Class, Race and Marxism by David Roediger

Author:David Roediger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

Settlement, Slavery, and the White Managerial Impulse

In connecting management and race, Commons bespoke longstanding, even foundational, American traditions. As members of both a white settler and a slaveholding society, Americans developed a sense of themselves as white by casting their race as uniquely fit to manage land and labor and by judging how other races might come and go in the service of that project. Dispossession of Indians, and the “changes in the land” that it entailed and celebrated, found much justification in the supposed inability of indigenous people to “husband,” or manage, the resources at their command.10 Early American management decisions centered on what sort (and quickly on what “race”) of coerced labor was most economical, skilled, durable, efficient and tractable. After a period in which Indian slavery seemed a possibility, the last century of the colonial period featured cycles of favoring white indentured servants or African slaves. Management-by-ethnicity led slave traders and owners to attempt to discern in Africans putative propensities to survive and to resist, making such matters measurable and marketable according to the “tribe” of those imported. Similarly, in the fur trade judging the abilities and fostering the willingness of specific Indian tribes and individuals to organize and defend the gathering and transport of vast quantities of furs, defined management.11

It was clearly in the nineteenth century when “race management” became formalized into the thoroughly modern practices and discourses that Commons had in mind. The factory and plantation coexisted as the most spectacular sites for management of labor in the Americas with, if anything, the latter providing models for the former. As Robin Blackburn has written, “By gathering the workers under one roof, and subordinating them to one discipline, the new industrial employers were … adapting the plantation model.”12 The words “overseer,” naming the manager surveilling and speeding up the labor of slaves, and “supervisor,” naming the manager performing just the same roles in industry, have the same literal meaning. Similarly, the word “factories” had named the West African staging areas gathering laboring bodies for the slave trade, and then for the production of cotton making possible the textile “factories” of England and of New England13

Antebellum US politics, as well as economics, turned on the relative merits of free versus slave labor. Such discussions easily devolved into considerations of the (dis)abilities of African-American labor, in the fields and especially in manufacturing, as against those of “white” labor or of the “Irish race.” Far from simply arraying the industrial North versus the agrarian South, the ideological conflicts over these matters saw capitalists in the two regions study and debate not only the relative merits of slavery and free labor, but also the productivity of “black” versus “white” workers. In the 1850s, 20 percent of all manufacturing capital was invested in the South, and the slaveholders most inclined toward proslavery Southern nationalism often led the highly theorized and quantified charge for more such investments. A Lowell weaver imported to oversee production in a Carolina mill, for example, reported that

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