The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Rebellion in America

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Lecture by: Dr Ashok Kumar (Lecturer I international Political Economy, Birkbeck, University of London)

This lecture was held on June 4, 2020 at Indian Researcher, New Delhi. The following document is compiled by Aisha Kader (Research scholar, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai).

The title of the lecture is inspired by the title of Paul Gilroy’s work on race. It also has a reference to Star Wars, episode five of Star Wars is called ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. In episode 4, the rebel alliance had destroyed the moon-sized Imperial spacecraft called the Death Star which was capable of destroying entire planets. The way that America is capable of destroying countries and has. In episode 5, the imperialist forces respond in a manner to smoke out the rebel forces. The stage we are in right now is the stage where the empire strikes back. 

Race and Capitalism

Race has been analysed in various ways, but a common point of agreement across the different ideologies is the recognition that race is a social construction. Looking at race through Marxian lens, one can’t ignore how intrinsically capitalism and racism are linked. Capitalism depends on racism for profit, and also to divide and rule the working class. It is necessary to understand why race happens. Indeed, this the only to dismantling it.

Under capitalism, there are two elements of structural power. The first element is the power that is imposed on the workers. The bargaining power of the worker varies according to where they are positioned. This implies that the position determines the structural power exercised on the workers. The second element is based on the labour market. Under capitalism we can never have full employment. For example, if there are ten jobs available and there are ten workers in total to do those job with no surplus labour then you can’t have capitalism. If you have no surplus (in terms of labour, or land, or food etc) you cannot have capitalism.  Under primitive accumulation, when capitalism is emerging, it dispossesses a greater number of workers to have a reserve army of labour who they could then use against resisting workers. The bigger the reserve army, the greater the pressure the capitalist can put on workers. 

In America, this reserve army was required as a valve to put pressure on the workers, specifically white workers. This pressure wasn’t just the wages they received, the material wealth. As W.E.B. Du Bois said, there is also an immaterial wealth, ‘a psychological wage of whiteness’ where one group gains from being superior to another. 

Race is central to the development of capitalism in America. The ideas of race didn’t really exist till the 1600s in America, till black people were brought to America in chains as slaves. The landed classes at that time in America, gave a small plot of the worst land they had to a small section of the whites, in order to enforce the enslavement of these slaves who were now brought to America. 

The relationship of race in the US should be analysed using a historical materialist analysis. Many people look at race as something that exists outside capitalism. When we look at how people are racialized now, we can find its direct trace to capitalism. Hence it becomes important to ask the questions of how race is constructed, under what circumstances it is constructed and in whose interest?

Subjectivity of Indigenous people vs Slaves

Reductionist or culturalist idea, such as afropessimis, maintains that Black people everywhere are treated badly for the same sort of reasons. This isn’t true, there is no universal hierarchy that exists everywhere in the world at all times, to support this claim is politically dubious. Racialision is first and foremost contingent. It depends on material conditions. Patrick Wolfe draws on two distinctions, land and labour. Slavery meant that black Americans were primarily colonized for their labour rather than their land, whereas indigenous Australians, like indigenous people everywhere including America, were dispossessed primarily for their land. This clearly shows that while one group was dispossessed for their land, the other was controlled for their labour. So, these basic historical differences live in the popular culture now, where representations of Black Australians and indigenous Americans resemble each other. While in a contrast to this the  representations of Black Americans is very different. These racialized differences can be drawn to the fact that they were fundamentally and historically used by the dominant classes for land and labour. 

In America, over a hundred million indigenous people were exterminated, they were murdered, children were kidnapped and by assimilating mixed-bloods. There was a high motivation to integrate, through which they could dispossess the indigenous people from their lands, a form of cultural extermination. Black Americans were systematically isolated and segregated. The One Drop Rule asserted that any person with even one black ancestor is considered black. This segregation rather than assimilation is crucial when the relationship was initially to a feudal system, then to a slave system and now to capital. When the relationship to capital is labour, they become a segregated group rather than an assimilated group. And when the relationship to capital is land, they become an assimilated group, and anything that is theirs can be taken away by dispossessing them for their land.

Role of Police and Prisons under Capitalism

Since 1989, Black Americans make up the majority of the prison population in America. Seventy-five per cent of the prison population is either Black Americans or Latinos, even when they constitute less than thirty per cent of the total American population. With 2.2 million total prison population, America leads among the world countries, and also in modern history. In any given day in America, one in three Black Americans in their twenties find themselves in prison, parole or probation. This is particularly higher in the industrialized cities than the north.

The Police exist primarily as a system to regulate and even produce inequalities. They exist to maintain property relations, suppress labour and social movements, also to manage the lives of labourers, poor people non-white people. The earliest policing in the 18^th century had three major objectives, control of slaves, control of colonial subjects and the control of the emergent industrial working class. This evidence suggests that the system of social order is about the preservation of inequality and the accumulation of capital. This context should be kept in mind when looking at what is happening currently in America. 

Formation of Police Force as a Response to Riots

Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police Force. It is the oldest police force and continues to be one of the brutal forces that manage race relations and capital as a consequence. After the creation of the force, London had these watchmen to patrol to streets. There was also this excessively violent malicious force exclusively to protect private property rights of the emerging bourgeoisie or the landed classes. Robert Peel had developed his ideas on policing from his time managing the British colonial occupation in Ireland. He saw new forms of social control which would ensure the continued domination. This was also the phase of growing insurrections, political uprisings and riots. 

Repression by the state through the malicious military forces created by the colonial administration antagonized these rebellious actions. And this antagonism bolstered the resistance. So, Peele was forced to develop a lower cost and more legitimate form of policing and it was called The Peace Preservation Force, and he tested this out in occupied colonized Ireland. 

The emergence of police in England grew directly out of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. This movement was born out of widespread poverty and displacement. Due to the industrialization, there was a widespread displacement of peasants, resulting in primitive accumulation. Movements sprung up everywhere around in England. In a rally in Manchester, a cavalry charged to a crowd of protestors killing many of them.

The bourgeoisie felt that what they needed was the force to maintain control and to produce new economic order for industrial capitalism. The result of this was the London Metropolitan Police Force. This “London Model” was then imported to Boston in 1938, it spread throughout the North of the US, to newly industrializing cities of the north, which had seen huge influxes of immigrants. Here, the force created a system of greater economic unevenness and a sense of social chaos, particularly for the landed classes. 

The Boston police are explicitly trained to manage riots and social disorder associated with the working class. It was formed in 1838 as a response to the Boston Riots in 1837, where a mob of 15000 American protestants attacked Irish immigrants because they felt this increase in reserve army was bringing down their wages, and reducing their jobs. 

New York City Police Department was formed in was in 1845, this was a much stronger and robust than any other police force in the country. This was the direct result of the expulsion of immigrants, the eruption of riots, racial strikes and labour unrests. Specifically, this was a response to the black and white dockworkers who went on strike and did massive sabotage and disruption in 1802, 1825, 1828 and the then subsequent riots throughout the decade.  

Slavery, Ghettos and Labour Market

Slavery was another major force that shaped US policing well before the London Metropolitan Force was formed. In southern cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, full-time police officers who were in uniforms were mildly accountable to local officials. They were developed basically as slave patrol, and they had the responsibility to prevent slave rebellions and revolts. These patrols were given the power to go to the private property without even forewarning the property owners, or the slave master, to ensure that the slaves didn’t have any weapons, were conducting meetings, or learning to read and write. These were all seen as acts of rebellion. Crucially these patrols prevented slaves from escaping to the north. During this time, while some freed themselves to the northern cities, others went to Canada. 

During the Civil War, the poor whites fought for a system that dispossesses them from work, without the realization that this same system was exploiting them. In such a context, ideology is quite central. Following the Civil War, slavery was abolished in 1865. Once slavery was abolished, the slave patrolling system was also abolished. So, the primary purpose of the police shifted to disciplining these former slaves into a new economic and political order, a new set of laws were introduced for this purpose. 

Jim Crow Laws were introduced to enforce racial segregation. This included the poll taxes directed towards taking away the voting rights of Black Americans. Different methods like this were used to suppress the political agency, upward mobility and self-determination of the black people.

Louis Wacquant draws a link between the ghetto, the prison and the labour market. Louis Wacquant maps the history from the end of slavery to the present, and he describes how the urban ghetto operated as prisons themselves. These ghettos functioned as to keep blacks as the reserve of labour in a subordinate and confined manner in every single way.

The 20^th-century history sees that the working-age of black men shuttled between the prison and the ghetto, and he calls this ‘deadly symbiosis’. This symbiosis allows blacks to remain in a position of subproletariat, or what Marx would call a ‘lumpen proletariat’. So, the ghetto-prison system was used to segregate, and thereby extract labour. This process of containing the black population, so that they wouldn’t “contaminate” the surrounding white areas, would reinforce the ideas that black people were irrevocably inferior to the whites.

Think about it: if a white worker has access to employment, then they aren’t going to organize with someone whom they see as less than a human or even show solidarity to them. The twin goals in the US with regards to the black population in the state was labour extraction and social exclusion. These goals are contradictory in itself. Like, how do you extract a group’s labour when the labour requires regular interaction between the members of the dominant group and members of the subordinate group? Interactions would blur the line between both the groups. Indeed, social isolation can make efficient labour extraction more difficult. When the tensions between labour exploitation and social exclusion mount to the point where it undermines either of those systems, Wacquant argues, that the institution is then stabilised through physical violence. This is where the police become central. 

When Black southerners moved to the North, between the 1914 and 1960s, they were escaping the violence and the daily indignities of the south. But when they reached the North, they were ghettoized. Northern ghettos have been often described as “Black Metropolis in the womb of the white”. Ghettos served a positive economic function as the reserve army of cheap and pliable labour for the city factories, while also serving the purpose of segregation of the black population. But by the 1970s, the engine of the metropolitan economy had passed from the industrial hubs to the outskirts and other cities. Therefore, the utility of the black ghetto as the reserve army of labour started to fall. And as that happened, in the 1970s there was an explosion in the number of prisoners.

Black Lives Matter: From Ferguson

In 2014, during the Ferguson Riots, “Black Lives Matters” gained nationwide attention. This riot broke out as a result of the murder of the 18- year old black man Michael Brown by a white Ferguson police officer. Until this incident, no one had heard about this town.  As cities become “gentrified”, the values of the land of the people in the city became greater than the value of their position or subjectivity as labour. This defines neo-liberal urbanism and displacement in America and other advanced capitalist countries.

Until the 1969s, Ferguson was what you call a sundown town, legally it meant that black people were not allowed to be outside their homes after sundown. Till the early nineties, Ferguson was basically 90% white. As a result of industrialization and further breaking up of ghettos, blacks moved from Saint Lois its suburb Ferguson. The Ferguson administration is majorly composed of white people. Even though in a period of twenty years, Ferguson became eighty-six per cent blacks, they are often poor, dispossessed, and don’t have the access work. 

All of a sudden there was this huge dispossessed black population that was being administered by a fairly violent white population. That antagonism meant that even if the levels of police brutality in a city like Ferguson was at or even less than Detroit where there is a large percentage of black police officers, police force becomes more visible when you are in a city that is administered by a white administration, and the black population is threatened.

Murder of George Floyd

On May 25, George Floyd, a black man was handcuffed, pinned down and then choked to death with a knee by the white officer Derek Chauvin. The officer was initially charged with third-degree murder or manslaughter, but that has been then increased to second-degree murder. Other three police officers who had been standing around has also been charged. And this is the direct result of the riots and unrest. Since that happened in Minneapolis, unrest spread in every single city, and curfews were declared in many cities. More than 5000 national guards were activated due to the mass unrest. 

Burning down police stations, police cars, and US Chambers of Commerce are explicit demonstrations of political power. Just as riots are implicit expressions of political power. Poll after poll says that the public support the protester, this is unprecedented in American history. Bystanders are being attacked with the full weight of the state and the law. There have been at least three protesters who have been murdered so far by the police force. Put this in the context, there wasn’t a single protester who was killed during the Hong Kong protest as the media has been systematically attacking.

Modern Father vs. Post Modern Father

Slavoj Zizek uses an allegory to draw a comparison between a modern father and a post-modern father. In the first story, a father tells his son to go visit his grandmother as it is Sunday, but the son refuses. The father then threatens his son by saying he will beat him up if he doesn’t go. This creates a clear antagonism between the father and the son. The son goes to visit the grandmother, still, the antagonism remains. This old-fashioned totalitarian father is a modern father. In case of a post-modern father, he is tolerant. He says to his son “it’s Sunday, you should go see your grandmother as she loves you a lot, nonetheless, visit her only if you want.” So, the son goes believing that not only has he chosen to go but he thinks he likes it.

Recently Trump has come out with a very confrontational approach, where he can be seen as the Modern Father. Anyway, there is massive solidarity and demonstrations across the world. Ferguson happened under Obama, and the response was that of a postmodern father. With Trump, one cannot disarticulate the idea that polarisation and contradictions are very sharp. It then becomes a situation in which people either have to choose the Modern father Trump or the Post-Modern Father Obama. With Trump, the polarisation can be used for political mobilisations, whereas with Obama it becomes difficult, he does the same things, conditions are the same, but you think he’s on your side you think he likes you. He doesn’t.

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