While in this current period of transition and adjustment, I am happy and grateful to be continuing a discourse on the ongoing concerns of this blog, and consider myself extremely fortunate to have the support of so many friends to make this possible.
Up to this point, we have been addressing through historical and theoretical readings an approach to a critical Marxist historiography that articulates the historico-dialectical constitution of classes in the capitalist mode of production, both in and through what are typically considered to be subsidiary categories in Marxist thought, such as race and gender.
While this is leading to a clear critical engagement with theories of intersectionality and class reductionism, I am not yet there myself; however, I am taking up, in part, David McNally's challenge to the former current in its taking for granted the prior existence of these categories it finds at the intersection.1 What interests us here is how capitalism's universalized form of class antagonism is historically constituted through such particular expressions, and how to develop a historiography adequate to that challenge. This post continues this concern, but, for the moment, adopting a register of experimentation in light of new constraints. As such, we will take this thought's development through my first readings since beginning my incarceration, and the questions that have arisen from them on space and geography, time and history, and a logic of differentiation in Marx's Capital, and how these influence our understanding of the process of racialization.
A few weeks ago, when reviewing Soren Mau's Mute Compulsion,2 we noticed that there remains an ongoing deficiency in much of contemporary and past Marxism's ability to locate differentiations within classes in a formal logic of capital. Thus, we find many formal accounts of capital to have little political insight to offer on such issues. At this point, we should be very conscious of how critical a failure of our theory this is, if we can indeed do nothing about it. However, we continue to posit here that we can overcome this problem if we also confront the assumed separation between historical content and formal logic, and instead think and brace the two together in a philosophy of historical praxis. It is through the relief of historical consciousness that the abstractions dominating our lives gain a determinate character to us, becoming in the concrete the unity of many determinations, and it is here that we learn where we can grab onto a hand- or foot-hold, in the course of their many reproductions, the very exercise of history.
To this end, we begin with a focus on the way in which Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, begins his analysis and conception of Decolonization as "quite simply the substitution of one 'species' of mankind by another," a substitution that is "unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless."3[3] This introduces Fanon's articulation of the specificity of the colonial world's "compartmentalization" of people and their conditions of existence. In this biological language, the notion of speciation carries with it a sign of the depth of the existing rift between distinct groups of human beings. Rather than naturalizing it, Fanon aims here instead to illuminate this and its essential logic. As he tells us, "this compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never seem to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species i.e. what race one belongs to."4
We encounter here a register of distinction and dissonance. Social reality appears to us in the guise of natural selection and affinity. And yet, Fanon has already supplied us with the initial means of overcoming the fixity of this Manichaean world. For the challenge of "Decolonization, we know, is an historical process [...] it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self-coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance."5 Likewise, it is "by penetrating its geographical configuration and classification [that] we shall be able to delineate the backbone on which the decolonized society is organized," within and against its compartmentalization.6
The racial speciation of the human being encounters its potential negations in historical time and geographical space — the carving up of the old world in its overturning and the self-knowledge of these levellers in the way that this process necessarily came to be. These negations, however, cannot merely lay aside their degradation to subhumanity. They must proceed by way of it as their human reality. The division of the human being as species forms the condition by which, in this process of differentiation, Fanon identifies and conceives of the necessity of a new kind of humanity. For "the 'thing' colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation,"7 and the "colossal task" of decolonization is nothing short of "reintroducing man into the world, man in his totality," which will also require "the crucial help of the European masses, who would do well to confess that they have often rallied behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues."8 The bitter experience of the Algerian Revolution still makes apparent to Fanon the necessity of a universalist expression, despite the submission of the empire's working class to their own compartmentalization. What might retain the truth of Fanon's speculative vision for an emancipatory humanism? How may the necessary recognition of race's deep division of the human species-being foster a substantive universalism, rather than mere empty paeans to such?
The problematic notion of the "human" brought about by humanism's history is understood by Fanon to be the expression of a particular existence, one that still ultimately relies on a principle of humanity that it degrades in its course of actualization, thus undermining itself. So he says, "Western bourgeois racism [...] is a racism of contempt -- a racism that minimizes. But the bourgeois ideology that proclaims all men to be essentially equal, manages to remain consistent with itself by urging the subhuman to rise to the level of Western humanity that it embodies."9 This semblance of the human is one of its dissolution, and a dismemberment carried out on a global scale, experienced as a speciation through the specificity of the historical trajectory it takes on this world-historical path. To arrive at this, and the recognition of racial speciation as an error, however, Fanon does not reject the human being as a concept, but sees the actuality of a new humanity brought about by the Third World's self-liberation. In the conclusion, he drives this vision home with the weight of historical destiny:
"But what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. No, it is not a question of [going] back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times. It is not a question of stringing the caravan out where groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front, and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less and talk to each other less and less. The Third World must start over a new history of man which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification, and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, and exploitation and, above all the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off."10
The physicality of this passage is its communication of the human reality of colonialism's separation, and alienation of the species from itself. In that which it cannot be, a new idea and reality of humanity realizes what it must become. This is the kind of determinate negation of the colonized world of man's modern compartmentalization that Fanon tears asunder by its own means of realization. This is how his encounter with the Colony may produce Decolonization, and the stage of national consciousness of the independent Nation may yet reveal itself to be a vanishing necessity, to be superseded by this new universal, socialist humanism.
What mediation unites this passage of Colony into the Nation, and thus also connects it to the Nation's supersession? In the immediate and most abstract sense, the categories arrive to us as forms of being, as historical realities in a definite relation we encounter through the struggles animating their form. As such forms of being, in their operations we can also determine them to be definite forms of organizing social production within a historical and geographical hierarchy. The intertwining of Colony and Nation with the imperial project brings to light the essential terrain of conflict between these forms as appearances of the State, territorial configurations of sovereignty. That the colony may pass into nationhood itself brings out an indeterminate quality of this sovereignty, as does the constitution of a citizen subjectivity that is defined in relation to a colonized non-citizen subject. This constitutive exteriority appears as a problem to the contested nature of the colonized and racialized subject's sovereignty.
If subhuman, if not its own, why does the Empire kill to protect its holdings? What must be preserved by violence? The State's administration of violent force is the contested object of these struggles at first, and thus the passage of Colony into Nation. But to pause here, for Fanon, is a dead end, for "national consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell,"11 and "if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism,"12 then the transformation of social relations will be deferred for a project of bourgeois consolidation within the colonized themselves.
Decolonization as a project of transforming the social relations of the colonized, by their own self-activity, is the necessary passage through the dead end of nationalism. How is it that the passage from Colony to Nation also carries with it an emancipatory potential, if it is also fraught with danger itself? Let us see the older origin of the notion of the "colony" to answer this question.
In his New Science, Giambattista Vico traces the origins of human political institutions, the world of nations that was his object of study in 1725, to common customs and practices using a genealogical study of the poetic foundations in human language and conceptions of history. Among the many etymologies, he makes it known that the term "colony" properly signifies merely a crowd of workers who till the soil for their daily sustenance.13 The transformation of the colony from a form of subsistence workers to a deployment of labor requiring state-backing through charters carries with it the weight of a history of new social relations, namely, the nature or character of that labor, and thus the study of the State in the mediation of Colony and Nation necessarily becomes the study of the mode of production.
But we should be cautious here, as what initially appears is an identity between the mode of production and the forms of labor's exploitation. This is a common mistake because it is an easy one to make, simple as it is to a version of Marxist universal history that is mere stage-ism. Rather than focus on the concern of whether or not Decolonization's struggles are properly proletarian, sufficiently subsumed to capital, Fanon instead observes them on the merits of their transformative potential and universalist basis in the negation of life alienated from its conditions of existence and realization, a register of revolutionary consciousness that resonates in the mind and body as one in that collective struggle. Decolonization as the passing, vanishing necessity of nationhood is a moment of historico-geographic becoming.
An aspect of this historical constraint is the territorial integrity it gains through its materialization in the Border. In the triadic formula of Capital, Labor, and State,14 the Border is a lever of differentiation in the claim to legitimate subject status of a nation-state, an axis where the false opposition of the political and the economic disappears in the convergence of political rights of citizens and the wage differentiation of labor arbitrage. This dynamic of struggle constitutes the State, whether as Colony or Nation, into a distinct territory, a claim over a space as the guarantor of a definite social metabolism in relation to this spatial obligation. As the reproduction of this social metabolism, it is the guarantor of a definite kind of order, a deferral of history's course in the arrested movement of its potential agents. This constitution of space as an object produces distinct subjectivations in political compositions, which in turn inform and contest the integrity of that Border.
We are not only discussing lines on a map, but a process of dividing the world that occurs as a logic penetrating all levels of human experience. James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk reveals the porous nature of these institutions through the characters’ interactions with each other, as well as with the State. The process of self-recognition in the Other that Fanon develops into the decolonizing subjectivity is more clearly here the fabric of human social life, as Tish reflects on her love of Fonny:
"It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body--the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life."15
The spatialization of the self is a condition for its actualization in practice. In establishing a home together prior to Fonny's arrest, Tish remarks that "we were to spend a long time in this room: our lives."16 History, both personal and social, becomes senseless without a geography of its construction. The assembling and situating of space, both material and psychological, is a critical part of life-making. This is the heart of Tish's pain — the knowledge of a distance between her life and Fonny's, their experiences; While it is not insurmountable, it is also not perfectly commensurate. "He has moved—not away from me: but he has moved. He is standing in a place where I am not."17 This negativity is a recognition of that limit which becomes the new condition of their mutual self-knowing. And, as with the baby Tish carries, it is a link to a life that continues on, lives on through others, despite an individual's captivity. "The growth of the baby is connected with his determination to be free."18 It is but one dramatic example of the non-autonomy of the individual life. In the novel's concluding section, 'Zion', we see the connection made between Tish and Fonny's family and Fonny's labor as a sculptor. Fonny's desire to be free and the birth of their child are bookended by a working image. The lives we make and one day leave are the continued project of future generations, who themselves may yet save the dead.
In the juxtaposed images of Fonny's sculpting and his incarceration as the passage into a new life, we see the integral relation between space and the positing of purposeful, creative self-activity. It is Tish who provides this, in her own moment of transit, that, while pedestrian, carries with it the significance of world-history, with us at all moments:
"I looked around the subway car. It was a little like the drawings I had seen of slave ships. Of course, they hadn't had newspapers on the slave ships, hadn't needed them yet; but as concerned space (and also, perhaps, as concerned intention) the principle was exactly the same."19
It is through the perception of space, in relief against the historical consciousness which makes up a life's narrative — interweaved and realized through other lives — that reveals the intention of a world not destined to be this way. It is an intention revealed retroactively and then reconstructed, as reason: "I'm tired, and I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense-—Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen? But that's a really terrible thought. It can only come out of trouble—trouble that doesn't make sense."20 If, as Jameson says, history is what hurts, geography acts as a counterpart to recall that pain, the senses in a unity with the mind's critique of its conditions.
Just as Fanon depicts the compartmentalized world of colonialism through a sweeping survey of the social, material, and psychological dynamics of the Algerian Revolution, distilled into a universal experience, Baldwinrenders the experience of this compartmentalization among racialized subjects within the Empire through the narrative of Tish, through personal accounts of individuals expressing and struggling against a pain, a wound, in common. Between these two readings are their united themes of dismemberment from capacities, from purposeful, creative self-activity, the very conditions of existence and life-making. While it is indeed a necessity initiated by deprivations from such needs of reproduction, this brings us to a notion of life beyond mere subsistence. The form of our collective self-making activity attains validity in the world as "labor", carrying with it this import on the ethical significance of our practices, on registers social and individual, historical and geographical: objectivities given life through this agentive subjectivation within their constitution.
The specificity of this form of labor is then important, as the identification of their specific form is provided by the antagonism between this capacity of our purposeful activity and the ways in which this world's reproduction appears to have turned this very capacity against its own realization. Marx begins this analysis of social form within the form of the commodity. Through commodity’s aspects — natural and social, in use-value and value, respectively — he identifies the specificity of commodity-producing labor as a labor of dual aspects. It is a concrete labor task that expresses its social validity as an indifference to this task, and exists as human labor in the abstract, this capacity to act rendered autonomous from its means of actualization. The world of commodity value is a world wherein the value that social activity in production creates is indifferent to and separated from its own content. Even before we arrive at the full concept of the commodity labor-power, we can see how the form, at this stage abstracted from wages, is still an action which undermines and frustrates its executing agent. Rather than a property of objects themselves, the commodity is the product of a form of activity in which there is a contradiction between the social necessity of its constitutive relations, i.e. it is a precondition and result of a historically unfolding and refining class struggle.
The abstract violence of spatial compartmentalization is the violence of the commodity; force becomes itself an economic power. Just as Tish sees on the subway, in a reflection on her beloved's incarceration, the intention is carried through in a world made by that definite history and its transformation of a people's geography. If it is this labor that traps us in a definite form, how is it, in turn, an emancipatory capacity as well? To address this, I want to draw on Soren Mau's usage of Marx and Engels' notion of the "corporeal organization" of the human being as a species that externalizes its organic metabolic processes through social production and tool-making, the ability to consciously develop the techniques of that process through the reflective potential opened up by this constitutive separation of the human and its organs of realization in action. This openness of human labor's metabolic foundation demonstrates an ontological frailty in human social organization, namely that surpluses can be created by some, and appropriated by others. This openness, however, also means that this need not be the case. As is answered by the history of the class struggle by the history of the class struggle in all its forms and divisions, forestalling and initiating transformations of social relations. For while this constitutive separation allows for the possibility of exploitation and the domination of one class by another, it also reveals that this form of metabolism, no matter the form of labor, relies on a recognition of a necessity always beyond the individual, that the autonomous appearance of the individual is itself a product of the historical production of a space which reproduces humanity as separate, isolated units. By extension, the speciation of colonial racialization is a constitutive continuity of the commodity's world, compartmentalization dividing body and mind across continents and lives. While the commodity is constituted socially, it is a form of sociality that obscures this condition of its realization.
As the commodity abstracts labor from its concrete tasks to make objects commensurable in exchange, so too does this form abstract from the conditions in which the concrete labor tasks are performed. The making of the commodity is in this way a fragmentation and recombination of space for the purpose of surplus valorization. This is achieved through the very process of differentiation that sustains the formal equality of incommensurable qualities in monetary quantities. The compartmentalized world is the world divided along these contours of underdevelopment and unevenness. Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers a definition of race/ism that corresponds with this geography of political economy's critique, as "the exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death."21 The viscerality of this definition is its immediacy in relation to the quality and conditions of life that are possible in a racialized society. As we understand the space carved out by the commodity, so too can we understand this process of racialization as an existence ordained to those caught in the pathways carved by capital's accumulation process, the obverse of human labor's ontological frailty as the constitutive separation becomes a reproduction by way of separation, recombining only to shed as much labor as possible; surplus valorization is to form a value out of rendering a portion of the human species as surplus to social necessity, locked out of the conditions of life's actualization. Race acts as a historical and geographic marker of the particular intensities of this universalizing class experience, a particularity we cannot ignore in its formation of political subjectivities, and this as an aspect in the objectivity of social forms and this reproduction, such as the commodity, capital, the State.
The passage between Colony and Nation shows that these relations are moments of definite configurations, neither fixed nor eternal. These are projects that themselves have to be administered by intention, purposeful human activity within determinate constraints; while the State may appear to make history, it does not do so under circumstances of its own choosing. Institutions operate under constraints, just as do the individuals who make up their course of reproduction in their activity that is only ever socially valid. The fragility of human life, its ultimate transience, finds one expression in the potential historical transience of institutions, the spatial transience of capital's pathways of accumulation, just as the ability of human life to live on through others expresses the conditions of maintaining continuity in the process of reproduction and its own constitutive disruptions.
Octavia E. Butler's The Parable of the Sower is a striking vision of this impermanence in motion, lived through the individual life in a dissipating socius. Laura Olamina perceives the fracturing unity of her world early on, remarking years before abandoning the walled cul-de-sac of her home neighborhood, "Well, we're barely a nation at all anymore, but I'm glad we're still in space."22 The wall very quickly ceases to be a defense worth speaking of, unable to truly separate Laura's family and loved ones from the consequences of the social collapse surrounding them. Earthseed: The Book of the Living is a product of thought within this crisis, articulating a practice of its transformation. "Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about,"23 she says in a moment of conflicting visions. Is this world's repair to be abandoned? Perhaps it is about a selective repair, an achievement of evolutionary adaptation, where agentive selection becomes an essential moment of creative self-activity. Rather, not all that which is breaking need be fixed. "All that You touch You Change. All that You Change Changes You. The only lasting Truth is Change. God Is Change."24 Change and divine providence here are the exercise of human brain and muscle. When the wall comes down, it is not the end of the world, but the end of a world, the bordered territories of old a moment in the creation of what is to come.
“Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory” by David McNally
Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. 1.
Ibid, p. 5
Ibid, p. 2
Ibid, p. 3
Ibis, p. 2
Ibid, p. 62
Ibid, p. 110
Ibid, p. 238
Ibid, p. 97
Ibid, p. 144
Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Penguin Classics. 200.
Mészáros, István. Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. Monthly Review Press.
Baldwin. James. If Beale Street Could Talk. 52.
Ibid, p. 61
Ibid, p. 191
Ibid, p. 162
Ibid, p. 114
Ibid, p. 3
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso. 107.
Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing. 21.
Ibid, p. 276
Ibid, p. 3