5 Race and Racism in Marx's Camera Obscura

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Critical Sociology
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DOI: 10.1163/156916306779155207
2006 32: 617 Crit Sociol
Paul Paolucci
Race and Racism in Marx's Camera Obscura
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2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden www.brill.nl
* For correspondence: Paul Paolucci, Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and
Social Work, Eastern Kentucky University, 107 Keith Building, Richmond, KY 40475,
USA, E-mail: paul.paolucci@eku.edu.
Race and Racism in Marxs
Camera Obscura
P.tr P.ortcci*
(Eastern Kentucky University)
Ans+n.c+
The charge that Marxs work leaves sociologists few tools with
which to understand the phenomena of race and racism has
been a common one. Against such claims, this essay attempts
to mobilize several analytical devices in Marxs work that help
us grasp race and racism as sociological realities. These include
an understanding of the inversion process (referred to here as
the camera obscura) Marx asserted was inherent to bourgeois
ideology, his method of addressing the issue of tautology in
the philosophy of science, and his approach to political-economic
analysis. These aspects of Marxs work are essential for any
study of race and racism in modern capitalist societies.
Krv vonrs: camera obscura, Marx, race and racism, slavery,
colonialism, Christianity, taxonomy, biology, world-system.
Racism persists, but not simply or only because of fallacious beliefs held
by a critical mass of people. Racism is something other and more than
a collection of attitudes and its persistence cannot be explained by some
deep-seated aw in the human character. Racism is at its core a sociological
phenomenon and the social conditions which underlie it persist. Systematic
racism is the outcome of interrelationships between political-economic
factors unique to modernity and forms of discursive knowledge both
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by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014 crs.sagepub.com Downloaded from
618 Paolucci
1
While Marx, unlike Weber or Durkheim, cannot be accused of supporting national
prejudicial allegiance over commitment to the working class as an international movement,
he can be accused of being trapped within forms of racial thinking common to his
period. For example, one of the premises of racial thinking is the assumption of a corre-
lation between physical and character traits. Marx accepted, at least in part, this view,
once writing to Kugelmann that phrenology is not the baseless art which Hegel imag-
ined ( Letter to Kugelmann, January 11, 1868, in Padover 1979:241). More than once
he referred to niggers, with only a slightly less condescending posture expected for the
time period. Of his son-in-law, a mulatto from Cuba, Marx wrote: Lafargue has the
usual stigma of the Negro tribe: no sense of shame, I mean thereby no modesty about
making himself ridiculous ( Letter to Engels, November 11, 1882, in Padover 1979:399).
Marx often referred to Lassalle, his competitor / comrade, Jew-boy Braun, Jewish
Nigger, and Itzig, another anti-Semitic tag (see: Letters to Engels, in Padover 1979:435,
466, 473). In all fairness, Marx was ecumenical, allowing negative racial traits for all
nationalities: full of pretensions to that superiority with which the true Briton, thanks to
a special gift for stupid ignorance, is lled ( Letter to Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov, January 23,
1882, in Padover 1979:356). Also, in reference to the American Civil War, Marx wrote:
You will have rejoiced, as I did, at the defeat of President Johnson at the last election.
The workers of the North have nally come to understand very well: that a white skin
cannot emancipate itself so long as a black skin is branded ( Letter to Francois Lafargue,
November 12, 1866, in Padover 1979:223).
pre-dating it and internal to it. Understood in this context, a Marxist
perspective can assist in explaining how race as a form of knowledge
and racism as a social institution came to be.
Though sociological frameworks for studying the relation between racial
identities and institutional racism exist, it is commonly assumed that
Marxs work fails to oer useful, sucient, and / or necessary tools with
which to understand their dynamics. His direct comments on racial ques-
tions often support this conclusion.
1
In his defense, this paper argues
three features of Marxs work are crucial for understanding the rela-
tionship between historical events, the rise of race as an element of dis-
cursive knowledge, and racism as a key variable in the stratication
system in the modern capitalist world-economy: (1) his assertion that
knowledge in capitalist society becomes inverted as if in a camera
obscura; (2) his sensitivity to tautological reasoning in the philosophy of
science; and, (3) his political-economic analysis of the historico-structural
dynamics of capitalism.
Before laying out the argument, a statement of the specic relevance
of this inquiry is necessary. Several of the arguments below have been
covered elsewhere and this paper does not pretend to bring its reader
groundbreaking research on racist science (see: Gould 1981; Fredrick-
son 1981; Shipman 1994; Graves 2001; Harding 1993). Indeed, this essay
relies heavily upon them. What this paper attempts to show is how a
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 618
Race and Racism in Marxs Camera Obscura 619
Marxist view brings necessary insights to such issues and to the topic of
racism itself, something which is not addressed in these otherwise excel-
lent analyses.
The Camera Obscura
Marxs conceptual-analytical strategies related to the camera obscura
eect have been covered previously in the pages of Critical Sociology
(Paolucci 2001). Nevertheless, a brief review of its origins and how it
nds use in Marxs ideas is necessary in order to develop the concept
anew for the issue of race and racism in history.
In constructing concepts, sociologists must abstract structural wholes
out from history, and from structural wholes they must abstract out the
essential parts that comprise those wholes. However, not all possible con-
cepts that can be used to think about the world require the same pre-
cision in their construction. The idea of beauty is necessarily less
precisely denable than is the speed of light. Conceptual abstractions
can be plotted on a hypothetical line stretching form very arbitrary to
very systematic. Ideally, scientic concepts are abstracted as systemati-
cally as possible. In reference to the dierence between these two poles,
it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes
units . . . in which to think about the world (Ollman 1993:11).
In the social sciences, an attempt is made to create sound and logi-
cal categories that hang together well and correspond to appropriate
ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as empirical obser-
vations. In his critique of poorly formed conceptualizations, Marx claimed
several times that a reversal of ideas, concepts, and truth-value occurred
in bourgeois thought. The German Ideology, for example, asserts, If in all
ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-
process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physi-
cal life-process (Marx and Engels 1976:36). Marx and Engels used this
phraseology to depict a process whereby knowledge and reality are pre-
sented to consciousness in an inverted form of their real historical rela-
tions. Was this analogy simply a literary device that oers only fuzzy
analytical value? Or, does Marxs exposition provide comment on the
mechanisms in intellectual discourse that function as a conceptual cam-
era obscura? Three are developed here and applied to the history of
racism as a way of putting this concept, and by extension Marxs con-
tribution to race studies, to work. Before applying this concept to the
history of race and racism, its origins deserve a brief historical note.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 619
620 Paolucci
Aristotle is credited with one of the earliest observations of the invert-
ing eect natural processes such as light go through under special con-
ditions. According to tradition, during an eclipse he noticed that the
shadows of leaves become fragmented. While he did not understand why
this was so, he did take moment to comment on it. Pope John XII later
asserted this was Satans work. Over time, dierent observers began to
understand the process much better and even learned how to build
devices that reproduced the eect, one of which was the camera obscura
and became a foundation of later photographic technology. Initially used
in both the apprenticeship of artists and as attractions at fairs and expo-
sitions, in it an image was manufactured on one side that would appear
to the viewer on the other in an inverted or upside down form. In its
physical-mechanical form, this eect was clearly seen, if not always under-
stood. Marxs contention, conversely, is that the same eect material con-
ditions have on ideological constructions is not always clearly seen and
more rarely understood. It is the task of scientic thought to locate and
solve this problem. Inspection of Marxs methodological principles reveals
three mechanisms which account for this camera obscura eect.
Mechanism One: Mis-specication of Historical Data
The appropriate historico-structural context in which to interpret data is
vitally important. Marx believed that when a social relation, such as the
capitalist mode of production, is interpreted as eternal and natural, the
result is a mis-specication of the historical context of the data made
possible by this system. Pitched at the universal level, the conceptualized
present is treated as an example of the sociologically general. This treats
capitalism, a unique set of structural relationships, as a transhistorical
social fact. According to Marx (1988:7071), this falsely universalizes a
historically specic social relation:
Do not let us go back to a ctitious primordial condition as the political
economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains
nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a gray nebulous distance.
He assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce
namely, the necessary relationship between two things between, for exam-
ple, division of labor and exchange. Theology in the same way explains the
origin of evil by the fall of man; that is, it assumes as a fact, in historical
form, what has to be explained.
If all of history has been a repetition of universal processes, then the
specic historical relationships that account for the present tend to be
obscured in such a framework.
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Mechanism Two: The Modernistic Fallacy
The second mechanism, extending the rst, uses concepts whose conditions
of possibility rest upon recently developed structural relations to inter-
pret empirical events occurring at prior levels of historical generality. If
unaware how recent a phenomenon and its attendant concept are, then
an analyst is likely to interpret all previous history, whether in moder-
nitys mode of production but at a dierent era of its development, or
even all historical social systems, through concepts more applicable to
the immediate present (or the very recent past). Assuming that many
concepts are historical, Marx (1973:83) complained about Smith and
Ricardo . . .
. . . in whose imaginations this eighteenth century individual the product on
one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of
the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century appears
as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic
result but as historys point of departure. As the Natural Individual appro-
priate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited
by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day.
Conceptual frameworks made possible by modernity should not be used
as the interpretive basis for prior historical systems. Marx asserts that
this problem, while exemplied in bourgeois ideology, has thus far in his-
tory been a consistent problem in human knowledge in general.
Mechanism Three: The Forward Imposition
of Modernity on History
In his discussion of the fetishism of commodities, Marx (1992:80) con-
tinued to develop this analytical framework:
Mans reections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his
scientic analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of
their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of
the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that
stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary pre-
liminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stabil-
ity of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher,
not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their
meaning . . . The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms.
They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and
relations of a denite, historically determined mode of production, viz. the
production of commodities.
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622 Paolucci
This nal mechanism imposes modern, usually ocial and dominant,
frameworks of knowledge on a forward reading of history. Summarizing
the entire process just reviewed, the analyst rst assumes that all socio-
logical processes in history are pitched at the same level of historical and
structural reality. Next, they mistake a concept (usually not recognized
to have been) built on a current and historically specic social form as
a social universal and/or the product of an eternal human nature. This
concept is then used as a sieve to lter out (supposed) historical cases of
the same for analysis, cases that are now taken as representative expres-
sions of a universal phenomenon. This method allows the analyst
depending on their topic of interest to choose an arbitrary moment
in the linear past and then do a forward history of the phenomenon
armed with a conceptual framework founded in modernitys material
relations. The result is a form of discursive knowledge that reies the
present and inverts its real history by reading the present into the past.
In a very backward manner, analysis of social structure subsequently
tends to be both reied and obscured by such a construction of subject
matter (for previous discussion, see Paolucci 2001:107110).
Race and Racism in the Camera Obscura:
Reversing the Relationship
Idealism in bourgeois discourse assumes the opinions of aggregated indi-
viduals are the primary causal factors of historical and social relations.
Conceptualized as such, European elites attitudes about physical appear-
ance have been commonly assumed to be the primary motive factor for
the introduction of chattel slavery in the colonial sphere. This is perhaps
the most commonplace and sociologically erroneous assumption about
race/ethnic relations in modern discourse, whether held by the lay public
or by social scientists. In a previous conceptualization of Marxs camera
obscura framework, a comment on its relationship to racism was made:
instances of labor exploitation in ancient Rome and the antebellum South
are both understood as slavery, but the dierences between them are often
not noted and thus the qualitatively divergent aspects of them are obscured
e.g. slavery in Rome was not lifelong, humans never became the status of
non-human chattel, nor was it a rationalized and commodied industry.
Equating them minimizes the harshness of the US slave industry by rela-
tivizing it to Romes version of the spoils of war. Additionally, failure to get
the causal mechanisms in the right order forces one to make illogical and
empirically unsupportable assumptions/conclusions. For example, students are
constantly surprised to learn that racial-ideology came after rather than before
the institutionalization of European and American slavery. (Paolucci 2001:109)
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 622
Source: Russell Naughton, Adventures in Cybersound. Reprinted with Permission.
Retrieved from: http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/CAMERA_OBSCURA.html,
August 21, 2006.
Figure 1. Figurative Model of the Camera Obscura Eect from 16th Century:
Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, 1544.
Unfortunately, this statement was left unsubstantiated. Here, an attempt
is made to defend this claim. Mis-specication of modern European slav-
ery as being of the same as Roman or all historical forms of slavery
obscures its systematic and extraordinarily cruel nature. But more impor-
tant, such an approach obscures inquiry into the specic and unique
features of capitalist slavery, including how the US stratication system
evolved and the internal relationship among systems of thought domi-
nating social and scientic discourse.
In neither the Greek nor the Roman civilization was there a rela-
tionship between slavery and race (Graves 2001:20). Nor, it might be
added, did American slavery begin as a racial system. American slavery
was the most intense result of modern European forms of worldwide
labor exploitation (Cox 1976). To assume enslavement of Africans in the
Americas was the outcome of the irrational opinions of English, Spanish,
Portuguese and/or American elites overlooks and thus obscures those
same elites attempts to enslave, visit genocide upon, or otherwise violently
subjugate almost every indigenous, peasant, and proletarian population
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624 Paolucci
Source: Bright Bytes Studio, Jack & Beverly Wilgus. Reprinted with Permission.
Figure 2. Depiction of Camera Obscura at Weston-Super-Mare Pier, England.
they encountered, from the Irish, to the Native Americans and Indians
of Mexico, to West Africans, South Africans, and South East Asians. As
a result of this mis-specication, racisms place is often misconstrued as
a causal historical variable in modern relations of exploitation.
It was not racism in favor of the masses in Europe and racism against
African tribesmen that turned Africans into slaves. The British enslaved
the Irish for a time and both Irish and British peasants were viewed as
lesser breeds. While it is true that pre-capitalist European ideological
discourse posited Africans (and others) as exotic, primitive, or otherwise
as an other, this status was not at rst based solely on skin color but
rather a whole set of additional factors including language, region, and
religion, among others. In the Cape of South Africa, a large proportion
of slaves were imported from East Asia, not Africa, though an attempt
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was made to enslave the local population there. The South African
colonists ran into the same problem as experienced by the colonists in
North America, that is, enslaving local populations was extremely dicult
(Fredrickson 1981). Early English attitudes toward Africans were hardly
worse or more acidic than their attitudes toward European peasant classes
(though one should not underestimate the European ideological baggage
that associated the color black with dirtiness and white with purity; see:
Jordan 1974). Early on there was no mention of race or skin color in
debates on who was and who was not eligible for slavery. Portuguese,
Spanish, Dutch, and English colonial elites made no distinctions based
on skin color (or any other supposed racial criteria) as to whether those
in Ireland, South America, Africa, South East Asia, or North America
were t for enslavement. The evidence strongly suggests that Africans
and other non-Europeans were initially enslaved not so much because
of their color and physical type as because of their legal and cultural
vulnerability, writes Fredrickson. The combination of so-called hea-
thenness (i.e., non-Christian status) and captivity (as in a captured solider
of war) was stressed. Therefore, it is misleading and anachronistic to
read the overt physical racism that emerged later back into the thought
of this era (Fredrickson 1981:70, 73).
Early colonial legal theory viewed slaves as spoils of war, where enslave-
ment was viewed as an alternative to execution. The individual lost their
rights as prisoners and became the property of the victor (based on
Lockes philosophy), a status that did not change if bought or sold. While
slavery was made illegal in England and Holland, their laws did not pre-
vent their citizens from engaging in the trade (called the custom of mer-
chants for Christian nations). Purchasing slaves whether from Africa
or Asia was thus an international trade. While European traders some-
times provoked wars to encourage it, by the modern era the tradition
of enslaving captured soldiers had ended, bringing the need for new psy-
chological justications for slavery. The claim that Africans were hea-
thens constructed the slave trade as contributing to the mission of
Christianizing the world. Viewed the other way around, the growth of
the Christian mission of civilizing the world contributed to the growth
of slavery because the justications for slavery began to shift, in part, to
heathenism. Was not the African, a beast of burden, delivered by divine
Providence to labor for the benet of the noble and Christian Europe,
Graves (2001:25) writes of the emerging ethos. Whatever the case, clearly
an interactive relationship between Christianity and slavery existed.
Ideological justications for enslavement based on religious and mili-
tary grounds were followed by political action in the colonies that shifted
the basis from these grounds to a supposed racial origin. How did this
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626 Paolucci
occur? Though Christians were not allowed to enslave other Christians,
European and Church law allowed the enslavement of non-Christians,
i.e., heathens. Fredrickson (1981:75) summarizes nicely: Empirically
speaking, the enslaved can be described as nonwhite heathens who were
vulnerable to acquisition by whites as a form of property, either because
they were literally captured in war or because a slave trade existed or
could be inaugurated in their societies of origin. On an ideological plane,
it was the combination of heathenism and captivity that was initially
stressed. But the ideological sphere would change. In the link between
theology and science, the Christian doctrine of the unity of man gave
way to polygenism, the doctrine of multiple origins and thus multiple
species (Graves 2001; Gould 1981). This inuenced the political-legal dis-
course as, inevitably, the issue of whether or not Christians could enslave
those who had converted arose. In the 1660s, a Virginia law said that
converted slaves could henceforth be held in bondage. Later, a loophole
was closed in 1682 when heathen descent rather than actual heathenism
was the legal basis for slavery in Virginia . . . the concept of heathen
ancestry was a giant step toward making racial dierences in the foun-
dation of servitude . . . The legal developments and semantic tendencies
that in eect made the disabilities of heathenism inheritable and inex-
tricably associated with blackness laid the framework for . . . societal
racism (Fredrickson 1981:7879). People could escape heathenism by
demonstrating they had converted to Christianity; they could not escape
heathen descent. This set the possibilities for racial slavery.
Since it was usually assumed that everyone with brown skin color in
the colonies had descended from Africa or was otherwise a heathen,
as the discourse shifted from a focus on ones religious spirit to ones
physical makeup the link between Christianity / heathenism and free-
dom / slavery was severed throughout the colonies, leaving physical
appearance as the lone criteria that marked Africans as the slave class.
Thus, the criterion of heathen ancestry was signicant ideologically
and legally in creating a physical-appearance / racial-category system of
enslavement. Baptism was no longer a reason for manumission and the
more Americanized African descendants became, the more the biblical
Pauline doctrine of obedience to masters as a Christian duty was imported
to the plantation and the colonies. The emerging Black / White dichotomy
led almost directly to a caste-like social-legal-political relationship. It
would probably confuse cause and eect, however to view the transition
to racial slavery as motivated primarily by color prejudice . . . planters
also had very strong economic and social incentives to create a caste of
hereditary bondsmen, argues Fredrickson. As slaves became a better
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long term investment in Virginia by 1660s, laws were changed to indi-
cate that conversion to Christianity did not require manumission. Blackness
became the criteria of a legal caste-like status. Thus, the original decision
to create what amounted to a racially derived status probably arose less
from a consciousness of racial privilege than from palpable self-interest
on the part of members of a dominant class who had been fortunate
enough to acquire slaves to supplement or replace their uctuating force
of indentured servants. This shift to racial slavery helped to cultivate
the belief that the normal status of dark-skinned people was servitude
(Fredrickson 1981:7880).
In this outline of the historical events, slavery in the West occurred before
the designation of skin color as a marker of slavery and before the devel-
opment of a specically racist ideology. The subsequent drawing of a color
line during the institutionalizing of slavery in the US colonies resulted
in dierential allotment of political, economic, and social resources, status,
and power (Du Bois 1903). This structuring of the color-line into the
political-economic system is why persists in a stubbornly intractable way.
Playing a covering role for capitalism, the inverted knowledge of race
and racism that marks modernity is often confused with the suspicions
and rancor between other groups in historically competing social sys-
tems, or what is known as xenophobia. Wallerstein (1983:7779) explains
the dierence:
What we mean by racism has little to do with the xenophobia that existed
in various historical systems . . . Racism was the ideological justication for
the hierarchization of the work-force and its highly unequal distributions of
reward. What we mean by racism is that set of ideological statements com-
bined with that set of continuing practices which have had the consequence
of maintaining a high correlation of ethnicity and work-force allocation over
time. The ideological statements have been in the form of allegations that
genetic and/or long-lasting cultural traits of various groups are the major
cause of dierential allocation to positions in the economic structures . . .
However, [this] came into being after, rather than before, the location of
these groups in the work-force . . . Racism served as an overall ideology jus-
tifying inequality.
Getting the causal mechanisms in an incorrect historical order encour-
ages illogical and empirically unsupportable positions. If racial ideology
came after rather than before the institutionalization of European and American
slavery, then the cause of slavery could not be racism. Popular concep-
tions that racism caused slavery are backwards. And when the history
of racial ideology and slavery are expressed as outcomes of the collective
consciousness of aggregated individuals, the systems that work on them
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628 Paolucci
as an external and coercive forces are let o the hook. And, when the
causes of racism are obscured, methods to solve the problem are obscured.
The Philosophy of Science and Sociological Tautology:
Taxonomy and Bourgeois Ideology
The philosophy of science is concerned with what makes scientic knowl-
edge possible and the forms of reasoning scientists should accept. In their
observations, descriptions, and explanations, scientists try to separate out
identities (what things are or so they think or claim or assume) from
dierences (what things are not or so they think or claim or assume).
They are also concerned with creating useful conceptualizations so that
they can make logical comparisons of objects of knowledge in order to
make successful generalizations. Terms and analyses must work within
such constraints. Systematically created categories, relationally commensu-
rable and internally logical, make taxonomic categorization possible.
Here, the problem arises that a line of thought might make a tauto-
logical formulation by mistake. The logic of taxonomic analysis helps us
understand Marxs approach to tautological fallacies in sociological dis-
course.
Using observable and logical characteristics to dierentiate phenom-
ena is a key feature of scientic thought. The taxonomic method for
estimating relationships between phenomena, popularized by the botanist
Linnaeus, allows for the creation of a grid on which ranges of concrete
data can be displayed and analyzed. In one of his reections on his
study of systems of power and knowledge particular to modernity, Foucault
(1977:148149) remarked that in regards to taxonomy, the . . .
. . . drawing up of tables was one of the great problems of the scientic,
political and economic technology of the eighteenth century; how one was
to arrange botanical and zoological gardens, and construct at the same time
rational classications of living beings; how one was to observe, supervise,
regularize the circulation of commodities and money and thus build up an
economic table that might serve as the principle of the increase in wealth;
how one was to inspect men, observe their presence and absence and con-
stitute a general and permanent register of the armed forces; how one was
to distribute patients, separate them from one another, divide up the hospi-
tal space and make a systematic classication of diseases: these were twin
operations in which the two elements distribution and analysis, supervision
and intelligibility are inextricably bound up. In the eighteenth century, the
table was both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge. It was
a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument
to cover it and to master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an order.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 628
Foucault captures one role scientic thinking played in modern thought,
both internal to science itself but also extended through its relations with
other social institutions. Pitched at the level of the universal, taxonomic
analysis of human variation attempted to organize regular and concretely
observed characteristics, things that were supposed to be indicative of
key categories of the human condition in general. This form of knowl-
edge was inserted into the political-economic apparatus of modern society
and wielded in the racial programs developing in the modern world.
The technique of taxonomy is used to disperse a range of related phe-
nomena into meaningful categories based on varying specied criteria
that are supposed to dierentiate essential dierences and similarities,
i.e., meaningful in the sense that the criteria tell us something impor-
tant about the object in question and essential in the sense that the
characteristics the criteria target are necessary components of the objects
in question. To create a category, sensuously observable and measura-
ble dierences in the objects of study are used. Once abstract categories
are carved, comparison moves forward treating the two (or more) objects
as really qualitatively dierent facts. Among such rules for dividing obser-
vations into separate categories include the following: (1) categories must
be theoretically informed and based on non-arbitrary criteria; (2) crite-
ria are held constant throughout a table; and, (3) mutual exclusivity
(Suppe 1989).
2
In natural science, taxonomic analysis has proved useful for organizing
data and it is understandable that the human sciences would adopt it.
2
By a taxonomy (or taxonomic system) I mean a system of categories for classifying indi-
viduals on the basis of similarities; these similarities may be morphological, functional,
social, or whatever. A standard taxonomy for domain D is a nite collection of taxa (classes
of individuals in D) such that each taxon is assigned a unique category in a hierarchal
ordering of categories, and each individual in D belongs to exactly one taxon of each
category. More precisely, a standard taxonomy must meet the following conditions:
(1) There is a nite serially ordered sequence of taxonomic categories, C1. . . . . Cn;
(2) each taxonomic category Ci (1 I n) contains mi taxa, Ti, 1, Ti, 2, . . . . . ,Ti, mi;
(3) the Ti, 1, . . . , Ti, mi are each collections of individuals in D such that each member
of D is a member of exactly one Ti, j (1 j mi );
(4) all individuals in a given Ti, j (1 I n; 1 j mi ) must be members of the same
Ti + 1, k (1 I n; 1 k mi + 1).
Most biological taxonomies are taxonomies of this sort . . . Certain features of standard
taxonomies need to be emphasized. A given taxon of whatever taxonomic category will
always be a collection of individuals in D . . . Taxa of whatever taxonomic category are
collections of individuals groups on the basis of some similarity. A given taxon . . . is
dened by specifying the similarity characteristic of its members, the similarity by virtue
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630 Paolucci
Both types of science possess discursive traditions that assume all observ-
able life can conceivably be dispersed onto a logical grid, one that includes
all the pertinent information relevant to any knowledge of life, either
today or in all of history.
Marxs materialism reminds us that knowledge and historical processes
always have been intertwined. In the capitalist world-economy, expan-
sion and growth across the globe is an inherent material tendency of the
system as a whole. Scientic knowledge about races and indigenous
peoples has followed the path of growth of this core-periphery relation-
ship (Wallerstein 1974a, 1974b). The destruction of pre-capitalist societies
became the data gathering grounds for the disciplines of anthropology,
geography, sociology, and social work. The subjects of these elds stand
as the real life empirical data used to justify the putatively circumscribed
distinctions between the disciplines. The racial ideology the disciplines
helped develop in the core was taken to the periphery and institutionalized
to a signicant extent.
However, it has never been obvious what criteria any one taxonomic
scheme succeeds or fails to establish (Graves 2001). Some are patently
absurd e.g. creating a scheme for all trees based on their number of
leaves; bark characteristics and annual leaf cycles have been much more
fruitful criteria. During capitalisms growth, taxonomies of human groups
were adopted, with illogical criteria but also with extraordinary eect,
one of which was to establish the belief that humans could be divided
into discrete subgroups based on apparent physical distinctions. An atten-
dant belief was that these groups could be ranked in a meaningful hier-
archical fashion. However, the stratied racial grid used in modernity
has never proven consistent over time and space. Rather it has been in
relative ux, gyrating with the movement of the world-economy. The
subsequent institutionalization of racial privilege and reward both
directly and indirectly rippled through a wide range of western thought
and social positions of power. A scientic racism produced by imperialism
of which they are classed together. The hierarchical nature of standard taxonomies
simplies the denition of a given taxon . . . Depending on what sorts of similarities are
chosen to dene taxa, a number of dierent standard taxonomies may be dened for a
given domain, D. For example, one may dene plant species on the basis of morpho-
logical similarity, genetic similarity, similarity of sexual parts, anity by common ances-
try, size, and so on. Some choices (e.g. length of body) may result in highly arbitrary
taxonomies. Since the recorded beginnings of taxonomy (Aristotle and Theophrastus),
the attempt has been made to distinguish such articial from natural taxonomies, and
throughout the history of taxonomy much theoretical dispute has centered on the issue
of what makes a taxonomy natural. Most accounts accept the intuitive idea that natural
taxonomies are those which classify in accord with the objective reality confronting us in nature, but
dier in what is required to do so (Suppe 1989:202204).
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 630
and exploitation presented itself as neutral knowledge (see Harding 1993).
It has always been tautological.
A taxonomic analysis, which assumes the categories which data have
been divided into result in logically discreet groups based on meaning-
ful criteria, moves forward with the assumption that its categories are
not false divisions imposed on groups best left whole if their essential
identity is to be kept intact and meaningful. A sound taxonomic scheme
should not therefore split a natural unity in two and compare the results
as if they represent real dierences. The result is to mistake similarity
for dierence in one or another part of the equation, a tautological fal-
lacy. In such a tautological statement, one that is true by virtue of its
logical form alone (Websters), the formulation is its own proof and evi-
dence is rendered irrelevant, e.g., if A, then A, or, A = A. In mistaking
two objects that are qualitatively equal for objects that are essentially
dierent, an analyst is subject to assuming they are comparing two sep-
arate things that are in fact the same in their most important charac-
teristics, i.e., they think they are making an A versus B comparison when
they are in fact comparing A with A.
The form of tautology Marx cautions against is related to his camera
obscura warning and the reifying inuence it has on scientic knowl-
edge. For example, Marx (1982:140) states:
To M. Proudhon . . . abstractions, categories are the primordial cause.
According to him they, and not men, make history. The abstraction, the cat-
egory taken as such, i.e., apart from men and their material activities, is of
course immortal, unchangeable, unmoved; it is only one form of the being
of pure reason; which is only another way of saying that the abstraction as
such is abstract. An admirable tautology!
When a concept is assumed to capture universal human phenomena and
empirical evidence of its existence is gathered at qualitatively different
historical moments but is treated as representing qualitatively equal social
facts, then this evidence is likely to be interpreted as conrmation that
the concept indicates a transhistorical reality. This is a tautological and
thus fallacious formulation. Tautology is important to understand in con-
junction with implications of taxonomic thinking. Racial ideology devel-
oped in a taxonomical way but was done through the inverting eect
of the camera obscura. The outcome was a racist science condemned to
perpetual tautological fallacies.
The Great Chain of Being and Modern Racial Knowledge
Attempts to organize its experiences are probably as old as human cog-
nition itself. Many modern institutional discourses have accepted the
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 631
632 Paolucci
premise that taxonomic and hierarchical relationships exist which separate
groups from one another both between and within human, natural, and
cosmic orders. Originating as far back as Aristotle, one historical form
of knowledge in Western society that attempts to order reality is the idea
of a Great Chain of Being, a model of the universe that depicts the
place of matter, animals, and humans in it (Lovejoy 1936). This cosmology
depicts a hierarchical natural order organized in terms of increasing
levels of complexity among families of plant and animal groups. While
Aristotles original vision (Scala Naturae) was altered over time, the basic
conceptual premise was retained and set the foundation for both the
religious and the scientic discourse that would follow.
Religious discourse picked up on this way to order reality, tting nicely
as it did with Christianitys hierarchical vision of human life, with its
Godhead at the top, Jesus as his earthly representative, the Church as
carrying on Jesus ministry, and human and animal life next, all sitting
on top of physical nature, and then hell. The authority of the Catholic
Church over human society was built into this cosmology. To go against
church teaching or leadership was a crime against both oor and nis
natural order. This hierarchical vision set the stage for a moral order to
be applied to supposedly scientic taxonomies of the human species. With
hell below, earth in between, and then animals, humans, archangels and
then oor, the clear message was that the closer to the top one or ones
group, the greater their moral worth. This construct was imported to
early racist science.
The human sciences initially accepted the concept of race as a biologically
self-evident fact and placed humans in several dierent taxonomic schemes.
One scheme was based on the Christian versus heathen identity grafted
onto broad notions of regional and aristocratic identity. Equating European
identity with whiteness was not an initial taxonomic categorical form.
Like the African = slave / identity = racial group dynamic of early colo-
nialism, the invention of whiteness was caught up in class struggles.
Initially, identity was associated with families, clans, regions and some-
times country, with the categories of white or Caucasian taking time
to develop. Once conceived, white identity was extended to various
European groups groups previously organized in terms of ethnic identities
such as Italian, Polish, and Irish laborers as the American labor move-
ment needed increasing numbers of eligible members united in larger
unions during its struggles with capital (Gallaher 2002). It is in such ways
that the white / black racial dichotomy was a historical product wrapped
up in a socio-political-scientic complex. The relationship between changes
in the political-economic and the scientic spheres was regular though
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 632
Man
Mammals
Whales
Reptiles & Fish
Octopuses & Squids
Jointed Shellfish
Insects
Molluscs
Jelly -
Fish
Sponges
Higher Plants
Ascidians
Zoophytes
Lower Plants
Inanimate Matter
Figure 3. Aristotles Great Chain of Being.
uneven, where science often followed political-economic dynamics but
also foundered on its own forms of logic.
One racial taxonomy in nineteenth-century biological sciences in the
West included the races of Anglos, Saxons, Celts, Teutons, American-
Negroes, Toltecans, Pelasgics, Hottentots, Nilotics, Peruvians, Australians,
and Barbarous Tribes, and others (Gould 1981). These racial categories
violate rules for valid taxonomic categorization, i.e., they are not mutually
exclusive nor do they use consistent criteria to dierentiate them. Over time,
biological scientists found that any criteria used in racial taxonomic
category construction displayed as much variation within supposed groups
as between them. As a result, even when theoretically informed criteria
have been provisionally established, subsequent empirical testing nds
that holding them constant produces considerable overlap and contra-
diction in measured cases, e.g., individuals of supposed racial groups
could be eligible for membership in two or more categories, a failure of
the rule of mutual exclusivity and therefore taxonomically invalid.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 633
634 Paolucci
Figure 4. Rhetorica Christiana, Didacus Valads, 1579.
Source: By permission of The British Library, Shelfmark C. 107.e.3.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 634
Anthropologists once worked with at tripartite taxonomy composed of
Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid racial stocks. These categories
were supposed to be distinguished via skin color, eye shape, hair kink,
and other extraneous characteristics. Recognizing the impending problem,
anthropologists asserted that everyone is composed of some combination
of all three. These constructions are today thoroughly discredited. Criteria
as quality of eyes, nose, skin, and hair each socially and scientically
constructed as meaningful have no logical theory that justies using
them for taxonomic category construction. Further, such outward appear-
ances produce fallacious racial knowledge that often fails to comport with
biological measurement. For example, on the genetic level, two people
with very dierent outward appearances say one from Germany and
one from Somalia might be closer biological cousins than two people
with very similar outward appearance for example from Sudan and
Cameroon, or Germany and France, Japan and Korea. No matter what
criteria have been chosen, supposed racial groupings have never passed
scientic muster, making the establishment of a human taxonomy an
impossibility (for previous discussions of this problem in addition to the
literature already cited here, see: Montague 1942; Livingstone 1993; also
see literature about The Genome Project).
Skin colors do not exist as discrete categories, reminds Graves (2001:30).
In fact, race has no biological basis at all.
3
Race, as a biological fact,
3
Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are
not reected on the genetic level. But the more closely researchers examine the human
genome the genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body the
more most of them are convinced that the labels used to distinguish people by race
have little or no biological meaning . . . They say that while it may seem easy to tell
whether a person is Caucasian, African or Asian, the ease dissolves when one probes
beneath surface characteristics and scans the genome for DNA hallmarks of race.
Scientists say that the human species is so evolutionarily young, and its migratory pat-
terns so wide, restless and elaborate, that it has not had a chance to divide itself into
separate biological groups or races in any but the most supercial ways . . . Race is a
social concept, not a scientic one, said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics
Corp. in Rockville, Md. We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small
number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world . . . Venter and
scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put
together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had
declared there is only one race the human race. Venter and other researchers say traits
most commonly used to distinguish race, like skin and eye color, are controlled by a
relatively small number of genes, and thus have been able to change rapidly in response
to environmental pressures. So equatorial populations evolved dark skin, presumably to
protect against ultraviolet radiation, while people in northern latitudes evolved pale skin,
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 635
636 Paolucci
is a social and scientic myth. Anthropologists and biologists have con-
cluded that . . .
the concept of race seems to be losing its usefulness in describing [human
genetic] variability . . . [I]t seems impossible even to divide . . . populations
into races . . . [ This] does not imply that there is no biological or genetic
variability among populations of organisms which comprise a species, but
simply that this variability does not conform to the discreet packages labeled
races or subspecies. For man the position can be stated in other words: There
are no races, there are only clines . . . Thus, although it is possible to divide
a group of related species into discrete units, namely the species, it is impossible
to divide a single species into groups larger than the panmictic population.
(Livingstone 1993:133134)
However, when taxonomy was applied to humans as a species, once sep-
arated into discrete groups and then compared as if dierent sub-species
were real, all conclusions in the racial sciences that followed were invalid
because of the initial tautological formulation. Race then, in addition to
racism, is a sociological-historical phenomenon.
Criteria for taxonomies social and scientic have changed from
religion, to region, to language, to lore, to physical traits. In reality, it
was not science but imperialist assumptions that informed racial cate-
gories. Upon invasion, if indigenous peoples survived, they became the
object of labor exploitation, Oriental objects of science (Said 1978),
or, in one memorable phrasing, the wretched of the earth: rst vic-
timized, then imprisoned and hated (Fanon 1965). The result has been
the creation and destruction of ethnicities across and within state bound-
aries in the global division of labor (for discussion see: Wallerstein 1983,
2003). As socially unequal groups were observed, their outward charac-
teristics were used to formulate biological hypotheses of dierence.
With no sound theory or data to inform them, the number of possible
racial categories has had virtually no theoretical limit, being established
the better to produce vitamin D from pale sunlight . . . If you ask what percentage of
your genes is reected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about
race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent, said Dr. Harold P. Freeman
of North General Hospital in Manhattan. By contrast, scientists say traits like intelli-
gence, talent and social skills are likely shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands,
of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome. In Freemans view, the science of
human origins can help to heal any number of wounds . . . . Science got us into this
problem in the rst place, with its measurements of skulls and its emphasis on racial
dierences and racial classications, Freeman said. Scientists should now get us out
of it (Angier 2000).
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 636
Bonnet - 1764 Lamarck - 1809
- Humans Worms
Mollusks
- Monkeys
- Bats
- Ostrich
- Birds
Fish & Reptiles
- Flying Fish
- Fish (Whales?)
Birds
Amphibious
Mammals - Eels
- Serpents
- Reptiles Whales
Hoofed Mammals
- Shellfish
- Insects
- Worms Mammals
Insects
Figure 5. Two Great Chains of Being From Early Biological Science.
at as little as two and as many as 63, perhaps more. The problem of
counting the number of races was created by the inability of nineteenth-
century biologists to properly identify phenotypic traits that had taxo-
nomic signicance . . . Before Darwin, the prevailing view in natural
science was that all biological traits had signicance because they were
the result of divine plan (Graves 2001:6566). Though older racial tax-
onomies seem archaic and nonsensical in retrospect, it is still common
to nd racial categorizations in surveys e.g., White, African-American,
Hispanic, Asian, Pacic Islander, Native American, and Other with
criteria ranging from skin color, to geography, to language, to time-
period. As a result, modern categories fail the taxonomical rule of con-
sistency much as they did a century-and-a-half before. It was / is not
science or self-evident biological dierences that determine(d) racial cat-
egories but politics and power. In the United States, for example,
Hispanic terminologically rooted in the criteria of language and geog-
raphy (i.e., inconsistency) was created by the US government and
wielded to unify everyone with a South or Central American heritage,
regardless of color, even if the peoples of a country such as, say
Argentina, Bolivia, or Peru do not dene themselves as Hispanic
(for a discussion on this see Gimenez 1989). Revealing the racism embed-
ded in the term, while Americans are extended license to stress their
European heritage, Mexicans typically are not, i.e., Hispanic is rarely
seen as European though it is clear Spain is as European as any
Anglo-Saxon nation, a real contradiction in modern racial ideology.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 637
638 Paolucci
Figures 68. Racial Chains of Being.
If they are not based on real biological dierences, what has made
racial categories sociologically real? Racial categories have always reected
real relations of social inequality more so than signicant biological real-
ities. Goulds list above (i.e., Anglos, Saxons, Celts, Teutons, American-
Negroes, Toltecans, etc.) shows an early-middle period of imperialist
knowledge. When the development of the world-economy brought dierent
groups into a similar location in the global division of labor, they lost
their status as a racial group apart. As the various European groupings
the Anglos, the Saxons, the Teutons, etc. became white, their habits,
tastes, ideas, norms, and forms of knowledge became the standards by
which others were categorized and judged. The Mongolians, Chinese,
Malayans, and Polynesians became Asians and the Toltecans and
Peruvians became Hispanic. Such racial categories retain their mean-
ing for their audiences and users to the extent they reect real social
status and inequalities in power and wealth within the capitalist world-
system.
Source: From Graves, Jr., Joseph, The Emperors New Clothes. Copyright 2001
Joseph Graves, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 638
The Tautology of Racial Taxonomy
4
In the history of racial thinking, various beliefs emerged about how things
such as intelligence, morality, athleticism, sexuality, and even genital size
were associated with various groups (for discussion see: Hoberman 1997).
In one form of contemporary racial research, such characteristics are
measured and, after all conceivable control variables are statistically
accounted for, any resulting statistical dierences between groups
assumed, dened, and divided a priori as separate racial groups (e.g.,
white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) are assumed to be accounted for
by biological-racial dierences. Though none have been studied, genes
emerge as causal factors by default. This is a tautological formulation.
Why? Such an inquiry is really asking two covert questions: Are our
racial categories justied? And, can athleticism (or intelligence, or brain-
pan size, or skin color . . . or genes) stand as criteria of real racial
dierence? The answer to the rst question is answered yes prior to data
collection by arbitrarily using cultural prejudice (e.g. skin color) to divide
groups into separate taxonomic categories. This allows almost any signicant
statistical correlation to count as racial in character once other variables
are controlled. The answer to the second question is thus also answered
yes by denition, i.e., athleticism (etc.), like skin color, is assumed
to be a meaningful marker of race. Translated: if racial dierences exist,
4
The argument in this section is informed by the work of Barbara Jean Fields (1990).
Source: From Graves, Jr., Joseph, The Emperors New Clothes. Copyright 2001 Joseph
Graves, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
The facial angles of Petrus Camper: A, a young orangutan; B, a young Negro;
C, a typical European. From J. R. Baker, Race (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 29.
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 639
640 Paolucci
Source: From Graves, Jr., Joseph, The Emperors New Clothes. Copyright 2001 Joseph
Graves, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
then racial dierences exist. Researchers must argue that racial dierences
cause racial dierences, an empty scientic claim but one which has a
political usefulness that is readily apparent (Graves 2001:111 discusses
contradiction and tautology in common racial denitions).
Race, Racism and Marxs Political-Economy
For Marxs approach, the capitalist mode of production is not assumed
to be coterminous with either modernity or society. The capitalist mode
of production is the political-economic structure historically becoming
increasingly regular across time/space in modernity. This does not mean,
however, that Marxs method provides no tools for studying wider ques-
tions of social inequality not directly conceived as class relations. True,
Marxs work often does focus directly on political-economic issues. On
the questions of race, gender, nationalism, and religion, the reason Marx
ignores them, at least in his systematic writings, [is] because they all
predate capitalism, and consequently cannot be part of what is distinc-
tive about capitalism . . . Uncovering the laws of motion of the capitalist
mode of production, however, which was the major goal of Marxs inves-
tigative eort, simply required a more restrictive focus (Ollman 1998:348).
Nevertheless, there is nothing incompatible with a Marxist study of capitalism
The facial profiles from Robert Knox, The Races of Men. This figure shows
no transition between the sub-90 angle of the orangutan and the 90 angle
of the European. The Negro is inferred to have a sub-90 angle. Robert Knox,
The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1869; reprint,
Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne and Co., 1969).
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 640
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642 Paolucci
and a concern with the inequalities and dynamics of race (and gender,
it might be added). Marx was trying to understand capitalism as a sys-
tem and while he did believe this system possessed a powerful inuence
on other social institutions, including discursive knowledge, his method
is not the economic reductionism it has been accused of being. Marxs
perspective brings to the study of race and racism not an economic deter-
minism but rather an understanding that capitalism possesses central
components that played a crucial role in constructing systematic racism.
Skin color alone had nothing to do with original racial categories,
even in the initial racist sciences. As forms of knowledge, racial cate-
gories have actually been based on political-economic time-space crite-
ria. As Wallerstein has continually stressed, a supposed races empirical
conditions of possibility rest not in a unique biology but rather at the
point in space and time when dierent peripheral peoples were incor-
porated by imperialist powers into the worldwide division of labor in the
capitalist world-economy. This is by no means a trivial matter. It was
and is of momentous importance for the subsequent relationships of hier-
archy and subordination involved in the history of racism. But it stands
to ask: Was this racism uniquely European in heritage? Is historical
racism something that should be pinned on European thought for devel-
oping and spreading? Was capitalism a white-supremacist event because
of the ideas of its progenitors? What is to blame? Capitalism? Capitalists?
European elites? European thought?
European xenophobia was no more extraordinary than the disdain
held by elites for the average person in other social systems. While it
was the ruling classs ideology of superiority that was imported into the
relationships they forged with their own working classes and the indigenous
peoples of the lands they conquered, modern xenophobia is not something
uniquely European. For a Marxist view, because racial membership empir-
ically rested not on a groups unique biology but rather at the point in
space and time when they were incorporated into the division of labor
of the capitalist world-economy, the content of white supremacy was
something that resulted from the geography of initial capitalist development,
where the accident of the character of those who rst stand at the
head of the movement becomes explanatorily important (Marx 1989:137).
It was less a feudal xenophobia in Europe one that would become
Western racism that accounts for modern racial ideology than the fact
that any society coming to a capitalist style of development rst would
have grown and spread into other societies and would have done so in
a way that its previous xenophobia and ethnic divisions would have been
transformed into a racism that would have similarities to todays but
with dierent categories based on dierent geographic-linguistic-ethnic
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 642
congurations. Such a putative racial ideology would not have shared exactly
the same underpinnings in its religious and philosophical roots, but if the
allocation of social status via the exploitation of labor leads racial ide-
ology rather than trailing it, then it follows that this dynamic would have
been operative no matter where capitalism rst developed. Capitalism is
an inherently racist system because of its structural tendency to histori-
cally expand in search of protability and the dependence of this protability
on nding exploitable labor. However, white-supremacism is not inher-
ent in capitalisms structure. It was the accident of history that foisted
this character upon it.
If Marx must be understood to adequately understand capitalism, then
his work is crucial for any understanding of both slavery and racism too.
Though the Irish were enslaved for a period, it makes sense to ask, what
prevented the general enslavement of European working classes, unlike
those in Africa? If it was not racist opinions or a collection of individuals
who were simply greedy, what accounts for the enslavement of Africans
as opposed to others? The impetus for modern slavery was the drive for
labor exploitation under the auspices of capitalist development. This
exploitation was visited upon numerous populations worldwide. How was
it determined which groups were to be enslaved as opposed to indentured?
This was less a conscious choice at rst (all were seen as eligible for slav-
ery at some point) than it was a default option. Population density, cul-
tural complexity (loosely construed), the availability of land and of labor
in peripheral regions, and the relationship between local commodities
and international markets in the capitalist world-economy were the cross-
cutting factors that determined which populations were enslaved, forced
into indentured servantry, exterminated outright, pushed into wage labor,
and/or coopted into ruling classes (Cox 1964, 1976; Fredrickson 1981).
As incipient European capitalists looking for a return on investments
expanded their colonial reach, objective structural conditions shaped and
limited the degree of intensity of exploitation they could force upon labor.
They would have enslaved anyone they could have but they also had
to negotiate this drive with other structural constraints. In North America,
the indigenous peoples were spread out and had a relatively simple culture
and so enslavement was dicult. They knew the land and had allies and
thus could more easily escape and / or resist. They were thus displaced,
moved, or exterminated. In sparse populations within a complex culture,
such as in central Mexico, local elites had some power and thus Europeans
had to negotiate with them, bringing them into a ruling coalition. In
dense areas with more complex culture, such as in London or Dublin,
attempts at enslaving the working population were eventually abandoned
because of peoples ability to resist and revolt in multiple ways. Wage
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 643
644 Paolucci
labor was the degree of exploitation that could be achieved. Finally, a
more dense population and a relatively simple culture made West Africans
more easily enslaved. So they were.
While Cox admits this broad set of considerations simplies too much
(e.g., slave trading existed in Africa before European traders arrived there
and they often simply tapped into this ongoing system), his approach
demonstrates the viability and necessity of considering structural variables.
More importantly for this essay, racial ideology under capitalism came
into being after these structural determinations resulted in slavery, not
before. The view of racism as the causal historical variable of racial slavery
is a quintessential reversal in discourse that Marx warns against and
something his structural analysis of capitalism helps correct. The reduc-
tionism prevalent in idealist philosophies of science leads discourse to
ignore the historical roots of the social structure containing the primary
causal variables of concrete phenomena. It is for reasons such as these
that Marxists have consistently accused sociology in general of having a
bias, mostly unintentional and tacit, that supports bourgeois ideology.
Population Density
Sparse Dense
Cultural Simple
Displaced Enslaved
Complexity
Complex
Amalgamated Wage Labor
Source: Adapted From: Cox 1976:9. Reprinted by permission of the Oliver Cromwell
Cox Online Institute.
Table 2. Structural Determinants of Labor Exploitation in Early
Capitalism.
Conclusion: The Moral Hierarchy of Modern Racial Ideology
Bourgeois ideology has left us in a condition of torpor in reference to
facing down the contradictions of racial discourse. Audiences exposed to
the history of racial science often react with a feeling of disbelief at the
prospect that race has no scientic basis whatsoever and that science
assisted in creating it. It is a bitter pill to swallow but it is nevertheless
true. Once exposed, there is the feeling of intellectual powerlessness: If
race isnt real, what is it that makes us look dierent? Are not white
and black reected in our skin? Even if it the categories and the con-
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 644
cept were made up, arent we stuck with them? Can we now no longer
be black or white? Given ongoing social inequalities, many people have
emotional and political investments in their racialization. But the prob-
lem is deeper than a fatalistic acceptance of this historical trick. Certain
groups benet from the ordering of social status, reward, and moral eval-
uation more so than do others. Racial categories themselves in this sense
function in support of institutional racism by allowing certain groups to
become the standard by which others are understood and judged. If we
want to end racism, then we must undercut those things that account
for racialization itself. Overcoming capitalism and its ideological system
is the rst but not only step.
Race as a term of discursive knowledge has often been interpreted
in Western culture (now world culture) as being a universal social category,
as if all societies sans time / space engaged in a similar morally binding,
biologically based, hierarchical taxonomy grounded in assumptions about
the role of skin color and / or other bodily characteristics. We now know
what is called race today did not come into being until industrial slav-
ery, scientic biology, and a moral-religious-legal discourse about the
nonwhite, non-Christian, non-Western peoples of the world arose. Race
as a form of knowledge was an outcome, not a cause, of this process.
Race and racism, then, are quintessentially modern forms of knowledge.
But this form of knowledge has outlasted its function in justifying slav-
ery. Capitalism, evidently, functions better with racism than it did with
slavery. The question pressing on us collectively today is why this is so.
Race as a universal myth infects sociological knowledge at its rudi-
mentary levels, misinforming beginning students by historically decon-
textualizing racism, using it as a historically universal causal variable and
thus endorsing one element of racial ideology, i.e., that it is a real fact
of biology that causes historical events. One popular introductory soci-
ology textbook condently asserts that color and culture . . . often push
us into war and spark episodes of hatred and violence . . . The reason
people make so much of race is that societies rank people by these genetic
traits in systems of social inequality. This denition is itself a tautological
beginning, i.e., race is the social ranking via genetic traits in a system
of social inequality. Once race, rank, and racing are seen as separate and
xenophobia and racism are conated, the author continues: Racism has
pervaded world history: The ancient Greeks, and people from Africa to
Asia were quick to view anyone unlike themselves as in some way inferior
(Macionis 1998:213, 215, 217). Elsewhere, a more publically known intel-
lectual informs us that race has aected all kinds of human relationships
for thousands of years, and in all parts of the world. Strife between
Africans and East Indians has erupted into varying levels of violence
CS 32,4_f6_617-648I 11/13/06 1:46 PM Page 645
646 Paolucci
from Uganda to Guyana to Trinidad. Though he admits that race is
not a purely biological phenomenon, he argues that racial intermix-
tures over the centuries have left hybrid populations in every country
with such [r]acial and ethnic dierences [making] stable government
dicult to achieve in many countries, and free stable governments all
but impossible (Sowell 1983:1516). Both of these analyses falsely univer-
salize race and racism, put them in the place of xenophobia, and distort
the process of the racialization of modern society, each a disservice to
sociological knowledge and those aected by it by depicting racism as a
universal event. This tack only makes an understanding of race and
racism that much more dicult and claries nothing.
There are at least two additional problematic outcomes from such a
lesson, one for students and one for sociologists. The student is left but
a cynical response, i.e., If humans are so obstinately racist, then noth-
ing will ever change. It must be a distressing lesson that humans have
always been racist and this racism has always lead to war. This picture
leads to the conclusion that all eorts to ght racism are fruitless. Why
try if racism is part of human nature? And many eorts have been fruit-
less to the extent that real material conditions remain unaddressed. For
sociologists in their endeavors to assist a change in the world, they are
left no recourse but to gear their eorts toward trying to make individual
persons think non-racist thoughts. In this view, if history and social structures
are assumed to be the product of an ethos or a moral community sharing
values and norms, then to rid our world of racism such thoughts must
be changed one person at a time. This thought-control function, arguably
not the image sociologists have or want others to have of themselves or
their profession, is what is left given the idealist auspices dominating the
discipline. Specifying Marxs approach to scientic reasoning, applying
his historical materialist and political-economic analyses to racial ques-
tions, and the critical examination of popular categories of social and
scientic thought can, perhaps, assist in counteracting this racist legacy
through informing our political action.
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