31

John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"

"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.

"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"

"Not really."

"But..."

John is suddenly strangely interested.  "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."

One person making a little decision doesn't change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...

"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.

"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"

"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form.  'Races' were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'.  The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal".  There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege.  But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary.  The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world.  Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty.  It was a justification.  It divided some workers from others.  It was an unremovable mark.  Pigment became a serial number.  The toxic effects of this still deform the world.

It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery.  Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces.  In this scene, slavery is something you consume.  Do you want some slavery in your tea?  Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.

John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica.  He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war.  As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.

This scene is happening in November 1963.  The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain.  Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation".  The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour".  Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament.  Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain.  That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.

Boulders.  Lakes.  Ripples.

Categorically Speaking

Kant's categorical imperative is an expression of the bourgeois liberal ideas of the 18th century, expressed as morality.  It is progressive in the sense that it attempts to derive morality from Reason.  It is part of the Enlightenment.  It also expresses the new, universal promises of the bourgeois revolutions in that it universalises (i.e. "All men are created equal").  It is based on the principle of universality.  What you do must apply to all people or it fails to be truly moral. 

However, it is also based on a bourgeois notion of rights.  The concept of 'rights' is a product of the rise of bourgeois property/trade relations.  One brings one's rights to the market place and, on that basis, one participates in the putatively level playing field.  For Kant, one negotiates the conflicts between these rights on the basis of contractual clauses.  If the Party of the First Part undertakes to do such and such, the Party of the Second part will be understood to be obliged to do so and so.  It is this which finally inverts the universality of the notion into an entire bourgeois conception of individualism.  Through this embedded notion of contractual obligations, the decision as to universal moral actions rests with the individual's willingness to enter into a personal contract regarding his conduct, his willingness to be bound.

The sting in the tail lies in the fact that different people will always have different notions as to what is or isn't universally desirable.  One individual may consider it highly desirable that theft be considered universally immoral because they have a great personal interest in the institution of private property (i.e. because they own lots of it).  Another (who perhaps owns little) may be prepared to risk universalising the permissability of theft if he thinks he can steal what he wants and then protect his stolen goods by force.  Alternatively, there may be those who feel that there are worse prospects for the future than the fall of private property.  And, in practice, the guardians of morality will always be ready to claim the universality of laws that they themselves break, simply because they take a more pragmatic view of Reason.

The R/reasonable promises of bourgeois liberalism and Enlightenment will always have such loopholes in their social contracts and, as a result, will always find themselves in full or partial, official or unofficial abeyance.  The Enlightenment declared that all men were created equal, but oversaw (and, indeed, was partially built upon) all black men (and women) being crated equally... for shipping.  Why should a white man who profits from the slave trade care if 'enslave black people' became a universal moral maxim?  He knows the colour of his own skin will exempt him from the chains, and the inequality of property and opportunity will protect him from universal business competition.

It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

*

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.

*

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation.  ...[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.

*

Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the 'eternal laws of Nature' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into 'free labouring poor,' that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

- Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31.  My favourite bit.