Caracterización de los problemas mal planteados en la fron-

Over the past two decades, class analysis has been subjected to a full-scale assault by poststructuralists, who have rejected the possibility of developing

55 EW Burton, “Considerations upon the upper chamber in the Australasian legislatures”, Victorian Review, vol. 7, no. 37, Nov 1882, p. 3.

knowledge of the past, arguing that all we have are texts, themselves self-interested interpretations to which we bring our own agendas. From such a perspective, historical endeavour either becomes a literary activity devoid of truth-claims,⁵⁶ or the endless deconstruction of texts, whether ironically or playfully.⁵⁷ Indeed, history itself was an attempt to legitimise either the “grand narrative” of progress, or of working class revolution, and hence part of the oppressive structure of power-knowledge.⁵⁸ One response was to focus on the experience of the powerless and marginalised;⁵⁹ another to look for and

deconstruct discourses of oppression. In reply, the liberal historian, Richard Evans, pointed out that it is a pre-existing theory—the supposed bête noire that transforms history into metanarrative—that enables the historian to look beyond the superficial. “Without Marxist theory…a major and influential classic such as E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class would never have been written.”⁶⁰

A range of Marxists have also answered the critique of postmodernism. For Alex Callinicos totality is not an oppressive concept, but the reality of society.

Capitalism is a global system “into which all the human activities on the planet, in all their richness and variety, are integrated…[and] subordinated to the logic

56 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973, p. ix, p. x.

57 eg Derrida, quoted in Lawrence Stone, “History and postmodernism” in Keith Jenkins (ed), The postmodern history reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, p. 242.

58 Robert F Berkhofer Jr, Beyond the great story: History as text and discourse, The Belknap Press, Cambridge Mass, 1995, pp. 40-41.

59 eg Foucault, discussed in FR Ankersmit “The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History” in his (ed), Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate, Wesleyan University, 1986, p. 25.

60 Richard J Evans, In defence of history, Granta Books, London, 1997, p. 234.

of competitive accumulation governing the system.”⁶¹ Matt Perry argues that, far from having any theoretical foundations, postmodernism is grounded in

“Nietzche’s irrationalism, Saussure’s linguistics, Foucault’s discourse analysis and Derrida’s textualism”,⁶² and both Callinicos and Perry have subjected these theories to a powerful critique. To the postmodernist rejection of social theory as oppressive, Callinicos responded that “historical inquiry requires some conception of how human beings relate to their variable social contexts, and of the nature of and the differences between social contexts.”

The only choice the historian has is between the self-conscious adoption of an articulated social theory and the tacit reliance on an

unacknowledged social theory. Taking the latter course means that the generalizations used by the historian escape precise formulation or critical scrutiny.⁶³

This became particularly relevant in debates about Holocaust denial. An approach to history that denies the ability to establish facts or any notion of truth, leaves us without any basis on which to challenge those who insist that the Nazi Holocaust did not happen. Indeed, postmodernist Diane Purkiss has even argued that “most neo-Nazi historians adopt the most conservative possible protocols of discovery, revelation and truth-telling”, which for her shows the dangers of relying on evidentiary methods.⁶⁴ Richard Evans challenged this, arguing that the revisionists in fact falsified their evidence.

61 Alex Callinicos, Theories and narratives: Reflections on the philosophy of history, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 209.

62 Perry, p. 141.

63 Callinicos, Theories, p. 92.

64 Evans, In defence, pp. 241-2.

There is in fact a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric.

Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.⁶⁵

Nevertheless, all historical evidence is a product of social conditions, and requires interpretation. But to see history as “irreducibly theoretical” is not to reduce history to some social theory; it is to see history as a dialogue between theory and evidence while recognising that empirical evidence “imposes inescapable limits on all theorising.”⁶⁶ Far from being a determinist teleology, Marxism is, as Engels put it: “above all a guide to study… All history must be studied afresh”.⁶⁷

In the postmodernist rejection of social theory, Perry finds a mirror image of conservative empiricism; “It expresses the same theoretical incapacity of dealing with complex dynamic contradictory worlds.”⁶⁸ This incapacity is evident, for instance, in the work of Patrick Joyce, who attempted to rewrite nineteenth-century labour history on the basis of a deconstruction of the language of class. As Marxist historian, Neville Kirk, argued, this approach

65 Evans, In defence, p. 124.

66 Callinicos, Theories, pp. 93-4.

67 Letter to Schmidt, quoted in Perry, p. 61.

68 Perry, p. 152.

all too often simply accepts language, and especially the language of self-representation, at face value. There is also the strong tendency to divorce saying from doing and self-presentation from the ways in which one is seen and represented by others.⁶⁹

Kirk in particular rejected the way Joyce accepted the nineteenth-century English liberal, John Bright’s, claim to be the “standard bearer of the people” at face value, given the long-standing popular memory of Bright as a “tyrant”.⁷⁰ A range of Marxists have challenged poststructuralist theories of language and the supposed indeterminacy of meaning, drawing on the social theory of language developed by Volosinov and others.⁷¹

Much of the poststructuralist critique of Marxism was focused on a caricature, drawing on the dogmas of Stalinism, as in Ann Curthoys’ assertion that Marxist historical method was “teleological, resting on the idea that history has a

purpose, is a story only half told, whose ending is already knowable but not yet achieved.”⁷² More substantial was Curthoys’ argument that the divisions in society were plural:

since race, ethnicity, and gender play a very important part in determining economic opportunities, social position, and access to power. If gender and ethnic differences and conflicts constantly cut

69 Neville Kirk, “History, language, ideas and postmodernism: A materialist view” in Keith Jenkins (ed), The postmodern history reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, p. 332.

70 Kirk, History, language, pp 332-3.

71 Perry, pp. 141-3; Paul Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist theory of history, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006, pp. 6-11; see especially Marnie Holborow, The politics of English: A Marxist view of language, SAGE Publications, London, 1999.

72 Ann Curthoys, “Labour history and cultural studies”, Labour History, no. 67, November 1994, p. 15.

across class relationships, how can we continue to see classes as social groupings, as collective political actors?⁷³

This argument has widespread adherence, and represents a major challenge for Marxist attempts to explain racist social structures, including the racial

exclusion represented in the White Australia policy. The first thing to note is that there is nothing new in this argument. In Marxism and class theory: A bourgeois critique, Frank Parkin argued that:

The most damaging weakness in any model of class that relegates social collectivities to the status of mere incumbents of positions, or

embodiments of systemic forces, is that it cannot account properly for those complexities that arise when racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual divisions run at a tangent to formal class divisions.⁷⁴

Parkin’s agenda was to attack Marxism, not develop a theory of race or racism, but others who have also argued for a plural or Weberian understanding of power did make the attempt. The three writers who had the greatest influence on Australians writing about White Australia in the 1970s were Michael Banton, Pierre van den Berghe and John Rex.⁷⁵ They were deeply discontented with

73 Curthoys, Labour history and cultural studies, p. 14.

74 Frank Parkin, Marxism and class theory: A bourgeois critique, Tavistock publications, London, 1979, p. 4.

75 Ann Curthoys explicitly acknowledged her intellectual debt to van den Berghe, using the title of his Race and ethnicity (Basic Books, New York, 1970) for the title of her PhD thesis, “Race and ethnicity: A study of the response of British colonists to Aborigines, Chinese and non-British Europeans in New South Wales, 1856-1881”, Macquarie University, 1973, p. iv; as did Andrew Markus in his Fear and hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850-1901, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, where he attempted to apply to nineteenth century Australia a modified version of the dominant and competitive ideal types of van den Berghe’s race relations theory, pp. 287-8 for acknowledgement, and pp. 242-50 for his attempt to apply a modified version of van den Berghe’s theory. Ray Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin framed their work within the somewhat more radical theory of John Rex, see Kathryn Cronin, “‘The yellow agony’: Racial attitudes and responses towards the Chinese in colonial Queensland” in Raymond Evans, Kay

mainstream race relations sociology in Britain and America, which through the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s had been focused on “empirical” studies, for instance of racial tensions and attitudes in specific localities. Writing in 1967, Van den Berghe saw the empiricist and anti-theoretical nature of much of the existing work as ideological, hiding a complacent liberal optimism about “the basic ‘goodness’ of American society” and a social program focused on getting minority groups assimilated into the mainstream. Rex saw the contribution of professional sociologists as “negligible” at best, and reactionary at worst, with some seeing their job as protecting Britain’s political culture from the threat supposedly posed by “coloured people”.⁷⁶

Banton attempted to develop a general theory focusing on the development of racist ideas and the social construction of racist behaviour, while both van den Berghe and Rex attempted to construct typologies of racial situations and to identify those social structures which underpinned forms of institutionalised racism.⁷⁷

Rex rejected Marxism, and instead theorised race relations as a product of the relations between social groups of some kind, but in attempting to define these social groups he faced the conundrum inherent in this kind of analysis. For the conception of “racial group” to mean anything, it must either be something objective in human society, or it must be a category determined by human

Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Race relations in colonial Queensland: A history of exclusion, exploitation and extermination, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988 (First published 1975), p. 264.

76 van den Berghe, Race and racism, pp. 5-8; John Rex, Race, colonialism and the city, pp. xii, 167, 180.

77 John Rex, Race, colonialism and the city, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1973, pp. 174, 177.

consciousness. The only possible basis for an objective ascription of “race” is biological, and Rex rightly rejected that as having no foundation in science. He then considered defining “a situation as racial if the people whom we are studying think it to be so”. This, too, he rejected for being “subjective”, and because “it sells the pass to the racists” by allowing them to determine that

“race” really is biological. The result was that he had nowhere left to go, and seven pages later, in Race, colonialism and the city, he had decided that a racial situation was one “of inter-group differentiation in which men [sic] explain the differences between them in terms of biological theories.” Perhaps the racists did get to define racial situations, and by extension, racial groups, after all. The more serious problem was that the argument was largely circular, racists produce racialised situations and races which in turn open the door to racism.⁷⁸

Pierre van den Berghe’s theory of racism has many similarities to that of John Rex. He argued that a “race” is a group that is “socially defined but on the basis of physical criteria”, and, “[i]t is not the presence of objective physical

differences between groups that creates races, but the social recognition of such differences as socially significant or relevant.” Racism occurs when there is institutionalised inequality between two or more social groups and some kind of cultural or physical difference between the groups, socially defined as “race”.

Again, the existence of “races” is a product of racism; and racism a product of unequal relations between races. Again, the argument is almost entirely circular.⁷⁹ One consequence of the Rex/van den Berghe approach is that it

78 Rex, Race, colonialism and the city, pp. 183, 184, 190-1, 203-4. Of course the difference between these two propositions is that the second involves a situation of structural differences between social groups, and Rex lists and discusses nine such structures.

79 Pierre van den Berghe, Race and racism: A comparative perspective, John Wiley & Sons, New York, London, Sydney, 1967, pp. 9, 13. It cannot be entirely coincidental that van den Berghe

naturalises both race and racism. As Colette Guillaumin pointed out, the very notion of “race” implies that there are profound natural differences between groups of humanity, and that racism has a natural, biological foundation.⁸⁰

The issue of social group formation is the most problematic part of this

approach to understanding racism. It is largely assumed that “white” people, those belonging to the dominant group, would naturally choose to belong to it.

But what is not explained is why “black” people, belonging to the subordinate group, would choose to belong to the social group defined as “black”;⁸¹ their acceptance of this status is simply assumed. As Theodore W Allen put it in his monumental study of the origins of African-American slavery, “while some people may desire to be masters, all persons are born equally unwilling and unsuited to be slaves”. Allen insisted that to understand the origins of slavery and the idea of the white race in the United States, you needed to study the business of social control—how it was that the slave owners and the rest of the ruling class were able to impose racial slavery on African labourers, and then sustain it by mobilising and disciplining poor whites.⁸² In criticising the psycho-cultural approach of Carl Degler, who argued that American slavery was a product of English prejudices against black people, Allen insisted that “whatever the state of English prejudices at that time, any attempt to hold African laborers in

moved to embrace a form of sociobiology in the late 1970s; see his “Race and ethnicity: A sociobiological perspective” in Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 1, 1978, pp. 401-11.

80 Her argument is discussed in Robert Miles, “Apropos the idea of ‘race’…again” in Les Back and John Solomos (eds), Theories of race and racism: A reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp. 136-7.

81 Michael Lyon pointed out that this was the implication of Banton’s approach, in “Banton’s contribution to racial studies in Britain: an overview”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, October 1985, pp. 81-3.

82 Theodore W Allen, The invention of the white race: Volume 1: Racial oppression and social control, Verso, London and New York, 1994, pp. 1, 8-21.

lifetime hereditary bond-servitude was doomed by the African ‘prejudice’

against it, as expressed by flight and rebellion.”⁸³ And even when it came to cohering the dominant group, the “white” race, where all the benefits were concentrated, compulsion was necessary. In his book, Race Relations, Michael Banton noted some of the processes by which people designated white were compelled to respect and sustain the colour line in the US South. In this analysis he argued that social groups cohered as a result of “stimuli”, and that when it came to the US South, “there are many stimuli to evoke racial alignment”.⁸⁴ But once again, at precisely the point where racism needed to be explained, there was no explanation as to how and why these “stimuli” were able to dominate the field when so many people had a direct interest in getting rid of them. One common approach, typified by the work of Frank Parkin and reflected in almost all writing on the exclusion of Chinese people in Australia, was to see the white working class as the group who imposed “social closure” against racialised people. David Mason has challenged this approach, pointing out that white workers “are themselves excluded from access to valued resources”.⁸⁵

What Banton, Rex and van den Berghe have in common, despite their analytical differences, is a Weberian approach to the structures of racism. All use the Weberian device of “ideal types” to describe differing situations of racial conflict and domination, and all see “race” as an autonomous structure of power in society, reflecting a Weberian (and indeed Nietzscheian) view of relations of domination as inherently plural.⁸⁶ At the level of broad social

83 Allen, Invention, vol. 1, p. 8; italics in original.

84 Michael Banton, Race relations, Tavistock, London, 1967, pp. 62-8.

85 See Parkin, pp. 37, 39, 86; David Mason, “Race relations, group formation and power: A framework for analysis”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, October 1982, p. 426.

86 See Alex Callinicos, Theories, p. 111.

theory, the British Marxist Alex Callinicos has argued that the central analytical weakness of Weberian sociology is its single-minded focus on conflict and power, which leads its adherents to “lose sight of what Marx calls the labour process—the co-operative activity through which human beings work

together”.⁸⁷ The same methodological problem is evident in what I am calling

“Weberian” approaches to racism.⁸⁸

This problem becomes most acute when Weberian and other decentred

approaches are asked to theorise white anti-racism. Any theory of racism must be able to offer a consistent explanation of its opposite. If racism represents an independent structure of power and privilege, separate from economic power and state power, how do we account for white support for black civil rights in America, white support for Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and white support for refugees and Muslims at the present—even if these currents are in a minority? How do we account for the almost total disappearance of

anti-Catholic prejudice in Australia—a prejudice that was extremely powerful (and organised) for over a century? It is here that the one-sided focus on power and conflict characteristic of Weberian theories becomes most problematic. Some of the writers I have discussed have dealt with this issue, and their approaches are revealing. Banton saw class solidarity as one way that ethnic identity can

diminish,⁸⁹ but didn’t develop the point. Pierre van den Berghe saw the possible

87 Callinicos, Theories, pp. 127-8.

88 Michael Lyon makes this point about Banton and Rex, in Banton’s contribution, p. 474. Banton links the “plural society” approach of Kuper and van den Berghe to Weber and his analysis of groupings called “stand”, or estates (as distinct from status groups) in The idea of race, Westview Press, Boulder (Co), 1977, p. 164. See also David Mason, “Introduction” in John Rex and David Mason (eds), Theories of race and ethnic relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New

88 Michael Lyon makes this point about Banton and Rex, in Banton’s contribution, p. 474. Banton links the “plural society” approach of Kuper and van den Berghe to Weber and his analysis of groupings called “stand”, or estates (as distinct from status groups) in The idea of race, Westview Press, Boulder (Co), 1977, p. 164. See also David Mason, “Introduction” in John Rex and David Mason (eds), Theories of race and ethnic relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New