The Israel Massacre Forces by Gideon Levy, Apr 01, 2018, Haaretz

Opinion 

The Israel Massacre Forces

The shooting on the Gaza border shows once again that the killing of Palestinians is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes

Gideon Levy Haaretz

 Apr 01, 2018

The death counter ticked away wildly. One death every 30 minutes. Again. Another one. One more. Israel was busy preparing for the seder night. TV stations continued broadcasting their nonsense.

It’s not hard to imagine what would have happened if a settler had been stabbed – on-site broadcasts, throw open the studios. But in Gaza the Israel Defense Forces continued to massacre mercilessly, with a horrific rhythm, as Israel celebrated Passover.

If there was any concern, it was because soldiers couldn’t celebrate the seder. By nightfall the body count had reached at least 15, all of them by live fire, with more than 750 wounded. Tanks and sharpshooters against unarmed civilians. That’s called a massacre. There’s no other word for it.

Comic relief was provided by the army spokesman, who announced in the evening: “A shooting attack was foiled. Two terrorists approached the fence and fired at our soldiers.” This came after the 12th Palestinian fatality and who knows how many wounded.

Sharpshooters fired at hundreds of civilians but two Palestinians who dared return fire at the soldiers who were massacring them are “terrorists,” their actions labeled “terror attacks” and their sentence – death. The lack of self-awareness has never sunk to such depths in the IDF.

As usual, the media lent its appalling support. After 15 deaths Or Heller on Channel 10 News declared that the most serious incident of the day had been the firing by the two Palestinians. Dan Margalit “saluted” the army.

Israel was brainwashed again and sat down to a festive meal in a spirit of self-satisfaction. And then people recited “Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not,” impressed by the spread of plagues and enthusing at the mass murder of babies (the killing of the first-born Egyptians, the 10th plague).

Christian Good Friday and the Jewish seder night became a day of blood for the Palestinians in Gaza. You can’t even call it a war crime because there was no war there.

The test by which the IDF and the pathological indifference of public opinion should be judged is the following: What would happen if Jewish Israeli demonstrators, ultra-Orthodox or others, threatened to invade the Knesset? Would such insane live fire by tanks or sharpshooters be understood by the public? Would the murder of 15 Jewish demonstrators pass with silence? And if several dozen Palestinians managed to enter Israel, would that justify a massacre?

The killing of Palestinians is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes. There’s nothing cheaper in Israel than Palestinian blood. If there were a hundred or even a thousand deaths Israel would still “salute” the IDF. This is the army whose commander, the good and moderate Gadi Eisenkot, is received with such pride by Israelis. Of course, in the holiday media interviews, no one asked him about the anticipated massacre and no one will ask him now either.

But an army that prides itself on shooting a farmer on his land, showing the video on its website in order to intimidate Gazans; an army that pits tanks against civilians and boasts of one hundred snipers waiting for the demonstrators is an army that has lost all restraint. As if there weren’t other measures. As if the IDF had the authority or right to prevent demonstrations in Gaza, threatening bus drivers not to transport protesters in territory where the occupation has long ended, as everyone knows.

Despairing young men sneak in from Gaza, armed with ridiculous weapons, marching dozens of kilometers without hurting anyone, only waiting to be caught so as to escape Gaza’s poverty in an Israeli jail. This doesn’t touch anyone’s conscience either. The main thing is that the IDF proudly presents its catch. Palestinian President Mahmous Abbas is responsible for the situation in Gaza. And Hamas, of course. And Egypt. And the Arab world and the whole world. Just not Israel. It left Gaza and Israeli soldiers never commit massacres.

The names were published in the evening. One man was rising from his prayers, another was shot while fleeing. The names won’t move anyone. Mohammed al-Najar, Omar Abu Samur, Ahmed Odeh, Sari Odeh, Bader al-Sabag. This space is too small, to our horror, to list all their names.

When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity ? By Kris Manjapra The Guardian Thu 29 Mar 2018

 Slave trade routes in the 17th century. Photograph: Alamy

 When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity ? By Kris Manjapra The Guardian  Thu 29 Mar 2018 

After the abolition of slavery, Britain paid millions in compensation – but every penny of it went to slave owners, and nothing to those they enslaved. We must stop overlooking the brutality of British history. By Kris Manjapra

The Guardian  Thu 29 Mar 2018 

n 3 August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer. Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out one of the largest loans in history, to finance the slave compensation package required by the 1833 act. Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore agreed to loan the British government £15m, with the government adding an additional £5m later. The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to some £300bn today.

You might expect this so-called “slave compensation” to have gone to the freed slaves to redress the injustices they suffered. Instead, the money went exclusively to the owners of slaves, who were being compensated for the loss of what had, until then, been considered their property. Not a single shilling of reparation, nor a single word of apology, has ever been granted by the British state to the people it enslaved, or their descendants.

Today, 1835 feels so long ago; so far away. But if you are a British taxpayer, what happened in that quiet room affects you directly. Your taxes were used to pay off the loan, and the payments only ended in 2015. Generations of Britons have been implicated in a legacy of financial support for one of the world’s most egregious crimes against humanity.

The fact that you, and your parents, and their parents in turn, may have been paying for a huge slave-owner compensation package from the 1830s only came to public attention last month. The revelation came on 9 February, in the form of a tweet by HM Treasury: “Here’s today’s surprising #FridayFact. Millions of you have helped end the slave trade through your taxes. Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.”

The tweet, which the Treasury says was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in January, generated a storm of anger and crowdsourced corrections. First, the British slave trade was not abolished in 1833, but in 1807. Second, slavery was not abolished in all parts of the British empire in 1833. The new law applied to the British Caribbean islands, Mauritius and the Cape Colony, in today’s South Africa, but not to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) or British India, for instance. Third, no freedom was “bought” for plantation slaves in 1833, as the enslaved were compelled to work in unfreedom, without pay and under the constant threat of punishment, until 1838. Most importantly, the Treasury’s tweet did not mention that generations of British taxpayers had been paying off a loan that had been used to compensate slave owners, rather than slaves.

The tweet, which was hastily deleted, had the stench of British historical amnesia and of institutionalised racism. A few days later, the historian David Olusoga wrote: “[This] is what happens when those communities for whom this history can never be reduced to a Friday factoid remain poorly represented within national institutions.”

The tweet was no aberration. It was emblematic of the way legacies of slavery continue to shape life for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, and for everyone who lives in Britain, whatever their origin. The legacies of slavery in Britain are not far off; they are in front of our eyes every single day.

We can only begin to understand slavery’s influence on Britain today by first allowing 500 years of human history to flash before our eyes. Beginning in the last decades of the 1400s, we see African people kidnapped from their families, crammed into the dark pits of slave forts, and then piled into the bowels of ships. We see voyagers and traders, such as John Hawkins in the 1560s, becoming some of the first British men to make massive fortunes from this trade in kidnapped Africans. By the late 17th century, we see the British coming to dominate the slave trade, having overtaken the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. We see tens of thousands of merchant ships making the “middle passage”, the voyage across the Atlantic that transformed captives from Africa into American slave commodities. Half of all the Africans transported into slavery during the 18th century were carried in the holds of British ships.

From the 15th to the 19th centuries, more than 11 million shackled black captives were forcibly transported to the Americas, and unknown multitudes were lost at sea. Captives were often thrown overboard when they were too sick, or too strong-willed, or too numerous to feed. Those who survived the journey were dumped on the shores and sold to the highest bidder, then sold on again and again like financial assets. Mothers were separated from children, and husbands from wives, as persons were turned into property. Slaves were raped and lynched; their bodies were branded, flayed and mutilated. Many slave owners, in their diaries, manuals, newspaper writings and correspondence, readily admitted the punishments and violations they exacted on black people on the cane fields and in their homes. Take, for example, the unapologetic recollections of violence and predation that comprise the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a British slave owner in Jamaica in the mid-1700s. Thistlewood recorded 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 136 enslaved women in his 37 years in Jamaica. In his 23 July 1756 entry, he described punishing a slave in the following manner: “Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag in it whilst his mouth was full and made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.”

In Barbados, the British established one of the first modern slave societies. Slavery had certainly been practised in many parts of the world since ancient times. But never before had a territory’s entire economy been based on slave labour for capitalist industry. Beginning in 1627, the enslaved were put to work in the intense cultivation of sugar cane, working in chain gangs in shifts that covered a 24-hour production cycle. In one of the greatest experiments in human terror the world has ever known, this system of plantation slavery expanded over the following centuries across the Caribbean, South America and the southern United States. Fear and torture were used to drive black workers to cut, mill, boil and “clay” the sugar, so it could be shipped to Britain as part of a lucrative “triangle of trade” between the west coast of Africa, the Americas and Britain. The trade in slaves, and the goods they were forced to produce – sugar, tobacco and eventually cotton – created the first lords of modern capitalism.

Britain could not have become the most powerful economic force on earth by the turn of the 19th century without commanding the largest slave plantation economies on earth, with more than 800,000 people enslaved. And the legacy of such large-scale, prolonged slavery touches everything that is familiar in Britain today, including buildings named after slave owners such as Colston Hall in Bristol; streets named after slave owners such as Buchanan and Dunlop Streets in Glasgow; and whole parts of cities built for slave owners, such as the West India Docks in London. The cultural legacy of slavery also infuses British tastes, from sweetened tea, to silver service, to cotton clothwork, to the endemic race and class inequalities that characterise everyday life.

Britain’s central role in 500 years of the slave trade and plantation slavery is often dissolved like a bitter pill into the much more palatable tonic of the nation’s role in the story of abolition. This narrative often begins in the pews of Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, where the cherubic William Wilberforce worshipped. Today, he can be seen on the stained glass above the altar of that church, giving the news of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade to a black woman who kneels before him. Around Wilberforce coalesced a group of Church of England social reformers, known as the Clapham Saints, who led the campaign against the slave trade, and then pressed onward to fight for the abolition of plantation slavery in 1833. Over the past few decades, scholars have also stressed the ways in which the antislavery movement depended on expanding democratic participation in civic debate, with British women and the working classes playing a crucial role in the abolitionist ranks. British parliamentarians were inundated with thousands of petitions from ordinary people pressing them to pass laws that eventually brought slavery to an end.

Abolitionists in Britain maintained that slavery was a violation of God’s will. Since every human being possessed a soul, they argued that no human being could be made into another man’s possession without also perverting the divine plan. To encourage their fellow citizens to look into the face of the enslaved and see fellow human beings, British abolitionists distributed autobiographies of people who had experienced slavery, such as works by Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince. If only the British public could hear the voices of black people through their writing, then they could empathise with their oppression. It would then become possible to look into the eyes of the enslaved and see a person staring back.

But narratives of abolition cannot be reduced to a story of angelic white benefactors gifting freedom to their black wards. (There are 32 images of William Wilberforce in the National Portrait Gallery, but just four images of black abolitionists and antislavery activists from the same period.) In Britain, the popular narrative too often ignores the fact that blacks on the plantations were convinced of their own personhood long before anyone else. Rebellions were endemic to slavery, and by the 1810s and 20s, many slave societies in the British Caribbean were experiencing insurgencies. Enslaved people rebelled in Barbados in 1816, and Demerara (today’s Guyana) in 1823. Shortly after Christmas 1831, an audacious rebellion broke out in Jamaica. Some 60,000 enslaved people went on strike. They burned the sugar cane in the fields and used their tools to smash up sugar mills. The rebels also showed remarkable discipline, imprisoning slave owners on their estates without physically harming them.

The British Jamaican government responded by violently stamping out the rebellion, killing more than 540 black people in combat, and later with firing squads and on the gallows. The uprising sent shockwaves through the British parliament and accelerated the push for the abolition of slavery. Henry Taylor, head of the West India division of the British Colonial Office, later commented, “this terrible event [of the rebellion]… was indirectly a death blow to slavery”.

Not only did blacks mobilise for their own liberation, but by the 1820s slavery was also beginning to clash with an economic principle that was becoming an article of faith for British capitalists: free trade. Eric Williams, a historian of slavery who also became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad in 1962, has argued that slavery in the British empire was only abolished after it had ceased to be economically useful. Many British merchants involved in selling Cuban, Brazilian and East Indian sugar in Britain wanted to see an end to all duties and protections that safeguarded the West Indian sugar monopoly. British capitalists also saw fresh possibilities for profit across the globe, from South America to Australia, as new transportation and military technologies – steamships, gunboats and railways – made it possible for European settlers to penetrate new frontiers. The economic system of British slavery was moribund by 1833, but it still needed to be officially slain.

By 1830, debates were raging in the British parliament, and in the public sphere, about ending slavery. The powerful West India interest – a group of around 80 MPs who had ties to Caribbean slavery – opposed abolition. They were joined by an additional group of some 10 MPs who did not possess slaves themselves, but still opposed any proposal to tamper with slave owners’ right to property – that property, in this case, being human beings. The faction presented “compensated emancipation”, or the payment of money to slave owners at abolition, as a way of upholding property rights. Beyond parliament, many thousands of Britons across the country – slave owners, West India merchants, sugar refiners, trade brokers, ship owners, bankers, military men, members of the gentry and clergymen – actively championed the principle of compensation by attending public rallies organised by various West India Committees.

This notion of “compensated emancipation” was relatively new. When slaves were emancipated in northern US states in the years before 1804, no compensation to their owners was paid. Only in the 1810s did the British government take the unprecedented step of paying compensation to Spain, Portugal and some West African states to solicit their cooperation in the suppression of the slave trade. The attempt failed, however, as Spain and Portugal pocketed British money and continued their slave trading until the later 19th century. British slave owners nonetheless demanded, in the 1830s, that this international precedent be applied to them.

The argument for slave-owner compensation relied on perverse logic. Under English law, it was difficult to claim compensation for the loss of chattel property, since rights to movable things – such as household possessions, or tools, or livestock – were considered inherently unstable, expendable and ambiguous. So, the West India interest in parliament, led by the likes of Patrick Maxwell Stewart, a rich London merchant who owned slaves in Tobago, made fanciful arguments to align the enslaved more with land or buildings, or even with body parts, than with human beings. According to one line of argument, because the government paid money to landowners when it took over fields for public works such as docks, roads, bridges and railways, so too it had to pay slave owners for taking over their slaves. According to another argument, because the government paid soldiers for the injury to organs or the loss of limbs during war, so too it had to provide slave owners aid for cutting them off from their slaves, which maimed slave owners’ economic interests.

Many mainstream abolitionists felt uncomfortable about the compensation of slave owners, but justified it as a pragmatic, if imperfect, way to achieve a worthy goal. Other abolitionists, especially a vanguard group within the Anti-Slavery Society called the “Agency Committee”, railed against the idea. “It would reconcile us to the crime,” wrote one contributor to the Anti-Slavery Monthly Report in 1829. “It would be a sap on public virtue,” wrote another the following year. Some activists even demanded that compensation be paid to the enslaved. “To the slave-holder, nothing is due; to the slave, everything,” said an antislavery pamphlet in 1826. Many antislavery members of parliament, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton and William Clay, spoke out vociferously against slave-owner compensation. Hundreds of petitions were also sent in by the corps of abolitionists beyond the ramparts of the political elite, insisting that no money go to the perpetrators of crimes against God’s will.

The decision to compensate slave owners was not just an inevitable expression of the widespread beliefs of those times. Political decisions reflect who is in the room when the decisions are being made. The Reform Act of 1832 drastically transformed the British electoral system and extended the franchise, to the detriment of the West India interest. But even in the reformed House of Commons, scores of MPs still had close financial or family ties to slave ownership. On the other hand, it bears remembering that the first black Britons were not elected to the House of Commons until near the end of the following century, more than 150 years later.

Other slave-owning states, including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Brazil, would follow the British example of compensated emancipation in the coming decades. But the compensation that Britain paid to its slave owners was by far the most generous. Britain stood out among European states in its willingness to appease slave owners, and to burden future generations of its citizens with the responsibility of paying for it.

The owners of slaves in British society were not just the super-rich. Recent research by historians at University College London has shown the striking diversity of the people who received compensation, from widows in York to clergymen in the Midlands, attorneys in Durham to glass manufacturers in Bristol. Still, most of the money ended up in the pockets of the richest citizens, who owned the greatest number of slaves. More than 50% of the total compensation money went to just 6% of the total number of claimants. The benefits of slave-owner compensation were passed down from generation to generation of Britain’s elite. Among the descendants of the recipients of slave-owner compensation is the former prime minister David Cameron.

The decision to emancipate slaves by treating them like property, and not like persons, was no mere theoretical exercise. Rather than putting a sudden end to their suffering, the process of emancipation marked a new phase of British atrocities and the terrorisation of blacks.

The emancipation process was minutely orchestrated by government bureaucrats. In September 1835, less than a month after the government received its loan, slave owners began their feeding frenzy as they obtained compensation cheques at the National Debt Office. Payment amounts were determined based on application forms that asked claimants to itemise the number and kinds of enslaved people in their possession, and to provide certificates from the slave registrar. There were some 47,000 recipients of compensation in total.

In addition to money, slave owners received another form of compensation: the guaranteed free labour of blacks on plantations for a period of years after emancipation. The enslaved were thus forced to pay reverse reparations to their oppressors. At the stroke of midnight on 1 August 1834, the enslaved were freed from the legal category of slavery – and instantly plunged into a new institution, called “apprenticeship”. The arrangement was initially to last for 12 years, but was ultimately shortened to four. During this period of apprenticeship, Britain declared it would teach blacks how to use their freedom responsibly, and would train them out of their natural state of savagery. But this training involved continued unpaid labour for the same masters on the very same plantations on which they had worked the day before.

In some ways, the “apprenticeship” years were arguably even more brutal than what had preceded them. With the Slavery Abolition Act, the duty to punish former slaves now shifted from individual slave owners to officers of the state. A state-funded, 100-person corps of police, jailers and enforcers was hired in Britain and sent to the plantation colonies. They were called the “stipendiary magistrates”. If apprentices were too slow in drawing water, or in cutting cane, or in washing linens, or if they took Saturdays off, their masters could have them punished by these magistrates.

Punishments were doled out according to a standardised formula, and often involved the most “modern” punishment device of those times: the treadmill. This torture device, which was supposed to inculcate a work ethic, was a huge turning wheel with thick, splintering wooden slats. Apprentices accused of laziness – what slave owners called the “negro disease” – were hung by their hands from a plank and forced to “dance” the treadmill barefoot, often for hours. If they fell or lost their step, they would be battered on their chest, feet and shins by the wooden planks. The punishment was often combined with whippings. The treadmill was used more during the apprenticeship period than it ever was under slavery, precisely because it was said to be a scientific, measurable and modern form of disciplinary re-education, in line with bureaucratic oversight. One apprentice, James Williams, in an account of his life published in 1837, recalled he was punished much more after 1834 than before. Indeed, it is likely that slave-owners sweated their labour under apprenticeship, in order to squeeze out the last ounces of unpaid labour before full emancipation finally came in 1838.

While the British state, even after emancipation, still failed to see black people as persons, the enslaved themselves inhabited a complex society of their own creation. Enslaved people called the experience of slavery “barbarity time”. And during the barbarity, they developed their own internal banking and legal systems. They created extensive trading relations between towns and villages, and across plantation enclaves. They had their own spiritual practices, such as Obeah, an Afro-centric repertoire of divination and social communion cultivated alongside the religion bestowed by the Christian missionaries. Slaves had their own rich musical forms and traditions of storytelling. They were engineers, chemists and medics on the plantation fields they inhabited. Many of their innovations contributed to making life under slavery livable, such as the architectural design of the tapia house in Trinidad. Even if the official white gaze could not see the 800,000 persons that lived in the plantation colonies, those persons still persisted.

Benjamin Disraeli, the great Tory prime minister of the late 19th century, once described the “forlorn Antilles”, or Caribbean, as millstones around the neck of Britain. Here in Disraeli’s remark, is the British habit of externalising the problem of slavery as playing out in some distant place, rather than within Britain’s own heart of darkness. Today, evading the question of British slave legacies takes the form of celebratory national narratives about British abolition, and in the nervous reflex of switching the topic to “modern slavery” whenever the history of British slavery is raised for discussion. Slavery becomes comfortable for the British nation if it can be situated “out there”, among the dark-skinned peoples of the earth, in countries far away.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the British establishment has been so resistant to hearing calls for reparations for slavery. In 1997, manacled human remains were found on a beach in Devon. It was soon determined that the bones were those of enslaved blacks who had probably been kept in the hold of The London, a vessel shipwrecked in 1796. The enslaved people, who were probably from the Caribbean, were supposed to be sold on the British slave market. Labour MP Bernie Grant, a reparations advocate and one of the first black members of parliament, took the occasion to make a pilgrimage to Devon, and to renew the call for reparations.

Grant’s programme began with the demand for an apology from the British state for the legacies of British slavery. “I am going to write to the Queen,” Grant had said in a speech in Birmingham in 1993. “I know she is a very reasonable woman.” He died in 2000 without ever receiving that very reasonable apology.

In 2013, a powerful renewed call for reparations arose among representatives of Caribbean nations, stimulated by the publication of the book Britain’s Black Debt. The following year, its author, Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, and chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission, gave an address to a group of British MPs and peers in the UK parliament’s British-Caribbean all-party group. His voice booming across Committee Room 14, Beckles argued that Britain has a “case to answer in respect of reparatory justice”.

 British prime minister David Cameron on a visit to Kingston, Jamaica. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

He anchored his demand for reparations in the need for the British state to admit its role in forcefully extracting wealth from the Caribbean, impeding industrialisation and causing chronic poverty. The Caribbean, by the late 20th century, became one of the largest centres of predatory lending, orchestrated by the IMF and World Bank, as well as by European and American banks. Even today, the economies of Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua find themselves dangling precariously between life and debt, suspended by their historically enforced dependence on foreign finance.

The legacies of slavery and racism are no less present in Britain, where black workers are more than twice as likely than white workers to work in temporary or insecure forms of employment. While 3% of Britain’s general population is black, black people comprise 12% of the incarcerated. And people of colour are still hugely underrepresented in positions of power in Britain – in politics, academia and the judiciary, in particular.

Six months after Beckles’ speech, the Treasury finally finished repaying the debt on its Abolition of Slavery Act loan. And a further six months after that, in July 2015, then-prime minister David Cameron travelled to Jamaica on an official visit. There, on behalf of the British nation, he took a big leap backwards. It is time to “move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future,” he stated glibly.

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war

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But how can you move on from something that has not yet stopped happening? Neither the history of British slavery, nor the process of emancipation that re-enacted slavery, nor the bones of the enslaved that wash up on British shores, nor the debt for slave-owner compensation that continued for so long to cycle through British national accounts, seem ever to be able to bring the nation’s representatives to acknowledge its crimes against humanity and to provide restitution.

The scholar Christina Sharpe has written about the “residence time” of black bodies thrown into the dark sea during the “middle passage”. This is the span of time, measured in thousands of years, that it takes for the atoms of jettisoned slaves’ bodies to pass out of the oceanic system. The Atlantic is one kind of vault of slavery’s aftermath. But so too is the ocean of British national debt, through which the ghosts of the enslaved circulated for centuries, waiting for their moment of due reckoning; waiting for an apology from the British state, and for its commitment to redress what British slavery sought to obliterate: the personhood of black folk who emerged out of this empire, like me and my ancestors.

Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism and early social reproduction theory, Ankica Čakardić 25 Feb 2018

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from the Journal, Historical Materialiosm

Ankica Čakardić is an assistant professor and the chair of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Gender at the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Her research interest include Marxist critique of social contract theory, Political Marxism, Marxist-feminist and Luxemburgian critique of political economy, and history of women’s struggles in Yugoslavia. She is currently finishing her book on the social history of capitalism, Hobbes and Locke. A longer version of this paper, presented at the 2017 London Historical Materialism conference, has been published in the journal's Issue 25.4 as 'From Theory of Accumulation to Social-Reproduction Theory: A Case for Luxemburgian Feminism', available in advance here.

The Accumulation of Capital

Luxemburg did not write many texts on the so-called ‘woman question’.1 However, that does not mean that her work should be omitted from a feminist-revolutionary history. On the contrary, it would be highly inaccurate to claim that her works and, specifically, her critique of political economy lack numerous reference-points for the development of progressive feminist policy and female emancipation, throughout history and today. With Luxemburg’s several essays on the ‘woman question’ and several key theses from her The Accumulation of Capital, let us try to take Luxemburg’s theory a step further. Is it possible to speak of a ‘Luxemburgian feminism’? What does Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism stand for?

On the eve of WWI, after about fifteen years of preparation, Rosa Luxemburg published The Accumulation of Capital (Berlin, 1913), her most comprehensive theoretical work and one of the most relevant and original classical works of Marxist economics.2 The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism was a follow-up to the Introduction to Political Economy which Luxemburg wrote while preparing her lectures on political economy, held between 1906 and 1916 and delivered at the German Social-Democrats’ Party School.3Briefly put, The Accumulation of Capital sought a way to scientifically study and explain the conditions of capitalist monopolisation, extended reproduction and imperialism, while taking into account the dynamic relation between capitalist and non-capitalist spatiality. Luxemburg held that Marx had neglected capital’s spatial determination, while in his critique of capital he had centred exclusively on ‘time’, i.e. the temporal dimension of the internal dynamics of capitalist reproduction. In contrast, Luxemburg ‘sought to show that capital’s inner core consists of the drive to consume what is external to it – non-capitalist strata’.4 Luxemburg’s goal was to articulate her own theory of extended reproduction and critique of classical economics, which would contain not only a temporal but also a ‘spatial analytical dimension’. This spatial determination of capitalist accumulation Peter Hudis has termed ‘dialectics of spatiality’.5

Friends and enemies alike piled sharp criticism upon Luxemburg for noting Marx’s ‘glaring inconsistencies’, as she believed, the ‘defects’ of his approach to the problem of accumulation and expanded reproduction from the second volume of Capital.6 In a letter to Franz Mehring referring to critiques of her The Accumulation of Capital, she wrote:

In general, I was well aware that the book would run into resistance in the short term; unfortunately, our prevailing ‘Marxism’, like some gout-ridden old uncle, is afraid of any fresh breeze of thought, and I took it into account that I would have to do a lot of fighting at first.7

Lenin stated that she ‘distorted Marx’,8 and her work was interpreted as a revision of Marx, in spite of the fact that it was Luxemburg who mounted a vehement attack on the revisionist tendencies within the German SPD. In opposition to the Social Democrats who grouped around ‘epigones’ and an opportunistic current of political practice which ‘corrected’ Marx into a gradual dismissal of socialist principles, revolutionary action and internationalism, Luxemburg insisted on harnessing a living Marxist thought in order to offer more-precise responses to and explanations of the growing economic crisis and newly-appearing facts of economic life. While Luxemburg’s works on political organising, revolutionary philosophy, nationalism or militarism are often analysed by scholars of her thought, few authors have tried to provide a systematic retrospective of Luxemburg’s economic theory and its legacy, or offer a contemporary Luxemburgian analysis of political economy.9 In the words of Ingo Schmidt: ‘Leftists interested in Luxemburg’s work looked at her politics but had little time for economics’.10

Although The Accumulation of Capital was met with severe criticism upon publication, by the opportunistic-reformist and revisionist elements of the SPD, as well as by orthodox Marxists led by Karl Kautsky, it was not only her work that was criticised as ostensibly suspect in its Marxism. These critics often used cheap psychological and conservative naturalising arguments that were meant to undermine the credibility of Luxemburg’s work and expose it as inept and insufficiently acquainted with Marxist texts. A good example of this type of criticism is provided by Werner Sombart, who stated in his Der proletarische Sozialismus:

The angriest socialists are those who are burdened with the strongest resentment. This is typical: the blood-thirsty, poisonous soul of Rosa Luxemburg has been burdened with a quadruple resentment: as a woman, as a foreigner, as a Jew and as a cripple.11

Even within the German Communist Party she was dubbed ‘the syphilis of the Comintern’, and Weber once ‘assessed’ Rosa Luxemburg as somebody that ‘[belongs] in a zoo’.12 Dunayevskaya writes:

Virulent male chauvinism permeated the whole party, including both August Bebel, the author of Woman and Socialism – who had created a myth about himself as a veritable feminist – and Karl Kautsky, the main theoretician of the whole International.13

Dunayevskaya’s gender-social analysis also cites a part of a letter in which Victor Adler writes to August Bebel on the subject of Luxemburg:

The poisonous bitch will yet do a lot of damage, all the more so because she is as clever as a monkey [blitzgescheit] while on the other hand her sense of responsibility is totally lacking and her only motive is an almost pervasive desire for self-justification.14

In question was evidently a certain type of conservative political tactics that amounted to attacking prominent women, which in this case included a serious dismissal of Luxemburg’s work based on biology – the fact that she was a woman. Although this important aspect of social and gender history will not be further discussed here, its ubiquity needs to be borne in mind when discussing the theoretical and numerous quasi-theoretical critiques of The Accumulation of Capital and Luxemburg’s experience as a woman theoretician, teacher and revolutionary.

If feminist analyses of Luxemburg’s works in general are rare, even rarer are feminist engagements with her The Accumulation of Capital.15 If there is any interest in feminist interpretation of Luxemburg’s work, it is usually defined in relation to her personal life and occasionally to her theory. Luxemburg not having written much on the subject of the ‘woman question’ certainly contributed to the fact that the subject of most interpretations of Luxemburg’s feminism is linked to episodes from her life and intimacy. These are, naturally enough, highly important subjects, particularly bearing in mind that historical scholarship has traditionally avoided women and their experiences. However, let us try to give an answer to this question: what can a few of Luxemburg’s texts and written speeches tackling the ‘woman question’ tell us about her feminism?

Luxemburg’s Critique of Bourgeois Feminism

Luxemburg did not exclusively devote herself to organising female workers’ groups; her work in that field was obscured by the fact that she usually worked behind the scenes. She fervently supported the organisational work of the socialist women’s movement, understanding the importance and difficulties of work-life for female emancipation. She usually showed her support through cooperation with her close friend Clara Zetkin. In one of her letters to Zetkin we can read how interested and excited she was when it came to the women’s movement: ‘When are you going to write me that big letter about the women’s movement? In fact I beg you for even one little letter!’16 Relating to her interest in the women’s movement, she stated in one of her speeches: ‘I can only marvel at Comrade Zetkin that she ... will still shoulder this work-load’.17Finally, although rarely acknowledging herself as a feminist, in a letter to Luise Kautsky she wrote: ‘Are you coming for the women’s conference? Just imagine, I have become a feminist!18Besides the fact that she was working ‘behind the scenes’ and privately showing her interest in the ‘woman question’, she still engaged herself in an open discussion concerning the class problem faced by the women’s movement. In a speech from 1912 entitled ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’, Luxemburg criticised bourgeois feminism and assertively pointed out:

Monarchy and women’s lack of rights have become the most important tools of the ruling capitalist class.... If it were a matter of bourgeois ladies voting, the capitalist state could expect nothing but effective support for the reaction. Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against ‘male prerogatives’ would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage.19

The question of women’s suffrage along with the philosophy of the modern concept of law based on the premises of individual rights played an important role in the so-called big transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Rosa Luxemburg, the question of women’s suffrage is a tactical one, as it formalises, in her words, an already-established ‘political maturity’ of proletarian women. She goes on to emphasise that this is not a question of supporting an isolated case of suffrage which is meaningful and completed, but of supporting universal suffrage through which the women’s socialist movement can further develop a strategy for the struggle for emancipation of women and the working class in general. However, the liberal legal strategy of achieving suffrage was not class inclusive and did not aim to overturn the capitalist system. Far from it. For Luxemburg, the metaphysics of individual rights within the framework of a liberal political project primarily serves to protect private ownership and the accumulation of capital. Liberal rights do not arise as a reflection of actual material social conditions, they are merely set up as abstract and nominal, thus rendering their actual implementation or application impossible. As she contemptuously argued: ‘these are merely formalistic rubbish that has been carted out and parroted so often that it no longer retains any practical meaning’.20

Luxemburg rejected the traditional definition of civil rights in every sense, including the struggle for women’s suffrage, and she pointed to its similarity with the struggle for national self determination:

For the historical dialectic has shown that there are no ‘eternal’ truths and that there are no ‘rights’.... In the words of Engels, ‘What is good in the here and now, is an evil somewhere else, and vice versa’ – or, what is right and reasonable under some circumstances becomes nonsense and absurdity under others. Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these ‘eternal’ truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.21

What Rosa Luxemburg suggests in the aforementioned quotation from ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’ pertains to classical problems initially raised and debated within the framework of socialist feminism from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century: the role of bourgeois feminism in capitalist reproduction and the use of feminist goals as a means of achieving profit. Whenever capitalism is in crisis or needs ‘allies’ for its restoration or the further accumulation of capital, it integrates marginalised ‘Others’ into its legal liberal political form, be they women, children, non-white races, or LGBTIQ people – whoever is disposable or potentially useful for further commodification:

Thus one of the fundamental conditions for accumulation is a supply of living labour that matches its requirements, and that capital sets in motion.... The progressive increase in variable capital that accompanies accumulation must therefore express itself in the employment of a growing workforce. Yet where does this additional workforce come from?22

According to Luxemburg’s economic theory, the capitalist mode of production reproduces itself by creating surplus-values, the appropriation of which can only be hastened by a concomitant expansion in surplus-creating capitalist production. Hence, it is necessary to ensure that production is reproduced in a larger volume than before, meaning that the expansion of capital is the absolute law governing the survival of any individual capitalist. In The Accumulation of Capital Rosa Luxemburg establishes the premises for understanding capitalism as a social relation which permanently produces crises and necessarily faces objective limits to demand and self-expansion. In this sense she developed a theory of imperialism based on an analysis of the process of social production and accumulation of capital realised via various ‘non-capitalist formations’:

There can be no doubt that the explanation of the economic root of imperialism must especially be derived from and brought into harmony with [a correct understanding of] the laws of capital accumulation, for imperialism on the whole and according to universal empirical observation is nothing other than a specific method of accumulation.… The essence of imperialism consists precisely in the expansion of capital from the old capitalist countries into new regions and the competitive economic and political struggle among those for new areas.23

Unlike Marx, who abstracted the actual accumulation by specific capitalist countries and their relations via external trade, Luxemburg claims that expanded reproduction should not be discussed in the context of an ideal-type capitalist society.24 In order to make the issue of expanded reproduction easier to understand, Marx abstracts foreign trade and examines an isolated nation, to present how surplus-value is realised in an ideal capitalist society dominated by the law of value which is the law of the world-market.25 Luxemburg disagrees with Marx, who analyses value relations in the circulation of social capital and reproduction by disregarding the specific characteristics of the production process which creates commodities. Thus, the market functions ‘totally’, that is, in a general analysis of the capitalist process of circulation we assume that the sale takes place directly, ‘without the intervention of a merchant’.

Marx wishes to demonstrate that a substantial portion of surplus is absorbed by capital as such, instead of concrete individuals. The question is not ‘who’ but ‘what’ consumes surplus commodities. Luxemburg, on the other hand, analyses the accumulation of capital starting from the level of international commodity exchange between capitalist and non-capitalist systems. Despite Luxemburg’s objections, she nevertheless realises that Marx’s analysis of the problem of variable capital serves as the basis for establishing the problem of the law of the accumulation of capital, which is the key to her social-economic theory. Equally, that line of argument allows for understanding the highly important distinction between productive and non productive labour,26 without which it would be almost impossible to understand social-reproduction theory as a specific reaction to neoclassical economics and its partnership with liberal feminism. Precisely for this reason in The Accumulation of Capital Luxemburg quotes Marx:

The laboring population can increase, when previously unproductive workers are transformed into productive ones, or sections of the population who did not work previously, such as women and children, or paupers, are drawn into the production process.27

This type of economy and liberalistic inclusion of the ‘labour population’ obviously has low democratic potential and lacks any aspiration to emancipate the oppressed class. Rights are allocated very cautiously, on an identity-level basis (as opposed to the material social level), and exclusively according to the formula designed primarily to safeguard the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Bourgeois women from the early nineteenth century do not have the abolition of the class system in mind; on the contrary, they support it. Moreover, bourgeois feminism affirms capitalism and one’s own class position, and disregards the rights of working-class women. The processes of accumulation of capital, the modern state, the aspirations of liberalism, and then bourgeois feminism move along the same path:

At a formal level, women’s political rights conform quite harmoniously with the bourgeois state. The examples of Finland, of American states, of a few municipalities, all show that a policy of equal rights for women has not yet overturned the state; it does not encroach upon the domination of capital.28

Luxemburg explains that the role of the women’s suffrage movement is reactionary not only because of the simple failure of bourgeois women to support the struggle for workers’ rights and the social rights of proletarian women, but also because of their active participation in affirming the oppression of women which arises from social relations based on the reproductive work of women within the household sphere. The central methodological point of Luxemburg’s theory of economics consists of an assertive clash with classical political economics. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the subjects of her critique also include precisely those social phenomena and processes which enable capitalism – liberalism, the role of the bourgeoisie in the transition from feudal monarchy to capitalism. Rights, laws, and modern-day social contracts are institutions that played a key historic formal role in the affirmation of capitalism.29But also, bourgeois feminism plays an important part in the maintenance of capitalist class-structures. On the one hand, the bourgeois class of women demands the political right to vote only for the ruling class of women, and from an individualist standpoint they hold no interest in tackling the issue of the position of women in general or class-related causes of the oppression of women. In Luxemburg’s opinion, the role of bourgeois women is very important and it maintains an active presence in perpetuating the established social relations:

Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat.30

By opposing the goals of bourgeois women to the goals supported by proletarian women, Luxemburg clarifies that the problem here is not only gender related, a ‘woman problem’, but also a class-related problem. Talking about women in general whilst feigning universality will not do, because gender analysis without class analysis is reductive. Women belonging to the higher classes mostly do not participate in production within the framework of market processes and thus consume surplus-value, which has been drained through the exploitation of the working class; thus their role in the reproduction of social relations is of a ‘parasitic nature’:

They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And co-consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their ‘right’ to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.31

Thus, Luxemburg adds, the only social role of bourgeois women is to maintain and reproduce the existing order; they are not allies in the struggle for emancipation:

The women of the property-owning classes will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.32

Luxemburg is not alone in her sharp criticism of bourgeois feminism. Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, among others, contributed a great deal, particularly if we bear in mind their standpoint towards the reactionary attitudes of liberal women on the emancipation of women. Socialist women’s universal demands arose as an effect of social material motives and causes, ultimately finding more in common with men belonging to the same class than with the women of a higher class. This was in spite of the fact that, historically, the appearance of women in the labour market was frequently seen as an attempt to introduce cheaper competition for the male labour-force, which in turn influenced the decline in the price of labour. Considering the problem of the female labour force, socialist women point out that the workload of women is additionally aggravated by reproductive labour within the household sphere. One could almost speak of the ‘first wave’ of social-reproduction theory, when Zetkin states: ‘Women are doubly oppressed, by capitalism and by their dependency in family life’.33 One such brilliant example comes also from Luxemburg’s interpretation of the societal role of the family. Referring to Engels, in a speech from 1912 she differentiated between labour in the market sphere and labour in the household sphere, thereby laying the foundations for early social-reproduction theory:

This kind of work [bringing up children, or their housework] is not productive in the sense of the present capitalist economy no matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent, the thousand little efforts add up to. This is but the private affair of the worker, his happiness and blessing, and for this reason non-existent for our present society. As long as capitalism and the wage system rule, only that kind of work is considered productive which produces surplus value, which creates capitalist profit. From this point of view, the music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy. And seeing this brutal reality clearly and sharply is the proletarian woman’s first task.34

Luxemburg underlines the key analytical issue we face if we are to attribute the disadvantageousness of women’s position simply to the ideology of the ‘antagonism’ between women and men, instead of to the capitalist mode of production. That warning illustrates how wrong and reductive it is, according to Luxemburg, to interpret the oppression of women transhistorically and in line with liberal feminism, instead of interpreting it as a product of the antagonism between capital and labour:

The call for women’s equality, when it does well up among bourgeois women, is the pure ideology of a few feeble groups without material roots, a phantom of the antagonism between man and woman, a quirk. Thus, the farcical nature of the suffragette movement.35

As neoliberalism successfully exploits gender for the purposes of the class-interests of capital, we are facing an important task of designing anti-capitalist strategies based on the resistance to the market and its reproduction, thereupon focusing simultaneously on the domestic sphere and reproductive processes within the framework of the capitalist mode of production. At a time when systematic analyses of the relation between the market and the state – either at the national or international level – are necessary starting-points for a discussion of any short or long-term alternatives to the capitalist mode of production, Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism and her connection to social reproduction theory seem to present not only a valuable introductory reference, but also the political model well suited to organising alliances among parallel structures and aligning their progressive goals.

References

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Notes

1Restricting ourselves to the available English translations, several works/speeches from the period from 1902 to 1914 in relation to the ‘woman question’ can be identified: ‘A Tactical Question’ (1902), ‘Address to the International Socialist Women’s Conference’ (1907), ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’ (1912) and ‘The Proletarian Woman’ (1914). All texts are present in Hudis and Anderson (eds.) 2004.

2Luxemburg 2015a.

3In Hudis (ed.) 2013.

4Hudis 2014.

5Ibid.

6See the critiques of Anton Pannekoek, Gustav Eckstein, Otto Bauer and Karl Kautsky in Day and Gaido (eds.) 2012. On the other hand there were also positive responses; see Franz Mehring’s review where he states: ‘While some reject the work as a complete failure, even denouncing it as a worthless compilation, others consider it the most significant phenomenon in socialist literature since Marx and Engels took up the pen. This reviewer belongs completely to the second group.’ (Day and Gaido (eds.) 2012, p. 746.)

7Adler, Hudis and Laschitza (eds.) 2011, p. 324.

8Quoted in Day and Gaido (eds.) 2012, p. 677.

9Certainly the exceptions being Kowalik 2014; Hudis 2014; Bellofiore, Karwowski and Toporowski (eds.) 2014; Ping 2014; and Bellofiore 2010. Also, we can speak of various types of applications of Luxemburg’s dialectics of spatiality to different theories of ‘new imperialism’ which are definitely not systematic analyses of Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism (and we shall refrain from discussing here the quality of each), compare: Harvey 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2014; Federici 2004; Sassen 2010; Arrighi 2004; Panitch and Gindin 2003; Cox 1983. The issue of imperialism is an integral part of the new critical theories and it has a long history, from Hobson and Lenin via Luxemburg, Bukharin and Guevara, to Fanon.

10Schmidt 2014.

11Quoted in Bulajić 1954, p. VIII.

12Quoted in Thomas 2006, p. 154.

13Dunayevskaya 1981, p. 27.

14Ibid.

15We must bear in mind the contributions from Haug 2007 and Dunayevskaya 1981.

16Adler, Hudis and Laschitza (eds.) 2011, p. 153.

17Luxemburg 2004c, p. 237.

18Cited in Dunayevskaya 1981, p. 95.

19Luxemburg 2004d, p. 240.

20Luxemburg 2004a, p. 235.

21Luxemburg 1976, p. 111.

22Luxemburg 2015a, p. 330.

23Luxemburg 2015b, pp. 449–50.

24She poses a question directly criticising Marx and his ‘bloodless schemes’ of the relations between the two departments (c+v+s) from the second volume of Capital: ‘How then can one correctly conceive of this process and its inner laws of motion by using a bloodless theoretical fiction that declares this entire milieu, and the conflicts and interactions within it, to be nonexistent?’ See Luxemburg 2015b, p. 450. As underlined by Krätke 2006, p. 22: ‘Any effort to improve or enlarge the Marxian schemes is futile. In her view, the Marxian reproduction schemes were fundamentally flawed and no reformulation could save them.’

25Although Luxemburg rightly claims that Marx does not deal with external trade in detail, she disregards the fact that he unequivocally placed the society he researched and analysed in the context of the global economy: ‘Capitalist production never exists without foreign trade. If normal annual reproduction on a given scale is presupposed, then it is also supposed together with this that foreign trade replaces domestic articles only by those of other use or natural forms, without affecting ... value ratios.... Bringing foreign trade into an analysis of the value of the product annually reproduced can therefore only confuse things, without supplying any new factor either to the problem or to its solution.’ See Marx 1992, p. 546.

26The difference between productive and non-productive labour is interpreted through Marx’s concept but also through an elaboration of Savran and Tonak 1999 and Cámara Izquierdo 2006. The authors state that the aforementioned difference presents the basis for understanding capitalism as a whole, and particularly in analysis of specific traits of twentieth-century capitalism. The emphasis is on the duality of the problem, depending on whether we refer to ‘productive labour in general’ or ‘productive labour for capital’. This distinction is considered very important in understanding the relation between reproductive (domestic) labour and the problem of non-productive labour.

27Luxemburg 2015b, p. 587.

28Luxemburg 2004b, p. 244.

29For a more detailed elaboration of a social-historic approach to Western liberal theory and modern political thought, with an emphasis on ‘transition’, compare Wood 2012.

30Luxemburg 2004d, p. 240.

31Ibid.

32Ibid.

33Cited in Riddell 2014.

34Luxemburg 2004d, p. 241.

35Luxemburg 2004b, p. 243.