the historical relationship between race / white supremacy and capitalism, & the attendant relationship between race and class, are multifaceted and complex. anyone who tries to tell you that these relationships are settled and simple, that either race or class has absolute primacy over the other, that white supremacy and capitalism aren’t in many ways dependent upon & respondent to each other in how they were formed and in how they continue to shape the world in which we all live, is oversimplifying a question that’s been at the core of a lot of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, & anti-colonialist thought for decades at least. the issue should not be one of conflict–asking “which of these systems overrides or matters more than the other”–but one of synthesis–working to understand how these systems function with and in relation to each other, albeit sometimes in troubled or complicated ways. to have any hope of inquiring into these issues we cannot be afraid of complexity.
the makings of race & the makings of modern capitalism are historically inextricable from each other. if race as we know it today (and specifically the categories of white, Black, & Indigenous american) can be understood as having arisen from european colonialist expansion and the attending enslavement & genocide (/ “removal”) of Indigenous populations, and, slightly later, the more systematic enslavement of and trade in African people–things that, in the late 1600s, began to demand a post hoc explanation as to why some people were subject to enslavement and not others–then, equally, that very imperialist expansion that gave rise to race can be understood as a driving force in the birth of modern capitalism (see especially Fields). and european imperialism and colonialism elsewhere in the world, along with, most recently, neoliberalism, have continued to develop and reinforce the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism (see especially Harris). historical evidence suggests that racism and racial ideology had to be invented and then, in many contexts, had to be taught–and taught diligently–to European peasants, especially indentured servants, in order to suppress their tendency to organise against their masters alongside African slaves (see Federici, 106-107). it took another couple hundred years even after all of this for race to be considered in quite the manner it’s considered in today–as a matter of “biology,” rather than of climate or environment (see especially Harvey). “race” is a set of fictions subject to constant shifting and re-negotiation, & seeing its construction and foundations will require recourse to capital (among other things) at every level.
to claim that race is trans-historical, or that it predates and supercedes capitalism, is to remove race from the circumstances that led to its creation, and therefore to naturalise & to essentialise it. but there is nothing natural or naturally arising about racial ideology or racism.
to claim that racism is an ingrained sense of hatred for non-”white” people that exists in “white” people for reasons entirely unrelated to the material realities of enslavement and colonialist and imperialist expansion, and to the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism as it occurred in Europe and elsewhere, is to claim both that there is some sort of biological or metaphysical truth to the (often troubled) category of “white,” and that there is somehow something naturally detestable about the people who fall outside of that category. on both counts this viewpoint does white supremacy’s work for it. it is also, in its essentials, the accepted liberal view of race, no matter what language you dress it up in.
certainly europeans prior to their colonisation of the americas had cultural and aesthetic ideas and ideals that, viewed through the distorting lens of hindsight, seem to be referencing race, and they’re commonly brought up as early examples of racism & anti-Blackness. indeed, europeans recalled and repurposed these ideas & aesthetics concurrently with the invention of race, subsuming them into the developing system & discourse of white supremacy (and also things like anti-Blackness and colourism). but it’s ahistorical and disingenuous to call this “race” in the context of a conversation in which the term is being used to denote a more specific set of historically contingent (since ~ the very late 1600s) and biologised (since no sooner than the 1850s) ideas & categories.
to claim that race supercedes capitalism, or that struggle against white supremacy is in any way divorcable from, or is even counter to, struggle against capitalism, is also to erase or otherwise misrepresent the legacy of countless racialised peoples & colonial subjects who understood & understand their struggles against these two systems to be inextricably linked. anti-colonial & anti-racist organising have been socialist for decades and it’s downright silly to pretend otherwise. acting like communist or socialist activism & organisation is somehow inherently a white thing is to deny agency & complexity to the many Black revolutionaries, peoples in the Global South, & other nonwhite people and people of colour whose resistance to white supremacy and capitalism provide frameworks for communist organising to this day. socialism is not “white” and never has been (see especially “Who is Oakland”).
of course the other, equally misguided, side of all of this is the tack taken by a lot of white leftists who ignore the roles of imperialism & colonialism in the formation of modern capitalism, ignore the roles that race & colonialism play in creating superexploited subjects in the periphery of empire whose labour can be extorted for the benefit of the ruling class, and ignore the ways in which white supremacy works as an institutional barrier to accumulating wealth for Black people and other people of colour in the West. to claim that capitalism is material while race is merely social, that the relationship between capitalism and race is one of base vs. superstructure (yes, I have really had this argument), or to claim that there is any way to dismantle capitalism without confronting white supremacy, is equally to disregard and disrespect the work & lived experiences of racialised & colonised socialists and revolutionaries.
to disregard any attempt to account for the material realities of race as mere “identity politics” that subvert nonwhite people’s loyalties away from “purer” class struggle–implied or stated to be the only legitimate arena for resistance of any kind–is to ignore how race materially (including, yes, economically) impacts the lives of racialised people. it is also to ignore the role that race has played in subverting the loyalties of white wage labourers against people of colour by giving them small concessions (slightly better jobs & working conditions, plus the mere psychological satisfaction that hey, at least they were white) as incentives against organising alongside working class people of colour. this racial divide between members of the working class needs to be addressed–not merely swept under the rug as an example of white workers working against their own self-interest (as if–while, yes, still worse off than they would be if capitalism were not in place–they did not materially benefit at the expense of other workers). white supremacy and racism need to be confronted in any struggle against capitalism. ignoring all of this is flagrantly to disregard things that Black revolutionaries in the U.S. have known, again, for decades, as well as to express a profound lack of care for nonwhite peoples across the board. and that’s why white leftists get on my damn nerves, lmao.
“There’s certainly a raw and visceral shock to seeing swastikas displayed in American streets,” Hart tells TIME. “But this is a topic I’d been working on for quite a while at that point, and while it wasn’t something I expected, it was a trend I’d been observing. I wasn’t terribly shocked but there’s still a visceral reaction when you see that kind of symbolism displayed in the 21st century.”
Hart, who came to the topic via research on the eugenics movement and the history of Nazi sympathy in Britain, says he realized early on that there was a lot more to the American side of that story than most textbooks acknowledged. Some of the big names might get mentioned briefly — the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, or the highly public German American Bund organization — but in general, he says, the American narrative of the years leading up to World War II has elided the role of those who supported the wrong side. And yet, American exchange students went to Germany and returned with glowing reviews, while none other than Charles Lindbergh denounced Jewish people for pushing the U.S. toward unnecessary war. In its various expressions, the pro-Nazi stance during those years was mostly focused not on creating an active military alliance with Germany or bringing the U.S. under Nazi control (something Hitler himself thought wouldn’t be possible) but rather on keeping the U.S. out of war in Europe.
So why was that past overlooked for so long?
In part, Hart theorizes, it’s because the American story of World War II is such a powerful national narrative. The United States, that narrative says, helped save the world. Rocked by Pearl Harbor, Americans stepped up to turn the tide for the Allies and thus solidified their nation’s place as a global superpower. That narrative doesn’t have much room for the relatively small, but significant, number of Americans who were rooting for the other side.
“It’s always been uncomfortable in this country to talk about isolationism, though the ideas are still out there,” he says, “It’s part of the American mythology. We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war.”
It was also possible for those who had participated in Nazi-sympathetic groups to later cloak their beliefs in the Cold War’s anti-communist push — a dynamic that had in fact driven some of them to fascism in the first place, as it seemed “tougher on communism than democracy is,” as Hart puts it. (One survey he cites found that in 1938, more Americans thought that communism was worse than fascism than vice versa.) Such people could truthfully insist that they’d always been anti-communist without revealing that they’d been fascists, and their fellow Americans were still so worried about communism that they might not press the matter.
Saturn’s atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter’s, but Saturn’s bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn’s finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s. Since then, Earth-based telescopy has improved to the point where regular observations can be made. The composition of the clouds varies with depth and increasing pressure.
The winds on Saturn are the second fastest among the Solar System’s planets, after Neptune’s. Voyager data indicate peak easterly winds of 500 m/s (1,800 km/h).
Thermography has shown that Saturn’s south pole has a warm polar vortex, the only known example of such a phenomenon in the Solar System. Whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C, temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C, suspected to be the warmest spot on Saturn.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute and Kevin M. Gill
If you can’t find a place on your blog for Patrick Stewart in a bathtub dressed like a lobster, then your blog probably doesn’t deserve such majesty anyway.
It has returned to my dash and I cannot fight the compulsion to reblog…
the patrick lobster appears only once in a thousand years, reblog for good luck
Apple: this is a mischievous moon. She wants to cause some trouble. Delightful impish smile. A good start. 9/10
I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. This looks like one of those Lenny faces copy pasted onto some Swiss cheese. Bad moon but not horrible 5/10
Microsoft’s simplistic style isn’t working here. This is no moon. This is a strangely patterned electric socket. 2/10 could be worse
Oh dear. This isn’t the moon at all! This is a horrible child! 2/10 could still be so much worse
I don’t hate it! 7/10
This is so horrible. I feel so angry when I see it. This moon feels nothing, only anger. 2/10
Kind. Wholesome. Three-dimensional. Refreshing! She’s so good. I want her in the sky. 10/10
rip tumblr 