Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
out in different states, the industrial working class that Marx considered to be the vanguard of the revolution became the “labor aristocracy” later identified by Lenin.37 The transformation of the proletariat from an exploited mass with “nothing to lose but their chains” to a politically integrated constituency administered by the state pacified the working class.38
Of course, the incorporation of different working classes reflects the concrete, historical characteristics of a social formation. Thus, in the United States, the working class was incorporated in a racially differentiated manner. Capital does contain the universal and theoretical ambition to create “a world after its own image,” a smooth space where capital can move freely, where all of humanity sells their labor for a wage, and all human activities are organized through the commodity-form and cash nexus.39 However, capital is also a pragmatic and promiscuous producer of difference. Historically, capital organized and subsumed all forms of labor control—slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production, and reciprocity—within a global division of labor.40 The global differentiation and territorial spread of these modes of labor control have forever linked processes of labor- and racial-formation. Historically, capital formed non-white populations as marginalized groups through a process of wholesale, collective proletarianization, what Oliver Cromwell Cox understood as the substantive material force behind modern racism as a social structure.41 The nascent capitalist world-economy of the sixteenth century was also a global racial regime: slavery for blacks, indentured labor for whites, and “coerced cash crop labour” for the indigenous populations of the Americas. Over time, racialized subjectivities are also enforced from below in ways that are “simultaneously politically calming (learning how to adapt and thereby cope) and radicalizing (learning the nature and source of oppressions).”42 As Stuart Hall famously put it, “Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced.”43 The interwoven nature of racial- and labor-formation created an interwoven global structure of racial and class oppression, “the problem color line” that marked the boundary between global poles of wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion, exaltation and abnegation.44
While the color line set the boundary between Europe and the colonialized world, it ran through the United States and shaped the formation and incorporation of the working class. In what would become the United States, the racialization of the working class preceded the extension of the franchise and the recognition of organized labor. During the early colonial period, ruling mercantile elites relied on two sources of bonded labor: African slaves and the indentured servitude of poor Europeans. In 1676, these two groups joined together in Bacon’s Rebellion, a revolt in Virginia spurred by the wretched conditions of bonded laborers, among other issues. After authorities put down the uprising, however, plantation owners and mercantile elites codified racial hierarchy into law, the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, inventing the white race and dividing the working class with the color line.45 The racialization of the working class also affected its pacification. A formal, legal system of racial control now mediated the organization of labor and the relations among individuals.
The reformulation of the state as an overtly white supremacist entity, however, was not a direct and simple outgrowth of the racist elites. Instead, this transformation of the state is the condensation of a relationship. In other words, the formalization of racial conflict after Bacon’s Rebellion was a strategic response of the ruling class to an unfavorable relation of forces, the threat of rebellion from bonded labor. It led to reformulation of the law and the institutional apparatus of the state that formalized racial domination, divided the working class, pacified a revolutionary threat, and strengthened elites by disarticulating the working class. In this way, the state is neither a “Thing-instrument . . . which is so completely manipulated by one class or fraction that it is divested of any autonomy whatsoever,” nor a “Subject . . . enjoy[ing] absolute autonomy.” Instead, a particular “state-form” arises from the materiality of social relations. In this conception, the state is “a site and centre of the exercise of power but possesses no power of its own.”46 Power is located in the struggles around and within the institutional apparatus of the state. The outcomes of these struggles—the shifting power differentials among groups and their institutionalization—produce a particular state-form, the complex of relations and institutions that organizes capital accumulation and regulates the social surplus. In the United States, the intertwining of racial- and labor-formation means that the state-form is inescapably racialized. Labor, as a whole, did not gain a foothold in the state. Labor racially valued as white did. This racialization pacified the working class, limiting the extent and scope of class struggle. Racial politics constrained working-class politics, conditioned the formation of the state, and colored the prose of pacification that animated it.
THE HERRENVOLK-WELFARE STATE
This racialized incorporation and pacification of the working class had far-reaching consequences. More than just a specific facet of labor-formation, racialization is also an epistemic process of subject formation that infantilizes, animalizes, and criminalizes racialized populations, rather than humanizing them as rational subjects and human lives with value.47 In the United States, the intertwined nature of racial- and labor-formation organized life at the most quotidian levels, shaping how people understood themselves, interpreted their world, and interacted with each other. These processes created a fundamentally racialized polity, what some scholars labeled a herrenvolk democracy:48
Under this regime, which persisted until the civil rights movement, all whites are political equals while all not-white persons are relegated to an inferior status. The result is a curious mix of democratic government and egalitarian values along with state repression, mob violence, and an ideology, justified by religion and science, of the eternal inequality of humanity.49
Herrenvolk democracy pacified social struggles by linking blackness with criminality and creating whiteness as a vessel through which the productive violence of pacification flowed. These arrangements also pacified the working classes in a different way. Race provided an alternative to class identity. The cross-class alliance created by a strongly felt white identity redirected political attention away from capital-labor antagonism and toward contradictions within the working class. As a result, the (white) working class won a weak welfare state within a stark and punitive system of racial order.50
While the origins of herrenvolk democracy lie in the sixteenth century, this racialized system of social regulation not only survived the disruptions associated with the Civil War, it structured the rise of industrial capitalism in ways that benefited capital. As W. E. B. DuBois famously argued in Black Reconstruction, white workers chose the “psychological wage” of white supremacy over proletarian solidarity and abolition democracy.51 Further-more, white workers earned their whiteness, in part, by participating in the subjugation of non-whites. Policing played a critical role. During slavery and Jim Crow—the period of overt, legally codified white supremacy—policing was a vehicle through which whiteness was expanded. European ethnics, particularly the Irish and Germans, solidified their claims to whiteness, in part, through working in and eventually seizing political control over police forces.52 More broadly, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period historians call “the nadir of race relations”—was a time of protracted, “low-intensity” racial terror: thousands lynched, anti-Chinese pogroms, the genocidal end to the “Indian Wars,” the imperial incursions in the Caribbean and Pacific. Whiteness solidified in relation to this violence.53
The policing of industrializing cities was particularly important. Urbanization created new social worlds with possibilities for interracial socialization, cultural subversion, and political radicalism. The city became a clear site of class struggle. Between 1889 and 1915, an estimated 57,000 strikes mobilized ten million workers. As with the racial terror of the period, private groups like the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the American Legion were major players in the pacification of labor unrest. The conflicts also spurred the modernization of police forces, leading to the formation of the first police intelligence units, Red Squads.54 Fabricating the new industrial order required more than strike breaking, policing also secured the color