12.09.2001

Capital and the invention of race

Whatever words are chosen to describe the United Nations ?World conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance? in history textbooks, they will struggle to convey the tawdry spectacle on display in Durban a week ago. The event did though reveal the true nature of bourgeois anti-racism over and over again.

Even before the conference started it was clear that any honest proclamations against the evils of racism would be drowned in an orgy of hypocrisy. Then there was the US of George W Bush. The US threatened initially to boycott the event in protest against statements equating Zionism with racism and calls for reparations for the material and moral losses caused by the 18th and 19th century trade in black African slaves. It opted instead to send a low-level delegation as a sign of the contempt in which it clearly held the whole event. It was these two issues that dominated the entire week, the treatment of Israel especially leading eventually to the withdrawal of the US and Israeli delegations, along with several Jewish groups.

Durban, if nothing else, confirmed the central place of anti-racism in modern-day bourgeois ideology internationally - the purpose of the event was to realise ?the political commitment to eliminate all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance? (conference website). Despite this ringing declaration some trends on the left maintain a dogmatic view: capitalism was founded upon the lucrative trade in black skins. Ergo capitalist ideology must remain irredeemably racist. Presumably this includes the ANC government in South Africa itself.

According to Socialist Worker, racism is a ?complete belief system, a system structured into capitalism? that ?continues today? (September 1). The Guardian in its turn has it that everyone and every country is guilty of racism to one degree or another. Equally every society since the dawn of history has displayed racist hostility towards outsiders. Racism is in other words inherent to the human condition. Thus racism is made into a concept with universal and timeless significance - a distinctly ahistorical view.

In fact racism has specific origins in time and space. The modern-biological concept of race was invented in the context of the Atlantic world of early capitalism and the drive for what Marx called ?primitive capital accumulation?. The sugar and tobacco grown easily in the new world held out the prospect of instant fortunes for any aristocratic investor who could establish a plantation. The main problem was labour. Natives were decimated or made extinct within a generation or two due to European germs. Indentured labour from Britain and Ireland died or quickly fell sick from tropical diseases. The answer was found in west Africa and in alliance with slave trading states, such as Benin, and Arab traders, millions of human beings were transported to the Americas. Loss of life was appalling. But the profits - including for the slavers - were staggering.

Slave labour in the Americas was run according to strict capitalist principles. The only limit set on exploitation was the cost a acquiring a new slave on the market. Unlike the slave system in the ancient world - Athens and Rome - the social category of slave could be explained with some conviction by natural condition. Whereas in the ancient world slaves came from every nationality - including the dominant ones - American slavery became associated ideologically with being black. To be a slave was to be black, to be black was to be a slave.

There was another factor behind the invention of ?race?. The founders of the American colonies were militantly protestant. As in Britain and Ireland, catholics were the defining ?other.? As slave numbers grew - especially in the West Indies and the southern states of the US - so too did the need for a wider social base of support. This was especially so after the slave revolution in St Dominique of 1791 led by Toussaint L?Ouverture. Unity of protestants and catholics against the black slave-class was cemented by inventing a previously unheard of concept - the white ?race?.

So the theory of humanity being divided into three or four distinct ?races? was tied in with the origins of Atlantic capitalism - a very useful invention which could also excuse the huge European imperialist empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. German biologists refined the doctrine with a whole pseudo-science of human superiority and inferiority. Not surprisingly Germans and north Europeans were top of the ?evolutionary? ladder. Blacks, Australian aborigines at the bottom.

The socio-economic basis for an ideology engendered by the slave trade and nurtured by imperialist colonialism has of course gone in Britain and elsewhere. Durban saw the US and some European participants attempting to relegate these issues as belonging to an unfortunate episode of history, now best forgotten. None - apart from the likes of Fidel Castro - were prepared to directly link capitalism?s birth with slavery and racism.

Unsurprisingly the most vociferous proponents of an apology and some form of reparation were the kleptocratic leaders of various impoverished African states. For them  the issue was not capitalism, but more aid. Most European delegates also favoured an apology with only a hard core of former colonisers opposed. However, the insistence on linking an apology to reparations put paid to any hopes of an apology. Had it been forthcoming, it would of course have been nothing more than cant. As was the final, meaningless, agreed statement on the question, based on proposals coming from the UN: ?We also recognise that the political, socio-economic and cultural structures imposed in the context of slavery and the slave trade, and other forms of servitude, conquest and colonialism permitted and encouraged racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance?.

Of course, as is always the case on such occasions, despite operating within the UN ?big tent? each state was pursuing its own narrow national ends. Those who adopt an ahistorical view of racism tend, as a corollary, to underplay the significance of such  nationalism as the main underlying thread in bourgeois ideology. What much of the left takes for racism is, more often than not, in actual fact national chauvinism. Hostility to asylum-seekers in its current mainstream form is not based on ethnicity or skin colour, but on the fact that they are ?outsiders? who threaten Britain?s,  limited resources and services, etc.  Of course the fact that they are largely working class and/or poor is the real reason why the state wants to keep them out. Even when they gain entry they are illegals - and therefore easily exploitable as worst paid labour.

Bourgeois anti-racism and a rearticulated nationalism today generally play the same role in cohering the dominant national identity as did racism historically in the United States.

The conflict in the Middle East and the role of Israel provided the other main source of antagonism in Durban. Lord Janner, the Labour peer who led the Jewish delegation to the conference, condemned it as an ?anti-semitic outrage redolent of the Nazi era? (The Daily Telegraph September 10). The Telegraph itself condemned the ?hateful anti-Israeli language? of the conference documents. Unsurprisingly the Palestinian delegation took a different view: for them the UN conference ?transformed the Palestinian question into the issue of all peoples fighting against racism and for freedom? (ibid).

This equation between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism is not confined to the mainstream of British politics. Mark Osborn of the Alliance for Workers? Liberty, speaking at Communist University 2001, insisted that the British left (especially the SWP) was, because of its anti-Israel stance, anti-semitic. A more accurate description would be that it lacks a consistently democratic programme. The left?s failures, or refusals, to recognise the right of the historically constituted Israeli-Jewish nation to form its own state - while not, of course, having the right to oppress the Palestinians.

The nationalist ideology of Israel is not racism. As Israeli commentators point out, the ?law of return? is not racist because it allows ?Jews of all colours and nationalities to come to Israel? (Jerusalem Post September 9). Nevertheless this imagined solidarity of all Jews is in practice premised on the subjection of the Palestinian population. Though finding some historic justification in the failure of the working class of Europe to prevent the Hitlerite holocaust, there is nothing benign in the ?law of return?. Sucking in Jewish migrants fuels Israel?s irredentist drive to expand into the mythological boundaries of the Davidic kingdom. Nowadays that means heavily guarded, fortified settler colonies, nuclear arms and systematic state terrorism.

Zionism has today a thoroughly reactionary content, despite its origins as the ?cry of the oppressed?. Of course the Israeli Jewish nation has the right to exist and - in order most effectively to bring about the unity of the two people - we support the right of both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to form their own states. A real one in the case of Palestinians, not a bantustan.

One does not need to equate Zionism with racism in order to expose its reactionary essence.

James Mallory