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DOI: 10.1163/156916306779155207

2006 32: 617Crit SociolPaul Paolucci

Race and Racism in Marx's Camera Obscura

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Critical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 4 also available online

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: [email protected].

Race and Racism in MarxsCamera Obscura

P P*(Eastern Kentucky University)

A

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 inthe 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.

K : 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 thana collection of attitudes and its persistence cannot be explained by some

deep-seated flaw 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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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 oncehe 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 filled (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 finally 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 racialidentities and institutional racism exist, it is commonly assumed that

Marxs work fails to offer useful, sufficient, 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 stratification

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 specific 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 essayrelies heavily upon them. What this paper attempts to show is how a

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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

effect have been covered previously in the pages of Critical Sociology

(Paolucci 2001). Nevertheless, a brief review of its origins and how itfinds 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 wholesout 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 definable than is the speed of light. Conceptual abstractions

can be plotted on a hypothetical line stretching form very arbitrary to

very systematic. Ideally, scientific concepts are abstracted as systemati-

cally as possible. In reference to the difference between these two poles,

it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishesunits . . . 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 cameraobscura, 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 offers 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 ofracism 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.



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620 Paolucci

Aristotle is credited with one of the earliest observations of the invert-

ing effect 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 whythis was so, he did take moment to comment on it. Pope John XII later

asserted this was Satans work. Over time, different observers began to

understand the process much better and even learned how to build

devices that reproduced the effect, 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 effect was clearly seen, if not always under-

stood. Marxs contention, conversely, is that the same effect material con-

ditions have on ideological constructions is not always clearly seen and

more rarely understood. It is the task of scientific thought to locate and

solve this problem. Inspection of Marxs methodological principles reveals

three mechanisms which account for this camera obscura effect.

Mechanism One: Mis-specification 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-specification 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 ahistorically specific social relation:

Do not let us go back to a fictitious 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

specific 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 first, 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 different 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 exemplified 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 reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his

scientific 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 theirmeaning . . . 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 definite, historically determined mode of production, viz. the

production of commodities.



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622 Paolucci

This final mechanism imposes modern, usually official and dominant,

frameworks of knowledge on a forward reading of history. Summarizing

the entire process just reviewed, the analyst first assumes that all socio-

logical processes in history are pitched at the same level of historical andstructural reality. Next, they mistake a concept (usually not recognized

to have been) built on a current and historically specific social form as

a social universal and/or the product of an eternal human nature. This

concept is then used as a sieve to filter 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 reifies 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 reified 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 publicor 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 differences 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 commodified 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 getthe 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)



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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 Effect from 16th Century:Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, 1544.

Unfortunately, this statement was left unsubstantiated. Here, an attempt

is made to defend this claim. Mis-specification 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 specific and uniquefeatures of capitalist slavery, including how the US stratification system

evolved and the internal relationship among systems of thought domi-

nating social and scientific 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 theAmericas 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



9/33

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 Indiansof Mexico, to West Africans, South Africans, and South East Asians. As

a result of this mis-specification, 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 first 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 difficult

(Fredrickson 1981). Early English attitudes toward Africans were hardlyworse 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 fit 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 justifications 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 justifications 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 benefit 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 justifications 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 werevulnerable 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 influenced 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 differences in the foun-

dation of servitude . . . The legal developments and semantic tendencies

that in effect made the disabilities of heathenism inheritable and inex-

tricably associated with blackness laid the framework for . . . societalracism (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 significant 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 effect, 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



12/33


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 lessfrom 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 fluctuating 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 beforethe devel-

opment of a specifically racist ideology. The subsequent drawing of a color

line during the institutionalizing of slavery in the US colonies resulted

in differential 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) explainsthe difference:

What we mean by racism has little to do with the xenophobia that existed

in various historical systems . . . Racism was the ideological justification 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 majorcause of differential 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 beforethe 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 off 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 scientific 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

differences (what things are not or so they think or claim or assume).

They are also concerned with creating useful conceptualizations so thatthey 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 differentiate phenom-

ena is a key feature of scientific 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 reflections 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 scientific,

political and economic technology of the eighteenth century; how one was

to arrange botanical and zoological gardens, and construct at the same time

rational classifications 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 classification of diseases: these were twin

operations in which the two elements distribution and analysis, supervisionand 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.



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Foucault captures one role scientific 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 concretelyobserved 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 specified criteria

that are supposed to differentiate essential differences 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 differences in the objects of study are used. Once abstract categories

are carved, comparison moves forward treating the two (or more) objects

as really qualitatively different 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 finite collection of taxa (classes

of individuals inD

) such that each taxon is assigned a unique category in a hierarchalordering of categories, and each individual in Dbelongs to exactly one taxon of each

category. More precisely, a standard taxonomy must meet the following conditions:

(1) There is a finite serially ordered sequence of taxonomiccategories, C1. . . . . Cn;

(2) each taxonomic category Ci(1 I n) contains mitaxa, Ti, 1, Ti, 2, . . . . . ,Ti, mi;

(3) the Ti, 1, . . . , Ti, miare each collections of individuals inDsuch that each member

ofD 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

defined by specifying the similarity characteristic of its members, the similarity by virtue



15/33

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. Scientific 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 fields 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 significant 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 groupswere adopted, with illogical criteria but also with extraordinary effect,

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 stratified racial grid used in modernity

has never proven consistent over time and space. Rather it has been in

relative flux, 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 thoughtand social positions of power. A scientific racism produced by imperialism

of which they are classed together. The hierarchical nature of standard taxonomies

simplifies the definition of a given taxon . . . Depending on what sorts of similarities are

chosen to define taxa, a number of different standard taxonomies may be defined for a

given domain, D. For example, one may define plant species on the basis of morpho-

logical similarity, genetic similarity, similarity of sexual parts, affinity 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 artificial 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

differ in what is required to do so (Suppe 1989:202204).



16/33


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 differences. The result is to mistake similarity

for difference 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

different, 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 influence it has on scientific 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 differenthistorical moments but is treated as representing qualitatively equal social

facts, then this evidence is likely to be interpreted as confirmation 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 effect

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



17/33

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 ideaof 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 scientific discourse that would follow.

Religious discourse picked up on this way to order reality, fitting 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 and

natural order. This hierarchical vision set the stage for a moral order to

be applied to supposedly scientific taxonomies of the human species. With

hell below, earth in between, and then animals, humans, archangels andthen , 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 different 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-scientific complex. The relationship between changes

in the political-economic and the scientific spheres was regular though



18/33


Man

Mammals

Whales

Reptiles & Fish

Octopuses & Squids

Jointed Shellfish

Insects

Molluscs

Jelly -

FishSpongesHigher Plants

AscidiansZoophytes

Lower PlantsInanimate 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 differentiate 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 finds

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.



19/33

634 Paolucci

Figure 4. Rhetorica Christiana, Didacus Valads, 1579.

Source: By permission of The British Library, Shelfmark C. 107.e.3.



20/33


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 scientifically

constructed as meaningful have no logical theory that justifies 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 different 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

scientific 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 reflected 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 tellwhether 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 superficial ways . . . Race is a

social concept, not a scientific 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,



21/33

636 Paolucci

is a social and scientific myth. Anthropologists and biologists have con-

cluded that . . .

the concept of race seems to be losing its usefulness in describing [humangenetic] 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 different 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-historicalphenomenon.

Criteria for taxonomies social and scientific 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 theobject of labor exploitation, Oriental objects of science (Said 1978),

or, in one memorable phrasing, the wretched of the earth: first 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 difference.

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 reflected 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 first place, with its measurements of skulls and its emphasis on racial

differences and racial classifications, Freeman said. Scientists should now get us out

of it (Angier 2000).



22/33


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 significance . . . Before Darwin, the prevailing view in natural

science was that all biological traits had significance 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 find racial categorizations in surveys e.g., White, African-American,

Hispanic, Asian, Pacific 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 notscience or self-evident biological differences that determine(d) racial cat-

egories but politics and power. In the United States, for example,

Hispanic terminologically rooted in the criteria of language andgeog-

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 define 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.



23/33

638 Paolucci

Figures 68. Racial Chains of Being.

If they are not based on real biological differences, what has made

racial categories sociologically real? Racial categories have always reflected

real relations of social inequality more so than significant 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 differentgroups 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 reflect real social

status and inequalities in power and wealth within the capitalist world-

system.

Source: From Graves, Jr., Joseph, The Emperors New Clothes. Copyright 2001Joseph Graves, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.



24/33


The Tautology of Racial Taxonomy4

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 differences between groups

assumed, defined, and divided a priori as separate racial groups (e.g.,

white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) are assumed to be accounted for

by biological-racial differences. 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 ourracial categories justified? And, can athleticism (or intelligence, or brain-

pan size, or skin color . . . or genes) stand as criteria of real racial

difference? The answer to the first 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 significant

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 definition, i.e., athleticism (etc.), like skin color, is assumed

to be a meaningful marker of race. Translated: if racial differences 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 JosephGraves, 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.



25/33

640 Paolucci

Source: From Graves, Jr., Joseph, The Emperors New Clothes. Copyright 2001 JosephGraves, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.

then racial differences exist. Researchers must argue that racial differencescause racial differences, an empty scientific claim but one which has a

political usefulness that is readily apparent (Graves 2001:111 discusses

contradiction and tautology in common racial definitions).

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 modeof 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 capitalistmode of production, however, which was the major goal of Marxs inves-

tigative effort, 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).



26/33


Country&

Traits

Relativeto

Separate

Year

Examined

Europeans

H

eritable?

Environment?

Species?

F.B

ernier

France,1684

General

Neutral

?

?

No

G.W.vonLe

ibniz

Germany,1

690

General

Neutral

No

Yes

No

H.H.LordK

ames

U.K.,1774

Skincolor,l

ips,h

air,sm

ell

Inferior

Yes

No

No

J.F.B

lumemb

ach

Germany,1

775

Skincolor,l

ips,hair,sm

ell

Noranking

Yes

Yes

No

S.T.

Sommer

ing

Germany,1

784

General

Notalwaysinferior

Yes

No

No

P.

Camper

Netherlands,1786

Skullangle

Inferior

Yes

No

No

G.

BuVon

France,1789

Skincolor,s

mell,intellect

Inferior

Yes

No

No

C.Meiners

Germany,1

790

General

Inferior

Yes

No

No

C.White

U.K.,1799

Skulls,sexorgans,

Skullssmaller,

Yes

No

Yes

sexuality

sexorganslarger

S.S

tanhopeSmith

U.S.,1810

Skincolor,g

eneral

Inferior

No

Yes

No

J.P

richard

U.K.,1813

Skincolor,c

ivilization

Inferior

Yes

Yes

No

SirW.Lawrence

U.K.,1823

General,civilization

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

G.

Curvier

France,1831

General

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

S.M

orton

U.S.,1849

Skullvolumes

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

L.

Agassiz

U.S.,1850

Skincolor,s

mell,intellect

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

J.B

achman

U.S.,1855

Fertilityofh

ybrids

Equal

Yes

No

No

J.N

ott

U.S.,1857

General

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

G.

Gliddon

U.K.,1857

General

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

PaulBroca

France,1862

Skeletal

Inferior

Yes

No

Yes

Source:FromGraves,Jr.,Joseph,

TheEmperorsNewClothes.

Copyright2001JosephGraves,J

r.R

eprintedbyperm

issionofRutgersUniversityPress.

Tabl

e

1.Eighteenth

andN

ineteenth

CenturyN

aturalistson

the

RacialTraitsofthe

Negr

o.



27/33

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 influence

on other social institutions, including discursive knowledge, his methodis 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 different 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 becauseof 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 inspace 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 first 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 first would

have grown and spread into other societies and would have done so in

a way that itsprevious xenophobia and ethnic divisions would have been

transformed into a racism that would have similarities to todays but

with different categories based on different geographic-linguistic-ethnic



28/33


configurations. 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 havebeen operative no matter where capitalism first developed. Capitalism is

an inherently racist system because of its structural tendency to histori-

cally expand in search of profitability and the dependence of this profitability

on finding 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 first (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 andlimited 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 difficult. 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



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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 simplifies 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 thecausal 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 EnslavedComplexity

Complex Amalgamated Wage Labor

Source: Adapted From: Cox 1976:9. Reprinted by permission of the Oliver CromwellCox 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 scientific 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 different? Are not white

and black reflected in our skin? Even if it the categories and the con-



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cept were made up, arent we stuck with them? Can we now no longer

beblack 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. Certaingroups benefit 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 first 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, scientific 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 confidently asserts that color and culture . . . often pushus 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 definition 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 racingare seen as separate and

xenophobia and racism are conflated, 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 affected 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



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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 differences [making] stable governmentdifficult 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 affected by it by depicting racism as a

universal event. This tack only makes an understanding of race and

racism that much more difficult and clarifies 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 efforts to fight racism are fruitless. Why

try if racism is part of human nature? And many efforts 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 efforts toward trying to make individualpersons 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 scientific reasoning, applying

his historical materialist and political-economic analyses to racial ques-

tions, and the critical examination of popular categories of social andscientific thought can, perhaps, assist in counteracting this racist legacy

through informing our political action.

References

Angier, Natalie. 2000. Genome Researchers Discover Race Little More than

Skin-Deep. Lexington Herald-Leader& The New York Times News ServiceTuesday,August 22.Cox, Oliver. 1964. Capitalism as a System. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

. 1976. Race Relations: Elements and Social Dynamics. Detroit, MI: Wayne StateUniversity Press.



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Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago. IL: A. C. McClurg & Co.Fanon, Franz. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove.Fields, Barbara Jean. 1990. Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States

of America.New Left Review181(MayJune):95118.Foucault, Michel. 1977.Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY:Vintage.

Fredrickson, George. 1981. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American andSouth African History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Gimenez, Martha. 1989. Latino / Hispanic Who Needs a Name? Against aStandardized Terminology. The International Journal of Health Services19(3):557571.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York, NY: Horton.Graves, Joseph. 2001. The Emperors New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at theMillennium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Jordan, Winthrop. 1974. The W

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