To any reader of my blog entries, I would like to apologize for the overwrought language of my recent writing. I was evidently working several thoughts out in my head, and since I wasn’t yet able to articulate them very clearly I instead resorted to bathos. One of the ideas taking shape was the continuum of servitude and citizenship. Until around 1800 you were not a citizen but a subject or in the worst case a serf, by definition not fully free. The French Revolution changed this by making every male subject into an equal citizen of the nation. This, however, also created an aspirational hierarchy between nations to replace the former hierarchy of estates from king to serf, within a country. The exclusive status of national citizenship, the subjugation of foreign peoples by conquest or colonialism, and the ever more murderous wars culminating in the diseased nationalism of fascism and genocide—these were the trade-off for the old hierarchy of estates within the erstwhile kingdoms, empires, and principalities.
What does the feudal hierarchy have to do with the pecking order of peoples or nation-states from the imperial to the colonized? Either hierarchy serves to establish the relative order of haves and have nots, so that those who work and those for whom they work are kept apart or kept out, depending on whether and where their labor is needed. Slavery gets an unnecessarily bad press. It differs by degree and circumstance, not by kind, from the impoverished proletariat of the 19th and 20th centuries or the illegal immigrant of recent times. The society of unequal classes or estates, like the slave-owning or serf-holding society, serves to keep the lesser beings down. The society of national boundaries serves to keep them out (until their labor is needed). Bondage “condenses” from disparities of wealth and citizenship, the way moisture condenses from disparities of temperature. This in turn justifies itself by inventing racism or its equivalent. We need to think in terms of the objective process rather than subjective prejudice: resentment of former slaves arriving in the North during and after the Civil War, hostility toward Jewish refugees arriving in the West after World War I (grist for the Nazis’ mill), or resentment of illegal immigrants clustering in filthy camps around Europe today—these are all “condensations” in the disequalizing, crisis-fomenting process of capital concentration.
Servitude and non-citizenship are two sides, two phases, of the same subordination and exploitation. Slavery overlaps with the new system of states and citizens in Napoleon’s Haiti, in antebellum America, and today among captured would-be immigrants who are apprehended in Libya and sold into bondage by their captors. The extreme disparity of wealth creates the equivalent of slavery the same way it creates prostitution or violence. Instead of recognizing this deeper force at work, we tend to look backward, as if slavery were a phase of development that has been surmounted. We have taken to certifying and branding oppression and past trauma as the source of a kind of reclaimable social capital in lands that embrace equality and the rule of law. Meanwhile, when starving families in an Afghanistan devastated by us sell children in order to feed themselves, it isn’t racism that makes them do it. The identification of racism and slavery, though not inaccurate, substitutes effect for cause and disguises the continuum of subjugation. It generates the irrelevant “discovery” which relativizes white racism on the grounds that Black African powers participated in the slave trade. It takes today’s work-seeking immigrant out of the equation altogether. The economy has always, for centuries, been global. For 500 years or more, slaves and their labor were integral to the global economy (see Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World). The idea that what happens within national boundaries can be distinguished from what happens in any other part of the global economy or the free present age from the slave-owning past is a fiction. This is why opposition to the exclusion and control of labor-seeking immigration is on a continuum with opposition to slavery. Both evils are aspects of the unfolding logic of capital. What opposition to slavery was in the 19th century, resistance to the oppression of nomadic proletarians is today. Those who demand open borders today carry forward the work of 19th-century abolitionists. And yes, it is utopian to demand an end to restricted movement across national borders. Two hundred years ago it was utopian to demand an end to slavery and colonialism.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 