Reserve Text: Greg Meyerson,
Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others
1. This essay will focus on Cedric Robinson's magisterial yet underanalyzed work Black Marxism, which has recently been re-released by University of North Carolina Press with both a new preface by Robinson and a foreword by the distinguished historian Robin D.G Kelley. Robinson's work is my focus in great part because of its incredible ambitiousness, totalizing sweep and scrupulous research (as Kelley notes, the footnotes "could have been a separate book altogether"). Unlike those writing in a post-Marxist tradition, Robinson does not reject Marxism by setting mini narratives against grand narratives. Given the unavoidability of "the global," this post-Marxist fetish of the local has itself lost credibility. Robinson opposes the Marxian grand narrative with a grand narrative of his own. He thus poses a significant challenge to historical materialism, but it is a challenge that historical materialism, properly interpreted, meets.
2. The point of my essay, quite bluntly, is to show that Robinson is wrong about Marxism and that Robinson is not alone, the errors he makes being fundamental not only to current theorizing about race and class, my two principal concerns, but also to current theorizing about gender, culture, "relative autonomy" and causal explanations of oppression and exploitation. So while this essay focuses on Black Marxism, it will, by way of contextualizing it for the present, discuss as well and in some detail the work of Kelley--especially his foreword--and labor historian David Roediger. In my conclusion, I will suggest further affinities between Robinson's work and a wide range of contemporary theorists who in their various ways recapitulate many of Robinson's premises.
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3. The "relative autonomy" of "race" has been enabled by a reduction and distortion of class analysis. The essence of the reduction and distortion involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism. The key move in the critique of economic determinist Marxism depends upon the view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure. It is then relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/ARE not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal categories (though such causal pluralism often results in the deconstruction of the category of cause). It might be said, at least with regard to the "class struggle in theory," that most critics of Marxism zero in on the perceived conceptual inadequacies of base and superstructure. So I'd like to state my position on this at some length before turning to Robinson (and others) since there is so much misunderstanding circulating around the concepts of class and base/superstructure.
4. Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent--a primacy which does not render women and people of color "secondary." This view assumes that "working class" means white--this division between a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid, is a view this essay contests all along the way. The primacy of class means in one sense that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.
5. This may seem reductive and undialectical. As I will show, the incorrect understanding of the primacy of class does carry with it for critics of historical materialism both the devaluation of "race" and "gender" as explanatory categories and their devaluation as real people, women and minorities. So when the charge is made against Marxism that it makes race and gender secondary, there is always the sense that race and gender are being treated at once as analytical categories and citizens--with the implication that Marxism in theory is the corollary of a deprivation of rights in practice. On this incorrect view, race, gender, class are co-primary, interacting, intersecting and, to reiterate the confusion I see between the triad as analytical category and person, in dialogue.
6. In my view, and this is surely controversial, but it also puts Marxism on its strongest footing (base), the primacy of class means not only that class is the primary determinant of oppression and exploitation but the only structural determinant. "Race" and gender (this essay focuses of course on racism but it has implications for gender) are not structural determinants. Yes, there is racist and sexist ideology, as well as superficially antiracist and anti-sexist ideologies--multiculturalism, bourgeois feminism and patriotism are three examples--as well as class ideology (which in the U.S., by turns, is antiworking class while denying the existence of social class other than as a normative category for which we all should strive--middle class). And there is a racial and gendered division of labor, whose severity and function vary depending on where one works in the capitalist global economy. Both ideology and the division of labor are understood here to be functional for class rule--facilitating profit making and social control. Class rule is itself a form of class struggle. This latter point is crucial. Class rule is never automatic or easy, and there is constant resistance, both to class rule itself or its symptoms. This essay thus strongly rejects that part of the Althusserian thesis on social reproduction that explains class rule as a function of interpellation.
7. So class does not mean the economic in contradistinction to the political or the material in contradistinction to the mental. And class struggle should itself not be seen as a reflex of the primacy of the productive forces over the social relations of production-in this scenario, the working class is not really struggling to emancipate itself but to emancipate "the productive forces." Such a view also legitimates nationalism as a stepping stone to internationalism-insofar as nationalism (through, say, import-substitution) helps develop capitalism enough so that it becomes ripe for the next stage. Finally, class does not mean "objective," defined in turn as "impersonal forces." Yes, all agents must face the constraints of a given mode of production--capitalists must obey capital's laws of motion. They must be motivated to maximize profit in order to survive, though the strongest profit making motives in the world cannot prevent the destruction of capital, which is a property of the system. In this sense, the mode of production is objective, not reducible to the wills of individual agents. But processes of class rule always involve subjects (embodied to be sure) who do make choices about how to rule and how to resist.
8. The primacy of class means that these two elements are inseparable--we must not divide them into the economic base (equated with "class" and "impersonal forces," the two in turn synonymous with "structure") and the political superstructure (just about everything else from law and custom to the agency of ruling and resisting subjects), separate realms that "mutually determine one another." As I've argued elsewhere and will argue below, when you split the economic and the political and then recombine them, you do not have dialectics so much as an incoherent amalgam of incommensurable categories, or in E.P
Thompson's words, "barren oscillation." Finally, class does not mean capitalism. The tacit equation of the two facilitates the mistaken view, central to Robinson et al, that pre-capitalist sexism and racism pose insoluble problems for Marxism. It is now time to turn to Robinson (and others).
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9. In Robinson's case, his equation of class analysis with economism or economic determinism is in part what allows him to critique Marxian class analysis from the standpoint of his culturalist alternative, which interprets Marxism as an insufficient internal critique of a Eurocentrism rooted in a fundamentally racist and violence prone Western metaphysic (a racial metaphysic), one point of which is to deny an alternative tradition, the black radical tradition. This latter tradition is rooted in an "incommensurable" metaphysic characterized by a "shared epistemology" which "granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material" and whose essence is "the absence of mass violence." Its revolutionary consciousness is a "black" "antilogic to racism, slavery and capitalism" (whose essence is the aforementioned deep rooted racial metaphysic) and whose origin is outside and irreducible to "the mirror of production," that last phrase one of the many employed by Robinson as part of his argument that Marxian accounts of class consciousness are reflexes or mirrors of capital logic.
10. In the opening pages of Black Marxism, Robinson describes capitalism and the Marxian theorizing of it as desiring to be an "objective system," rooted in the "rationalistic thrusts of a economistic world view," global and universal, totalizing in its aims. Yet these aims are simultaneously undermined by the "particularistic psychologies and interests [racism and nationalism among these] which it could not slough off"(Robinson, BM, 9).On Robinson's widely shared view of Marxian theory, racism and nationalism, the import of culture and tradition, are aporias that Marxists must continually explain away or deny, either by marginalizing them or dissolving them teleologically in some vague universalist future. Robinson repeatedly refers to Marxist theory as economic determinist or economist. And thus unable to deal with language, culture, tradition, ideology, racism or sexism. Robinson's comment about Marx in the preface to the 2000 edition (a preface which is in tension in certain respects with the text but not on this score) stands in for his views of the Marxian tradition:
Driven by the need to achieve the scientific elegance and interpretive economy demanded by theory, Marx consigned race, gender, culture and history to the dustbin. Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by pre-capitalist, non-capitalist and primitive accumulation. (Robinson, xxix.)
11. This critique is part of the larger argument adumbrated above about Western civilization summarized by Robinson's comment in the preface that "race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce and power" (Robinson, xxxi). Robinson notes Marx's well-known affinity for aspects of Aristotle's thought. Robinson takes this affinity to support his thesis that Marxism is part of the "racialist architectonic" to which the black tradition is opposed and with which it is incommensurable. Robinson notes the "obvious genealogy and striking parallel between Aristotle's treatment of slaves and slavery and those of Marx":
Aristotle saw slavery as necessary for the self-sufficiency of the polis and in only rare instances were slaves expected to achieve a virtuous life. Given their marginal intelligence and development, Aristotle found no compelling reason for inquiry into the ethics, consciousness, or desires of slaves, content to state that, "the slave is in a sense a part of his master, a living but separate part of his body." Marx, though he found slavery abhorrent, similarly recessed slaves from his discourse on human freedom: The slave works swayed by fear, and it is not his existence itself which is at stake since it is guaranteed him to him even if it does not belong to him.(Robinson, xxxi).
They're, says Robinson presumably paraphrasing Marx, an "embarrassing residue" of an old mode of production, "which disqualified them from historical agency. . .in the modern world"(Robinson, xxxi).
12. Note the language: "dustbin," "residue" and "tossing into the abyss." The function of this language is to show how Marxism is violent and exclusionary. This position is in turn reinforced by Robinson's repeated references to Marxism as a "theory" imposing itself via its "preformed categories" (read a priori) onto recalcitrant phenomena (like nationalism, or "black social movements," the implication being that Marxism--itself an excrescence of western civilization--wants to dominate black people). Another function of this rhetoric is to naturalize nationalism, especially the black radical tradition, while associating Marxism with the external, the extrinsic, the dead. Marxism imposes its dead categories on the vitality of the black radical tradition. Marxism, as the highest stage of western civilization, is violent, imposing itself on the naturally non-violent African people (Robinson explains the persistence of racial domination over African peoples as resulting in part from the fact that "violence did not come naturally to African peoples," the inescapable implication being that it does come naturally to "European peoples") (Robinson, 309). Another way in which Robinson's rhetoric helps to position Marxism as inflexible comes by virtue of his structuralist metaphors--suggesting the relative stasis or stagnation of the Marxian tradition, trapped as it is in the racial architectonic. Thus Marxism is not literally a prioristic (not subject to the dictates of experience) so much as a form of an older, profound collective experience shaped by the racial architectonic, an experience which renders Marxian judgments a priori with respect to the experience of the other.
13. These comments about Marx are one-sided, undialectical in Marxian terminology. They are even more onesided about the marxian tradition, failing to address the debate between productive forces technological determinist interpretations of Marx and the noneconomic determinist Marxian tradition, a debate represented among others by G.A Cohen on one side and Richard Miller and Alan Gilbert on the other, though indeed a main influence on the latter two was Mao's Critique of Soviet Economics. Not surprisingly, that part of the Marxian tradition Robinson excludes emphasizes a Marx and a Marxism much more open to new political experiences than Robinson suggests.
14. What Marx also says in Capital Volume One is this:
whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the U.S a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Another way of saying as he says later that "labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."
15. Marx's support of proletarian unity and support of abolition was taken up by significant sectors of the English proletariat. Here is one resolution on behalf of abolition, ardently defended by Marx:
Therefore this meeting considers it the particular duty of the workers . . . to denounce the base dishonesty and advocacy of slaveholding. . . and to manifest the warmest sympathy with the endeavors of the abolitionists to bring about a final solution to the question of slavery.
What is crucial to note here is that the English (and Irish) proletariat's defense of abolition was rooted in a noneconomic determinist understanding of common interests between the proletariat in England and the antislavery cause. By not following their narrow economic interest, the workers endured greater hunger in the short term than they would have had they supported the South as did the ruling class. Only a political movement, notes Gilbert in his paraphrase of Marx's endorsement of worker abolitionism, "could defend the long range common interests of the proletariat against shortlived economic gain." As "the Sheffield workmen" put it to Roebuck the Union leader "who wanted to recognize the South: "Never! We should have a civil war in England" (Gilbert, 1999, 129, 130).
16. In addition, while in the 1840's, Marx may have tentatively thought the modernizing force of colonialism to be a possible positive and did not emphasize the damage done the working class movements from racism, he changed his mind in response to new political experience. He ardently attacked English working class racism against the Irish in addition to his defense of antislavery. Robinson acknowledges Marx's views here yet marginalizes them, emphasizing his colonialist attitude toward India, with the implication that his understanding of English and Irish divisions was a function of his Eurocentrism. Yet it should be noted that even as Marx extenuated, but barely, colonialism in India as a modernizing force, he defended the Sepoy rebellion (Gilbert notes that "Marx opposed English colonialism in India more thoroughly than even Gandhi did until after 1921"(Gilbert, 1999, 254).
17. The point of my scrutiny of Robinson's rhetoric is not merely to point out its tendentiousness. The real point is that in order to transcend economism, you need to transcend the reification/voluntarism dual of which it forms a part. Like many opponents and proponents of Marxism who claim to be critiquing the really existing economism and reductionism in the Marxian tradition, Robinson repeats the dualism he wishes to transcend. If class analysis is equated with economism in its various versions, then the other phenomena will almost surely be analyzed as irreducible to it or "out of phase." As Meiksins Wood has put it in her brilliant analysis of the aporias of Althusserianism, which tends to see history as a series of discontinuous chunks and complicates the base/superstructure metaphor by seeing them accordingly as discontinuous chunks that interact, phenomena like racism almost have to be viewed as "superstructural fragments left over from another mode of production" which "overdetermine" the base or simply come to be viewed as "backward" or "debris." Robinson's language of "dustbin" etc. is thus an accurate reading of one part of the Marxian tradition. As Meiksins Wood shows, the failure to supersede this tradition leads directly to the postmarxian deconstruction of the last instance which never comes. Thus history becomes either nothing but micropolitics (postmarxism) or a faceoff between idealist deep structures of mind (Robinson). As I will try to show, Robinson's critique does not dissolve the aporia indicated by what some call "the debris theory," but redescribes it as the autonomy of culture.(see Meiksins Wood, 1995, chapter two)
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18. The heart of Robinson's critique of Marxism as an extension of Europe's racial metaphysic stems from his assertion that racism preexisted capitalism. It is assumed from this that class cannot account for race as the case is often put these days. One mistake Robinson makes (a mistake common to this tradition) is, as I've mentioned, tacitly and falsely to equate class analysis with the analysis of capitalism. In fact, a noneconomic determinist Marxism focusing on processes of class rule and social control offers, I will argue, a superior analysis of both pre-capitalist and capitalist racisms. I'm thinking particularly of Ted Allen's two volume work The Invention of the White Race, which, while focusing on the origins of antiblack racism in the United States, spends a good deal of time analyzing English racism against the Irish. And the recently published work by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, <i>The Many Headed Hydra</i>.
19. What's striking here is how similar Robinson's analysis of anti-Irish racism is to Allen's. In fact I would go so far as to say that Robinson's analysis, while meant to be anti-Marxist, often approaches a non economic determinist class analysis. But not always, for his dominant analytic categories are not only incompatible with the kind of class analysis offered by Allen, but simply cannot withstand scrutiny. So I'd like to compare Robinson's analysis of pre-capitalist and capitalist racisms to Allen's historical materialist analysis. I will then broaden the discussion to one of general historical method, where I will compare historical materialism, represented below by Allen, Rediker/Linebaugh, against the kinds of criticisms of Marxism raised by Robinson, Robin Kelley in his laudatory foreword to <i>Black Marxism</i> and David Roediger, whose criticisms of Marxism bear noted resemblance to Robinson's.
20. I will begin with their remarkable rejection of phenotypic or skin color explanations of racism. Both, interestingly, cite and critique Edmund Morgan in similar ways--see him as both approaching and backing off the insight that race has nothing to do with skin color. Robinson notes that Morgan is willing to argue that "in the eyes of unpoor Englishmen the poor bore many of the marks of an alien race." Robinson continues:
In the next breath however he declares: 'to be sure, poverty was not genetically hereditary. The poor were not born of another color than the rest of the population but legislation could offer a substitute for color.' He appears to link specifically racial prejudice to differences in color; that is without color, a prejudice may emerge that is only like racism: 'the contempt that lay behind these proposals [the enslavement of the poor] and behind many of the workhouse schemes is not easy to distinguish from the kind of contempt that today we call racism.' The parallels he pursues between English domination of the Irish in the sixteenth century and Native Americans from the seventeenth century on, however would suggest otherwise. Here again is an instance where the existence of European racism toward other Europeans is simply denied in both analytical and historical terms.(Robinson, 339).
21. Allen's argument about religio-racial oppression of the Irish is meant to detach racism and race from phenotype. To do this, he, like Robinson, emphasizes the parallels between policy toward English, Native Americans and Africans. In particular it is addressed to Jordan's psychoanalytically inspired "blackness within" hypothesis that explains racism in terms of "the English need to be white," or need for white identity. As Allen says, "'a need to know they were white'" cannot possibly explain the attitude of the English toward the Irish" (Allen, Vol. One, p.28). The details of English policy toward the Irish, the many changes in policy, from racial oppression to national oppression and back again, and even the odd combination of national oppression in Ireland coupled with racial oppression in Ulster (more on this later) is explained as deliberate ruling class policy undertaken in response to the particularities of class struggle and social control.
22. Robinson's first chapter is entitled "Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development." Much of what he argues is consonant with Allen's historical materialism, almost identical. This is clear from among other things the subtitle. Allen's class analytic social control hypothesis argues against economism--the attempt to explain, for example, racial slavery or "white race identification" (this is part of his critique of Timothy Breen's work) via "exclusively objective factors" like the rising price of tobacco in late 17th century Virginia (Allen, Vol. One, p.20). For Allen, such objective factors are inadequate as explanations for the particularities of racism in the U.S. For Allen, deliberate ruling class policy in a situation not of their own making best explains racism. The difference is of course that because Robinson equates class analysis with economism and "objective factors," subjectivity in history tends to be read as incompatible with Marxism. I'll return to this line of thought in a moment. Right now, I want to pursue the parallels between Robinson and historical materialism a bit further.
23. In chapter one, Robinson asserts that "the class that ruled, the nobility, by its orchestration of the instrumentalities of the state, imprinted its character on the whole of European society. And since much of that character had to do with violence, the lower orders were woven into the tapestry of a violent social order." He goes on to state that "this was not a simple question of the dominance of the ruling class over the masses" (BM, p. 21). Now, a couple things he says here are taken to be at odds with Marxism. The reason this dominance is not a simple question (Marxists are always simple) is because, as he says, the masses as such did not exist, though he appears to contradict himself on the next page when he asserts that "when it came to the structures of the state, their knowledge of the social, cultural, and historical compositions of the masses was exquisitely refined" (BM, p.22) The point he wants to make is that strategies of social control were quite sophisticated. And the concept of the masses was in part an ideological invention whose purpose was to mask this social control based on divisions.
24. In pitting himself rhetorically against Marxism as he has defined it, he makes assertions with which many Marxists would concur, at least up to a point:
the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate--to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical (dialect) differences into "racial" ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the third world began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.
As a civilization of free and equal beings, Europe was as much a fiction in the nineteenth century and later as its very unity had been during the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. . . . From the twelfth century forward, it was the bourgeoisie and the administrators of state power who initiated and nurtured myths of egalitarianism while seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the purpose of their domination.Old instruments gave way to newer ones, not because they were old but because the ending of feudalism and the expansion of capitalism and its world system--that is the increasingly uneven character of development among European peoples themselves and between Europeans and the world beyond--precipitated new oppositions while providing new opportunities and demanding new "historical" agents. (Robinson, p.26)
With all of this division in the service of domination, nationalism was required also : international capitalism persisted in competitive anarchy-each national bourgeoisie opposing the others as 'natural enemies.'
To do this required the cooptation of "their rational proletariat in order to destroy their competitors." (Robinson, 27.)
25. While both Robinson and historical materialists would agree that ruling classes make history though not under conditions of their own choosing, for Robinson, this becomes an anti-Marxist hypothesis, putting into question class analysis. For the processes of class rule Robinson talks about above are themselves subordinate to what he will call the western racial metaphysic, whose primary characteristic is a kind of fundamental violence. Violence, "mechanisms of self destruction inherent in Western civilization," is not then a function of class struggle and class rule so much as a function of Western culture that class rule takes up. (Robinson, p.71).
26. I noted above that Allen's polemic was directed against the psycho-cultural hypothesis for explaining racism. But this is only half of the polemic. The other part of Allen's polemic is against Edmund Morgan, for the insufficiency or incompleteness of his sociogenic hypothesis. The upshot of Allen's critique is that the incompleteness of Morgan's sociogenic account "spared the life of the innate racism idea that he had so trenchantly attacked as an explanation of racial slavery"(Allen, Vol. One, p. 18). Very briefly, for this is in fact quite a complicated argument, which in essence comes down to Morgan's underestimation of class inequality among Europeans. After the line between European and African, indentured servant and slave, was drawn in white and nonwhite and reinforced, there were, according to Morgan, "too few free [white] poor too matter" (Allen, Volume One, p. 18). In other words, the deliberate ruling class policy to divide "white" and nonwhite eliminated the basis for class struggle among the European labouring component by putting a ruling race in place of a ruling class: "by lumping Indians, Mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the ways for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class."
27. In addition to this erasure of the European proletariat, Morgan is also guilty, according to Allen, of erasing the revolutionary agency of the African slave. The import of this once again bears on the incompleteness of what Allen calls the "economic" explanations of racism (as opposed to a class rule social control explanation) exemplified in claims that what explains racial slavery was its cheapness. Allen notes the circularity of this argument: "to assume the cheapness is to assume the enslavement." Those in this tradition, from which Morgan incompletely breaks, "have proceeded as if the ability of the plantation bourgeoisie to control the African American bond laborer could be taken for granted"(Allen, Volume One, p.16). Ironically, this charge is precisely the charge Robinson leveled against Marxism, but as Allen's analysis demonstrates, the charge only holds against an economist Marxian analysis.
28. Yet another irony is that Morgan's analysis significantly parallels Robinson's despite Robinson's excellent critique of Morgan. Because, according to Morgan, ruling class strategy worked once and for all, in eighteenth century America, thus obviating the need for a system of racial oppression as social control(since there were "too few free poor whites to matter"), the continuation of this mode of control becomes a mystery: thus does Morgan through the insufficiency of his socioeconomic account (problems bound up with economic determinism) invite back the Jordan-Degler thesis he had done so much to dislodge (and thus does Morgan's analysis enable Roediger's, whose racist white working class will come on the scene next and reproduce the system of racial oppression for reasons of their own, not reducible to Morgan's "economic" (read Marxist) analysis).
29. For Robinson, racism "runs deep in the bowels of western thought," part of its "substratum," which is "unprepared for anything else"(Robinson, p.76). While this tradition permutates, it persists. This commitment to the hypothesis of a racial deep structure undercuts the lineaments of a Marxian analysis--as is the case with Morgan. Let's look at Robinson's discussion of American historical thought. He notes, in a rather traditional historical materialist way, that this arrogant and specious historiography was "an absolute imperative as a cornerstone for the rationalization of a slave society." This rationalization though is seen as the extension of the deeper racial logic--"a logical development of an errant civilization served so long by racial orders"(It should be noted that in this section and throughout, he oscillates between talking of this racialization as serving the ruling class and serving Western civilization). He notes that there is "an undercurrent" in opposition to this tradition, but it is "overwhelmed by the more constant and morally profound tradition of racism." These metaphors are important, central to his underestimation of class struggles against racism--both the struggles he mentions and those he omits. Instead of class struggles won on balance by the ruling class, he substitutes "undercurrents" overwhelmed by racial tides emerging from deep in the bowels(Robinson, 75, 79).
30. Even given these dominant metaphors, the history he offers doesn't always rest comfortably within the trope. For example, the racialist ideology directed at Europe's lower orders had to undergo quite a change in the American context where "the hard edges of class divisions, rooted in the European socioeconomic traditions of English gentry and continental European aristocracies, and their lower classes, were softened and obscured by a mythical racial unity." This mythical racial unity ("it was a lie but a terribly seductive one") functioned to cover up just how illusory were the "privileges of democracy." Robinson notes, like Allen does, how the history of indentured servitude, is relegated to the margins, how the reliance on white servants is marginalized in order to perpetuate a myth of white egalitarianism, of racial consensus--"the vise of intra-European racialism, religious oppression, and class contempt was lifted to embrace most of them[the white servants]"(Robinson, 76-80).
31. The question of course is why? For historical materialists, the invention of whiteness, more on this below, became, especially in the aftermath of Bacon's rebellion, a necessity of class rule. Robinson approaches such an insight when he says that such "racial fables" "obscure the related exploitations and oppressions of African, European, Asian and Amerindian peoples during the intervening 200 years"[since the American revolution](Robinson, p. 80). Yet given the power of the architectonic and the feebleness of counters ("undercurrents" etc), motivation for these practices seems to be missing--with the racial architectonic so solidly in place, despite its permutations, why would there be a need to obscure common exploitation since the incommensurable architectonics virtually ensure that these common interests--whatever this phrase can mean given the incommensurability Robinson posits--would not be realized? As I mentioned and as we'll see below, historical materialists can provide the basis for such motivations but it requires abandoning the racial architectonic paradigm for class struggle paradigm.
32. What Robinson says about Bacon's rebellion is symptomatic. Speaking of the white servants at the end of the eighteenth century, Robinson notes:
White servants were no closer to liberation at the end of the eighteenth century than were their distracted predecessors who had joined with the rankly ambitious Indian killer Bacon in a desperate attempt to redraw the boundaries of power and wealth of colonial society in seventeenth century.(Robinson, 78)
While the racism against Indians is highlighted, the multiracial character of the rebels goes unmentioned. But indeed this danger appears to be the basis for the invention of the white race even for Morgan, despite his economist weaknesses. In short, while Robinson and Allen share the view that racism cannot be reduced to questions of phenotype (color doesn't matter), Robinson, like Morgan, in essence repeats the Jordan-Degler psychocultural hypothesis that results from shared economist assumptions.
33. In his conclusion, speaking here of late nineteenth century white workers, Robinson notes, paraphrasing approvingly Dubois arguments in Black Reconstruction (more on Dubois below) that:
The racism of the American 'white' working classes and their general ideological immaturity has abnegated the extent to which the conditions of capitalist production and relations alone could be held responsible for the social development of the American proletariat. The collective and individual identities of American workers had responded as much to race as they had to class. The relations of production were not determinant. Dubois would pursue this issue politically but not theoretically.(Robinson, 314)
For those readers familiar with the arguments of David Roediger, whose connections to the kind of critique of historical materialism undertaken by Robinson I will explore later in the essay, this passage should ring a bell. As Roediger has put it, "to set race within social formations is absolutely necessary, but to reduce race to class is damaging." Likewise Morgan, backing off his claims about the volatile society (the time prior to the invention of the white race), will assert that perceptions of Africans were different, deriving perhaps from an unthinking racial "decision" (Morgan, p.314),that Africans could be more severely punished because, in the words of a Barbadian plantation owner, "Africans were a brutish sort of people" (unlike the English view of the Irish!), thus, as Morgan notes, "not subject to the rights of Englishmen." This, Morgan says as prelude to his comment, which takes us straight back to the psychocultural hypothesis, that "the new social order Virginians [!] created after they changed to slave labor was determined as much by race as by slavery"(Morgan, p.315). (It is interesting to note by the way that in quoting a Barbadian planter on Africans, he assumes that social conditions in the Caribbean were not significantly different from those prevailing in the U.S--Allen explicitly critiques such assumptions.)
34. All of these arguments reify race, a move that requires the underestimation of class struggle and other economist errors. For example, in Robinson's quote above, it is clear that over and beyond capitalist production relations alone, the white workers are being shaped by the racial architectonic (for Roediger, the white workers are "creating" themselves). What is omitted are the concrete processes of class rule in the context of class struggle, processes omitted through recourse to "capitalist productions relations alone," an abstraction from the historical particulars under which these relations always operate. This reductionist account of class rule facilitates and is facilitated by the excision of ideology and its replacement by psychology.
35. I'd like to close this part of the argument with a parallel between Robinson's argument for the primacy of race versus arguments for the primacy of patriarchy. Recently I got sent to me over the web a summary of Sue Clegg's defense of historical materialism against feminist challenges. Clegg argues that the concept of patriarchy may have ethical force but lacks explanatory power. I got another email defending patriarchy theory, this particular claim rooted in the fact that female labor in the formal and informal sectors of the economy is at the bottom of the world system, founding it, so to speak.
36. This comment about the world system resting on the backs of female labor is really just not precise. Especially insofar as it slips into a tacit and incorrect causal hypothesis, one based on a chain of misleading equivalents: On the bottom, therefore foundation, therefore cause. But the cause of the differential rate of exploitation is capitalism and why women occupy the bottom wrung has to do with capitalism making use of what's available. Sometimes, class rule does not make use of what's available but uproots it. Analogous to arguing for the cogency of the category "patriarchy" from the fact that female labor is at the bottom in the informal sector, a sector which "supports" waged labor (coded as male), would be to argue that race is autonomous from class because in the U.S, black labor was at the bottom: that slavery was racialized turns into an argument for the autonomy of race in the following way. Slavery (understood as the "economic" in turn equated with "class") doesn't explain who was enslaved. Why was slavery racialized? The implication is that Marxism cannot answer this question. But the question can be answered. It helped legitimate class rule by muting the class question. As Allen put it, "it was only because 'race' consciousness superceded class consciousness that the continental plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve and maintain the degree of social control necessary to proceeding with capital accumulation on the basis of chattel bond-labor"(Allen, Volume Two, p.240).
37. On Robinson's distorted or one-sided account of a necessarily mechanistic and economist Marxism, Marxism remakes the world as an automatic result of the spread of capitalist production; thus the world is a mirror of production. On this view, nationalism, if in step with the universalization of market relations, is supported by Marxists but otherwise viewed as backwards. Ultimately, as the market becomes global, so internationalism is expected as the reflexive (thus the mirror) response to these new production relations. Such a view indeed is inadequate, accounting neither for uneven development nor the failure of capital logic to produce its presumably predicted homogeneity. Nationalism, its persistence (just like the persistence of race, tradition etc), is thus the aporia that Marxism tries to slough off as it refuses to dissolve in capitalism's wake.
38. But as the above account is meant to suggest, this is a gross distortion. Historical materialism in one sense predicts uneven development as it is a property both of the logic of capital and the imperatives of class rule and social control. But the particular shape these imperatives take depend on the particulars of class struggle, particulars which include the particulars of history, ideology, geography. In America, the white race mode of social control was operative; in the Caribbean, it failed, requiring different forms of social control. As Allen discusses in vol. two, some Native American tribes offered structures (the presence of a cacique class) that could be used for purposes of colonial rule; others did not offer such usable structures and so instead were removed or exterminated. As briefly mentioned above, in the case of colonial rule in Ireland in the nineteenth century, national oppression could be the form of rule (with limited Catholic emancipation) in one case while racial oppression operated in Ulster (Allen, Volume Two, chapter three).
39. "Culture" on a proper historical materialist account, is not the other of class but forms part of a fuller theorization of class rule in different contexts. In colonial contexts, the culture of the dominated is thus very important, partially determining both the form of class rule--its mix of cooptation, marginalization, extermination--and its limits. Robinson's alternative of splitting off culture from class may be necessary in order to justify what I will argue is, contra Kelley's claim (see below), a nationalist fiction. But in making culture autonomous, it almost has to play into the hands of "the culture matters" theorists--from Moynihan to Huntington--who explain development and underdevelopment, violence and nonviolence, wealth and poverty as functions of largely incommensurable cultures. It is thus more than a little ironic that Robin Kelley, who has been an untiring critic of culture of poverty theories, nevertheless accepts or appears to accept one of its central underlying premises-the autonomy of culture from class.
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40. At this point I'd like to turn to a remark of Robin Kelley's from his foreword to Black Marxism:
Just as the Irish were products of popular traditions borne and bred under colonialism, the "English" working class of the colonizing British isles was formed by Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, a racial ideology shared across class lines that allowed the English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and mistreatment for the Irish. This particular form of English racialism was not invented by the ruling class to divide and conquer (though it did succeed in that respect); rather, it was there at the outset, shaping the process of proletarianization and the formation of working class consciousness. (Robinson, xiii)
In other words, if class shaped race; race (prior racialization, the western racial metaphysic) shaped class. As we'll see in a moment, new work by Rediker and Linebaugh shows to what extent the "English" workers needed to be reminded of their English status. They had to have it continually beaten into them through state terror--so that Kelley's phrase "there at the outset," is at least potentially misleading as are his comments about divide and conquer.
41. In a December 14, 1998, Nation article ("Integration: What's Left?"), Kelley refers to the divide and conquer thesis as "capitalist trickery" before asserting that segregation, therefore racism, is rooted in the fact that whites benefit from it and "people of color pay the price"--thus in my view confusing differential with benefit. The Marxian divide and conquer hypothesis does not require, as Kelley seems to imply with his magic (trickery) metaphor, a pristine homogenized (purely class conscious) working class divided like the red sea with a stroke of the wand by a demiurge ruling class.
42. Working classes, like human beings in general, are going to think a lot of things--some good, some very bad, some in their class interests, some not. The job of ruling classes is not to create diverse unities and divisions serving their interests in one fell swoop but, in the messy ways of the historical process (hegemony is after all hard work as Hall says and Robinson implicitly denies), to do their best to insure that movements don't get started and built that threaten the basis of their rule (as we will see, such movements often got started and built, but were just as often smashed, marginalized, coopted). The purpose of my historical sketches, up to this point and in what follows, is to show that while it is true that there is no pristine class consciousness (such consciousness is not spontaneous) disturbed from without, it is also false to naturalize racism by saying it's "there at the outset."
43. The analysis is also empirically problematic. If the critique of historical materialism offered from the vantage point of a nationalism that takes race seriously, refusing to treat it as epiphenomena of other processes, distorts historical materialism theoretically (parodying divide and conquer, assuming that because some members of the differentially oppressed working classes and peasantry are, by virtue of being part of a capitalist division of labor, less exploited than others, that they therefore benefit from the greater oppression experienced by those below them), it also promotes not surprisingly a nationalist historiography, one that falsifies history. The theoretical and empirical errors reinforce one another.
44. As Allen, Linebaugh and Rediker emphasize in their class struggle accounts, racialization is an ongoing process, but it's ongoing precisely because revolutionary counterracialization processes are also ongoing--a "hydra" repeatedly in need of decapitation and cauterization. In other words, Robinson's (and implicitly Kelley's at least in this instance) particular view of the English working class is itself a product of the suppression of the history of the Atlantic proletariat. Put another way, nationalist historiography, even of a labor flavor, featuring racialist European working classes and non-proletarian black traditions, is an inaccurate historiography, suppressing the class struggles that produced what nationalist historiography takes as a given. As the authors Linebaugh and Rediker make clear, this suppression took place again and again.
45. I will highlight a few points from their research--the international character of the class struggle on both sides of the class divide: the motley, multiethnic, multiracial, international character of resistance to class rule on the one hand and the import of ethnicization, racialization and nationalism in stemming the dangers of the hydra on the other. My examples will focus (though not entirely) on the English and Irish proletariat because it is their racism that has been emphasized.
46. Their history begins with the origins of English capitalism, with its founding in enclosures, the dispossession of the commons, and colonialism. The origins of capitalism were incredibly brutal, its victims multiethnic:
In England, the expropriation of the peasantry was accompanied by systematic violence and terror, organized through the criminal sanction, publish searches, the prisons, martial law, capital punishment, banishment, forced labor and colonization.(L & R, p.49).
Witch burnings as well were an essential part of this expropriation: the European witch hunt reached its most intense ferocity between 1550 and 1650, "'simultaneously with the enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade and the enactment of laws against the vagabonds, in countries where a reorganization of work along capitalist lines was under way.'" This laboring class they note "had been given a new form, a productive one, whether waged on unwaged, but not yet racialized (L & R, pp. 52 and 49)
47. "In all the forty English counties some eight hundred went to the gallows in each year of the seventeenth century," many hanged "for stealing goods valued at as little as eighteen pence" (L & R, p.51). As Linebaugh himself established in The London Hanged, hangings, continuing throughout the eighteenth century, helped enforce the wage relation on a resisting proletariat-in-process-of-formation.
48. In Ireland, according to William Petty, 504,000 Irish perished, with many more enslaved and transported, often to the Caribbean (I will return in a moment to the importance of these "black Irish" in the Caribbean.) The ruling classes during this period repeatedly emphasized the motley character of those needing to be enslaved, disciplined, exterminated. For Linebaugh and Rediker, Francis Bacon's discourse on holy war nicely encapsulates ruling class legitimation of terror. Those rightly subject to terror are categorized as monstrosities, peoples without nation, mere multitudes, "swarms of people." Yet he categorized these mere multitudes precisely and argued they deserved destruction: "West Indians; Canaanites; pirates; land rovers; assassins; Amazons; and Anabaptists." The first group referred to any Native American--"wild and savage people," more like beasts and birds, "the property of which passeth with the possession and goeth to the occupant." "Canaanites" referred to dispossessed commoners--"the many thousands of dispossessed in England, the wild Irish, and Africans." The third group consisted of pirates, those attacking English ships and slave raiding the coasts of England and Ireland--but also those who offered alternative, relatively egalitarian and motley communities or "hydrarchies" to members of the oppressed ship's proletariat. The "landrovers" were the lumpenproletariat. "Assassins" designated primarily regicides. The Amazons were collectives of "armed women" attacking enclosures and the Anabaptists referred to those "who in sixteenth century Munster had held 'all things to be lawful, not according to any certain laws or rules, but according to the secret and variable motions and instincts of the spirit; this is indeed no nation, no people, no signory that God doth know'. . . and Bacon, for whom the Anabaptists symbolized 17th century revolutionary Antinomianism wanted to 'cut them off from the face of the earth.'" (L & R, pp.61-5)
49. This violence and terror was motivated simultaneously by primitive accumulation and counterrevolutionary violence, indissociably the emerging logic of capital and class struggle, which shape each other at every turn. A central point of their research is to show the character of class struggles during the time before the emerging proletariat was racialized, and to show that even after "racialization," the process had to be continually reinFORCED--thus the significance of the New York conspiracy of 1741, which took place after the "invention of the white race." Class may be raced and gendered and vice versa, but it is misleading to say that the relevant sorts of racialization were "there at the outset." Here are some examples.
50. The left wing of the English revolution was both abolitionist and egalitarian:
Agitation against slavery was an essential element in the publications and practices of the Levellers. They fought to abolish slavery. . . . A rough definition of slavery at the time would include these features: it began in an act of expropriation and terror; it affected children and young people particularly; it compelled violent exploitation; and more often than not, it ended in death. The hewers and drawers of water, or the laboring subjects of the Atlantic economy, met this definition in an era well before race and ethnicity came to define slavery.(L and R, p. 111)
51. Heavily influenced by radical Antinomianism, the left wing of the New Model Army rejected the colonial enterprise against the Irish that came to inform the Cromwellian conquest. As the authors make clear, Cromwellian conquest required the prior smashing of Leveller, Digger, radical Antinomian resistance: "The day after the Leveller leadership had been crushed. . . Cromwell agreed to take charge of the expedition to conquer Ireland"(L & R, 120). Moreover, once "the Antinomian challenge was defeated, the way was open. . .to wage war against the Dutch and Spanish, to stabilize Barbados, to seize Jamaica and to establish slavery more broadly than ever by linking West Africa with the Caribbean" (L and R, p.120).
52. The ideological consequence of the victory over the hydra in England was that the abolitionist component was defeated and a racialized nationalism began to take its place--"If the Putney Debates of 1647 revealed the English revolution as an abolitionist movement, a 1659 parliamentary debate on slavery and 'the free born Englishman', held on the eve of the restoration of the monarchy. . . marked a counterrevolutionary reversal": "the development of the English doctrine of white supremacy thus occurred in the context of counterrevolution, the restoration of the monarchy and the advance of the slave trade" (132,134).
53. Central to a class struggle historiography is that hegemony is the product of both force and ideology, the combinations varying depending on historical circumstances. Also central to this account is that the revolutionary ideas and practices, however imperfect, are hard to eliminate--eliminated in one place for a period, they pop up, hydra-like, in another, as in Barbados.
54. In the standard imagery of the ruling class, Barbados was viewed as "the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish. Rogues and whores and such people are those which are generally brought here." The "island was inhabited by all sort," the motley crew:
English, French, Dutch, Scots, Irish, Spanish Jews, Indians and Africans. Heinrich von Uchteritz, a German mercenary who fought for Charles Stuart, was sold to a plantation that had 'one hundred Christians, one hundred Negroes and one hundred Indians as slaves.'(L & R, p. 124)
Planters here imposed a "puritanical work discipline" on the "multiracial gangs in the canefields"(p.125).
55. The response to these conditions (a response shaped by various traditions with anticapitalist and cosmopolitan components both European and African) was often rebellion, especially among Irish and African:
The cooperation between such redshanks and African slaves was a nightmare for the authorities.
Rediker and Linebaugh continue:
The Governor's council announced in 1655 that 'there are several Irish Servants and Negroes out in rebellion in ye Thicketts and thereabouts,' making a mockery of a law passed in 1652, 'an act to restrain the wanderings of servants and Negroes.' The first recorded group of maroons in Barbados was interracial, as was the case in the capital, Bridgetown, into which recaptured runaways were thrown. 'What planters feared most of all was a rebellious alliance between slaves and servants" explains. . . Hilary McD. Beckles. Irish and Africans conspired together in plots of 1675, 1686, and 1692.(L & R, 126)
56. In response, "the rulers of Barbados separated the servants, slaves and religious radicals from each other," divisions codified in the comprehensive slave and servant code of 1661, which anticipated other such codes including the 1705 code in Virginia which firmly established racial divisions between white and black, divisions dealing a decided blow to the multiracial revolutionary Antinomianism that had "reared its head" between 1663 and 1676, the year of Bacon's (Bacon and his followers were called Levellers, Ranters and antinomians) rebellion: "The defeat of the servants and slaves and the recomposition of the plantation proletariat coincided with the origins of scientific racism," they note. (L and R, 127-8)
*****
57. The multiracial, international New York conspiracy of 1741, is notable in part because the invention of the white race was well underway. Contra Robinson's metaphor of "imprinting," the white race mode of social control was never entirely successful, its hegemony never guaranteed, always in need of reimposition (I should note, to distinguish my account from any post-Marxian appropriation, that the fact that hegemony is hard work, never entirely successful, while testimony to the hydra like fighting spirit of the revolutionary proletariat, does not gainsay the fact of this hegemony rooted in the structural domination of ruling class over working classes, capital over labor). Describing the life in Hughson's tavern, central to the plot, Linebaugh and Rediker note that "here was a world turned upside down, a place where Africans and Irish were Kings, as they would be in the larger society after the uprising. In New York, they believed, 'there should be a motley government as well as motley subjects.'" The social relations underlying this conspiracy were rooted primarily (though not completely as you can see) in the life of the maritime proletariat:
It grew out of the work of the waterfront, the organized cooperation of many kinds of workers, whose Atlantic experiences became the building blocks of the conspiracy. The rebels of 1741 combined the experiences of the deep-sea ship (hydrarchy), the military regiment, the plantation, the waterfront gang, the religious conventicle, and the ethnic tribe or clan to make something new, unprecedented and powerful. The events of 1741 can be understood only by attending to the Atlantic experiences of the conspirators, in the villages and slave factories of the Gold Coast of Africa, the cottages of Ireland, the Spanish military outpost of Havana, the street meeting of religious revival, and the Maroon settlements of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and their surrounding sugar plantations. (L & R, pp.176, 179)
58. This isn't the place to go into the details of the revolt; the revolt was discovered and snuffed out. 30 people of color were hanged, four whites, including Hughson, whose corpse was left to rot. Seventy more Africans were exiled, five Europeans were forced to join the British army at war with Spain "where the conditions of soldiering life likely made theirs a delayed sentence of death": "The authorities approached the solidarity with trident in hand, each of its points carefully sharpened to puncture the prevailing multiracial practices and bonds of proletarian life in Atlantic New York." They attacked the places along the waterfront where multiracial relations form, urging "diligent inquiry into the economy and behavior of all the mean ale-houses and tipling houses within this city," most pertinently those entertaining "'negroes, and the scum and dregs of white people in conjunction.'" The dynamics of the slave trade were also changed by "a series of private business decisions undertaken by the merchants of New York." Slaves began to be imported less from the Caribbean, part of the "Atlantic circuit of rebellion," and more directly from the African coast. Finally, the "racial fluidity"(compare Morgan's volatile society)--where the multiracial conspirators could use the term "white" to refer to the ruling classes--was deliberately targeted to produce "new discipline and a different solidarity."(206-10)
59. They demonized the Europeans involved in the revolt, calling them "monsters in nature," "the disgrace of their complexion." Hughson, the owner of the tavern where the plot was hatched, was "the scandal of his complexion and the disgrace of human nature!" Bad whites and rebellious blacks were the victims of spectacular demonstration hangings. Yet other Europeans involved in the conspiracy were let go--thus Linebaugh and Rediker's comment that the ruling class treated the conspiracy with terror and mercy. New York's rulers thus "divided and weakened the proletariat as they unified and strengthened a fictive community based on whiteness" (209) Once again force and ideology, state and private, repressive and ideological apparatus, combined to decapitate the hydra.
60. Yet another example: According to Ted Allen, the division between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland was the local stand-in for English racism against the Irish, a racism that Allen terms appropriately, given the racializing function of religion in this particular case, religio-racial oppression. The United Irishman were strong enough in the midst of furious divide and conquer policies among the ruling classes as to require 76,000 troops to put them down. Ironically, an irony that is nevertheless understandable on a Marxian class struggle account, in the aftermath of the rebellion, national oppression, involving the recruitment of the Catholic bourgeoisie into the intermediate social control stratum, began to replace racial oppression, "a change in the British system of colonial rule" in order to circumvent "the United Irishmen phenomenon" .(see volume one, p.91-6). Except, Allen notes, in Ulster, where racial oppression was maintained as a necessity of social control--based on "the exclusion of Catholics from social mobility," with all this entails. What the two significantly different arrangements, existing side by side, had in common was the imperative of class rule. In both cases, the arrangements had similar functions. Allen sums up these uneven developments of class and colonial rule:
In coming to grips with the problem of social control, the British colonial bourgeoisie was opting for the admission of the Catholic bourgeoisie into the intermediate buffer social control stratum. But if social control was to be maintained in the Catholic provinces of Leister, Munster, and Connaught by the abandonment of the system of racial oppression, it was equally imperative that racial oppression-Protestant Ascendancy-remain in place in Ulster. Anything other than that would invite a resurrection of the equalitarian notions of the United Irishmen, with all their uncongenial implications for the British bourgeoisie. The maintenance of the racial privileges o the Protestant tenants in Ulster therefore was the necessary complement of the strategic admission of the Catholic lay and clerical bourgeoisie in the rest of Ireland into the system of social control.(Allen, Vol. One, 127)
61. In nineteenth century America, this English-Irish proletarian (racial) divide was of course substantially weakened once again through the whitening process described by Allen. Division between England and Ireland, unity between Irish and African as evidenced by the former's often ardent support of abolition in Ireland, was replaced by divisions between white and black, a process really quite unintelligible if examined through concepts like "prior racialization" or the "racialization of class," concepts which describe but do not explain.
62. One of the central points of the historical materialist Linebaugh and Rediker's work discussed above is that the separation between the narrative of the working class and the narrative of black power, a separation which Robinson does nothing to dislodge, is itself a reifying abstraction, one designed to suppress what Linebaugh and Rediker call an "egalitarian and multiethnic conception of humanity, which. . . represented the grandest possibility of their age [L and R speak of the late eighteenth century here] and ours."
63. This conception (whether part of the same tradition or not is more an issue for authenticity seekers) of the centrality of revolutionary multiracial unity (one to be contrasted with its class collaborationist counterpart represented by today's triumvirate of Bush, Powell, and Rice) has continually raised its hydra heads: John Brown and his multiracial band of rebels, the Knights of Labor, the IWW, the largely Communist Party influenced CIO. And such movements have continued to meet with great repression due presumably to the threat they pose. As Saxton has noted in contrasting the multiracial industrial unionism represented in nuce by the Knights to the racist craft unionism that would be so well represented by Samuel Gompers. . . . employer attacks "fell more heavily upon the Knights because they were perceived as more dangerous." And as Robin Kelley has noted about leftist multiracial unionism in the McCarthy period, "It is not an accident that the most militantly antiracist unions were the main targets of Mccarthyite witch hunts."(YMD, p.120).
