Colour mania in the past (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Colour prejudice, and the classification of people as “superior” or “inferior” simply because of the colour of their skin, is one of the most persistent and pernicious of fallacies. The important thing to remember is that such an attitude is completely modern. It is not something that has existed from the beginning of man’s life, and neither is it a deep-rooted human instinct.

Its origins lie a mere three or four hundred years back. No European regarded Genghis Khan or Suleiman the Magnificent as inferior beings, or worried about their colour. And they themselves were “colour-blind;” their murderous and highly efficient armies were multi-racial. The shock troops of the Turkish army, the Janissaries, contained a large number of white men in their ranks. Again, in the 15th Century when Portuguese ships were edging their way around the coast of Africa, they did not consider that the colour of the Continent's inhabitants was important. Anybody who embraced Christianity and fitted into the economic set-up was accepted into the fold. Both Mulattoes and Negroes rose to high positions in Portuguese society. They commanded Portuguese ships, and many became priests, often rising to be high dignitaries of the church. They became interpreters and advisers to native chiefs and to resident Europeans, as well as brokers and merchants. Many settled in Europe, after a successful career of moneymaking. More important still, many became slave-traders of great importance, feeling no more affinity with negro slaves than a European aristocrat felt for a European peasant.

Certainly prejudices and hatreds of one sort or another have existed for centuries. Religious bigotry, fear and suspicion of strangers, aristocratic contempt for the lower classes, hostility between cities or states, and the bitterness of the merchant classes towards the landed nobility are a few examples. The permutations were endless, but they had nothing to do with colour. The Jews were the object of bitter persecution for many centuries, but this was purely a religious matter, and not racial.

It is to the history of modern Europe that we must turn for an explanation of colour prejudice. For about 300 years Western Europe had it all its own way, and dominated the world. As Europe moved from Feudalism into Capitalism, it went through a period of intense development—technological, military, and political. This gave it an immense advantage over other areas, especially the two great continents of America and Africa, whose inhabitants were in a much earlier stage of development. Ancient empires went down before mere handfuls of Europeans, and the treasure houses of Peru and Bengal were open to these rapacious plunderers. Whole continents were colonised and exploited by these same small nations. This gave rise to ideas about the superiority of the white races. The workers of Europe, slaving away in their dark Satanic mills, were able to console themselves with the thought that they were members of a “Master Race”. This gave rise to race theorists whose ideas, suitably simplified, are still trotted out today.

Of course three hundred years is a very short time in over five thousand years of recorded history, and if you apply the test—that military or scientific ability equals superiority—to five thousand years, and not just three hundred, then the white races have come out pretty badly. Race theories are now being put forward again in this country, for example by the British National Party, who are trying to exploit immigration difficulties in Southall. They overlook the fact that the people who formed the spearhead of European expansion—Portuguese, Spaniards and Italians: men like Columbus, Cortez, Vasco da Gama, and Cabot — were members of what race theorists consider an inferior section of the white races, dubbed by Lapouge, one of the most rabid of racists, as Homo Alpinus. You may not be able to have your cake and eat it but race theorists are always trying to.

As conditions change, so we are witnessing the racists shifts in attitude. Not so long ago the Chinese were regarded in a rather patronising manner. Romantic or sinister, mysterious or comical, but definitely inferior. A popular song of the 1920’s —Limehouse Blues—describes them as “Chinkies”. That sinister lot, with their opium dens in a kind of East London hell —any schoolboy, who could afford the price of a Tuppeny Blood knew that they were up to no good. In reality the Chinese of East London were small in number and engaged in the most mundane of occupations. But China, having led the world for most of its history, had temporarily fallen behind. It was divided and militarily weak, a prey to the greed of the European powers, and overshadowed by its pushing neighbour Japan. The Chinese could be regarded with amused tolerance. Today such expressions as “Chinkies” and “Chinaman” have a strange, archaic ring, and it is difficult to realise that they were once in common usage. Today China is a major power with its foot on the nuclear ladder, and is now challenging the U.S.A. or Russia. Chinamen are no longer comical.

But of all race prejudices, one stands out above all others—that against the Negro. An American Negro folk singer summed up the position in a few bitter lines.

If you're White, alright,

If you're Brown, stick around,

But if you’re Black, get back—get back—get back.

Unbelieveable lengths have been gone to, to keep the image of the Negro as an inferior being, and to write the lie into the sub-conscious mind. One example will suffice. The great folk hero of the 20th century is the cowboy, played against a backcloth of the legendary West. For fifty years they've galloped across the screens in their thousands. One thing you will never see; a Black Cowboy. But at the time of the great cattle drives, there were estimated to be over five thousand Negroes working as cowboys. This is not surprising, as cattle droving was a dangerous and badly paid job, and Negroes, like other members of the working class including Mexicans and Chinese, worked at it.

Forty years ago in the early Western films all cowboys were Whiter than White, while Mexicans, with their nasty faces under their big hats, were the villains. Today Mexicans and Chinese cowboys are portrayed, but the Negro still must not be allowed to be a folk hero. Why does such an attitude exist? The answer lies in one word; Slavery. With the opening of the American Continent there began a gigantic forced migration. The caravels that sailed from West Africa to the New World with their tragic cargo were radically to alter the pattern of world population. They were to make the Negro races second only to Europeans in their dispersion throughout the world. Estimates vary, but certainly many millions of Negroes were transported. Chattel slavery was an ancient institution, it was one of the economic stages through which humanity had passed. But modern slavery was unique.

In slave societies slavery was accepted as part of life, just as wage labour is accepted today. Anyone of any race or religion was liable to be a slave; even a member of a ruling class could be captured in war and enslaved. Slavery was regarded as a misfortune, it was not regarded as a sign of racial inferiority. But there was an important difference about the slavery that grew up in the modern world, in that the people who practised it had long left slavery behind. Europe had passed out of slavery, through feudalism, and was emerging into Capitalism by the lime the Western slave trade got under way. The world was treated to a new spectacle — slave traders who prated of freedom. At least the slavers of ancient Rome or Baghdad had not accompanied their activities with shouts of Liberty and Equality.

After all, the logical conclusion of a belief in liberty is that all men should be free, but the slavers’ profits were far too good for that kind of logic. To struggle, and even suffer, for political freedom on one hand, and accept slavery on the other, requires the kind of attitude that can look at a modern dictatorship and call it a Peoples’ Democracy, it also needs justification, and the only way the slavers could do this was to convince themselves that the slaves were sub-human, and fit only for slavery. To achieve this end the bottom of the intellectual barrel was scraped, and the Bible as well as pseudo-science were dragged into bolster up the double talk.

But colour mania goes beyond a mere question of skin colour. Race theorists have invented divisions within the “white” races themselves, with colour of hair, eyes and the shade of skin as the “tests’’. These divisions have been given such names as the Latin, Celtic, Slav or Aryan races. In fact these divisions are purely linguistic, and extremely vague ones at that; .they have nothing whatever to do with race. Which of them is held to be inferior or superior depends largely on which group the particular theorist happens to belong to. 

Perhaps the most violent and disastrous of all these myths was that of the Aryan, Nordic or Teuton, which reached its ultimate lunacy in Nazi Germany. “Teutons" are, roughly those people living in North West Europe, mainly Germany, Scandinavia, the Low countries and England. They are, according to themselves, the finest flowering of the human race. The "true Teuton” is blond, tall and blue eyed. This is so silly, as a glance at the majority of people in these countries will show, that one would be inclined to dismiss it, if it were not for the terrible example of Nazi Germany. One has only to look at many of the Nazi leaders — including Hitler — to realise the depth of self-deception that the racists can plumb.

The definition of the “true Teuton” is interesting. Every age and civilisation has its ideal type of person, and an ideal conception of beauty. This ideal changes, often from generation to generation, as a study of advertisements, matinée idols and popular magazines over the last half century will show. These ideal types tend to be portrayed in popular literature, art or poetry, in spite of the fact that they bear little or no relationship to the vast majority of people, so that a picture of an age, taken from these sources alone, would be completely deceptive. The “ideal person ’ of the Vikings and early North Europeans appears to have been tall, blond and blue eyed. All of the ”best people” in their sagas and poems, all the gods, heroes, and nobility, are portrayed in this manner. With the rise of German and other European nationalisms these ancient writings were brought out, and it was concluded, quite incorrectly, that all early and therefore “pure” Teutons were; tall, blond and blue eyed.

Workers who profess to support the theories of the racists, should read them a little more carefully. All the race theorists —Gobineau, Lapouge, Houston Chamberlain or Nietzsche to name just a few—had another side to their theories. This was their contempt for the working class. Whatever their differences on other fields they were agreed on this one point. The mere fact of being workers, they thought, marked people out as lower human types. All the race theorists had axes to grind — German nationalism, British Imperialism, control of immigrants into the U.S.A., and above all aristocratic supremacy. They would not have been at all impressed by such slogans as Keep Brixton White, considering that Brixton, like other working class areas, was fit only for what they called “lower human types” to inhabit.

Race theorists today are unscientific, inconsistent and pernicious. In this, they arc carrying on an inglorious tradition, and perpetuating a history of cynical deception..

Les Dale

The Great Discoveries and their economic effects. (1926)

From the February 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

When civilisation was concentrated round the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, Phoenician ships from Syria pushed further and further westward, trading; and colonising as they went, and preventing the too credulous Greeks from intruding by spreading tales of the quite mythical sea monsters they had met on the voyage. They eventually reached the Atlantic and coasted south-west round Africa, and tradition has it that their ships made call at Britain for supplies of Cornish tin. Of this we are not sure and we know still less about the Scandinavian voyager, Leif, son of Eric the Red, who it is said reached America in the year 1,000.

But in 1492 Christopher Columbus, fortified by nothing more definite than his inability to believe “that the sun shines upon nothing, and that the nightly watches of the stars are wasted on trackless seas and desert lands,” sailed westward across the Atlantic to look for a route round the world to India and the East, and hit upon the West Indian Islands. This was the era of the Great Discoveries.

Five years later, after half a century of persistent Portuguese exploration of the West African coast, Vasco de Gama succeeded in passing the Cape of Good Hope and in opening direct sea communication with India. By 1500 the Portuguese were settled in Brazil and there followed innumerable explorations from end to end of the Atlantic shores of North and South America. In 1520 Magellan had rounded the southern tip of South America and found a sea route to Eastern Asia, although the voyage of over two years cost the lives of Magellan and half his crew. We read of repeated attempts during the succeeding centuries to find sea passages to the North of America and Asia.

To understand the effects of this era of expansion, we must consider the economic condition of Europe in the preceding centuries, and its relations with the East.

Over the greater part of Europe “natural economy” as distinct from “money economy” still prevailed. That is to say, food and clothing were in the main produced for use in the immediate neighbourhood ; trade, and the use of money, were comparatively rare, and limited to luxury goods. The exceptions were the great trading and manufacturing towns which had sprung up at convenient centres for the collection and distribution of commodities, and on the most important land or sea trade routes.

The sea trade was in the hands of merchants of Genoa and Venice and other Italian towns, and of the Hanse towns in the Baltic. The Hanse traders dealt chiefly with Russia, Scandinavia, and the Baltic lands, and were interested in raw materials such as wool, which they obtained from England, corn which they supplied to many Mediterranean nations, and fish.

The Genoese had a monopoly of the South Russian trade which came overland round the Black Sea bringing silks and spices from India and China. The spices were valued highly because it was only by their liberal use that the meat of those times could be made really palatable.

The Venetians, too, dealt in spices, drugs and other Eastern products transported by caravans which entered Egypt from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. These spices were grown in the East Indian Islands and reached the termini of the caravan routes in the ships of Arab traders who held undisputed sway over the Indian Ocean.

Both Genoa and Venice brought their luxury wares to depots such as Antwerp, where exchange took place with the Hanse merchants. Overland routes ran up the Rhone to Paris; over the Alps and down the Rhine ; and from Venice via Augsburg and Nurembourg to Hamburg and other Baltic centres.

Both groups of merchants made regular calls at English Ports, and the bulk of European trade was in their hands. It was this trade which gave political importance to the cities and was the cause of their rivalries. The chief source of the merchant’s wealth and the goal of every adventurer’s ambition was the East, which up to that time had not been directly and easily accessible to Europe.

During the 15th century, owing to the advance of the Turks into Europe, the whole of this trade was endangered. In 1453 Constantinople fell to them and the Genoese routes were altogether barred; while the Turkish approach to Egypt threatened also the activities of the Venetians. It was the Turkish invasion which was the immediate cause of the desire to reach India by sea, and consequently of the great expansion during the 16th century.

The marked increase of exploration had the effect, which was of great importance afterwards, of giving rise to a new tradition of more daring and skilful seamanship in Portugal and Spain and later in Holland and England. The discoveries caused the shifting of the centres of commerce from the Mediterranean to those countries with an Atlantic coast; the drying up of the overland routes to the Baltic and the consequent decline of the Mid-European cities ; the abandoning of much of the caravan communication with Asia; and the sapping of the vitality of Venice and Genoa. Spain, Portugal and England were thus encouraged to build their own mercantile fleets.

The Portuguese established an Indian Empire and gained control of the East Indian spice islands and a monopoly of the traffic in the Indian Ocean. The amount of trade increased enormously, but the distribution of the wares in Europe was conducted and financed by the Dutch, who obtained the bulk of the profits and laid the foundations of their own later financial supremacy. It was the Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean and the endorsement of their claim which they obtained from the Pope, that induced the Spaniards to finance Columbus in his attempt to reach India by sailing westwards. The discovery of America was, however, not used by Spain to develop commerce. The finding of gold and silver and the extensive mining of the latter which began in 1530 enabled Spain to prosper for a while on a different basis. She attempted to make the new world merely a source of bullion monopolised by her, and to keep this bullion inside the mother country. The result of the monopoly and exclusion of foreign traders was to incite Dutch and English freebooters to attack the bullion ships, and the bullionist policy at home was equally disastrous in the long run. There was a world rise in prices as a result of the inflow of gold and silver, but instead of allowing the food and other industries to profit and grow by satisfying the big demand from the new colonies, the sheep-owning families who were the ruling class deliberately hampered them.

Then, owing to an anti-foreign agitation, due to a mistaken notion that the presence of foreigners in the country had caused the rise in prices, the Government expelled those who had been their best artisans and merchants and without whom industry declined. Spain then became largely dependent on supplies of fish, corn, and manufactured goods from Holland and England, this again stimulating the economic development of the latter.

The rise in prices had a generally quickening effect on trade outside of Spain, and not only did this affect the trading nations and their industries, but it materially speeded up the introduction of money in place of “natural economy.” This was the immediate cause of the peasant war in Germany in 1525, owing to bitter disputes about the money value of labour services. The war set Germany back economically, and the other advanced nations benefited by the removal of a rival. The working out and decline of her mining industries also affected Germany adversely. Accumulation of capital, which was rendered easier by the abundance of gold and silver, led to the opening of new commercial and industrial enterprises in the East and the New World as well as in Europe.

This growth of capital, the consequent greater power of the merchants, and the new contact with the non-Christian East were also the causes of a revival of slavery and had a depressing effect on the condition of the peasants and wage earners in Europe itself.

England rapidly changed from a wool exporting to a wool manufacturing nation and before the end of the 16th century her commerce was largely carried on in English ships; both the Venetian and Hanse fleets having ceased to call.

The high prices which ruled universally, and the particularly high price of wool due to the demand from Flanders and from home manufacturers were the chief causes of the great decrease of arable and increase of pasture farming in England, a process assisted by the suppression of the Monasteries and the dispersal of their lands in 1536. This agricultural revolution which was in progress up to 1600 had the effect of driving many thousands of tenants and labourers off the land into the towns, where for a long time there was no demand for their services. In the meantime vagrancy grew to be a serious problem and the Poor Law became a permanent national institution.

Great trading companies to East and West were formed and out of the strife of the early buccaneers an English merchant fleet was built which eventually surpassed that of the Dutch, and was to be the foundation of England’s future commercial and naval power.

The development of shipping and the demand for timber from Russia opened up communications with that country and materially hastened its internal political and economic growth.

New East coast towns like Boston and Hull grew up for the Baltic trade, while Bristol flourished on the trade across the Atlantic. England now became the centre of the Christian world, owing to her admirable position as a depot. There was a corresponding decline in the commercial monopoly previously exercised by Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean.

With the rise of her commerce and banking, Holland also carefully developed her agriculture, and her success in the use of root crops and grasses which for the first time made it possible to keep stock alive during the winter, was of great importance to England and other countries which later learned from her example.

For Europe as a whole the results were important and lasting. The need for big accumulations of capital to join in the new commercial enterprises, which were of an unprecedented size and expense, and the need for adequate protection against attack in distant waters, gave an urge towards national instead of city organisation. This was the economic basis of the new nations and Empires, Portugal, Spain, Holland and England.

The great increase in sea voyages, the new experiences and the new knowledge of navigation obtained from the Arabs gave an added importance to overseas trade and, as has been seen, destroyed the old Mediterranean and overland trade routes.

In its turn commercial activity created bigger markets and a steadier demand for raw materials and industrial products, which reacted immediately on the hitherto small and unprogressive industries. Local isolation tended to be broken down as bigger areas were drawn into the sphere of commerce either as sources of supply or as consumers of Colonial and Eastern goods. The use of money became everywhere more general with its disintegrating effect on the old Manorial relationships, and banking began to be of new importance as a support of industry.

In short, the discoveries began the era of industrial and commercial activity which continued without essential change till the Industrial Revolution.

Edgar Hardcastle

Words and Men. — Part 2 (1933)

From the November 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

Here it is necessary to deviate from the path of literature proper to recall certain landmarks of this revolutionary epoch.

In England the feudal barons were engaged in the internecine squabbles called Wars of the Roses (1455-1485), which represent the death agony of the feudal aristocracy and ended by exterminating or impoverishing all the leading barons and establishing, with the Tudor Henry VII, a dynasty embodying the alliance between the central monarchy and the burgher guilds.

Gutenberg in 1445 had perfected his printing press, a copy of which was introduced into England by Caxton in 1477. This invention was of inestimable value to literature; it meant that books became comparatively cheap and ceased to be an aristocratic or priestly monopoly; the spread of knowledge to all classes was now possible.

Following a period of keen competition among the various Mediterranean traders came the siege and capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. This finally blocked the most important route to India and the Far East, whence came not merely luxury silks and ornaments, but the gold and silver required by commercial society and the condiments and spices vitally necessary at a time when there was no efficient means of preserving meat. Supreme incentive was thus given to the attempts at finding a new route to the East; Prince Henry in 1460, Diaz in 1486 and Da Gama in 1498 coasted round Africa until the way to India lay open; Columbus in 1492 and the Cabots in 1497 attempted a westward passage and came across America; Amerigo Vespucci crossed the South Atlantic in 1500 and in 1520 Magellan followed him, rounded Cape Horn and ended by circumnavigating the globe. Gold and silver were at first obtained by robbing or taxing the natives; later rich deposits were discovered in Bolivia and Mexico in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The increase in navigation led to far-reaching astronomical investigation, and soon all ideas of the nature of the universe had been entirely revolutionised.

This vigorous stir and bustle of adventuring after new worlds immeasurably extended the bounds of literature, enriching its vocabulary and multiplying its subjects. Moreover, Constantinople had for centuries been the cultural descendant of classical antiquity, the centre of European learning. The invasion of their city by the “infidel” Turks sent hundreds of scholars with their scientific instruments' and ancient manuscripts into Western Europe, particularly Italy and France, where their command of philosophy, literature, art and science received unstinted appreciation from an expanding society athirst for every aspect of knowledge.

In England the Renaissance was assisted by the closing of the monasteries, which left numbers of men with no ideas of living but the sale of their ability to read and write.

By the opening of the sixteenth century merchant capitalism had taken root all over Western Europe ; it brought a period of strong monarchies, increased leisure, comparative peace, and enormous intellectual activity of every kind, and notably a rapid growth of diverse and elaborate forms of art: painting, engraving, sculpture, gold and silver work, wood-carving, architecture, poetry, philosophical works, satire, essays, “Utopias," stories of adventure real and imagined. This time of prolific expression is called the Re-Birth or Renaissance. In it we see the enterprise, vitality and optimism of the new and lively ruling class finding an immediate and abundant echo in every art form as yet known to man.

The Renaissance in literature is represented in England by poets like Thomas Wyatt and, later, Spenser and Philip Sidney, essayists or philosophers like Thomas More, Bacon and Thomas Browne, and playwrights like Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare. In France it early found complete and peerless expression in Francois Rabelais, who more than any other one man is the prototype of the fresh order of society. His first work, Gargantua, appeared in 1532, twelve years after the first journey round the world; he produced three others before his death in 1552. The key-note of them all is an ardent devotion to “universal science” and a boundless love of life. Life is good; the world is good; mankind must have every freedom to develop fully in all directions; original sin is absurd, metaphysical speculation of any kind is absurd; let us collect concrete facts about this amazing universe and approach its most diverse aspects with unquenchable curiosity. The bourgeois class, as it gathered its strength to throw off the shackles of feudalism, was grasping at the whole world, not at mere abstractions and forms, but at life itself; and that is what Rabelais offers. He cares nothing for beauty or morality, and hardship and suffering are but further manifestations of the abundant variety of life. This was, of course, a highly convenient philosophy for a society engaged in establishing a new form of the slave trade. His terrific command of words reflects the fertility of his brain, his gigantic optimism the vision of a new world both physical and intellectual.

He was followed in France by the sceptical individualist Montaigne, whose use of the essay-form was coincident with the growth of the physical sciences, especially astronomy, mechanics and hydrostatics, whose insistence on personal liberty was typical of a society desirous of unlimited free competition, but whose pessimism showed that the high hopes of limitless expansion for mankind held at the time of Rabelais were not being fulfilled. This streak of pessimism is to run through all French literature so long as the anachronisms of feudal organisation remain to dam the tide of social change.

Some seventy years after Rabelais comes Shakespeare (1564-1616). The bourgeois class in England had been able to develop fairly freely, and English buccaneers were supreme on the high seas; the landowners and merchants had achieved a temporary compromise, and society as a whole presented a stable aspect. Individualism by now was taken for granted, and literature was becoming more and more subjective. Moreover, the anti-Catholic feeling had its effect on literature; men studied languages in order to criticise Church texts, and history in order to score off Church legends. Shakespeare is always subjective, even in natural description; his vocabulary is much influenced by foreign words and his histories formed part of a complete cycle of English and ancient history; Marlowe’s Edward II belonged to the same cycle. Shakespeare’s subject matter is generally trivial or melodramatic; he is invariably concerned with emotion rather than thought; such moralising as he offers is complacent, never stimulating. But he is the most brilliant master of language yet seen: and there lies his chief importance. His fluent, supple, incisive metaphors and startlingly virile similes rendered an incalculable service to English speech.

Contemporary with Shakespeare were a number of lyric poets such as Fletcher, Drummond, Campion and Drayton, most of whose verse celebrates the ups and downs of romantic love. This form of literature is frequent in leisured society. But the Elizabethan lyrics are distinguished by their diversity of form and metaphor, their elegant language. At this time also began the steady intrusion of introspective religion into poetry. The merchant capitalists were not altogether satisfied with the Elizabethan compromise, and their dissatisfaction found some outlet, prior to open revolt under Cromwell, in an ever sterner and more uncompromising Protestantism. The current interest in the problem of religion and the State was bound to influence poetry as well as philosophy; some of John Donne’s and all George Herbert’s work exemplified the tendency, but its political aspect is most greatly voiced by Milton. His deep impatience of authority and vast self- confidence (“to justify the ways of God to man”), together with his bold experiments in metre and rhythm (Lycidas is written in free-verse) are all clearly symptomatic of a rebellious and arrogant movement in society. It is impossible to read Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes without envisaging the old rebel, undaunted in spite of defeat and difficulty.

Stella Stewart.

Link to Part 3