In the past few months I have been thinking more about "racial capitalism," or, more to the point, one I alluded to, but did not develop in The Double Shift, and have posted about here, about the intersection between the hierarchies produced in the labor relation and the hierarchies of racism. On what could be called the racial division of labor.
I would like to thank Alex Taek-Gwang Lee for drawing attention to the limitations of The Double Shift on this point, as Alex writes in a review of The Double Shift and Nick Nesbitt's Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians. (A book that I also reviewed here)
"Read’s focus on the ideology of work in largely Euro-American contexts means that the global division of labour, the colonial history of work discipline and the racialisation of labour relations receive less sustained treatment than one might wish, given his own tools."
As much as I take Alex's criticism to heart, the real reason I have been thinking about race more and more is, to put it bluntly, the increasing tendency of the US to double down on its status as a racial ethno-state. While it might be permissible to separate a discussion of work from racial politics as an academic exercise, any attempt to think and engage in politics has to take as its starting point the intersections of race, class, nation, gender, sexuality, etc., most definitely etc., as Bill Haver would say.
This is a lot more than I am going to get into here, just documenting some of my ongoing research interests. Anyway, as AI likes to say, the more I delve into the canon of racial capitalism, the more I think about two passages that are absolutely unavoidable for thinking about race and politics. These passages are familiar to anyone, and are often cited more than their books are read. The first is from W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. It is as follows:
"It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while the received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect on their personal treatment and the deference shown them...The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule."
I was thinking primarily of the first sentence, which is the famous one, but I cited most of the paragraph because I think it is important.
The second is from Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order with was cowritten by Stuart Hall, Chas Chritcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. It is as follows:
"But race performs a double function. It is also the principal modality in which the black members of that class 'live,' experience, make sense of and thus come to a consciousness of their structured subordination. It is through the modality of race that blacks comprehend, handle and then begin to resist the exploitation which is an objective feature of their class situation. Race is therefore not only an element of the 'structures'; it is a key element in the class struggle--and thus in the cultures of black labour. It is through the counter ideology of race, color, and ethnicity that the black working class becomes conscious of the objective contradictions of its objective situation and organizes to fight it through."
Although this passage is perhaps more familiar in its TLDR version "race is the modality in which class is lived." That in some sense my first point about these passages. Black Reconstruction is a book about the civil war, one that puts the actions of the enslaved center, and about how the history of the incomplete project of Reconstruction gave us the color line as a persistent problem of the twentieth and twenty first century. It is a massive work of reeducation that challenges the entire story of the US, of which the discussion of the "wages of whiteness" plays a small, but integral role. In the same way Policing the Crisis is a massive study of how the "moral panic" around mugging became integral to not just media and political strategies but a way of governing in dissensus. In this book the short discussion of race as a modality of class is only one part of the entire argument. They are both required reading for making sense of the world today, but they are often reduced to these passages, which are cited and debated on their own.
I am not saying that this is wrong, that these passages need to be simply placed back into the works from which they come, and their corresponding debates. They are cited, quoted and misquoted, because they are powerful statements. For a long time, I was tempted to think of these statements along the formula of what Balibar called "the other scene," the way that economic relations are always displaced onto subjective identities. To cite a paragraph that I have cited all too often:
"I even think that we can describe what such a schema would ideally consist of. It would not be the sum of a ‘base’ and a ‘superstructure,’ working like complement or supplement of historicity, but rather the combination of two ‘bases’ of explanation or two determinations both incompatible and indissociable: the mode of subjection and the mode of production (or, more generally, the ideological mode and the generalized economic mode). Both are material, although in the opposite sense. To name these different senses of the materiality of subjection and production, the traditional terms imaginary and reality suggest themselves. One can adopt them, provided that one keep in mind that in any historical conjuncture, the effects of the imaginary can only appear through and by means of the real, and the effects of the real through and by means of the imaginary; in other words, the structural law of the causality of history is the detour through and by means of the other scene. Let us say, parodying Marx, that economy has no more a ‘history of its own’ than does ideology, since each has its history only through the other that is the efficient cause of its own effects. Not so much the ‘absent cause’ as the cause that absents itself, or the cause whose effectivity works through its contrary."
However, this detour by the other scene overlooks the way in which the deplacement from the mode of production to the mode of subjection takes place along with a much more immediate hierarchy. In other words the mode of production has its own divisions which are racialized and feminized. On this point I have been influenced by A
nnie McClanahan's Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work, which I am currently reading.
What follows is an excerpt from something I am working on that follows this line of thought, of the hierarchies of the economy directly producing and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies,
The history of tipping, from household servants, often women, to Pullman Porters and Red Caps, mostly black, has been a history of preserving the racial composition of the wage, as primarily for white men. Similar exclusions have maintained piece work status for agricultural work, primarily done by immigrants and other minorities. These histories continue into the present, as Annie McClanahan argues,
"Tipwork is also no less racialized and feminized today than it was in the early twentieth century. In the mid-2010s, female-identified workers made up more than 70 percent of all tipped workers and 66 percent of tipped restaurant workers, but they made fifty cents per hour less than workers who identified as male in equivalent positions.
The stark divide between waged work outside the home and the unwaged work inside the home has been replaced with the “tip” as a mediating figure. Tip work not only produces much more economic uncertainty, it also increases surveillance and control, by outsourcing it to the customer. From its conception tipping was always recognized as both an economic relation, a way to make customers directly pay labor costs, and a relation that produced a particular hierarchy and dependence. Its racialization and feminization is inseparable from the desire to maintain and perpetuate these hierarchies. These qualities are not only part of tipping’s history, as relics of the past, they are actively being recreated on new grounds as tips are disseminated across all sorts of apps that mediate new forms of gigwork. In a similar way, piece work has been given a second lease on life by platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which divide up digitally mediated work, transcribing, translating, image recognition, customer service, and so on, into a series of small tasks that can be outsources all over the world. The perpetuation of these economic relations into the present is also a maintenance of the way in which they reproduce a profoundly hierarchical relation. Rather than include everyone within the category of the wage, recognizing their abstract labor, it creates a division within labor itself, between those who are recognized by the wage, and those who are subject to tips, or fragmented into piece work.
If one wants an image of how all this functions as a contemporary distribution of the sensible, imagine entering a hotel, a woman smiles and greets you as you check in, as you walk to your room you pass the cleaning staff, often immigrants from Africa or Latin America. You will not interact with these people, except to perhaps leave a tip when you check out. The entire passage through the space of the hotel is a space through a gendered and racial hierarchy. We could say the same about restaurants, with their highly gendered division of work that is integral to the service economy, as well as a division between front and back of the house that is often articulated around racial lines. Add to this a laptop connected to gigworkers both locally, the food delivery services and car services that are part of urban life, and globally, the tasks that keep social media and artificial intelligence, we have a daily education in the hierarchies of gender, race, and nation. The passage through these spaces is often a passage through hierarchies that they reproduce.
To return then to the passages from Du Bois and Hall, it seems to me that those famous passages can be read as a kind of "double shift,"
to use my own lingo, the way in which racial (and gender) hierarchies are always both part of the mode of production and the mode of subjection, both part of the materiel organization of hierarchies and their representation and conceptualization. The scene is at once the same scene and its other. This is why there has been so much debate about these provocative lines from both Du Bois and Hall, there is a lot of attempt to reduce them to the primacy of race or class, wages as material or psychic, overlooking the fact that it both/and not either/or.
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