Rev Left Radio - Unity and Struggle (pt. 5): Wage Labor and White Supremacy

Episode Date: July 26, 2020

Eve and Dianne join Breht to discuss the relationship between white supremacy and wage labor. This is the fifth installment in our ongoing collaboration with Unity and Struggle. This Rev Left mini-series will trace and engage with the development of Unity and Struggle's systematic study of race through the lens of historical and dialectical materialism. Check out, and contribute to, Unity and Struggle's study here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2019/11/racestudypart1/ Check out more from Unity and Struggle here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/ Follow them on twitter @unityandstrug Outro Music: 'Come in Alone' by My Bloody Valentine ------ Rev Left Shirts: https://goodsforthepeople.com/all-goods/revolutionary-left-radio LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hey everyone, Brett and I just wanted to let you all know that we now officially have Rev Left shirts for sale. We collaborated with Goods for the People, which is a communist clothing line started by a previous guest of the show and some of his comrades. We worked with them to create the design, and the shirts come in a variety of colors, styles, and sizes. The revenue from each shirt goes to simultaneously support our show and Goods for the People. So if you are at all interested, we will provide a link in the show notes. We really appreciate the comrades over at Goods for the People, and we deeply appreciate everyone who listen to the people. to and supports Rev. Left Radio. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive.

To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the new world in this country The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives.

It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger when they malign so long. long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place. Because I'm not a nigger. I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it. The question you've got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, north and south, because it's one country, and for a negro, there's no difference in the north and the south. There's just no difference in the way they, in a way, they castrate you. But that's, but the fact of the country, it's

castration is the American fact. If I'm not a nigger here, and you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have the last installment, at least for a while, of our ongoing collaboration with unity and struggle. On today's topic is the intersections of wage, labor, and white supremacy, and how white supremacy and its structures morphed over time leading up to the Civil War and then Reconstruction. And so we tie in some historical concepts with some present-day movement and actions, talk about Black Lives Matter, Afro-pessimism, etc.

So just a great talk, and if you're not familiar with what's going on, I'll link to all the previous Unity and Struggle episodes we've done. It's just a sort of collaboration that's been ongoing every month or two. We have another little episode, and they're about 20 minutes long. So I'll link to all those if you want to go back and listen to them from beginning to end. And then in the fall, when they restart their study, focusing on reconstruction, we'll have them back on and we'll continue the collaboration. So without further ado, let's get into this discussion with Eve and Diane on wage labor and white supremacy. Enjoy. Hi, Brett. Thanks so much for having us again.

So again, I'm Eve from Unity and Struggle, and I'm here with a close comrade, Diane. So this is our, technically our last section in this part of our long-term study on race and capitalism. We're looking at wage labor and white supremacy. We're going to take a break after this and do put together a second part that begins with reconstruction. So this is sort of exciting that we're able to kind of wrap up this first part of the, the project so thanks again for having us back i'm diane thank you so much for having me i'm a geographer and i've been invited to participate in the group and it's been a great experience so i'm ready to have a conversation awesome well yeah welcome diane um eve you've been on many many times but welcome

back uh so yeah let's just go ahead and get into it then we're today we're really focusing on on wage labor um so what is wage labor and why is an understanding of wage labor important okay so wage labor, I think the sort of like short and sweet version of wage labor is that it has a duly free aspect. So you're free from the means of production, meaning you don't own your direct means of production that will help you produce what you need in society. And you're free to sell your labor to any capitalist or boss. In this section, we kind of dove in a little bit deeper to look at the way that wage labor is a commodity. So we looked at some Marx. We read some historical texts and some other sort of ultra-left texts looking at wage labor. And one of the

things that Marx discusses is a split between labor and labor power. So labor in sort of, you know, a far-left understanding of Marxism is just your ability to interact with the world in general. So that can be everything we do, just the way we interact under capitalism or under feudalism or potentially communism. It's just the way that we're sort of in conversation with the world around us, our sort of self-activity is another way to put that. Labor power, on the other hand, is a commodity under capitalism. So it is bought and sold, and the value of our labor power is determined by an exchange rate that is set throughout time and based on certain instances. So we looked at debates around labor power and how the value of labor power is determined.

And this is important for racial relations, and we'll get into this a little bit more, but there's distinctions throughout history around the value of labor power. So in a moment like slavery under capitalism in the U.S., you have workers who are selling their labor power at a certain value, and then you have another set of people who are enslaved who are actually sold as commodities in full. So it's not just their labor power that's being used, but their entire beings. And this connects to some of the Afro-pessimism stuff that we discussed last time. So these are a couple of sort of frameworks that we use to set the tone to kind of parse out how racial relations begin with this dichotomy of free and on-free labor and labor power versus enslavement as a commodity. And how this, you know, beyond the slavery moment, how this sort of sets the framework for black and white racial relations.

Yeah, absolutely. So now that we have a grasp on wage labor, what is the relationship between wage labor, racialization, and white supremacy? So basically when we were looking at these historical texts, right, we kind of saw the development of the U.S. from the era of an independence war into the Civil War. So that's kind of what we were looking at and a little bit after. And what we recognized was that like free and unfree relations lacked clear division, right? And so it was through this, like, haziness or break, really, we could kind of foreground like a foundation and open up an understanding towards the hegemonic labor relations where racialization became that tool that amplified and kind of situated the different relations. Basically, through the different texts, we were able to kind of pinpoint spaces where ideology allowed for this to manifest and sustain itself. So, for example, we looked at the Protestants of the North, right? And these families, so this is right after, right up until the American Revolution, a little bit after, where these northern families utilized unpaid labor within their family and in the community itself, and they extended this to children and single women in the community.

And they weren't necessarily these formalized apprenticeships, which were common at the time. But these labor relations were done in the name of wanting to stay. year folks away from this Puritan notion of idleness in the community. And then we also saw this too in the south, not as much as in the north, of course, but for those whites who were not of the land-owning elite and did not, you know, benefit from enslaved labor, they were coerced and also surveillance and controlled. There was, you know, we read about the attempts to push them into workhouses, for example, children, young women, and this, again, this is less common in the North, and they also resisted

against it as well. But it was this notion of like, okay, you must be productive, and we must be able to kind of observe you and make sure that you're doing what we need you to do for development of our region. And what we saw in between this kind of framework within, you know, why it's controlling those that did not have access to land. or were performing their own free labor, was, especially in the North, now this issue of, or at the time, this challenge of free blacks who were living off of their own labor autonomously. And this kind of threatened the structure of whites who were kind of forced into these indentured positions. So we saw that, you know, blacks as a minority in cities like New York and in Philadelphia,

before the Civil War, we're struggling to maintain their freedom and autonomy as skilled workers, and meaning that they, you know, were artisans, crafts people, sales, people. And so these institutions that they created, those small were constantly surveillance, they were policed, and they were threatened. And also there was this notion that, you know, there was this constant threat that free blacks could have been enslaved or re-enslave and taken back to the South or sold back into the South. So what we recognize is that like the contestation of racialization played within within these kinds of threats, surveillance, and structures like this. So one group that we really kind of follow through the book as amplified through Jacqueline Jones and also Rotiger was the immigrant group of the Irish and how they were racialized within this structure.

We read accounts that slave owners would regulate certain types of work to Irish migrants. and the belief that their commodity, the enslaved people, would be endangered. And the type of work that they wanted the Irish to do in terms of development would have allowed them to put their enslaved commodity at risk. Those jobs were also contested and they were abandoned. So that's kind of how we see the differentiation in this uncertainty here within the wage labor framework. And even within that, there were notions that these laborers who abandoned this work that was potentially deadly were seen to be lazy. And so there was policy, formal charity structures, et cetera, that sought to control them by assigning them to work in workhouses or within different family homes. They reify this apprenticeship structure in the name of control.

What I found interesting, what we found interesting, is that within this hegemonic structures, Jacqueline Jones kind of noted that all of these groups were trying to avoid becoming the quote unquote neo slave, especially after the Civil War, where you had now official free blacks that were looking to enter the workforce. So all of this kind of ideology and actual like realized violence kind of situated the hegemonic structure that fortified white supremacist ideology. so maybe you could talk a little bit more about how the hegemonic structure of white supremacy was sort of formed and then also importantly how it was countered yeah so i think i think one of the things just to add on to what diana was just saying is so one of the things that we're looking at in this section is also so it's also it's what the ruling class is doing to establish white supremacy as an ideology and it's a practice and then how that becomes reinforced by the state and vice versa But it's also how the working class, the white working class itself, starts to begin to think of itself as a white working class and adopt, you know, this racialized framework.

Some sort of like rosy-eyed autonomous tend to think that this is something that's imposed from above, that working, that white working class people don't really have an investment in whiteness, that it's something that they learned or, like, disciplined into. And then others tend to believe that it's a logical choice, that it's like, you know, part of the division of labor. that people are competing for jobs, et cetera. And I think that both of these frameworks are a little bit, they fall a little short. And then I think the other one is the Afro-pessimism stuff, which is, you know, saying that it's kind of an irrational sort of like fear-motivated and like drive for power.

And maybe Diane could probably talk about this more because she knows a lot more about Afro-pessimism. But yeah, so this like sort of ideology within the working class and the acts of white supremacy that come from within the working class, or something that I think is we're trying to sort of like locate where that comes from and whether it's part of like the logic of capitalism

and people making sort of logical choices as capitalism develops objectively above and you know around them or if it's like kind of a combination of two where people are sort of like participating in this but also making you know sort of rational choices to become white.

So these are some of the things we looked at. I think the Irish is a good example because throughout history they weren't actually considered white until later on when it became like sort of a political project of the Democrats to, you know, envelop Irish people into whiteness in order to like oppose the end of slavery. Also, I think what's interesting about this is that in the past sort of, I guess, like interrogations of whiteness and sort of racial relations. We've talked about the primitive accumulation moment and how blackness becomes associated with sort of like stealing labor and forcing people into a forced labor situation, slavery.

Similarly, as capitalism develops, this becomes sort of like the basis for the black, white dynamic where, as Diane mentioned, even free blacks were subject to a sort of mediation by whites. So this came in the form of straight-up violence, like mob violence, lynchings, things like that, but also state surveillance and just basically any kind of threat to autonomy. So like celebrations, for example, in New York City that were based on African traditions or African-American traditions were heavily sort of police and, you know, watched, like there was subject to the white gays, basically. So it was like a constant mediation by white people.

And I feel like this is an interesting dynamic that I think really defines the black-white relation where white people sort of have an ownership over black autonomy. Anytime, you know, there's, you know, small businesses that are black, black businesses, black struggle, white people are sort of mediating that and deciding what is sort of like a safe struggle, what is, you know, incorporation into white supremacist capitalism. And this can be extended to even today with some liberal projects that we can go into later. I wanted to touch on a perfect example of what you're talking about, which is the 1921 basically bombing of what was known as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, a history that's been drawn on in recent protests. But another example of black people having some semblance of economic autonomy and the white power structure just not allowing that to be.

You know, it must be destroyed because that is a threat to the overall hierarchies of class and race in this society. Eve did mention, Diane, the Afro-pessimist understanding of where the white working class comes from. And if I'm correct on this, I think James Baldwin gives it some pretty interesting articulations. Did you want to touch on that before we wrap up on the last question? Certainly. I think, you know, for this section in particular, too, the strategies of Afro-pessimism allow. So basically having us kind of look at white pathology in ways where we don't necessarily study it. So thinking about what is considered like cultural work.

So we looked at how the minstrel shows, for example, kind of fortified a specific racialization that was violent, as well as just, you know, different types of propaganda, media that people were consuming at the time that opened up ideologies to where groups like the Irish, other marginalized groups or ethnic groups that were being synthesized into whiteness were fortified by this. And through that process of being fortified into whiteness, the perpetuation of anti-blackness was necessary for that to happen. And so at the time that we're looking at, especially post-Sivil War, where it's supposed to be a time of now reckoning of black citizenship and black integration, these processes of furthering white supremacist ideology furthered blackness, black folks from being integrated into the new

republic with, you know, they were supposed to be post-the-civil war structure. Yeah, fascinating. So to wrap up, sort of bringing the historic into the present, how does all of this connect up to racial struggles today and the, you know, historic uprisings that we're currently seeing even? You know, I can start. You know, one thing I found really interesting through looking at this section was thinking through petitions of citizenship through this kind of notion of wanting to kind of wager with whiteness. And I think that was really amplified at the beginning of Black Lives Matter, where different groups were trying to figure out, okay, how do we relate to this struggle instead of seeing themselves as part

of the struggle? So we saw narratives as people saying, like, we are the this particular group for Black Lives instead of saying, you know, just straight up Black Lives Matter. And thinking through how that kind of liberal ideology kind of reinforces that, yes, you all are other and thus because you all are other, we care. It kind of reified a lot of the kind of racial relations structures or negotiations we saw at the turn of the century where groups that weren't black, but were kind of racialized as other, and W.E.B. Du Bois kind of talks about this too. We're trying to mitigate or figure out how they could structure themselves out of blackness into whiteness, yet seem that they are for the cause.

And what that ends up doing is liberalizing the radical moment of the cause. We also see this too with kind of abolition, right? So at the time, if we're kind of comparing the work done at the, you know, the turn of the Civil War and comparing kind of the language of what abolition meant between different groups. The mitigation or kind of manipulation of abolition, watering it down, that topic that, that it's a means to make it comfortable for a white supremacist logic, whereas in turn, you know, abolition is meant to abolish white supremacist logic and what that includes. So. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I mean, I might kind of like one of the things that I kept thinking about when I was reading about these critiques of abolitionism, white abolitionism, was, again, this sort of like mediation by whiteness and a sense of what is sort of appropriate struggle or how incorporation into white supremacist capitalism, like how that project is seen as, you know, the only respectable form of black struggle. And I know that this might be a little bit controversial, but it's our last one until the fall, so let's go for it. But I just kept thinking about the demands for abolition of the police in this moment and, you know, or like defunding the police. And how that in some way is also sort of mediated by a white supremacist sort of liberal logic because it's not a direct abolition of police. It's not burning the precinct, stealing the weapons, and directly sort of liberating people. but rather, you know, a sort of redirecting struggle into policy and, you know, sort of safer and, you know, white-mediated forms of struggle. Absolutely. I just want to kind of get your views on this.

There is some dialogue between the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter and some questioning about whether that rhetoric, especially given its sort of semi-co-co-option by white liberal establishments and even corporations using it in their advertising now, shifting that rhetoric towards something more akin to black power, something that reflects black self-determination. Diane, do you have any thoughts on that or either of you have any thoughts on that shift and whether or not you support it or you see something powerful in that possibility? Well, with the term of Black Lives Matter and thinking about how the manifestation of it over time, right? Because it's not this isn't new to now.

We're going all the way back to 2012 and thinking about how people have been kind of how people have developed their consciousness through the term. I see it as an opening. And I think it's important to remind ourselves that

Black Lives Matter should be the enclosure. When we do that is when we start to kind of propagate liberal ideology because it's not a allowing us to kind of push ourselves in an abolitionist framework of thinking about what does that mean when we say Black Lives Matter by just closing it. As to the historical processes of the black power language, black power movement, it's all a continuation, I think, of the

black radical tradition. So I don't see it as like we need to bring something back. I see it all as like a general like drive. And with that drive, we still need to push forward. So if we are seeing that there's liberal co-optation of Black Lives Matter, we need to be articulate of that, and we need to continue to challenge ourselves on what that means and kind of go back to, so, you know, I've heard great thinkers speak about Black Lives Matter and, you know, remind us that the Kumbahi River Collective, you know, allowed us to probably say when all, when Black Lives are free, everyone is free. And what they meant by that was the nuance of Black Life. And when that's true, where we all are truly free. So yeah, I don't see anything out of time. I think everything is working linearly in a linear fashion, but we need to be cognizant that like we have to keep pushing ourselves and keep opening up the language to really get toward the revolution where we're demanding. I see. I see. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you both for coming on. Is there any last words that either of you want to say or if not where people can find and

contribute to the study online? Yeah, so I just want to say, I don't have any shout out to specific people this time. I think people are really busy with all the protests and, you know, just taking care of one each other, of each other in this moment. So I just want to thank so much to Rev. Love Radio for hosting us for this. We'll be excited to come back in the fall. So if you want to check out the study that we've been doing for the past nine months, you can check that out at Unity and Struggle. And we're also on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Unity and Strug. So that's at, U-N-I-T-Y-A-N-D-S-T-R-U-G, just one-G.

And it's an open study, so you can feel free to add anything, make comments, damning critiques, whatever you like. And hopefully we'll talk again in the fall. Thank you so much. This has been a really fun project. Absolutely, yeah. It's been an honor to work with your organization. And I'll link to the study in the show notes as well as all the previous Unity and Struggle episodes. so people who are maybe just coming to the show and seeing this for the first time can go back

and work through all of the episodes that we've done together. Thank you, Eve. Thank you, Diane, so much. A pleasure to talk to both of you, and we will continue to do this in the fall. Thank you so much. You know, you know, you are around, you around, you know, to the world, and I'll turn you around. Oh, I think you're alive. Why are they need to believe?

Deeply what you see what you see? to be to rise and rise you come and rise to you know I don't know.

It's a lot of them. I'm alive You will see I'm alive You will see One one little wise Because I'm cried I go

I'm glad to be in a house Come in a road Come in a road Keep on to the road Turn you around When you're home Don't be proud

No, around life life Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be. I'm not.