Theme: Networks of Capital
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
At its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction-a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. Certainly its philosophical origins are indisputably Western. But the same must be said of its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view 1. This most natural consequence though has assumed a rather ominous significance since European Marxists have presumed more frequently than not that their project is identical with world-historical development. Confounded it would seem by the cultural zeal that accompanies ascendant civilizations, they have mistaken for universal verities the structures and social dynamics retrieved from their own distant and more immediate pasts. Even more significantly, the deepest structures of "historical materialism," the foreknowledge for its comprehension of historical movement, have tended to relieve European Marxists from the obligation of investigating the profound effects of culture and historical experience on their science 2.
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
The ordering ideas that have persisted in Western civilization (and Marx himself as we shall see was driven to admit such phenomena), reappearing in successive "stages" of its development to dominate arenas of social ideology, have little or no theoretical justification in Marxism for their existence. One such recurring idea is racialism: the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the "racial" components of its elements. Though hardly unique to European peoples, its appearance and codification, during the feudal period, into Western conceptions of society was to have important and enduring consequences. 3
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion. Ultimately, this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism; a mistake founded on the presumptions that Europe itself had produced, that the motive and material forces that generated the capitalist system were to be wholly located in what was a fictive historical entity. From its very foundations capitalism had never been-any more than Europe-a "closed system." 4
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-WiredFrom p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
The Africans were, however, not the only ones to be so unfortunately used in the slave trade. The greed of the English and European merchants easily overran their racial and national sympathies. Thus it was that the crews of their slaving ships died at rates perhaps even higher than their human cargoes. 6 In time, English seamen sang about their fate in graphic terms: Beware and take care Of the Bight of Benin: For one that comes out, There are forty go in.
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
Just as instructive, the rebels among these Africans and "negroes" were described as "runaways," a term that has endured in the historiography of the period. It should be remembered, however, that it was from the efforts of men and women such as these that the Black settlements of Virginia's piedmont and the Afro-Creek "Exiles of Florida" (the Seminoles) would consist. In similar fashion, the maroon peoples of the Caribbean and South America would be formed. They were as well, at the end of the eighteenth century, among the estimated 55,000 who fled to the British forces and the loyalist settlements when the colonists pursued the logic of the fear of their own enslavement to the point of revolution. 8
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
From p. [INSERT PAGE NUMBER] in Social Theory Re-Wired
As peasants, as tenant farmers, as migrant laborers, as day laborers, as domestic servants, and as wage labor, their expropriation extended into the present century. Even in the destruction of the means of production, the wars that Marx and Engels had stipulated as inevitable in capitalism, Black labor was pressed into service. They were exempt from no aspect of exploitation. 10
Watch the the video “Reversing Runaway Inequality: Racial Capitalism” from Citizen Action of New York. The video provides contemporary examples of capitalist exploitation of African Americans in housing, environmental (un)regulation, education, and mass incarceration. Robinson argues that capitalism and racialism have always gone hand in hand, and these examples show that relationship continuing today. Do any of these examples surprise you? Why or why not? Do you agree with Robinson that capitalism is inherently racialized? If so, why? If not, how can we explain the well-documented racialized exploitation described in the video?
Robinson argues here that Marxism’s conceptualization of history as progressing through stages is Eurocentric—that is, it’s based on European history and analytical methods. Marx and his followers, according to Robinson, have universalized the European experience of class struggle to all civilizations, even though non-European civilizations have developed differently.
Robinson continues critiquing the idea of Marxist historical materialism. He says that in universalizing European experience, Marxists have ignored the ways that particular cultures and histories shape the development of capitalism and exploitation. In other words, history is contingent, developing differently in different places, societies, and cultures.
Robinson is pointing out that some ideas that Marxism essentially ignores developed in European feudal society and have become immensely important to how modern societies are organized. One of those ideas is “racialism”—that is, the idea that societies should be organized around racial groups. Robinson is critiquing the Marxist tendency to minimize the influence of racialism on modern societies in favor of a historical materialist commitment to class analysis.
Marxism treats racialism as an artificial holdover in capitalism from pre-capitalistic economic systems. Robinson, in contrast, says that racialism was central to the capitalist economy from its beginning 300 years ago. He’s critiquing how Marxist analyses are based on a “fictive historical entity”—the idea of a European feudal system built primarily around class distinctions—that imagines race as artificial to the class differences that supposedly really matter.
In this section, Robinson is pointing out that the slave trade was massive in terms of the number of human beings who were enslaved and forced to create stuff that their owners profited from. He’s also pointing out that enslavement (and attendant colonialism) was integral to virtually all European economic and social development from the 15th century onward, including industrialization and finance in England and the French Revolution. Basically—Robinson is saying—Europe developed, modernized, and capitalized through enslavement, not in spite of it, as Marx suggested. Put differently, racialized enslavement was central, not peripheral, to the development of capitalism.
Robinson traces the growth of enslavement in the British American colonies, pointing out that indigenous people and indentured servants (a term describing a temporary form of contractual enslavement, whereby a person agrees to work without pay for a set amount of time to pay off a debt) provided the first slave labor. Robinson then traces the growth of the African slave trade among the English. In this paragraph, Robinson highlights how that trade not only killed African victims during capture and transport, but also the merchants who bought and sold enslaved people. Robinson’s point seems to be that racial capitalism and the greed that it inspired resulted not only in the exploitation of enslaved people, but also in the destruction of the crews who forcibly brought them to the Americas.
Robinson is making two points here. First, he’s implying that the construction of racial categories in the Americas came as a result of enslavement, not the other way around. In other words, race as a concept developed as a way to justify existing racial capitalism—the material benefit that Europeans gained from enslaving Africans. Robinson here agrees with Marx that the ideas of society (in this case, the idea of race) develop in order to justify and maintain the system that produces stuff (in this case, enslavement and colonialism).
Second, Robinson is pointing out that as enslaved Africans learned European agricultural and production practices and had children, Europeans homogenized these descendants into one group. Rather than referring to enslaved people by their indigenous tribal affiliations, Europeans treated all enslaved people as members of one group. Robinson says that this homogenization represented a further dehumanization of enslaved people on the part of Europeans.
Robinson is here highlighting how some enslaved people escaped and created their own settlements in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. He’s also highlighting how some joined the British in the Revolutionary War as the colonists hypocritically fought for their own freedom from Britain while keeping others enslaved.
Here Robinson sums up his argument: that Europe and its colonies in the Americans couldn’t have developed economically and socially without mass enslavement. That enslavement, in turn, devastated the economies, societies, and lives of enslaved Africans.
Robinson points out that exploitation of the descendants of African enslaved people didn’t stop with the official abolition of enslavement, as European colonies continued to take advantage of colonies into the 20th century, and as capitalism in the Americas continued to depend on the cheap labor provided by the descendants of enslaved people. Robinson is pointing out here that capitalism, even without an explicitly legal reason for doing so, continues to exploit African people and the descendants of enslaved people today.