MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 7 February 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“History is bunk” wrote Henry Ford, perhaps the father of modern capitalist production.
I know many people, black, poor and dispossessed who would say exactly the same thing as Henry Ford, without any of Ford’s rationale. Henry Ford had made a profound change in world history. He wanted to produce more cars. Therefore he had to produce more people capable of buying cars. If cars were sold only to the elite, Ford would have lost his wider market. And remember capitalism had already pronounced that “God was dead,” and the new god was to be the Market, the Almighty Market, the Omniscient Market, the Free Market, which created all things, regulated all things and determined all things.
Ford then advocated and initiated the $5 a day wage, which created a mass market and so the modern era. The masses were turned into mass consumers of capitalist production, and the production of goods and services reached unprecedented heights. Capitalism was triumphant. In its triumphalism, it did not only proclaim that God was dead. It proclaimed the “end of history”.
Even “socialists” joined in this end of history refrain. Because the masses were buying cars, and VCR’s etc. etc. they argued, including the great Herbert Marcuse, that the masses were becoming bourgeoisified, therefore the industrial workers could not transform society. Capitalism was forever and ever.
For, according to capitalism a new heaven and a new earth would arrive when all the world had a VCR probably one to each person in a family, a car for the husband, one for the wife, and one for the maturing children, and a personal computer for each and all.
The rights of “intellectual property’ would guarantee that technology would remain secret and “white.” Thus blacks would be locked out of these processes, except as consumers, imitating the “Jones’.” The more successfully they imitated the “Jones’” the more they would be accepted as part of the great white human family. The more black leaders were corrupt using “guile” to attract Capital to dominate the production of goods and the production of services in their individual countries the more there would be no new history, and the more history would have ended, with each jostling against the other to get the latest car, the latest VCR, the latest PC and the latest satellite dish. The development of the human personality would have ended, to all intents and valid purposes, except those of the Market. The Market which works in mysterious ways, its magic to perform as the magic of the market would be the Supreme Being, unchallenged with pastor and cardinal glorifying the new God for new God, while still ritually serving the old.
The marginalisation of blacks, would be complete without “welfare” or “affirmative action”. The one the result of struggles of the 30’s and the emergent Sovietism of the Soviet Union, misnamed socialism. Soviet State Capitalism subordinated its working class by providing welfare on the grand scale from cradle to the grave, while the exploitation of labour intensified under the all-knowing Soviet bureaucracy.
The other “Affirmative Action” was the reluctant recognition, after numerous riots, that blacks had been disadvantaged in the triumphal march of Capitalism, and so Capitalism grudgingly agreed to give blacks some “quotas” to get in at the middle echelons of capitalism. Such would at least reduce the combativity of Blacks in the U.S. When there was no combativity, affirmative action was withdrawn as the logical end to a period of “benign neglect”.
Whenever black countries engaged in consumption of the goods provided by the Almighty Market, an agency the IMF as one of God’s new archangels, would descend and structurally adjust consumption to production, while cheapening production for the Almighty Market, by devaluation or capital outflows to meet over-burdensome debts, owed to the Almighty Market’s treasurers, the bankers.
Meanwhile, the one World Government, so long hoped for by religions within and without Christianity, would not be the United Nations – which Capital would owe more than a billion dollars thus rendering it, if not totally but mostly ineffective – but the World Trade Organisation. This latter would be beyond control of national governments, but would determine where, when, if or if not certain goods and services could gain access to Heaven – the World Market – and this only if the Archangels and angels could have unlimited access and penetration of the virginity of black and developing countries.
I have said enough in the simplest terms to say something at once concrete and futuristic, to show where Euro-American history is leading the world.
Now I can move to another level. Dominant ideologies are by definition conservative. In order to reproduce themselves in all forms of social Organisation, national and international, they must see themselves as the end of history.
However, and this is crucial, the first step of scientific thought, and therefore black history, must be to go beyond the vision that the dominant conservative ideologies and the social systems they serve have of themselves.
Capitalism, in its triumphal world march, degraded and dehumanised the entire black world, not partially, but totally. The overcoming of that degradation and that dehumanisation involves and includes, logically, inevitably, and ineluctably, the overcoming of capitalism itself. To teach black studies to make blacks believe they can be integrated into the dominant social system, is merely to prolong the subordination of blacks while pretending we have some separate identity. We can glory in the specificities of our cultural history, while being more and more subordinate to the dominant conservatism. Most of our institutions of learning in the English-speaking Caribbean have made that adjustment or have been structurally adjusted into it. Do I need to call names? No. It applies to all of them, without exception. All worship, on bended knee at the altar of the market.
Maybe I should end on a more concrete, but unusual note. Capitalism as Fanon pointed out is really the story of men – HIS-story. As Fanon put it “it is the proclamation of an essential equality between men [to dominate women and the Market] which manages to appear logical to its own eyes by inviting the sub-men [blacks and Asians of the colonies] to become human and to take on the prototype of western humanity, as their own, and as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie.”
It is not an accident, that we in these developing countries take our notions of romantic love, from conditions and circumstances in which we do not live. And so we take and imbibe romantic love – the most fundamental form of human expression – from The Bold and the Beautiful, from As The World Turns, and from The Young and the Restless.
Now this is distinct contrast to the real history of women in the Caribbean. In the 19th century as the labour gangs of the plantations became increasingly female, a picture of black women emerged in conservative ideology, or the writing of history. Black women were portrayed as super-super Amazons, who could be called upon to labour all day, perform sex all night, and be quite satisfied morally and culturally to exist outside the formal structures of marriage. She was projected, by the pro-slavery advocates, in the historical or literary imagination, “as lacking a developed sense of emotional attachment to progeny or spouse, and indifferent to the values of virtue and high moral sensitivity” as Hilary Beckles so insightfully revealed. The best she was capable of is a kind of Aunt Jemima solicitude in service to whites. Her children were accounted for in the plantation’s inventory “as an additional capital unit.”
It is to see how these historical stereotypes were historically produced by “market forces” that black history has to turn its attention, and the emancipation of women, must involve a critique of the “market forces” which so subordinated Caribbean women, and how to go beyond it.
Such history, and the struggles attendant and concomitant with that study of history from the point-of-view of the oppressed, is the essence of black history.
Without that re-evaluation of history, and the struggles that go with it, humanity in all its variety and multicultural forms, cannot emancipate itself from the thralldom of Capital.
In a manner of speaking then, the emancipation of black men and women is the well-spring for the emancipation of all humanity. But the one cannot happen without the other.
The study of black history, is directly and indirectly the study of the emancipation of humanity. Not for nothing then did one of the great munch of the 20th century, CLR James link the Haitian Revolution with the French Revolution, the emancipation from slavery in America, with the movement of industrial capital, and the emancipation of European held colonies with the concentration of capital at a new pole the U.S.A. after the First but more so the Second World War. It is understanding black struggles that one understands European, American, or Korean struggles by Labour, against Capital. Bulgaria, Serbia and Korea are new flashpoints in the struggle of Labour against capital. They will inform the black struggle and vice-versa. I have said enough for now.
Last updated on 14 February 2022