lgordon labor migration race fctjournalofcontemporarythought winter2010-libre

LEWIS R. GORDON

Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship

It has become a truism of recent thought that labor, migration, and race converge in the portrait of exploitation occasioned by modern capitalism. Often overlooked, however, are the theological underpinnings and their relation to the wider, global models of human organization and politics at hand. These foundations also offer a grammar of recurring themes by which, as Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lèvi-Strauss observed, the path from the mythic to the scientific is a transformation more of name than form. We are left, then, with questions of the tenability of moving forward in an age that seems to be struggling with which past to force onto the present.

The topic at hand points to a poetic theme from Audre Lorde, one that has achieved mythopoetic status—namely, her oft-cited maxim of the master’s tool not being able to tear down the master’s house. My co-editor Jane Gordon and I received much rancor, for instance, from some critics for challenging this sacred tenet of black critical thought in our anthology Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (2006). Our claim was straightforward: The master did not actually build his house, and the tools by which it was built were not exclusively his. Enslaved, dominated, oppressed, and subaltern peoples brought their intellectual resources and labor to the task of building the modern world, and any realistic effort to transcend the world of colonization and enslavement requires adjudicating this complicated, and often complicit, past and present. The point seemed obvious, but our critics responded in ways that struck us as, unfortunately, neurotic: They would rephrase our claim as somehow defending mastery and then offer as an alternative claim the very point we made—that among the tools used to build the status quo were resources from enslaved peoples. A difficult task, then, is the decolonizing one of conceptual transformation, where along with new concepts could also be new relationships by which to forge a different future and different forms of life. Such an effort requires some reexamination of the past.

The approach by which I would like to consider these questions is that of Africana philosophy, with some considerations from ideas in political economy. Africana philosophy focuses, as I have argued in An

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 32 (Winter 2010)

Lewis Gordon teaches in Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Journal of Contemporary Thought158

Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), on problems of philosophical anthropology, freedom and liberation, and metacritical analyses of reason. These considerations emerged from the contradictions of the modern world, where freedom is avowed in the midst of continuous constructions of more rigorous techniques of enslavement and dehumanization. They come to the fore in this area of philosophy because of what is historically posed by the African Diaspora as an enslaved and subsequently colonized population. They are also a consequence of the forms of rationalizations used to justify such modern developments, among which are anthropological notions with mythic and thus normative force albeit wrought by many contradictions in reality. Such misconceptions include the expectation of migration without transformation, of self-contained communities in motion, as if people are metaphysically complete substances, without change and effect. From such a perspective, human beings from different places can be in proximity without being in relation with each other. To maintain that view requires an extraordinary distortion of historical and social reality.

A familiar theme of anthropological distortion is race. It is, however, one whose historical portrait is often governed by disciplinary decadence. Biologism, sociologism, psychologism, historicism, economicism, and a variety of other discipline-governed isms often offer portraits that situate race from the dawn of the species in one extreme to the nineteenth century and the emergence of the human sciences on the other. Yet the etymology of the term “race” tells a story that crosses all of these disciplinary perspectives in a way that confirms its anthropological character. The subject underneath race discourse is, after all, the human being, and since race is about the classification of human groups, it follows that its subject matter cannot be completely contained in disciplines designed to address only parts of human reality. Failure to understand this, as Du Bois (1898 and 1903) argued, leads, in effect, to attempting to squeeze the human being into a disciplinary shoe whose size is supposed to fit all. And what happens to those who do not fit into such a schema? They become, in a word, “problems.”

A feature of problem people is that they become problems by virtue of failures of systemic assimilation. It is not that they necessarily resist systemic assimilation. It is that they face a circumstance of institutional bad faith, where the mechanisms of rejection in the social world, manifested or denied by those who affect and effect them, hide from themselves by placing “cause” onto supposedly problem people. Put differently, problem people are blamed for their condition through processes that include problematic explanations. These include ideological and hegemonic rationalizations, neurotic investments, and

159Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship

an array of self-deceiving devices. A key exemplar of these tendencies is the punitive dimensions of social practices and explanations that emerge when race is introduced. We are familiar today with what happens to social welfare programs in Europe and North America, for instance, when the populations benefiting from them include those of a dark hue. They are either eroded or eradicated, or if continued, beset with conditions that did not apply to the dominant populations (see Handler, 2004; Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007). The explanation of exploitation is an insufficient explanation of this tendency, however, since that factor would be sufficient grounds for not offering social welfare remedies to the preceding populations as well. To understand this dynamic, some explanation of race and its history is needed.

Race has a history of a prototypical and then full-fledged form of thought or what Paul Taylor (2004) calls “self conscious race thinking.” The prototypical history refers to theories of human difference from ancient to the end of medieval times. The ancient versions, in Africa, Asia, and Europe were not explicitly race thinking because the concept was not yet developed, but familiar tropes of a centered group of human beings counting as truly human versus those who were evident in ancient writings. These accounts of human difference were premised upon teleological conceptions of nature, in which the centered group exemplified in the direction or purpose of achieved humanness. Although there was variation in the models offered, the ancient Greeks generally thought in terms of a species-form of human achievement. For Plato, these concerns transcended the organic features of embodied human beings, but for Aristotle, the organic fusion of form and matter made concrete the manifestations of human potential in the centered group and a natural limitation on the outside groups, which included, as argued in his Politics, barbarians, women, and slaves (cf. Robinson, 2001). The emergence of Christendom transformed the centered group into one legitimated by a theological naturalism, which framed the outsiders at first as those who rejected Christianity. In the Iberian Peninsula, this framework took the form of raza, which referred to breeds of dogs and horses and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews. As Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews, represented a deviation from Christian normativity. The defeat of the Moors in Iberia was followed by the Inquisition to assess the authenticity of the remaining populations of Moors and Jews who had converted to Christianity, a process which led to demands for demonstrations of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) best exemplified by individuals whose origins were supposedly purely Christian. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological center, these groups stood as a prototypical formulation of the anthropology that took a path through razza (Italian) to the


modern term race. The initial period of the expansion of Christendom in the late fifteenth century led to Christian encounters with populations of people who were neither Moor nor Jew, although there were efforts to interpret them in such terms as Conquistadors had at first thought they were encountering strange mosques and synagogues (when the populations were presumed to have been lost Hebrew tribes) in the New World. The enslavement and near genocide of the Native populations of the Americas led to Bartolomé Las Casas’s efforts to save them through appeals to the Papal authority and his famous debate with Gines de Sepúlveda on the status and suitability of the Native populations for slavery. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a consequence of these conflicts.

The emerging secular explanations that developed by the end of the sixteenth century were in no small terms a consequence of meeting people; animals; and fauna not accounted for in the Bible, in addition to the changing worldviews from the emerging new science inaugurated by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon, to name a few. This new science demanded explanations, as Ernst Cassirer observed in An Essay on Man (1962), without theological causality. The search for non-theological causation in the human organism became part of a nexus rooted in nature itself. Johann Blumenbach devoted his classification interests, for instance, to divisions within the human species, racial divisions, correlated with the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, as they tend to be known today, including the term Caucasians, which he coined, to refer to Europeans. In the nineteenth century, the explanation that eclipsed all discussions up to that point at least with regard to the understanding of the human being in nature and the development of human differences was Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. With regard to the human being and differences in the social world, the theoretical frameworks that set the stage for the eventual critique of Darwinian conceptions of race was the materialist sociology of Karl Marx, the historico-genealogical “positivist” anthropology of Anténor Firmin, the metacritical one of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the social-diagnostic phenomenology that grew out of Husserl’s thought and critical work on the human sciences in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon, as well as the structuralist and poststructuralist turns from Lèvi-Strauss through to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, among others (see Carbonell 2009; Chandler, 2006; L. Gordon, 2008; Taylor, 2004).

A crucial and missing backdrop of this portrait, however, is the story of imperialism or at least geopolitical relationships akin to imperial ones. (I say this because we simply presume that the Greco-Roman concept of empire applies to the expanded relations of geo-power orchestrated by the Chin state to create China or the Moguls in India or the Sultans in


the Arabic world or the Aztec-controlled regions. Walter Mignolo [2008]has argued, e.g., that these are unique cultural political relations that may not be properly understood by the notion of “empire.”) That race is, however, a concept that emerged within the historical experience through which Europe emerged legitimately requires consideration of its imperial undercurrent. A crucial feature of empires is their structure of central consumption. Empires reach outward and create a flow of resources inward, to their center, where they are consumed. The technological resources of empires affect the reach and speed of consumption, and they also affect the labor required for their function. Empires, in other words, produce new relations as they engulf new terrains of people, and in doing this, something particularly unexpected happens. The hope of empires is to have a static center of agents who consume, but this expectation is reproduced as the empire reaches out and leads to a flow of people to the center for the sake of their own survival. Every empire, in other words, stimulates migration of peoples.

In the past, this process of consumption and migration took millennia to exhaust themselves, then centuries, and now decades. We forget that the few hundred years of British imperial rule and not even a century of U.S. imperial hegemony are nothing compared to the times of Rome or Egypt, and, if we count the Chin (Qin) expansion into China as an empire, expanded by the Han and subsequent dynasties, that continues today as a global political force. Empires, in other words, are facing a compression of time. In addition to a compression of time, empires are also facing the same of space. This is because the geographical reach of empires is now global, and with nowhere else to go, the world shrinks (see Gordon and Gordon, 2009: chapter 5).

One misconception of migration stimulated by empire is the notion that the imperial center remains the same while the periphery changes. The anxiously protected expectation of centered and national purity is compromised by the impossibility of maintained asymmetry between groups of peoples. It takes too much energy to keep people out while consuming what they have to offer, including the people themselves. The stories are familiar. Egypt conquering outward created the Afro-Asiatic world. Persia doing the same affected the Mediterranean Afro-Asiatic world and expanded it into the foundations of a Euro-Afro-Asiatic one. And Rome doing the same led to the fusion known today as Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (cf. Cohen, 1999). The reassertion of the Afro-Asiatic world led to Islam, and the conflict that followed led to the formation of Western civilization, Europe, and the modern world. (We forget today that although we look to the Middle East for Islam, most Muslims are in Africa and southern Asia.) And as varieties of Christian capitalism were transformed into secular modernity, Hindu-


affected capitalism and Buddhist-affected capitalisms are bursting from their cocoon as custodians of the damaged infrastructures of Western capitalist countries tremble and look to a future that for them is no less than the end of the world.

An odd dimension of these recent developments of temporal and spatial compression is a silly conflict on which past forms of globalism into which to retreat. The neoconservative response, for instance, is to look to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inspiration from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke (Thompson and Brook 2010; Frank, 2008). The neoliberals expand matters to the nineteenth century, by integrating Locke with John Stuart Mill while triumphantly rejecting Marx as a nineteenth-century relic and failure (Harvey 2005). Twentieth-century globalism is hardly considered, however, since that age of revolution, marked by experiments with socialism and the Cold War, is now subject mostly to critique and metacritique. Put differently, it’s as if the twentieth century’s legacy is global chaos left for the twenty-first century to fix, or at least attempt to fix. The rub, however, is that such problems are global, but there is fear of taking on the task of articulating what a genuinely twenty-first century globalism should be. The fallacy, after all, is to presume that globalism must be either a fifteenth-through- nineteenth-century phenomenon. As the world becomes geopolitically smaller, especially as environmental crises now accompany economic ones, humanity clearly can no longer afford to turn its back on its global situation.

Although the global situation of humankind is beset with many problems, among them is the continued model of a religious grammar of citizenship, brought from relegation, which shares etymological roots with religion, in the Roman and then Holy Roman worlds. The term “citizen” at first seems free of religious connotation, as it pertains to city dwelling, and with it only the correlative social relations whose legacy is what we know as politics. The polis was, after all, not only an ancient city but also a place in which relations of war were sublimated and transformed into discursive agonal practices. The price of physical conflict was too high in the enclosed polis, and thus discursive communication, speech, stimulated new relations from which glory, history, and other dimensions of what it means to live together emerged. The city became an imperial center, in a way, over national and state terrain, and it is no accident that the idea of a state without a capital city is unthinkable today (cf. Fanon, 1961; Mielants, 2008). In antiquity, however, especially in the Roman world, from which, as we have seen, the concept of religion emerged, the conditions of membership had a quasi-religious character with the criteria of birth or conversion. In Rome, in other words, one could become a Roman citizen, and other


groups—for example, Judeans—adopted this model, especially of matrilineal criteria for born citizens and processes of oaths and rituals for conversion or “naturalization” (Cohen, 1999). It is ridiculous but treated as a matter without question that contemporary citizenship follows similar criteria in most modern and avowedly secular states.

What, however, if were to radicalize secularization of states and eradicate birthright and oaths and rituals for citizenship and instead focused on contribution (e.g., but not exclusively, taxation broadly understood as any demonstration of contribution) to the common good? Let us suppose the following global situation (since imaginative acts are also crucial dimensions of theoretical work), where there is a form of global federalism initiating interstate commerce across localities whose primary criteria for membership and participation are demonstrations of contribution to the various localities. Labor is one consideration. Wherever one works, one should have a voice in its governance. Labor could be broadly understood as the physical production of things, the creation of ideas and aesthetic expression, or the cultivation of subsequent generations of citizens. It could include the contribution of skills of social cohesion and negotiation. And crucially, its reach could be global in the classic federal sense of shared and distributed power the consequence of which are internal lines of demarcation instead of external ones (cf. Karmis and Norman, 2005). Without external borders, one could migrate to where one’s skills are needed, and by contributing those skills, earn membership for participation as a local citizen. For such a world to exist, a radical transformation of global relations would occur, through which the meaning of “migrant,” “emigrant,” and “immigrant” would be transformed in the set of relations that would make the weight of global exploitation void because of nowhere for that kind of capital, the one that requires vulnerable and hence cheaper labor as extolled by neoconservatism and neoliberalism, to go. The benefits of safety nets in localities on the basis of contributions could be justified from basic contractarian argument of localities owing those who have contributed to them (for debate, cf. Pateman and Mills, 2007). At the federal level, that would mean investment in a global infrastructure that would affect the flow of materials and labor in a way that matches the reality of a spatially and temporally compressed world.

Although this is an imaginative act, we should bear in mind that humanity is already headed that way in the demands of labor itself. More people live in different places from where they work, and more people are part of a global flow of labor seeking work (see, e.g., Wolfgang et al, 2008; Frase 2007; Coughlan 2006; Coombes, 1995). Unlike times where primarily vulnerable populations were compelled to migrate or at least work where they do not live, that necessity is increasing among


the middle and upper strata of societies across the globe. The absurdity of erecting borders to keep people away from jobs that are not desirable for those in the center is a residue from a conception of nation and self that is, unfortunately, out of step with reality.

What exactly would a contributions-based model of citizenship mean for humankind is, in the end, the welfare of humankind itself. The anxiety wrought by race, for instance, is often assuaged by an appeal to the human who lurks beneath. Yet the borders that keep the human being over “there” from coming over “here” depend upon submerging human presence in a way more conducive to the proliferation of races—as we see in heightened racism and radicalized inequalities in an age that valorizes cosmopolitanism—than raising the standards of human conviviality. Lost in such border policing, marked also by fetishized investments, is the understanding that although some of us succeed alone, global failure is no less than the end of us all.

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