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slave trade

Capitalist Pig 3: The Synthetic Rat

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I was there at the birth,
Out of the cloudburst,

The head of the tempest.

Murderer!

Murder of calm.

– Kate Bush, ‘Little Earth’

 

Let’s, for now, posit a classical Hegelian dialectical triad. And let’s take the pig as the first point of our triad: the thesis. And let’s – as per Phil’s suggestion – take cancer as another point of the same triad: the antithesis. What would be the synthesis?

 

It’s worth making a short digression actually, on the issue of whether or not cancer and pigs are antithetical. In one sense, obviously not. Pigs get cancer. Pigs are used in cancer research. Eating bacon – even a tiny bit, once – will definitely give you cancer, as research has recently proved.

 

David Cameron is a cancer eating away at the heart of our society, and he once had intimate relations with a pig… and yet it’s hard to say that those relations, for all their intimacy, were not antithetical. After all, the pig in question was dead, and had presumably been killed and decapitated so that it could be brought to table for the members (ahem) of the Piers Gaveston society. There can hardly be any more antithetical relationship between any two subjects than that between diner and dish… and yet they are also inextricably unified. Diner and dish, and thence stomach and contents, cells and nutrition, and – ultimately – rectum and faeces. Did Cameron and his fellow Gavestonians consume the pigs they debauched? Pigs, moreover, that had previously satiated their other appetites – be they sexual, socio-cultural, or some combination thereof? If so, they entered into a relationship far more complex than the antithetical one between subject and object. And yet the antithesis remains. In the dancing fluctuation of the dialectic, the opposites are unified and the negation is negated. Just as pigs can suffer cancer – thus unifying themselves with cancer – they are also negated by cancer (as ultimately are we all) and negate cancer in return by dying and thus killing the very cancer cells which have killed them. In the end, cancer is self-negating – as, it is to be hoped, David Cameron will be – and the pig is as good a vehicle – or delivery system, or host – for this self-negation, as any creature.

 

We have established two important principles:

 

1. That cancer and the pig are antithetical, and

 

2. That cancer and the pig exist in an inseparable unity of opposites.

 

We arrive at the point of the synthesis without even trying. The synthesis is that most Marxist of insights: the fundamental, dialectical interconnectedness, and mutual reproduction, of the exploiter and the exploited. But how can this synthesis take form? So far we seem to have been heading to the obvious point of, say, selecting faeces as the synthesis. The faeces of the pig-eater… and yet, if we are to continue to subvert our original classically Hegelian dialectic (an essentially idealist formulation) into a historical materialist dialectic, we must take note of the fact that David Cameron’s crap doesn’t lead us anywhere.…

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31

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John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

“Ah,” says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, “A decision. Would it make any difference?”

“It would make your tea sweet,” says John, humouring this strange customer.

“Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?”

“Not really.”

“But…”

John is suddenly strangely interested.  “Yeah?” he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the ‘magical negro‘ stereotype… but actually he’s just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he’s one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

“What if I could control people’s tastebuds?” suggests the Doctor, “What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane.”

One person making a little decision doesn’t change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however…

“My father, he was a cane cutter,” says John.

“Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter, would he?”

“If this sugar thing had never started,” says John, “my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.”

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery – virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries – equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors – that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery – is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  ‘Race’ is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct… and a relatively recent one in its current form.  ‘Races’ were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were ‘white’.  The idea that ‘negroes’ were an inferior ‘race’ arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the ‘New World’.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated “all men are created equal”. …

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Categorically Speaking

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Kant’s categorical imperative is an expression of the bourgeois liberal ideas of the 18th century, expressed as morality.  It is progressive in the sense that it attempts to derive morality from Reason.  It is part of the Enlightenment.  It also expresses the new, universal promises of the bourgeois revolutions in that it universalises (i.e. “All men are created equal”).  It is based on the principle of universality.  What you do must apply to all people or it fails to be truly moral. 

However, it is also based on a bourgeois notion of rights.  The concept of ‘rights’ is a product of the rise of bourgeois property/trade relations.  One brings one’s rights to the market place and, on that basis, one participates in the putatively level playing field.  For Kant, one negotiates the conflicts between these rights on the basis of contractual clauses.  If the Party of the First Part undertakes to do such and such, the Party of the Second part will be understood to be obliged to do so and so.  It is this which finally inverts the universality of the notion into an entire bourgeois conception of individualism.  Through this embedded notion of contractual obligations, the decision as to universal moral actions rests with the individual’s willingness to enter into a personal contract regarding his conduct, his willingness to be bound.

The sting in the tail lies in the fact that different people will always have different notions as to what is or isn’t universally desirable.  One individual may consider it highly desirable that theft be considered universally immoral because they have a great personal interest in the institution of private property (i.e. because they own lots of it).  Another (who perhaps owns little) may be prepared to risk universalising the permissability of theft if he thinks he can steal what he wants and then protect his stolen goods by force.  Alternatively, there may be those who feel that there are worse prospects for the future than the fall of private property.  And, in practice, the guardians of morality will always be ready to claim the universality of laws that they themselves break, simply because they take a more pragmatic view of Reason.

The R/reasonable promises of bourgeois liberalism and Enlightenment will always have such loopholes in their social contracts and, as a result, will always find themselves in full or partial, official or unofficial abeyance.  The Enlightenment declared that all men were created equal, but oversaw (and, indeed, was partially built upon) all black men (and women) being crated equally… for shipping.  Why should a white man who profits from the slave trade care if ‘enslave black people’ became a universal moral maxim?  He knows the colour of his own skin will exempt him from the chains, and the inequality of property and opportunity will protect him from universal business competition.…

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It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race

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“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

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Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.

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With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation.  …[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.

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Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31.  My favourite bit.…

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