, or an unfortunate aberration from the sacred canons of constitutional liberty. Just as soon, America's colonial experiment was treated as aberrant. The language of empire was expunged, official discourse decontaminated, and the long-standing association in American thinking of liberty and democracy with 'whiteness' suppressed. That could not have happened were it not for the propagation of militant anticommunism.

Labels: 'race', anticommunism, cold war, colonialism, racism, truman, US imperialism

The malleability of 'race' in wartime posted by Richard Seymour

" Do Albanians look like Serbs?

"No. Of course the differences are only approximate but it is often very easy to tell a Serb from an Albanian in Kosovo long before he or she opens his mouth.

"The Serbs often have black or dark brown hair and are generally darker and more heavily built than Albanians. Their appearance is fairly typical of southern Slavs. By contrast, the Kosovars look Celtic to a British eye. They have curly hair, which is often blonde or rust coloured, and their skin tends to be very pale and covered in freckles. Their eyes are often green or blue and their build is much more slender than that of the Serbs. They have longer heads. It is not surprising that they look so different as they belong to different races that have very rarely intermarried." (Marcus Tanner, 'WAR IN THE BALKANS: THE BALKAN QUESTION; KEY ISSUES BEHIND THE WAR EXPLAINED', The Independent, 11 May 1999).

Labels: 'race', imperialism, racism, serbia, war, yugoslavia