This is Israel posted by Richard Seymour

This is a video of IDF soldiers, having invaded a Palestinian village in the West Bank, attacking local residents and internationals:



As the Angry Arab usually says of events like this, "this is Zionism".

Update: Ben White on the background.

Labels: apartheid, Israel, occupation, palestine, racism, west bank, zionism

CBS on Israel-Palestine posted by Richard Seymour

Watch CBS Videos Online

Labels: apartheid, cbs, democracy, Israel, palestine, racism, zionism

The Making of a 'White Working Class' posted by Richard Seymour

It is far from obvious why class should be colour-coded. We can see how 'race' has been contiguous with strata within classes, so that the lowest wages and the least skilled occupations are dispensed to non-white members of the working class. We can also see how class is often construed as a kind of ethnicity, and how ethnic designations often overlap with economic positions. But the question of why there should ever be an identity such as a 'white working class' is clearly a social psychological one. One way of looking at this is to identify an extreme example to look for salient traits, and I think I have such in the 1922 Rand Rising. The Rand, or Witwatersrand, is of course the core of the gold and mineral mining industry of South Africa, and has been since the late nineteenth century. As such, it was the centre of capital accumulation at the time of the Rising, with the overwhelming (distorting) emphasis on mining capital.

Historically, the modern doctrine of ‘race’ emerged in two ways. The first was in the course of military confrontation, as in the combat between European farmers and American Indians. Originally considered the colour of the ‘juyce of Mulberries’ or ‘Olive coloured of a sad French green’, they were understood as having been ‘naturally white’, but darkened by the climate. Only when relations between them and Europeans were characterized increasingly by military combat were the racial codes introduced. Similarly, the battles of white Afrikan frontiersmen with 'natives' co-produce a colonial-racial ideology, which would be referenced during the 1922 rising. The second way in which 'race' emerged was precisely in the global ordering of the labour-system, and the replacement of white indentured labour with African slaves. Race had always ordered the colonial labour system in South Africa, whether when Africans worked as slaves until 1834, or during the period of 'colour bar' legislation in the Cape and elsewhere. The "colour bar" that emerged after the Mineral Revolution turned what had been a stratification according to skill into a stratification by race. But what was the cause of such policies. According to one well-known aqccount (HJ & RE Simons, Class and Colour in SA, 1850-1950), "White Labourism" was a "primary cause of policies that incite racial hostility", which implies that the political ideology of white workers intruded into the running of the labour system, redistributing the structure of wages and privileges to the benefit of the 'white working class'. It is certainly true, as I mentioned in a previous post, that white workers (mainly British workers trained in the Cornish mines, as part of what Jonathan Hyslop calls an 'imperial working class') pressed for the imposition of forms of colour bar legislation some time before employers were ubiquitously in favour of such means. However, as I also said, the demand became effective when employers and state administrators decided to back it. There is a rationale for this. As Harold Wolpe points out ('The White Working Class', Economy and Society, 1976), the particular demand for a skilled, supervisorial bloc of labour directing unskilled labour, resulted from the particular conditions of early mining capitalism, where the risks were high and the scope of the labour force too large for an individual capitalist manager-owner to handle (nowadays, of course, we have byzantine bureaucracies known as 'human resources' and 'personnel', as well as an apparatus of junior managers, to deal with this). British immigrant workers may have accepted colonial ideology. Used to being at or near the bottom of a vertiginous class pyramid in Britain, they were now part of a 'master race'. And arguably they had a shared grounding in the imperial experience that was quite different from their metropolitan cohorts. However, the drive for a colour bar was still at the stage of the 1890s an expression of an interested defined more by status and the desire to preserve it than anything else. Keeping the main labour competition out of skilled occupations preserved a skill monopoly. Further, just as a refinement to the point, the 'white working class' was not yet defined by whiteness - it didn't include, for example, proletarianised Afrikaners, who only became a majority of miners in the Rand by 1918, after a period of the state promoting Afrikaner employment in the mines. And 'white labour' had no serious political platform then of the kind that would gradually acquire and which was expressed in a way in the Labour-Nationalist Pact administration of 1924. (David Yudelman, in The Emergence of Modern South Africa convincingly disputes the idea that the Pact was a genuine political victory for white workers, but that is not quite my point: the point is that they were recognised as a special and particular constituency by that time). So, had employers not turned to segregationist measures in the mid-1890s, and had state personnel under the British not encouraged this in various ways, it is difficult to imagine a 'white working class' identity of the coherence that was later displayed emerging.

Afrikaners had to compete with African labour for access to employment during the early 1900s for a number of reasons. The social historian Timothy Keegan describes (in Konczacki et al, Studies in the Economic History of South Africa, Volume II) how an older Boer way of life had been squeezed by British capitalist penetration and land speculation. Previously they might have relied upon only guns and ammo for hunting, and wagons and oxen for travel and trade. But by the end of the Anglo-Boer War, they were political and militarily defeated, as well as economically transformed. The diminishing scope of 'free land' produced class stratification within the community, with some becoming reasonably profitable landowners and others becoming 'bywoners' (tenant farmers). They were, however, unable to compete with experienced African sharecroppers, whose advantages included their emphasis on communal life which helped them weather the vicissitudes of crop cycles. Keegan rather unflatteringly describes it in these words: "Mostly, they ended up in the industrial centres as unskilled proletariat, where the white supremacist state was eventually to save them from the consequences of their economic ineffectuality". This is not quite right. As Charles van Onselen shows (in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand: Volume II, 1982), the initial tendency - quite successful for a while - was to join the local petit-bourgeoisie, involving themselves in two key economic areas: cab driving, and brick-making. Oh, laugh if you want: white bigots in the cabbie or brickie industry? I never in all my days! But of course the mining industry demanded a proper national transport system, which Kruger duly provided toward the end of the 1890s, just as the rinderpest was destroying the cattle that would pull the cabs, and the artisanal brick-makers lost out to mass production with Victorian technology. So, yes, Afrikaners were eventually forced into proletarianisation en masse. And, as more of them fled into the urban centres, dislocated by war and disease, they became more and more of a political problem.

It is sometimes claimed that Afrikaners remained unemployed through choice, by their refusal to accept conditions and jobs that their lack of 'economic effectuality' would have assigned them to - the jobs being done by the 'Kaffir', the 'native', African labour. Were they already so suicidally 'white' that they would rather starve than lower themselves to the status of the African working class? Robert Davies (in 'Mining Capital, The State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1913', Journal of Southern African Studies, 1976) suggests otherwise. The truth is that it simply cost more to hire Afrikaner labour because it cost more to support the reproduction of their labour. As they were not subject to the migrant labour system and the various system of colour bars, they were not housed in vast cheap compounds, and fed with bulk bought meat. Their families, moreover, were not supported outside the capitalist sphere of production. Petit-bourgeois Afrikaner nationalist and labour politicians were sure that white workers would make up for it by superior productivity, unable to see a social logic to what they took to be a perversion of the capitalist class. And it is by the mid-1900s that you start to hear for the first time calls for a 'White Labour' policy. Previously, Afrikaner social struggles and complaints had been met with indifference, repression and occasional palliatives. By 1906, however, there was a recession in the Rand economy and huge numbers of displaced, unemployed Afrikaners - with not a few trained soldiers among them, who had recently come close to defeating the mighty British Empire. The protest had to be met in some way, particularly as it was noticed that British mine-workers during their 1907 strike against productivity speed-ups had gained the solidarity of Afrikaner labourers, whom they addressed as "fellow South Africans".

David Roediger points out that the 'labour republicanism' of American workers in the 19th Century involved its adherents measuring their status both against the dream of an egalitarian republic of small producers and the nightmare of chattel slavery. (David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Verso, 2007) Similarly, white workers in early twentieth century South Africa could compare their lot with that of the indentured migrant 'Kaffir'. From 1910 onward, the mining industry was suffering a crisis of profitability which it sought to recover by boosting productivity, and increasing the number of machines that technicians supervised. The number of white employees per 1,000 tons hoisted declined continually between 1911 and 1915. Besides which, the employers were accelerating the fragmentation of skilled jobs into semi-skilled jobs that black workers could hold (still subordinate, of course). This was among the issues that drove the 1913 strike on the Rand which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Smuts government. Lionel Phillips, the mine industrialist and Unionist politician concluded that it was nonetheless better to back down on this occasion than risk a general strike which might stimulate a revolt among the far larger mass of African labour. The state and mining capital adopted two strategies to meet the problem. The first was to devise a military strategy to defeat the strikers next time (and it seems there may have been deliberate efforts to provoke the next strike that took place in January 1914, and which was defeated by the recently constituted Union Defense Force). The second was to co-opt labour - but this meant white labour. For example, when African workers held a strike shortly after the white workers strike in 1913, they were simply brutally crushed - and don't appear to have gained any solidarity from white workers. There was no sense of accomodating their demands. So, among other measures, the government opened daily lines of communication with trade unions (which, I should point out, were segregated and had been since they were formed against stiff resistance from employers), and moved to impose state regulation on the industry. White labour, previously making demands from without the state, were now seen as fit subjects for incorporation into it - not, of course, as co-equals with capital or any such thing, but certainly as superior to their African co-workers.

Trade union leaders were given to expressing their demands in terms of preserving the 'colour bar' and holding back the 'black peril' - often as a disingenuous means of galvanising wider support for mundane economic strikes, but in fact the colour bar issue did come up repeatedly. In the post-WWI period, there was actually a steady erosion of the colour bar, because employers figured it would be cheaper just to alleviate the restrictions. The Low Grade Mines Commission went so far at one point as to recommend the legal abolition of segregation. A 1920 strike by African workers had - though it was pummelled relentlessly - scared the hell out of the employers, and even forced a few concessions out of them. And at the same time, the co-optation of white workers was having less and less success, and employers were anxious amid plummeting gold prices to reduce workers' wages. So, it was that the stage was set for the 1922 Rising on the Rand. Jeremy Krikler points out in White Rising (Manchester University Press, 2005) that at the time of the strike there were 200,000 workers in the Rand mines, but approximately only 10% were white workers. Yet, and this is the crucial thing, they made no appeal for solidarity from African workers. Not only that, but when African workers crossed the picket line, they were not considered scabs in the way that white workers were. The slogan of the strike was, infamously, 'Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa'. It is worth pointing out that this didn't have the effect of galvanising mass cross-class support from white communities, as was presumably intended. So, what was going on?

Let's review: by 1922, Afrikaaners had fully entered the labour force in the mines, so the sector protected by colour bar legislation and custom was fully, inclusively 'white'; the fate of 'white labour' had become an explicit concern of the political class; the insitutions of segregated labour had been thoroughly entrenched, and the 1913 Native Land Act allotted three quarters of the land to white people or corporations, with rules restricting the sale of land to Africans; and neither the 1913 nor 1920 African miners strikes had resulted in much solidarity from white workers. So, I think that by this point it is safe to say that a 'white working class' identity had developed with some coherence. It competed with communist identities, of course, particularly after the electrifying revolution in Russia, which had also stimulated a wave of African revolt in the cities and would later infuse the countryside rebellion by the ICU (as in "I See You"). But my argument here is that to the extent that it is possible to conceive of a coherent 'white working class' identity, here it was. Now look at the sequel.

As the strike wore on, and it became clear that the Smuts government was intransigent (Smuts was viciously hostile to labour all his political life), the strike was developing into an open, armed insurrection. The Smuts government was plotting the most vicious military force, including aerial bombardment, against the strikers. As this ominous prospect unfolded, a staggering series of racial massacres occurred, comparable with similar riots and pogroms in America and Russia in the same era. I noted that African miners were not considered 'scabs' and they weren't. They were rarely attacked, and unions insisted that they be kept out of the fight, which was between themselves and management. And when the massacres did start, it was not of African mine workers, or even of labourers as such. It was random killing of civilians - there are eyewitness reports of women and children fleeing squads of armed white workers, and being shot down in cold blood. 150 were wounded, and 44 killed, by one estimate. Jeremy Krikler (in 'The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre', The Historical Journal, 1999) supplies the background. In the weeks prior to the massacres, an hysteria had built up in white communities about the 'black peril'. A palpable terror of an uprising took hold: 'the Kaffir will kill us all'. This fear had apparently been stimulated by one relatively isolated confrontation between African and white labourers at the New Primrose Mine, but the preparatory conditions were: a) the strikers knew that a terrible intensification of the class struggle was coming; and b) they had justified their strike by appealling to race pride, and race privilege, to keeping the African down, and perhaps their own guilt would have led them to expect an African uprising. But Krikler suggests another aspect of this: they took their appeal to be part of the white community seriously, and in their murders dramatised their desire to be in solidarity with the institutions of white supremacy that were about to massacre them: it was as if to re-direct the fire onto the 'real' menace, as opposed to the respectable white workers who only wanted their fair share.

The consequence was that they were cruelly defeated. They didn't take the insurrectionary class logic of their fight as seriously as they took the racial element. One consequence was that they lost approximately 17.7% of their wages - which, as Yudelman points out, was not really recovered by the Pact administration, whose policies of segregation, wage controls and state regulation were closer to the opposition than most like to admit. The workers were unable to see beyond a sectional interest because they racialised it. They were in part defeated by their commitment to the idea of a 'white working class', which in turn was produced in the furnace of colonialism, and the prevailing global system of white supremacy.

Labels: apartheid, racism, segregation, south africa, white working class

Migrant Labour and Xenophobia in South Africa posted by Richard Seymour

Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working class:

Behind some of this tension is the recent expansion of the hated migrant labour system. We thought in 1994 that the ANC government would slowly but surely rid the economy of migrancy, and turn single-sex dormitory hostels into decent family homes. But hostels remain, and in Johannesburg, the ghastly buildings full of unemployed men were the source of many attacks.

Even if racially-defined geographical areas have disappeared from apartheid-era Swiss-cheese maps, the economic logic of drawing inexpensive labour from distant sites is even more extreme (China has also mastered the trick), now that it no longer is stigmatised by apartheid connotations.

Instead of hailing from KwaZulu or Venda or Bophuthatswana or Transkei, the most desperate migrant workers in SA's major cities are from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent.

In a brutally frank admission of self-interest regarding these workers, First National Bank chief economist Cees Bruggemann intoned to Business Report last week: ``They keep the cost of labour down... Their income gets spent here because they do not send the money back to their countries.''

If many immigrants don't send back remittances (because their wages are wickedly low and the cost of living here has soared), that in turn reminds us of how apartheid drew cheap labour from Bantustans: for many years women were coerced into supplying unpaid services -- child-rearing, healthcare and eldercare for retirees -- so as to reproduce fit male workers for the mines, factories and plantations.

Apartheid-era superprofits for capital were the result. Now, with more porous borders and the deep economic crisis Zimbabweans face (in part because South African President Thabo Mbeki still nurtures the Mugabe dictatorship), South African corporate earnings are roaring. After falling due to overproduction and class struggle during the 1970s-80s, profit rates here rose from 1994-2001 to 9th highest in the world, according to a Bank of England study, while the wage share fell from 5% over the same period.

So notwithstanding South Africa's national unemployment rate of 40%, a xenophobia-generated bottleneck in the supply of migrant labour could become a problem for capital, such as occured at Primrose Gold Mine near Johannesburg. The mine's workforce consists nearly entirely of Mozambicans, who much of last week stayed away due to fear, thus shutting the shafts.

Labels: apartheid, colonialism, migrant workers, south africa

IDF soldiers torture, choke, beat and murder Palestinians posted by Richard Seymour

As Israel continues to build new colonies in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank city of Hebron have confessed to numerous atrocities against Palestinian civilians. The full testimonies can be read here. Sometimes, what is striking is the pettiness of the causes that leads Israeli soldiers to beheave like this. For example, one IDF soldier tried to steal an old man's tobacco box during a house raid. The old man protested, calling him a thief, and they all started to beat him up heavily. The thief then took the old man's hand and wrapped barbed wire tightly round it, explaining that "He lifted a hand on me, he'll be punished." That's the deal - if the untermenschen even lift a hand to their oppressors, they get beaten and tortured. Another old man got too close to Israeli soldiers while out walking, so they shot him. "No reason, he just got close". And so on.

However, there are also calculated attacks with intent to kill everyone in sight, regardless of whether they are armed, or defend themselves, or are unarmed non-combatants. For example, there's the testimony about a great "honour" that soldiers were given, by being allowed to swoop on a refugee camp in Tul Karem. The IDF had found that whenever they tried to raid the camp on previous occasions, the residents huddled round campfires fought back, climbing to the rooftops to shoot at the invaders. So, they decided to sneak in:

The four lit campfires we spotted were quite near each other, and near the only two or three vehicle access routes into the camp. We were told to also post sharpshooters…Our firing orders were that each squatter around the campfires should be shot just like during a liquidation operation.

Without pretense? Without arms?

Yes, even unarmed people were to be shot.

Everyone around the campfire?

Yes, everyone present at the campfire during our entry at 2AM or 3AM was to be shot to death. Regardless whether…

Regardless whether or not he was armed?

Even if he was unarmed. That wasn’t considered of any consequence. Intelligence reported that there were about 10-15 people hanging around, regardless of age, regardless of anything, everyone that….

Boom?

Boom.

...

Clearly this mission was not described as an ‘execution’. If it were one, a projectile would have been fired (at the squatters). Rather, it is described a ‘Confrontational, or violent patrol’. (e.g.a patrol aiming to draw fire, or, in this case, to shoot) Let’s say everything went as planned, how would they explain it tomorrow to the press? ‘The IDF encountered a group of armed people, (as probably there were some armed people there), and someone got wounded’, and that’s the whole story. Did you understand? And that’s the end. No mention that we came to execute.

What were you told in the briefing?

It was not described as an execution mission. Absolutely not.

How then was it described?

Like I said. Firing orders for this particular mission: Entrance (into the camp) at 2:30AM. Anyone present in the alley at that time was to be shot. There are no innocent people there. That’s the mission. No one described it as an execution mission.

Another testimony has Israeli soldiers stationed outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and instructed to fire on worshippers as they exited. "We were supposed to shoot whoever came out – doesn’t matter if he’s armed or not." [Curious thing: while I've been writing this, the contents of the online testimonies have disappeared from the original website - literally everything, including text, images and videos, has been deleted. You can of course view some caches of older material here for as long as Google keeps them up, and the booklet can at any rate be read here.] Israel's latest enemy in Hebron is Palestinian orphans.

We are on the brink of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba, which Israel will be celebrating with the usual aplomb during Passover. To keep the celebrations safe, they will be keeping out the Arabs - an appropriate tribute, I think, to the garrison state that has emerged from the original purification of the territory. Its systems of segregation, expropriation, blockade, colonisation, airborne occupation, assassinations, demolitions, raids, checkpoint massacres, protest shoot-ups, shellings, curfews and kidnappings, has all been for the purpose of maintaining racial supremacy over the indigenous Palestinian population and eventually eliminating the very possibility of Palestine for good. So this is a logical interlude in the tortuous conquest. Lights out for the natives. Pull up the drawbridges. Man the frontiers. Fire at anything that moves. Nothing can be allowed to disturb the repose of the executioners.

Labels: apartheid, Israel, palestine, zionism

Segregation, apartheid and the interpenetration of race and class. posted by Richard Seymour

It is a fairly commonplace myth in liberal historiography about South Africa that apartheid was a result of the triumph of illiberal Afrikaaners over the more liberal southern Cape which had the most British influence. It is actually a mytheme in British culture too, expressed in the joke: "Why is Holland so laid back? Because they sent all their mad bastards to South Africa." Another myth is that part of the reason for the ability of the racist-nationalist power bloc to impose entrenched segregation and then apartheid is the lack of pragmatism on the part of resistance groups such as the ICU, the Communist Party and the AAC, but this is to conflate pragmatism with liberalism and social compromise, itself a fairly commonplace gesture in bourgeois ideology. The marxist revisionists of the 1970s and their slightly pomo challengers in the 1980s provided the tools to take these myths apart, but they also furnished new insights into the ways in which 'race' operated as a regulatory principle and how it interacted with class. I am always intrigued by the way the fiction of race blends in with other social forms - class, ethnicity and gender, most obviously. One can easily think of examples: when I grew up a 'Protestant-looking' household was one that could pass for middle class; class itself is itself often understood as a kind of 'ethnicity'; the ideology of 'race' is usually coextensive with a conception of proper gender relations; and, as we will see later, the stratification within classes based on skills and trade has been susceptible to racial ordering. The racially ordered labour system in South Africa is as good a basis as any for investigating these interconnections

The roots of formal apartheid in South Africa, introduced in a series of measures by the Afrikaaner Nationalist government elected in 1948, were established in a sequence of legal, political, economic and ideological mutations that began with the transformation of the Southern African economy by the rise of mining capital. The principle of white supremacy had been established in various ways before – for example, in the Shepstonian policies of colonial Natal which “provided a ready-made rationalisation” for segregation (John Cell points out that the Natalian expert on the ‘Native Question’, Maurice Evans, also held that Natal and Basuto-land provided some of the fabric for possible segregation). And the constitutions of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic insisted on "no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants". However, an increasingly stark, and rigid, racial order emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through the imposition of racially organised restrictions in the labour system in the late 19th Century and the elaboration of legal doctrines pursuant to the subordination of the ‘Native’ after the Boer War, the ascendant capitalist elite sought to integrate African peasants into the labour supply on an affordable basis. The colour-coding of labour legitimised this subordination and helped to frustrate the development of class consciousness among the growing working class. Crucially, it met some of the demands of white workers on terms that could be accommodated by the ruling class.

However, this is not reducible to a ‘cheap labour’ thesis, which strikes me as a reductionist approach. ‘Race’ was not merely a pragmatic auxiliary to the capitalist management of the labour system, a cheap ‘divide and rule’ mechanism. The doctrine produced and imparted its own rationality, affecting the balance of risks for any would-be employer as well as for statesmen pursuing particular policies. The hyperstition of ‘race’ inflected debates about disease, population management and geography. And the relatively short-term goal of profitable mining was situated within broader debates about what constituted self-government (was it a political or cultural state?) and who was fit for it. It also interacted with religion (capitalist labour could be seen as an admirable system of reward and punishment for fallen man) and rationalism (in which segregated labour was eventually seen as the most efficient use of human resources for the improvement of all).

The historical context for this development is obviously one in which white supremacy was an organising principle throughout the colonial world, and in ex-colonies (for example, the post-bellum American Deep South provided much of the experiential input into the doctrine of segregation in the Republic of South Africa). This racial order infused and, to some extent, enabled the global emergence of nation-states and capitalist development. Initially, mining interests did not favour a rigid racial division of labour. Until 1885, the main mineral traded in Southern Africa was diamonds, and for much of the early trade, Griqua, Kora and Tlhaping producers were dominant. But white diggers had sought to impose their own monopoly on claim ownership with some success. For instance, while the British authorities in the Cape were reluctant to endorse overtly discriminatory legislation, diggers were required to have “a certificate of good character” from a justice of the peace or resident magistrate. The historian Paul Maylam notes that this did not prevent de facto white ownership and control of the diamond mining industry, and it may be that the policy was “racially laden” , particularly if one’s ‘race’ impeded a judgment of “good character”.

Even so, it is clear that whatever significant forms of segregation took place were still usually ad interim rather than premeditated and systematic. Indeed, the initiative often came from white workers who, beholden to a doctrine of "free white labour", sought to maintain and entrench their own relatively privileged status. What the mine-owners did want was to depress labour costs, and they did this by recruiting large numbers of African labourers for “unskilled jobs at minimal rates of pay”. This recruitment drive, especially as demand for labour outstripped supply in the 1890s, stimulated one of the many fears entertained by white workers – being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’ by cheap African labour.

The regnant ideology in the English-controlled Cape was assimilationist – the British would use what today is known as ‘soft power’ to win Africans “to civilization and Christianity”, as Sir George Grey put it. This assimilationist posture is often referred to in terms of a "Cape liberal tradition", but I question the utility of this phrase – it seems to re-describe rather than explain. After all, from 1875 there was a great deal of de facto segregation in the "liberal" Cape: for example on the railways, where one’s class of carriage was arranged both by class and race. Further, to de facto segregation was added de jure segregation with the National Reserve Location Act of 1902 which forced Bantu-speaking Africans into restricted locations. Parry makes the important point that the overall context of imperial rule had changed dramatically for Britain. If the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century had been expansionist, it had also attenuated its aggression with co-option and persuasion. The Indian Revolt of 1857 and the Jamaican Rebellion of 1865 both stimulated high-handed ‘revenge’ and an increasingly shrill assertion that the "lower races" could not be integrated and so would have to "disappear". Racial ideas meshed with Social Darwinist doctrines in official British propaganda. A new attitude to relations with the Africans was entailed, and it is one in which Victorian liberals were deeply implicated.

However, that background alone would not explain the scale, timing and nature of the transformation, much less the duration of employers’ resistance to entrenched segregation. It was the interaction of this transformation of imperial ideology with economic necessity that made was decisive. For example, the first of a series of cumulative transformations leading to entrenched segregation was arguably the 1894 Glen Grey Act, promulgated by Cecil Rhodes, which abolished communal land ownership, taxed those who could not prove they had worked in the last three months, and imposed male primogeniture laws for the inheritance of land, with the intended effect of driving more and more Africans who had hitherto subsisted on collectively owned land into the workforce. The legislation is named after the turbulent colonial territory that Rhodes was made Prime Minister of in 1890. The British had repeatedly considered similar measures to break up the old African social fabric and win the loyalty of some. It was initially conceived of as an adaptation to indigenous resistance, and this preceded the ‘mineral revolution’, never mind the arrival of Cecil Rhodes. However, the Glen Grey Commission that was put to work in 1892 was aware of the region’s hitherto protection from the pressures of the labour market, and hostile to it. And Rhodes was certainly anxious to satisfy his labour shortages. Whether or not the legislation was primarily intended to supply cheap labour, it did so, and provided a model for others who wanted to do so. At first blush, too, the legislation would not seem to advance segregation so much as integration, even if on a highly unequal basis, since its thrust was to drive African workers into capitalist relations alongside white workers. However, while it stimulated the production of a large African proletariat to work in the mines, it also established separate laws with respect to land and taxation. Segregation was not complete separation – it was separation for the purposes of domination and exploitation. The success of this policy inspired much of the legislation later recommended by the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) and legislation enacted post-Union.

The significance of this legislation is not only the precedent it set. Part of its importance is what it says about the racial order that it was acting on. In South Africa, the arguably mundane business of specialisation of skills and class differentiation had been enchanted by its interaction with ‘race’. Just as certain forms of menial labour was seen as being beneath whites, skill was increasingly a cultural achievement rather than a vocational one, a gift of whiteness rather than of training and labour market fluctuations. Such conceits guided future legislation. In 1898, it was deemed that no ‘coloured’ person could hold an engine-drivers’ certificate of competency. And in 1903, the Volksraad in Transvaal adopted a regulation explicitly barring all but competent whites from underground blasting. When Chinese labourers were imported as a temporary stopgap to the labour supply problem in 1904, they were specifically excluded from over fifty separate skilled trades.

The production of the new racial order was a response to various actual and perceived problems for the rulers of South Africa. In the first place, the British were committed to the principle of white supremacy. The British high commissioner to South Africa, Viscount Milner, had explained to Prime Minister Asquith before the Boer War began that the principle of defending the ‘Native’ from oppression at the hands of both Dutch and English in South Africa was at odds with the principle of winning a loyal ally in the Dutch. Secondly, mining magnates had complained Paul Krueger’s administration and its failure to produce a steady supply of the needed labour especially for the Witwatersrand. The solution could not involve coercion of a too obvious kind, since the ‘Native Laws’ of the Boers that resembled slavery had been an issue utilised by the British government in its war propaganda. Yet, if the transformation that took place during and after the Boer War was animated in large part by the desire of central mining interests for cheap labour, the enabling discourses were legal, political, scientific, bureaucratic and cultural as well as economic. It required a vast effort at social engineering, the adoption of a bureaucratic rationality and a form of knowledge about the ‘Native’ that was neither as variegated nor ambiguous as that possessed by missionaries. As Adam Ashforth points out, the ‘Native’ had to be carefully constructed to be the subject of laws. SANAC, appointed by Viscount Milner following the Inter-Colonial Customs Conference of 1903 at which delegates from Britain’s regional colonies were in attendance, was to produce this kind of knowledge. The proper subject of ‘Native’ law was thus defined variously as ‘Kafir’, ‘Bantu’, ‘Native’ or ‘savage’, and this definition itself overlaid with assumptions of cultural inferiority and disability. In particular, he was understood to be bound by feudal political forms and antiquated modes of production that were unproductive. It was therefore necessary to impose restrictions on ‘Native’ land ownership, and undermine their existing social forms with the imposition of primogeniture. If only it were possible to “do away with free land,” one could “strike at the root of much that is most unsatisfactory in Native life”. Further, intermixture between the races should be avoided, and the ruling race’s supremacy should be carefully conserved. Capitalist social-property relations and white supremacy were cosubstantial with civilization.

Other discourses co-produced the new segregated order. The bubonic plague had arrived in South Africa in 1900, with the Boer War in procession. A surfeit of metaphors through which the ‘Native’ was understood as ‘disease-ridden’ came into widespread useage. The description was often used as if it were cognate with ‘lazy’, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘poor’. These metaphors contained a hidden cargo of economic resentment, but they also induced a set of policies designed to reduce the intermixture of African and white populations. In the case of Cape Town, the policy of moving Africans to Uitvlugt was considered a great success. It produced a temporary labour shortage, but this could be managed if the location was used as a source for labour to be funnelled to employers based on ‘pass laws’. Not only was the ‘Native’ considered diseased. He was also the source of viral discontent, especially where there was too great an effort to civilize him and where he had developed expectations beyond his means. He stirred up discontent and was unwilling to perform the manual labour that was required of him.

The SANAC recommendations provided the basis for future segregationist legislation. But as Legassick points out, a large part of the responsibility for disseminating these ideas is borne by those liberals who pressed for self-government for South Africa along the lines of Australia and Canada. Lionel Curtis, an advocate of integrating South Africa into a single Commonwealth state on the basis of self-government, was also one of the earliest explicit advocates of segregation. Other liberals, such as James Bryce, considered the ‘disaster’ of Reconstruction states in the American South an exemplary lesson in the danger of extending self-government to the ‘natives’. While the South Africa Act of 1909 granted self-government for whites, ‘Natives’ were the subject of authoritarian colonial relations. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 restricted African land rights dramatically. Subsequently, some of the most violent labour disputes in the immediate aftermath of WWI - the South African government actually bombed the workers involved - involved the white working class wanting to avoid the status of 'Kafir'.

I leave the chronology there, although the resistance through the 1920s and 1930s, and what it says about combined an uneven development, is a compelling topic in itself. But let me put together some conclusions. It is obviously not possible to read off the transformation in South Africa’s racial order from economic developments. However, it is possible to say that among other things, the racial order was a particular ordering of labour, a colour-coding of labour’s status. It was increasingly seen as a natural means of managing both labour relations and the labour supply. The reshaping of the racial order did meet economic interests that were clearly expressed through policymaking institutions, and these emerged specifically from the transformation of the South African economy by the discovery of diamonds and gold in particular. It acted to consolidate Britain’s imperial tutelage of and economic position in the mineral-rich territory, by uniting its interests with those of whites in South Africa. Although South Africa’s capitalist class was not always the only or main agent pressing for entrenched segregation, only when that agency shifted from general resistance to aggressive support for such policies did the demand for them become effective. The spread of capitalist social-property relations and the imposition of white supremacy were co-extensive in a way that was possible chiefly because of the way in which capitalist relations were borne by the agency of empire. This is both because of the racist doctrines through which the British Empire came to understand its subjects, but also because it involved a capitalist society in an encounter with pre-capitalist societies which seemed self-evidently ‘backward’.

Labels: apartheid, capitalism, class and race, segregation, south africa

Palestine, apartheid and colonialism. posted by Richard Seymour

Jimmy Carter says so. Desmond Tutu says so. Nelson Mandela says so. Israel is imposing apartheid on the Palestinian people. Such a claim brings the usual rushed denunciations from people who know perfectly well the strengths of the comparison. All comparisons contain limits: for example, it is reasonably well known by now that the Palestinians do not fulfil the same function in relation to the Israeli economy as black South Africans fulfilled in relation to the Afrikaaner economy. Tony Cliff drew the conclusion decades ago that Palestinians were thus not well placed to win their struggle alone, and required the support of revolutionary movements across the Middle East, unlike COSATU, the ANC and the South African Communist Party. The obvious analogy between Palestine and South Africa is the distribution of land. The bulk of historic Palestine has been siezed from Palestinians and colonised for the benefit of a non-Palestinian ruling group. One could add the extraordinary restrictions on labour, travel rights, the increasingly extreme racist segregation imposed in laws, in water access, the "Jewish-only" roads and settlements and so on. One obvious difference, however, is that the founders of Israel conceived of it as an ethnic-nationalist state based on the dispossession and exclusion of Palestinians rather than their subordination and exploitation, in the main. It had to have a dominative majority of Jewish colonists, whereas Afrikaaner nationalists were content to have a minority rule of white colonists. Israel does not particularly need Palestinian labour in the same way that apartheid needed black labour. Israeli leaders are obsessed with "the demographic problem" (removing the Palestinian peril), while Afrikaaner racists were more concerned about conserving their control of the labour system and the profits that ensued (removing the 'communist' peril). In this sense, the Palestinians face more than an onerous system of oppression and ritual devastation: they face real attempts to do away with them as a national group, to destroy their life-sustaining systems and throw them off their land inch by inch. We are speaking here of politicide. Given a sufficient crisis for Israel, we could be speaking of genocide: after all, if Israel's existence as a polity were ever seriously threatened, we have it on reasonable authority that the state proposes nuclear annihilation of surrounding population centres. I could be wrong and am open to correction, but I don't think that black South Africans faced that prospect. Another sense in which apartheid and Zionism are similar is, of course, the fact that both result from colonial rule. In the same way that white Europeans guided by pungent racism toward the colonised took control of the 'white republics', so Zionist leaders who had collaborated with the British effective won control of a Zionist republic: a state founded in extreme violence, based both on ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and on racist subordination of those who weren't driven out. The difference here was that while contempt for the colonised applied to European attitudes to the Palestinians (who were not even recognised as Palestinians) the Zionist venture was never recognised as having anything to do with colonialism as such.

However, establishing parallels is less important than understanding the global system of domination that the Zionist movement drew upon, and the racial codes that they accepted. For, to establish parallels with apartheid South Africa, you have to at least begin to answer the question of what apartheid actually was: I mean, we all know the literal meaning in Afrikaaner - 'apartness' - but we also know or sense that simply separating the 'races' was not what was essential about it. It was really about separating the overwhelming majority (70%) of the population from the wealth and land of South Africa. It was about expropriation and exploitation organised on the basis of racist doctrines elaborated when the Portugese and Dutch first touched land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to the extreme and explicit racism of the Afrikaaner nationalists, apartheid was legitimised with reference to the emerging decolonisation movement, using the language of 'homelands' that the Afrikaaner nationalists maintained were the historic lands of the majority who spoke Bantu languages (the 'homelands' comprised 13% of the land of South Africa when the nationalists took power in 1948 - what else happened around that date?). Beyond this? Well, revisionist historians of South Africa argue that we will have misunderstood apartheid if we think it's something imposed only after 1948 by fanatical racists. The basic structures of the system, though intensified by the nationalist coalition, were put in place by the British colonialists and then by the Smuts government. The pass system was initiated by the British, and the Bantustans were based on the old labour 'reservations'.

The structures of apartheid emerged from the structures of colonial exploitation, not from wicked ideas. A harsh and murderous, even genocidal, racial hierarchy was imposed in every single 'white republic' formed as a result of European colonialism: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, the United States. However, they each produced their own wicked ideas: as a consequence, the justifying myths of apartheid were frequently remarkably similar to those deployed elsewhere. For example, the myth that southern Africa was barely peopled until the Europeans turned up and - to purloin a phrase - made the desert bloom: it was maintained that the Bantu-speaking peoples swept in to the Eastern seaboard and interior in order to benefit from the colonial ways, and therefore weren't disposessed at all by the colonists. (In reality, the Khoisan had been there for millenia, and the Bantu-speaking peoples had arrived centuries before the Europeans got there). Now, that sounds a lot like the Peters hoax, which expressed decades of official Israeli ideology, but it is also redolent of certain myths about the 'taming' of the West, as if it was a largely barren wilderness with a few tribes hanging around and getting in the way of progress. Another myth deployed in official apartheid history was that the various tribal groupings that supposedly arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so different, so culturally ill-at-ease with one another, that a restraining European hand was essential to keep order and prevent bloody war. (In fact, as is the case today in Darfur, ethnic designations shaded into economic ones: one could be a wealthy khoi, raising cattle, and lose it all through a catastrophe of some kind, and became a san, living through hunter-gathering; similarly, one could return to khoi status by accumulating sufficient wealth to return to cattle-farming). The myth of 'bitter ethnic divisions' is one that resonates with those used by the British to legitimise continued rule over India and Kenya, for example, and has now been deployed in Iraq. Now, of course, all the myths that were used to legitimise the apartheid regime were dispensed with only at the beginning of the 1990s, and then after some considerable struggle. This raises a point about the connection between power and knowledge: for years, simply because these myths were official, they retained purchase among a substantial layer of commentators despite ample refutation. In the same way, the gulf between what is now conclusively established about the conquest of Palestine, and the almost sixty years since then, and what is generally understood by commentators and the public alike, is massive.

The temptation to compare Israel's oppression of the Palestinians with apartheid South Africa is a result of the fact that they both emerge from the same historical complex of global white supremacy, in its various configurations. The denunciations of comparisons made of Zionism with Nazism, which produce much hysterical comment with little reflection as to why they possess resonance for those who make them, also fit into this matrix. When Norman Finkelstein raises similarities between aspects of Zionist ideology and that of Nazi ideology, he is really raising family resemblances (or relations) between colonialism and fascism. The founders of Israel didn't imitate the Nazis: they imitated colonialism and the apparatus of 'racial' knowledge that went with it. The Nazis radicalised and intensified European imperialist doctrines, whereas the Zionists simply adapted them for their own purposes.

Labels: apartheid, Israel, palestine, south africa

White supremacy is... posted by Richard Seymour

...a system. I know, believe me I do, that the very mention of the term 'white supremacy' is supposed to evoke Komical Krackers and Kooks, rednecks, sheet-wearers and fat old southern sherrifs. Because these happen to have historically been among the most visible agents sustaining and protecting white supremacy at least in America (and, so far as the KKK goes, in some of the Pacific outliers of the empire), they have been used in media dramaturgy as the brand label for a caricature of that system as some sort of abberation, or as some kind of funny delusion held by witless doughfaces. (Meanwhile, as movie viewers know, the FBI was an anti-racist activists union, simply aching to bust a few KKK chops on the orders of a cautious White House). However, American policymakers were always smarter than this: they knew that the domestic racial hierarchy was part of a global one that was produced and reproduced through the labour system, and which didn't always have to be protected through de jure segregation. Indeed, the whole point of the Jim Crow laws was not only to disenfranchise black Americans, but in doing so to prevent them from acquiring the education and labour rights that would improve their bargaining power. Suppose those ends could be achieved by other means? Today, the system is still reproduced in the labour market, and is sustained and defended through 'criminal justice'. Naturally, the way that system operates is to colour-code crime, especially violent crime, in a way that is structurally isomorphic to the treatment of international violence. Albert Memmi wrote that "While it is pardonable for the colonizer to have his little arsenals, the discovery of even a rusty weapon among the colonized is cause for immediate punishment." Your nukes are stupid and dangerous, while mine are a delectably intelligent form of global diplomacy. Your invasion threatens civilization, while mine protects it. My segregation is a local quirk, your resistance merits prison or the death penalty. Holocaust cartoons are unforgiveable, while Mohammed cartoons and dangling nooses are mere pranks sanctified by 'free speech'. Yes, we're defending civilization again: and you know it's bad when the official line on a lynching threat is "get a sense of humour".

Jena is a small, largely white, town in Louisiana, and already a euphemism-magnet. You can't talk about the town without referring to "racial demons", "unrest" and "tensions" which mysteriously, unpredictably "erupt", and then "simmer". Sometimes these "racial tensions" even "spark" public rallies. Shorthand is unavoidable, but much of this is ponderous circumlocution. I know American readers were aware of the details of this case long before I was, but UK readers may still be in the dark. When Kenneth Purvis, a black student at the local high school, requested permission to sit under a tree in the courtyard that was customarily reserved for white students(!), he got it, and used it. The next day three nooses were found dangling from the tree. Well, the headmaster apparently wanted to expel the white students responsible, but the superintendent intervened, calling it a "prank", and the mostly white school board agreed with him. A prank, mark you. I must have viewed any number of American high school farces in my younger years, and I never encountered the "zany" lynch-mob. I fear there is a whole outlook on life implied in such a claim that I will never be privy to.

At any rate, they reduced the punishment to three days suspension, thus triggering a massive local row. Lynching is, after all, a form of domestic terrorism that has killed thousands of African Americans. Racist violence has not exactly disappeared from the landscape, has it? For example, aside from the officially sanctioned murder, there was the killing - according to public testimony - of up to 200 black people by white vigilantes during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The most recent case of anyone being tried under lynching laws was when the attackers of Isaiah Clyburn were convicted in South Carolina in 2006. Clyburn survived the attack, by five white men, and the state didn't bother to investigate the racist dimension of it (Clyburn explains that they had yelled racial slurs at him before the attack) because it has no hate crime laws. Clearly, it was a threat, and equally clearly, the subsequent reactions displayed the range of racist resentment that fuelled the threat. (You may be interested to know that they appear to have inspired others, and of course there is now a website calling for the Jena Six to be - what else? - lynched).

There followed said "tensions", with an unsolved arson attack on a wing of the school, a beating being meted out on some black students by a white man named Justin Sloan (who was charged with battery and put on probation), and a gun being pulled on others (one of the students managed to sieze the gun from the assailant, only to find himself charged with theft of a firearm, while no charges were pressed against the original attacker). Shortly thereafter, a six black students beat up Justin Barker, leaving him unconscious and with a swollen eye. Their motive was that he was bragging about an earlier racist assault that a friend of his had made, and had allegedly been taunted black students with the word "n*gger". The students - Robert Bailey (17), Theo Shaw (17), Carwin Jones (18), Bryant Purvis (17), Mychal Bell (16) and an unidentified minor - were arrested. And the District Attorney tried to hit them with second-degree murder. They tried to have most of them tried as adults, though several of them are not adults. The charges were subsequently demoted to aggravated battery. One of the students, Mychal Bell, has been convicted by an all-white jury, and faces up to 22 years in prison for a school fight. I don't know why it never occurred to the courts to dismiss all charges on the grounds that it was only a prank. This is absolutely typical, of course. You could spend a few depressing years compiling details of similar sequences of events in which racist violence has been treated with indifference (and, actually, surreptitious condonement) by authorities, while violence in response has produced a massive crack-down. Sometimes these are outrageous enough, and noticed enough, to produce a movement. Such was the case after the East St Louis riots on 2 July 1917, a bloody and sadistic racist frenzy whipped up in part by the Democratic party which was accusing the Republicans of 'importing' black labour to diminish the bargaining power of white labour and help fix the elections. The night before, a car-load of whites had gone round shooting up black households in East St Louis - fire was returned, killing a couple of policemen. The next day, after a meeting at the Labour Temple, a clutch of white workers marched to black residential areas and began attacking men, women and children on the streets. There was no investigation and no move by the government to make lynching illegal. Six weeks later, and after repeated provocations by both white civilians and police, a hundred members of the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry, a black infantry in the still segregated US Army (which was on its way to fight a war for democracy against evil hun at the time), marched to Houston and began firing indiscriminately at white people. They, of course, were not protected by official indifference. 13 of the infantry were executed with no review or appeal. That atrocious episode in an era of extremely violent racist reaction was one of the key factors in the breakdown of support for America's entry into World War I among the African American leadership: why not, Mister President, make America safe for democracy?

Well, the events in Jena are simply an example of the problems that exist across America, which everyone already knows about. There was always a danger that this case would be sectioned off in public discourse, and used to demonstrate the contrary - that the rest of America is a-okay. However, it hasn't worked out like that. Jordan Flaherty of Left Turn believes that this has "ignited a movement". So does the excellent Gary Younge. The protests have barely featured in the British media, but they are making a huge impact in America - an in Jena, where a town of less than 3,000 residents has grudgingly hosted up to 60,000 protesters. Coming after the murder of Sean Bell and the mass murder in New Orleans - by wilful neglect, by deliberate confinement, and by shooting - this crystallises previously existing trends, but also demonstrates the ability of bloggers to disseminate information and help organise disparate groups of people. Perhaps a Third Reconstruction is afoot. I hear that Cynthia McKinney has supported the development of the Reconstruction Party in New Orleans, a labour-based organisation which aims to become a national party for social justice. There is an International Tribunal being carried out to present a more coherent account of the government's performance during Katrina than the official whitewash. America's immigrants, though terrorised by callous government agencies (libertarians, so sensitive to war's contribution to the augmentation of government, should be more attentive to way that immigration controls contribute to state-building), have been repeatedly on the march. But there remain six students at risk of imprisonment for assault aggravated by by being black. It's a civic felony.

Labels: apartheid, racism, white supremacy

UCU supports boycott of Israel. posted by Richard Seymour

So iniquitous. So uncalled-for. International condemnation rains down, government ministers bark their 'regret', a Nobel prize-winner is outraged, concerns for freedom are bruited. The media are universal in their condemnation. This cannot help the peace process, they unanimously gurn.

Not in respect of Israel's recent attacks on Gaza or the open kidnapping of Palestinian ministers, or the US-Israeli financed and armed 'civil war' (coup attempt). Not because Israel has been starving the Palestinians (or "putting them on a diet"). But because lecturers have voted overwhelmingly in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions who are pleading for a boycott of Israeli institutions, including the academia. Not only that, but they also voted to campaign for the "restoration of all international aid to the PA and all revenues rightfully belonging to it", and to oppose any "upgrade of Israel’s status until it ends the occupation of Palestinian land and fully complies with EU Human Rights law". It's a small step toward meeting that obligation, especially in a country that supplies massive amounts of weapons to the Israeli government. Disgracefully, Sally Hunt, the recently elected leader of the UCU, has issued a statement condemning the vote, claiming that it isn't a 'priority' for the union. I'm sorry, Sally, that doesn't fucking cut it. Israeli academic institutions are thoroughly imbricated with the occupation of Palestine, are deeply discriminatory in their own right, and have long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for the occupation. It isn't good enough to say that attacking the infrastructure of the occupation isn't a 'priority'.

There is an international campaign going on to boycott and disinvest from Israel. It is outrageous to say that other nation-states engage in similar behaviour and therefore one mustn't target Israel. No one denies that the victims of other states should be supported, but this pressure was initiated by the targets of oppression themselves, in the form of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which was launched in April 2004. PACBI is supported by 60 Palestinian trade unions, NGOs, and political and religious organisations. Those who actually have the chutzpah to raise 'academic freedom' need to be reminded that these institutions are themselves violators of that principle by being complicit in the denial of Palestinian freedom of all kinds. And then, god help us, this disgusting, invidious insinuation of antisemitism. Never mind that Zionists have always been happy to collaborate with antisemites, whether Hitlerite or Falwellite: this campaign, as the organisers note, is supported by many conscientious Israelis and non-Israeli Jews.

Happily, and its a sombre happiness in light of the daily terrorist campaign and slow genocide being perpetrated by Israel, the campaign is getting widespread support - even the architects are in on it. The NUJ backs the boycott. The South African trade union federation COSATU backs the boycott. Venezuela backs the boycott. The Liverpool dockers back the boycott. A new group called Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods has been formed. International gay activists back the boycott. Irish musicians back the boycott. There are growing calls for sanctions to be applied. About time. To listen to some of the carping Israel-apologists, you would think that the world has been doing little for sixty years but supporting the Palestinians. Moan, moan, moan, every other week a new initiative to support the expelled and oppressed and impoverished Palestinians. Would that it were so. But it is because the argument is now being won decisively by our side, even if Israel fully and devastatingly commands the military situation, that they are becoming so hysterical.

If you fancy throwing a pebble at Goliath, you can join the campaign here.

Labels: apartheid, boycott, genocide, Israel, occupation, palestine