Race and the making of the Australian working class 1

This is intended to be a multi-post series presenting a particular interpretation of Australia’s history, and specifically the history of the concept of whiteness shaped class relations. It is inspired by the strand of American labour history found in books such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. These works use critical race theory to explain how a ‘white’ section of the American working class has struck grand bargains with capital independently of, and to the detriment of, the black/non-white section. It seems that many of their ideas are applicable to Australia.

Part One: 1788 and All That

The story of the Australian working class begins in 1788, when boatloads of transported convicts arrived in Sydney. Among them were members of the black communities of urban Britain, products of the system of commerce (including the slave trade) which linked Britain with Africa and the Caribbean. At this early stage in Australian history, there were no racial distinctions: escaped convicts found refuge in Aboriginal communities, and those who remained rejected the name given by the British elites to their new hometown, ‘Rose Hill’, preferring its indigenous appellation, ‘Parramatta’. Black convicts such as Billy Blue were among Sydney’s most prominent people, and Irish convicts co-operated with Aboriginal rebels, such as Pemulwuy, who violently resisted British rule.

In the United States, the creation of race as a legal category is often dated to 1676, when a group of white and black unfree labourers rebelled against Virginia’s colonial authorities in what became known as Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the colony’s rulers sought to divide their subjects: whites became ‘indentured servants’ and were to be emancipated and given land after their service, while blacks were recognised as slaves occupying an inferior legal status to whites. In Australia, this process didn’t really occur under the convict system – black convicts were never treated differently than whites in the eyes of the law. (For example, Billy Blue was appointed a water bailiff, and his illegal transportation of liquor across Sydney Harbour was consistently overlooked by the authorities.) The antipodean equivalent of the American colour line is probably to be found during the gold rushes, with the Chinese as its main targets.

Billy Blue: proof of the diversity of the convicts transported to Australia.

This period of Australian history was not, of course, without organised, official racism. The often violent dispossession of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands was fuelled by the British authorities’ greed for land, and by the desire of the squatter class for large landholdings on which to establish itself as the equivalent of the British landed gentry. Although the authorities claimed that English law was to be applied in a colour-blind fashion in the colonies, no white person was hanged for the murder of an Aboriginal until 1838.

In addition to the penal colonies on the eastern seaboard, a colony entirely populated by free settlers was established in South Australia. (Victoria was also not a penal colony, but was not explicitly founded as such.) The colonists who arranged for the settlement of the Festival State were motivated by a moralism typical of Victorian Britain – one of their bugbears was the settlement of equal numbers of men and woman in South Australia, so as to avoid the social problems which they saw as arising from a high ratio of males to females. They also recognised that the availability of cheap land would have a negative effect on labour discipline. Unlike the ‘free labor’ ideology which came dominate political thought in the northern United States in the run-up to the Civil War, with which it shares some similarities, the set of ideas that guided South Australia’s development sought to limit the supply of land to colonists. E. G. Wakefield, one of the architects of the colonisation of South Australia, wrote in his book View of the Art of Colonisation that available land would lead to “exorbitant wages which sometimes harass the capitalist.” He wanted the colony to be ensured of a supply of labour coupled with restrictions on land, in order to decrease workers’ bargaining power in the labour market, as the colony at that stage lacked a system of ‘white privilege’. When such a system was established, as in Virginia in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, the elites could trust poor whites with the possession of land.

On the eastern seaboard, competition from unfree (convict) labour led to one of the first working class political movements in Australian history: the Anti-Transportation League. The League achieved great success, and forced the British authorities to phase out the transportation of convicts in the early 1850s. (However, convicts were still sent to Western Australia, and the penalty of ‘transportation to Australia’ still survives as a possible penalty for some crimes in English law.) Outside of organised political agitation, workers used strikes and direct action to force the authorities’ hand. For the first time, Australian workers had successfully pressured the state to exclude from the continent those who they perceived as threatening their livelihoods. On this occasion, the move was directed at people generally of the same ethnicity and skin colour, but the groundwork had been laid for all sorts of immigration restriction, and once Australia’s self-identity was changed from ‘penal colony’ to something akin to nineteenth-century America’s ‘white republic’, similar moves would inevitably be directed against non-whites.

Allons enfants de la patrie, la jour de gloire est arrivée

The first round of the French presidential election was held on Sunday (Saturday for voters in the overseas territories in the Americas and in French Polynesia), and here are the results:

*François Hollande (Socialist [blairite third-wayers]): 28.56%

*Nicholas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement [tory teabaggers]): 27.07%

*Marine Le Pen (National Front [far-right nutbags]): 18.12%

*Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Front [jaurèsian socialists]): 11.1%

*François Bayrou (Democratic Movement [centrists]): 9.11%

*Eva Joly (Europe Ecology The Greens [greenies]): 2.26%

*Nicholas Dupont-Aignan (Arise the Republic [old-school gaullists]): 1.81%

*Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party [alterglobalisationalists]): 1.16%

*Nathalie Arthaud (Workers’ Struggle [trotskyists]): 0.57%

*Jacques Cheminade (Solidarity and Progress [larouchites]): 0.25%

The big takeaways are (1) Hollande is on track to win the presidency – every poll this month has had him leading at least 53-47 in the second round, to be held on May 6; (2) the major parties may have avoided a repeat of 2002, but the National Front scored its best ever first-round vote and isn’t going away any time soon; (3) Mélenchon has somewhat revitalised the ‘left of the left’, but fell short of the heights that polls had suggested he might achieve.

What does this all mean for France, Europe, and the world? Celebrations for France’s socialists and comparisons to François Mitterrand’s 1981 victory, followed more of the same old shit. The National Front’s momentum might turn a lot of parliamentary seats into three-way contests, helping the Socialists to an ever greater landslide and making them less dependent on the Left Front for support. Everything at this stage points to Hollande reprising Sarkozy’s role as Angela Merkel’s gimp.

And it could get worse: Marine Le Pen’s advisers have spoken of re-creating the FN, which sounds like they are planning to re-brand it in order to make it possible to ally with mainstream right-wing parties (their model would presumably be Italy, where the Alleanza Nazionale used the early-1990s political crisis to de-stigmatise its fascist heritage and make itself a major player in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition). The prospect of an unpopular and worn-out Hollande facing a UMP-FN fusion in 2017 might be a possibility.

Stay tuned for more fun on May 6.

Kony as Kansas in August

 So, it turns out the KONY 2012 campaign is a smokescreen for the religious right. Extensive connections have been traced between its people (the charity Invisible Children) and conservative groups who have supported California’s Proposition 8 (the 2008 ballot initiative which outlawed same-sex marriage) and its links to the Ugandan government (against whom Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is fighting) include support for its continuing execution of homosexuals. Its hierarchy also overlaps with The Fellowship, a scary-sounding group of Christians who claim the allegiance of sitting members of Congress.

I watched the KONY 2012 documentary when it aired on Channel Ten in early March, and thought it a worthwhile cause, but one which was hindered by its imitation of other plastic-wristband causes which flatter Western hipsters as being the carriers of a modern-day White Man’s Burden. It also implicitly legitimises the Ugandan government, whose human rights record is no better than Kony’s, and ignores the reality that the Lord’s Resistance Army have mostly moved on from the country and now operate in the DRC, the CAR, and South Sudan. (Those criticisms, and others, have been made extensively since – Wikipedia has a summary.) There was also the little matter of Invisible Children founder and KONY 2012 presenter Jason Russell having a hilarious public meltdown. The revelation that the project is linked politically to America’s foremost reactionaries, however, takes matters to the next level – one wonders what other organisations are secretly controlled by the Christian right…or, indeed, if any are fronts for Islamism.

Perhaps what we need is a RELIGION 2012 campaign, in which we banish medieval superstition, racism, sexism, homophobia, terrorism, child molestation, honour killings, ritual animal slaughter, female genital mutilation, suttee, apocalypse predictions, HIV/AIDS denialism, and creationism from the public sphere.

Trayvon Martin and the Second Amendment

-->

Since the shooting of Sanford, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin at the end of February, the United States is going through one of its regular episodes of national hand-wringing about race relations.

On the racial angle to this, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is, as he always is on these sorts of matters, worth a read. The reaction to the shooting from various quarters has rehashed so many themes from the history of race in America, and has even drawn in President Obama and his Republican challengers. There is one aspect of the affair which needs to be better covered, however, and that is the use of this tragedy to push a particular line about the role of guns in American life.

In the opening scenes of Bowling for Columbine, film-maker Michael Moore uttered one of the most contemptible slanders I have ever heard. He mentioned the coincidence of the National Rifle Association and the Ku Klux Klan being founded in the same year (1871), and with a Fox News-style dog-whistle, he left viewers with the impression that the two events were somehow connected. In fact, the NRA was founded in the North, and among its early leaders was President Ulysses S. Grant (the recipient of the overwhelming majority of black and abolitionist votes in the 1868 and 1872 presidential election, and the man who signed the Ku Klux Klan Act into law). Meanwhile, the Black Codes introduced by Redeemer governments in the South usually proscribed gun ownership by African-Americans, among other denials of civil liberties. The breaches of the Second Amendment by Southern states did not go unnoticed in the North, and were among the factors which assisted the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. (The Second Amendment, however, was not incorporated to the states until 2007.)

The push for gutting the Second Amendment has flared up many times. In the late 1960s, it was Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, no friend of African-Americans, who testified before a congressional committee and called for all guns to be banned. When Bobby Kennedy brought up gun control on the campaign trail in 1968, his opponent Gene McCarthy thought he was playing the race card (at the time, mentioning gun control was a faux pas among liberals, as any talk of private citizens needing protection against lawlessness was seen as pandering to the white ‘backlash’ against civil rights). At some point between then and now, American liberals have done an about-turn, and now promote an interpretation of the constitution which nullifies the Second Amendment, or reduces its scope to apply only to weapons in use in 1791 (a standard which would exclude electronic forms of media from the First Amendment).

The change was probably cemented by the 1994 passage of the Brady Bill, a landmark piece of federal gun control (I prefer the term ‘victim disarmament’) legislation. The scares in the 1990s about the doings of right-libertarian or white supremacist militias (which reached its apogee with the Oklahoma City bombing of 1996) caused liberals to engage in the same fear-mongering about ‘National Security!!!11!’ that they (correctly) accuse conservatives of deploying. This phenomenon has resurfaced again during the Obama administration – liberals were quick to capitalise on the 2009 suicide of a census worker in Kentucky (who had the word ‘FED’ scrawled on his body, and whose death at first looked like a lynching) and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting to expound a narrative of America being threatened by violent anti-government activities.

Even before the investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin has concluded, the Brady Campaign, which pushed for the Brady Bill’s passage, is at it again. They are presenting a petition to Congress which derides the defence of the Second Amendment as the “extremist, political agenda of the gun lobby.” They talk about keeping guns out of the hands of “dangerous people”, but seek to equally disarm non-dangerous people defending themselves from ‘dangerous people’. They also overlook that Trayvon Martin wasn’t shot by a random member of the public, but the sole volunteer of a state-sanctioned neighbourhood watch association who had a history of working with the authorities to apprehend suspects. In other words, Zimmerman was in a sort of grey area between being a private citizen and an agent of the state.

In summary, there is nothing progressive about gun control, which in practice equates to leaving African-Americans (and other racial minorities) to the mercy of city police departments with records of racial profiling, police brutality, and disproportionate searches of their vehicles, and which has a history of being used by tyrannical majorities to disarm unpopular minorities.

Abolitionism: Part Two: why it succeeded and where it failed

In examining why the abolitionist movement succeeded in effecting such radical change in such a short period of time, one thing that stands out is how the defenders of slavery overreacted to abolitionist agitation, which then created a snowball effect and won more sympathy for the cause. We see this in the persecution of the embryonic abolitionist movement in the 1830s, the constant refrain that their agitation would endanger the Union, the development of a pro-slavery Southern nationalism (replacing the yeoman farmer-based Southern thought of Jefferson and Madison, which often saw slavery as a British-imposed necessary evil), and finally in the Southern belief that John Brown’s futile attack at Harpers Ferry was a sign of impending slave revolt. The paranoia among Southern planters that their social order was under threat caused them to lash out and expand their reach, both politically (through legislative measures such as the Fugitive Slave Act) and geographically (eg. the Mexican-American War and the expansion of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska).

I will offer a tentative explanation for the anti-abolitionist overreaction, and it is drawn from the thought of Noel Ignatiev, the former Harvard academic who wrote the classic study of nineteenth-century American race relations, How the Irish Became White. Ignatiev has written of whiteness as a sort of currency, which bestows certain social and political privileges on its bearers. If a significant number of white Americans were to reject the privileges of whiteness and become ‘counterfeit whites’, authorities who police the boundaries of whiteness could no longer be certain that any given white-skinned person was a participant in the scheme of white privilege. Using the currency metaphor, Ignatiev posits that even a small percentage of ‘counterfeit whites’ would be enough to devalue whiteness.

Prior to the rise of organised abolitionism, whiteness had come to signify membership in the community of American citizens. When suffrage was extended to virtually all adult white males in the 1820s and 1830s, it was often taken away from African-Americans who had owned enough property to qualify under the previous franchise. Thus, when a significant number (although nowhere near a majority) of northerners became active in the abolitionist movement, the defenders of slavery could no longer assume that every white American was a grateful beneficiary of white privilege. Even if John Brown wasn’t about to be followed by more abolitionist activists trying to incite slave rebellions, southerners wouldn’t be able to physically distinguish them from other white-skinned people. The idea of ‘counterfeit whites’, I believe, helps to explain the reaction against abolitionism, as the ‘currency’ of whiteness had become devalued by the presence of activists who divested themselves of white privilege.

In a few previous blog posts, I have explored the idea of oppositional political movements creating a counter-public sphere in which their ideas are disseminated, in an attempt to make them hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense). This can involve newspapers, schools, cultural institutions, trade unions, and entertainment facilities. Abolitionists certainly created such a counter-public sphere, beginning with Garrison’s first issue of The Liberator in 1831. Their network of organisations included anti-slavery societies (linked to the broader international anti-slavery movement), as well as factions within major political parties. It was via this network that abolitionists were able to promote their free labour ideology and disseminate their ‘Slave Power’ narrative, to the point where they realigned the party system and captured power in Washington, D.C.

The title of Ignatiev’s book, on the other hand, gives us a clue as to how opposition to abolitionism was formulated in the North. For migrant groups such as the Irish, their whiteness was a means of achieving social equality in an Anglo- and Protestant-dominated country, and the Jacksonian ideal of a republic of white men appealed to them. To overcome the lowly status ascribed to them by the Anglo elites, the Irish consciously separated themselves from, and placed themselves above, African-Americans. In fields such as voting rights, access to jobs, and housing patterns, the Irish generally sought to exclude blacks in order to promote themselves to equal status with the Anglos.

It was little surprise, then, that Irish-Americans didn’t take to the abolitionist cause, as it threatened the ‘white republic’ ideal which served as their best chance of gaining acceptance in their new land. The presence of so many defectors from the (anti-Catholic) Know-Nothing movement in the early Republican Party didn’t help matters, either. In the 1860 presidential election, they provided much of Stephen Douglas’ vote in the North, while the Irish populations of cities such as Charleston and New Orleans gave him nearly all of his southern vote. The leading role of Irish-Americans in the 1863 New York Draft Riots was another consequence of the abolitionist movement’s failure to articulate a clear vision of a ‘colour-blind republic’ to replace the ‘white republic’.

The victory of the abolitionist cause also reminds us how revolutions have historically been betrayed by political actors who wish to tone down the new, highly-charged political climate which they produce. The 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention, mentioned in my previous post (with sixty slaves, thirty propertyless whites, and thirty-five slave-holding whites), failed to completely transform the society of the Palmetto State. The appointed military Governor addressed it on its first day, and was quick to remind delegates that they did not represent the wealth, virtue, or intelligence of the state, and therefore, that their proposed constitution must look after the interests of the white elites. This was just one of a number of betrayals by both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, who left the new biracial governing coalitions open to attack from pro-elite Redeemers, and which culminated in the Thermidorian retreat from Reconstruction which followed the Compromise of 1877.