Theft of Substance by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
In the last post, I concluded a brief survey of the racial segregation of the labor movement in the US during Reconstruction with the categorization of white supremacy as a social relation of production. Here, I wish to further elaborate upon the manner by which the apparent historical particularity of a form of racial supremacy thought to be mainly dominant in the US content can be termed a distinctive quality of the capitalist mode of production. It would not be enough to simply demonstrate the ways in which white supremacy is also a global phenomenon, though this is most certainly part of the case. Rather, I believe that this general character of capitalist social relations can be drawn out from the particular, and that this is a key contribution of the body of thought that introduces us to the concept of racial capitalism. For, as we are to discuss white supremacy in the register of a social relation of production, we are then also developing an idea of how race operates within this register of capitalism’s totality. That is, to discuss race and its historical development in categorical terms as a social relation of production is not to locate the specific operations of these categories and provide a definition, but to situate their movements within the historical process that is the formation and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. In this post, I aim to derive from an examination of the role of history in Marx’s method a proposal for thinking of race and class in relation.
Throughout this blog, I have often used the term “racial class formation” to identify this process in its historical development. I have never been quite sure as to its accuracy, but have found it, within the context of its use, to adequately grant a sense of the movement of a process of “historical construction.”1 Ira Berlin deploys this term in his work Many Thousands Gone as an engagement and corrective to the notion that race is socially constructed. It is not merely that contemporary social relations are always creating race, but that these social relations are informed by a historical process of these modes of social practice. With this invocation of historical time, the mutability of categories is not annulled, but we are confronted with a more rigorous criteria for understanding the possible conditions of their transformation. To this point, Berlin cites Edward Thompson on class, telling us that class and race are “a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and atomize its structure”, thus that we may only contend with these categories as “the product of history,” only animated and made actual by “the contested social terrain in which men and women struggle to control their destinies.”2 The historiographic engagement on this terrain of struggle is the cultivation of the practice of historical thought.
Yet this equivalent treatment of the categories of “race” and “class” makes obscure the specificity of either term. What is at stake here is not so much the clarity of a precise definition, but the development of these concepts such that their historical actuality in concrete struggles can adequately account for the phenomena which they attempt to explain. While obviously both products of history, if race and class are identical in their analytical weight, we risk the inability to truly establish the logical connection that exists between their identity within this differentiation. While Berlin’s work creates a rich historical portrait of the changing composition of race relations across North American slavery from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, its focus on the contingency of the relations between slave labor and the racialization of blackness does not synthesize towards the apparent necessity between these categories that arrives by the peak of the American antebellum racial order. To say that “slavery’s changing character suggests that the first two centuries of African-American captivity were no prolegomenon to an antebellum quintessence” concludes the work as a capitulation to the ability to discern any specific essence to the character of the society produced and reproduced by racial chattel slavery.3 Furthermore, it appears to undermine its own argument regarding the distinctive regional regimes of slavery and race that developed in the North American mainland, as it is clear here that what unites any analysis between the Northern colonies, the Chesapeake Bay region, the low country South of Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Mississippi River Valley is their eventual cohesion into societies ruled by a dominant white class in control of state power. Even the waning presence of slavery in the North would maintain a racial hierarchy informed by the underclass status of black labor’s enslavement in the Southern plantation order.
But this relationship of race and class is still complicated, as Berlin’s opening of the contingency of their historical development is an essential moment of understanding their cohesion as the outcome of a process of contention and struggle. By understanding the racialized master-slave relation of these plantation orders as one of ongoing contention and negotiation over the terms and conditions of existence between antagonistic social relations, we have a synchronicity between the situation of race and class that poses a difficulty for its apparent lack of differentiation. In their work Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi & Howard Winant develop a critique of class-based theories of race, where the developments of racial politics in the twentieth century provide the basis for an account of race as an autonomous field of social conflict. Their account of the deficiencies of class-based theories of race focus on the prevailing Marxist location of the site of class-conflict articulated by the labor market, where racial categories are pervasive as stratifications of the working class, the precondition and result of a dominant class’ ability to develop and maintain a strategy of “divide and rule,” preventing the working class from organizing and acting upon its universal interests. Within this paradigm, Omi and Winant correctly identify that the problem of addressing race on these terms is that if race is epiphenomenal to labor market competition, then “it is quite difficult to specify anything about actual production relationships that is specifically racial.”4 Elaborating upon this critique, they say:
The problem with this is that it relegates subjectivity to the sidelines of the model. Class organization–across racial lines–is seen as the objective and primary necessity which all workers face. Racially based organization and identification is implicitly a form of “false consciousness.” This may work fine in the abstract, but concretely it would require the suppression of racially defined experience in order to operate. Historically speaking, the call for class unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms. This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.5
The import of this critique to Marxist thought should be clear. If Marxism’s concepts, such as the social relation of production, cannot provide any significant explanatory power for race, one of the most definitive categories for delineating the balance of forces in social conflict in capitalist modernity, then its claim to possessing an adequate critique of the capitalist mode of production and thus the terms of social action in class struggle are in serious jeopardy. Quite rightly, Omi and Winant point out that this conception of racial dynamics in class formation that solely sees race as the product of segmentation and split labor markets as a subversion of class unity produces an account of race that “remains an exogenous element” to these social relations.6 If race can be introduced from outside of the labor movement and destroy the working class’ capacity to act, then there is no hope that the class could ever achieve unity on its own terms. Further, race as an external, epiphenomenal aspect of these assumed dynamics of class formation mean that there is no account of race that forms as an extension of the capitalist mode of production’s historico-logical movement. This version of the social objectivity of class as a social relation of production maintains a methodological separation between subject and object. The living actuality of historical struggles, the racial forms in which class struggle has taken as concrete political subjectivity, play no role in informing the object of class struggle.
Yet Omi and Winant’s offerings run into problems upon which they establish the basis of their critique. Proposing two opposing poles in thinking of race, one of race “as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective,” and one of race as “mere illusion, a purely ideological construct,” they seek to navigate away from this opposition of iron veracity or falsehood by offering “race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”7 This leads to their definition of “racial formation” as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed,” in “a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” as part of “the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled.”8 However, this already faces problems from the standpoint of a critical position on the category of race. For Omi and Winant, a difficulty resides in “posing race as a problem, a misconception left over from the past, and suitable now only for the dustbin of history.”9 Instead, they claim that since race “continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world” that the task of theory is but to “explain the situation [...] to avoid both the utopian framework which sees race as an illusion we can somehow ‘get beyond,’ and also the essentialist formulation which sees race as something objective and fixed, a biological datum.”10
The error of this position is that this theorization of race, in merely seeking to understand, forfeits the critique of race as an organizing principle for social action. While the vulgar economism of some Marxist conceptions of class unity fail in their inadequate conception of the historical relation between race and class, this conception, while relying upon race’s historical prevalence, appears to jettison the historical specificity, thus historical transience, of race to capitalist modernity for a conception of its reproduced veracity. This remains a necessary moment in the development of a critique of race, but we do not have here an engagement of racial politics that can account for an evaluative position where race could be an error in the organization of social life. If race signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies, then we are also left with the historical question of how did this delineation of social conflict arise? Is this the logical and historical continuity to all social conflict in the US? Is social conflict an inevitable part of all human social life?
I. Externalization, Objectivity, Alienation
In the engagement with these problems that race and class pose to Marxist thought, I wish to emphasize an essential point to grasp in the development of a Marxist conception of social relations: that the logic of Marx’s thought is at once a historical treatment. But it is a historical treatment distinct from the engagements with particularity above. Marx’s critique of political economy as it appears in Capital is that of rational reconstruction. The historicity of Marx’s thought is of the way in which the logical movement of the capitalist mode of production derived from its constitutive categories and production relations give us a practical theory of history in which the reason of the separation of subject and object is developed, and thus a basis for a philosophy of praxis within a determinate social form can be established. Two of Marx’s earliest insights can serve to clarify what is specific to this approach to history. For one, we turn to the introduction to the Grundrisse:
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them. Further, since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form, or even travestied. For example, communal property. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself – leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence – it always conceives them one-sidedly.11
Here, Marx establishes not necessarily a limit, but a necessary precondition for the self-knowledge of historical thought in bourgeois society: that within its present, we conceive of historical movement in relation to it as the necessary point of arrival. This is the initial one-sided movement of historical consciousness, but the self-knowledge of this movement and the critical stance towards its activity becomes a means of engaging scientifically; science not as the mere reproduction of a method, but the simultaneous critical reflection upon the merits of a method in its deployment. The appearance within bourgeois society of economic forms and social relations that predate it establishes both a continuity of identity, and an essential difference within that continuity that makes its historical quality apparent.
We can view this development of Marx’s thought as in continuity with the claim that opens the first chapter of his and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party, that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”12 Bourgeois society and its basis, the capitalist mode of production, forces a historical reflection of the nature of human social life that has led to this development, one that, even in the mid-nineteenth century, appeared to possess the capacity to encompass and subsume all human social production. This is the obverse of the initial one-sided conception of bourgeois society’s teleological self-conception of progress. The capitalist mode of production is a social metabolic order of class antagonism, that, in its generalization through the real subsumption of capital, reveals the conditions for social activity in the relation of class.
The critique of political economy as it appears in Capital expands upon the character of these conditions for social activity. It is not just that class is a representation of an identity at hand to be readily assumed, but it is an objective criteria of the form of social production. This objectivity contains within itself a subjectivity of the human labor that externalizes itself in the form of this objectivity through its process of reproduction. Apprehended at this level of abstraction, however, reveals nothing specific or historical about the subject-object relation, or the very intelligibility of such a division. An intellectual genealogy into the specificity of this separation to Marx’s concern is taken up by Georg Lukács in the final chapter of The Young Hegel, where it is concluded that the central concept of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind is that of “externalization,” and a critical link is established between this development in Hegel’s thought and Marx’s early critique of it that results in the revelation of alienated labor. For Hegel, externalization, as it relates to the relation of subject and object, is the form in which the history of objectivity is portrayed, as a dialectical movement in the journey of the identical subject-object on its way back to itself.13 This is in relation to the immediate existence of the mind in conscious life:
The scientific statement of the course of this development is a science of the experience through which consciousness passes; the substance and its process are considered as the object of consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what falls within its experience; for what is found in experience is merely spiritual substance, and, moreover, object of itself. Mind, however, becomes object, for it consists in the process of becoming an other to itself, i.e. an object for its own self, and in transcending this otherness.14
The subject-object dialectic here is identical to that of substance and mind, where mind, as subject, externalizes itself in the comprehension of experience, becomes an other to itself in this process, and through this otherness to itself can obtain self-consciousness. This is the foundation of that process that Hegel comes to understand as history: “the process of becoming in terms of knowledge, a conscious self-mediating process–spirit externalized and emptied into time.”15 Spirit is Hegel’s concept to name this relation of a human consciousness of itself such that history becomes an externalized reintegration into the absolute subject. In this conception, the beginning and the end of history coincide, the end always prefigured in the beginning. Hegel’s teleology of history is one of inevitability in the rational reconstruction of its result:
But this substance, which is spirit, is the development of itself explicitly to what it is inherently and implicitly; and only as this process of reflecting itself into itself is it essentially and in truth spirit. It is inherently the movement which is the process of knowledge–the transforming of that inherent nature into explicitness, of substance into subject, of the object of consciousness into the object of self-consciousness, i.e. into an object that is at the same time transcended–in other words into the concept. This transforming process is a cycle that returns into itself, a cycle that presupposes its beginning, and reaches its beginning only at its end.16
Marx’s early critique of this conception of history in such works as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Holy Family presage the conception of bourgeois society’s one-sided self-knowledge cited above from the Grundrisse. Hegel’s absolute spirit “makes history only in appearance [...] conscious of itself as the creative world-spirit only in the philosopher and post festum, its making of history exists only in the consciousness, in the opinion and conception of the philosopher, i.e. in the speculative imagination.”17 Marx recognizes in Hegel’s conception of history as the emptying of spirit into time and back into itself a self-annulment of self-consciousness from the capacity to act upon historical time. Externalization comprehended as mere alienation of self-consciousness does not regard the real alienation of human activity, of which Hegel’s thought is but a reflection and a rationalization post festum. Thus, in Hegel’s thought we find a sophisticated dialectic of the production of knowledge, but one that reconciles itself with a political neutrality. The subtlety of Marx’s critique is that the alienation of practical activity opens the continent of history to not only rational reconstruction in itself, but a rational reconstruction for itself, one where the scientific logic of history makes possible the action of self-consciousness on conditions of its present. Thus, in Capital, the logic of the capitalist mode of production is not a conception of the teleology of history itself, but a historico-logical account of how the telos of capital conquers historical time, and thus makes necessary our reflection upon history in situation with this development through the unity of consciousness and activity in the totality of social production.
II. The Logic of Primitive Accumulation
That is, the logical movement from commodity and value to abstract labor, from abstract labor and value to money, from value and money to surplus value, thus labor-power and capital, is the crafting of connecting points of a specific process of historical development, an elucidation of the specificity of the capitalist mode of production through the temporal architecture of its social forms. But this is not a linear historical movement, where the unfolding of a logic proceeds as a mere timeline. It is historical in the sense that “history” is the objective temporality in which human social production necessarily is articulated, a process by which the making of the material conditions of social life proceeds through determinations that are made intelligible through their identity in difference across spatial and temporal articulation. The class struggle is the historical actuality of the identical subject-object, as the capitalist mode of production lays bare human self-consciousness’ concrete reality in the struggle over conditions of existence.
Marx’s exposition of the critique of political economy famously begins with the immediate appearance of “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails” as an “immense collection of commodities.”18 There is already an implicit distinction to be elaborated upon between different forms of wealth in different societies where the capitalist mode of production does not prevail. Likewise, the very opening of the investigation of the commodity, the utility of the object that leads to the category of use-value, begins with the insight that “Every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every useful thing is a whole composed of many properties; it can therefore be useful in various ways. The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history. So also is the invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects.”19 From the first page to the concluding section on so-called primitive accumulation, a process of historical concretion unfolds through the immanent logic of capital.
I wish to further elaborate on this process of historical concretion in Capital and its importance to developing our knowledge of the relation of race and class by way of interpreting this connection of the conclusion on so-called primitive accumulation to the logic of the capitalist mode of production, and thus the stakes of race and class in Marxist historiography. This is not the sole moment in which historical content comes to play a vital part in Marx’s presentation. As already stated, the register of historical time constitutes an essential relief against which the arguments of political economy are pitted throughout the text. The investigation into value as the social form of wealth and the social form of labor as value-creating labor necessitates the elaboration of categories that operate in distinct temporal registers. For example, following the conceptual production of labor-power’s commodity form independent and alienable from its bearer is the distinction between labor process and valorization process. There are abstract elements of any labor process in history, such as the labor itself as purposeful activity, the object on which work is performed, and the instruments of that work, and there is their operation and the criteria for this activity as it appears within the temporal dictums of valorization, such as the mediation of labor to these elements of its process through value’s monetary form of appearance.
Likewise, the concept of surplus value that is made possible through this mediation of the labor process in labor-power’s commodification gives rise to two distinct modes of its temporal construction, in absolute and relative form, and this conceptual development takes on various forms of the historical development of the constitution of the capitalist mode of production in the class struggle over the limits to the working day, the cooperative power of labor, the division of labor and manufacture, into the realized form of large-scale industry dominated by machinery in the production process. It is through this development in Capital that Part 6 on Wages is preceded by the distillation of absolute and relative surplus value’s logical synthesis, that “the utilization of the [commodity] labour-power creates a value for the capitalist without costing him any value in return. He is thus able to set labour-power in motion without paying for it. It is in this sense that surplus labour can be called unpaid labour.”20 A new understanding of capital then emerges in this synthesis for Marx, that is essential to the wage-form as capital’s ideal mediation of labor-power’s reproduction:
Capital, therefore, is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith thought. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people.21
This in turn reveals the essence of the capitalist production process, “seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction” as it “produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.”22 The full development of the antagonistic character of the capitalist mode of production on the scale of a social life’s totality is revealed in the chapter on the general law of capitalist accumulation, where the essence of capital accumulation is revealed in the “multiplication of the proletariat”23 that, as relative surplus population, constitutes a necessary externality to the workforce integrated into exploitation by wage-labor that defines the limits of the wage and subsistence by the competitive pressures this reserve army of labor sets upon them. Thus “the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”24
Arriving to so-called primitive accumulation at this point, then, appears a difficulty, as it would seem to us that we have reached the summit of Capital’s logic. Yet, Marx is well aware of the problems that still abound, as “the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation (the 'previous accumulation' of Adam Smith) which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”25 Marx sees in the circularity of capital’s organic nature as a system in his logical construction a problem of the consistency of historical explanation. Smith’s “previous accumulation” and similar such concepts in political are the kind of mythic reconstructions of history that play “ approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past.”26 The error here is in the inconsistency that results from this treatment and the glorifications of its results, such as private property, that is taken up by political economy. For Marx, historical reconstruction must be rational. That is, logically consistent with its result.
Thus the “pre-history of capital,” that “process of divorcing the producer from the means of production,” develops from the conditions of the society that precedes it, as “the economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.”27 That these elements were “set free” obviously implies their existence within pre-capitalist forms of social production. In fact, this is part of Marx’s statement on human anatomy and that of the ape, that here capitalist society still forms an essential point from which we are interpreting its predecessors as a mode of critique. The dialectical presentation of history, however, develops from within the critique of political economy, and history as class struggle unites its contestation of these conditions of human self-knowledge. Bourgeois society’s one-sided self-conception of history’s point of arrival focuses on how “the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds,” yet this is simultaneously the process by which “these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”28
III. Historical Reconstruction and Revisionist Historiography as Praxis
Here I would like to develop a synthesis of these strands of tracing Marx’s methodological treatment of historical time and its reconstruction that I have developed above, and its concern towards the question of the categories of race and class as social relations of production. To make that claim is to make an assertion that these categories have a life distinct to and within the capitalist mode of production, or, rather, serve essential functions within it. Yet we know that this has not always been the understanding of race to Marxist thought, or at least does not appear within Marx’s work. Famously, there is no treatment by Marx of the category of race as there is of class, and to some extent we may attribute the failings of Marxist thought on this matter to such omission. However, there remains no excuse for those developments of Marxism and proletarian movements that have found themselves resistant to the understanding of racial struggle as class struggle, and to adequately assess the limits of such a form of class struggle.
The task of addressing this has been taken up in one regard by the revisionist historiography of racial capitalism. Cedric J. Robinson’s term for the conceptual development of the school of thought he names the Black Radical Tradition is a synthesis of a work that precedes its naming, developed from that practical and critical application of Marxist thought to struggles that had taken on a distinctively racial character. The history thought most central to this in the US context that has taken on the most pronouncedly racial character is that of the enslavement of African labor during New World colonization. Robinson’s critical intervention, however, is not merely to theorize the radical tradition that emerges out of this struggle, but to also identify the logic of racialism that begins to emerge through class formation and proto-national identification in Europe prior to the encounter with African slavery. The essential contribution of this insight is that, if we are to only see racial logic’s emergence in the immediate identification of difference in a white conquest of black labor, we produce a conception of race that is solely identical with color, reifying race on terms it establishes for itself. For a true critique of race, we must develop a means of accounting for its reproduction beyond this encounter, as a logic operating across from and related, but relatively autonomous from, nation, ethnicity, and class.
To further this understanding, we can turn again to Marx’s treatment of so-called primitive accumulation. This history begins, for Marx, with a starting-point both historical and logical: “the enslavement of the worker.”29 Here, however, he does not mean the Trans-Atlantic slave trade or racial chattel slavery, necessarily, though there is in this a means by which Marx’s historico-logical treatment remains open and alive to revisionist historical reconstruction.There are two passages here which I wish to expand upon in this regard. Firstly, that insight that “all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation.”30 There is here a necessary criteria in the interpretation of historical time as that of class formation, here the capitalist class in their actions as a class for-itself. Secondly, there is the oft-cited passage on the genesis of the industrial capitalist in global conquest:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.31
These moments constituting the dawn of the era of capitalist production include three examples of populations that underwent racializing processes in their subjugation by European colonialism. There is another key aspect of their emergence in the institutional means by which the capital of European nations built its wealth upon this geographic hierarchization through imperial conquest. The methods of plunder deployed “all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”32 There is thus here a political geography of exploitation developed within and as the historical constitution of the modern capitalist nation-state. Bringing these moments together, we find that the concrete historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production arrives through such elements that allow money, commodities, means of production and subsistence, labor, all not capital in themselves, to function as capital within a specific organization of the process of social production, taking on a distinctive character and developmental trajectory in their combination.33
Looking at the above formulation for an account of the origination of race, we are also looking at a process of class formation in the international division of labor. This would, then, give credence to accounts of race that see its essence in the segmentations of the proletariat by global labor arbitrage and the splits in the labor market that ensue. Indeed, an organic part of capitalism’s reproduction would include the differentiation of labor-power’s value made possible by the wage-form. This account would allow for a logical consistency of racialization within the formal constitution of surplus value. In that sense, it is an essential part of fleshing out the category. Yet the weakness here has to do with accounting for those many instances in which class struggles have taken on racial lines of demarcation in the balance of forces, and those many instances where the assumption of a primarily held class unity fails to produce a sufficient multiracial solidarity within the working class. This essay alone cannot hope to definitively reconcile this problem.
What I am to conclude with here is a statement as to the importance of what I have called revisionist historiography to this issue, and its consistency with a Marxist method of engagement with historical content. Marx’s treatment of the primitive accumulation of capital from within those conditions of feudal society that created capitalist production’s possibility is an account that traces the conditions from which a capitalist class that comes to act as class for itself emerges, the manner by which it takes hold of these elements of feudal society’s dissolution for the ends of its reproduction. It is an engagement of historical content that unites substance and subject, taking the capitalist class in formation as the identical subject-object of a specific historical process that has, in the course of its subsumption of human social production, reconstituted the conditions of human self-knowledge of social life and the trajectory of its history. This is why Marx’s critique opens up the continent of history; it is not only the potential of a critique of the capitalist mode of production, but a critique of the possibility of any politics of social transformation that would seek to reverse the obverse conditions of universal emancipation it has created in the proletarian condition.
But this aspect of the historical creation of a global proletariat is merely an objective historical necessity as a consequence of Marx’s own speculative reason. That is, his own thought does not pose its reappropriation of the object of its alienation as mechanical determinism. The methodological importance of class struggle is that we have a society constituted in and through the common contention over the conditions of existence. To understand race and class as social relations of production is not to provide a tidy definition of either term. It is instead to resist their reduction to categories that can be delineated outside of their historical development. Their import to an analysis pertains in so far as they are objective categories immanent to the situation within which they pertain. If there exists the objective to relegate race and class to the dustbin of history, their end cannot be reasoned in pure thought, but must follow those instances of their practical overcoming in real historical struggles. This is the possibility of revisionist historiography and historical production, such as can be seen in the study of racial capitalism and the school of new histories of American capitalism that are reevaluating the role of racial chattel slavery. Race and class constitute aspects of a historical dialectic that must still be examined as means of constituting our social objectivity, and their critique will remain necessary so long as the conditions of social production give rise to them.
Berlin, Ira. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard.
Ibid, p. 1
Ibid, pp. 364-365
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s. 2nd. ed. London: Routledge. p.30
Ibid, p. 31
Ibid, p. 35
Ibid, pp. 54-55
Ibid, pp. 55-56
Ibid, p. 55
Ibid.
Marx, Karl, and Martin Nicolaus. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London; New York: Penguin Books In Association With New Left Review. Pp. 105-106
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 2019. “Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1).” Marxists.org. 2019. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
Lukács, Georg. 1976. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT. p. 541
Quoted in Ibid.
Ibid, p. 542
Ibid, pp. 545-546
Quoted in Ibid, p. 547
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. P. 125
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 672
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 724
Ibid, p. 764
Ibid, p. 799
Ibid, p. 873
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 875
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 876
Ibid, p. 915
Ibid, pp. 915-916
Ibid, p. 874 “In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners ; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour.”