LEWIS R.

GORDON
Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of
Citizenship
It has become a truism of recent thought that labor, migration,
and race converge in the portrait of exploitation occasioned by
modern capitalism. Often overlooked, however, are the theological
underpinnings and their relation to the wider, global models of
human organization and politics at hand. These foundations also offer
a grammar of recurring themes by which, as Ernst Cassirer and Claude
Lvi-Strauss observed, the path from the mythic to the scientific is
a transformation more of name than form. We are left, then, with
questions of the tenability of moving forward in an age that seems to
be struggling with which past to force onto the present.
The topic at hand points to a poetic theme from Audre Lorde, one
that has achieved mythopoetic statusnamely, her oft-cited maxim of
the masters tool not being able to tear down the masters house. My co-
editor Jane Gordon and I received much rancor, for instance, from some
critics for challenging this sacred tenet of black critical thought in our
anthology Not Only the Masters Tools: African-American Studies in Theory
and Practice (2006). Our claim was straightforward: The master did not
actually build his house, and the tools by which it was built were not
exclusively his. Enslaved, dominated, oppressed, and subaltern peoples
brought their intellectual resources and labor to the task of building
the modern world, and any realistic effort to transcend the world of
colonization and enslavement requires adjudicating this complicated,
and often complicit, past and present. The point seemed obvious, but
our critics responded in ways that struck us as, unfortunately, neurotic:
They would rephrase our claim as somehow defending mastery and
then offer as an alternative claim the very point we madethat among
the tools used to build the status quo were resources from enslaved
peoples. A difficult task, then, is the decolonizing one of conceptual
transformation, where along with new concepts could also be new
relationships by which to forge a different future and different forms of
life. Such an effort requires some reexamination of the past.
The approach by which I would like to consider these questions is
that of Africana philosophy, with some considerations from ideas in
political economy. Africana philosophy focuses, as I have argued in An
Journal of Contemporary Thought, 32 (Winter 2010)
Lewis Gordon teaches in Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Temple University in
Philadelphia, PA, USA. E-mail: gordonl@temple.edu
Journal of Contemporary Thought 158
Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), on problems of philosophical
anthropology, freedom and liberation, and metacritical analyses of
reason. These considerations emerged from the contradictions of the
modern world, where freedom is avowed in the midst of continuous
constructions of more rigorous techniques of enslavement and
dehumanization. They come to the fore in this area of philosophy
because of what is historically posed by the African Diaspora as an
enslaved and subsequently colonized population. They are also a
consequence of the forms of rationalizations used to justify such
modern developments, among which are anthropological notions with
mythic and thus normative force albeit wrought by many contradictions
in reality. Such misconceptions include the expectation of migration
without transformation, of self-contained communities in motion, as if
people are metaphysically complete substances, without change and
effect. From such a perspective, human beings from different places can
be in proximity without being in relation with each other. To maintain
that view requires an extraordinary distortion of historical and social
reality.
A familiar theme of anthropological distortion is race. It is, however,
one whose historical portrait is often governed by disciplinary decadence.
Biologism, sociologism, psychologism, historicism, economicism, and a
variety of other discipline-governed isms often offer portraits that situate
race from the dawn of the species in one extreme to the nineteenth
century and the emergence of the human sciences on the other. Yet
the etymology of the term race tells a story that crosses all of these
disciplinary perspectives in a way that confirms its anthropological
character. The subject underneath race discourse is, after all, the human
being, and since race is about the classification of human groups, it
follows that its subject matter cannot be completely contained in
disciplines designed to address only parts of human reality. Failure to
understand this, as Du Bois (1898 and 1903) argued, leads, in effect, to
attempting to squeeze the human being into a disciplinary shoe whose
size is supposed to fit all. And what happens to those who do not fit into
such a schema? They become, in a word, problems.
A feature of problem people is that they become problems by virtue
of failures of systemic assimilation. It is not that they necessarily resist
systemic assimilation. It is that they face a circumstance of institutional
bad faith, where the mechanisms of rejection in the social world,
manifested or denied by those who affect and effect them, hide from
themselves by placing cause onto supposedly problem people. Put
differently, problem people are blamed for their condition through
processes that include problematic explanations. These include
ideological and hegemonic rationalizations, neurotic investments, and
159 Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship
an array of self-deceiving devices. A key exemplar of these tendencies is
the punitive dimensions of social practices and explanations that emerge
when race is introduced. We are familiar today with what happens to
social welfare programs in Europe and North America, for instance,
when the populations benefiting from them include those of a dark
hue. They are either eroded or eradicated, or if continued, beset with
conditions that did not apply to the dominant populations (see Handler,
2004; Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007). The explanation of exploitation is
an insufficient explanation of this tendency, however, since that factor
would be sufficient grounds for not offering social welfare remedies to
the preceding populations as well. To understand this dynamic, some
explanation of race and its history is needed.
Race has a history of a prototypical and then full-fledged form of
thought or what Paul Taylor (2004) calls self conscious race thinking.
The prototypical history refers to theories of human difference from
ancient to the end of medieval times. The ancient versions, in Africa,
Asia, and Europe were not explicitly race thinking because the concept
was not yet developed, but familiar tropes of a centered group of human
beings counting as truly human versus those who were evident in
ancient writings. These accounts of human difference were premised
upon teleological conceptions of nature, in which the centered group
exemplified in the direction or purpose of achieved humanness.
Although there was variation in the models offered, the ancient Greeks
generally thought in terms of a species-form of human achievement.
For Plato, these concerns transcended the organic features of embodied
human beings, but for Aristotle, the organic fusion of form and matter
made concrete the manifestations of human potential in the centered
group and a natural limitation on the outside groups, which included, as
argued in his Politics, barbarians, women, and slaves (cf. Robinson, 2001).
The emergence of Christendom transformed the centered group into
one legitimated by a theological naturalism, which framed the outsiders
at first as those who rejected Christianity. In the Iberian Peninsula, this
framework took the form of raza, which referred to breeds of dogs and
horses and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews. As
Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews, represented
a deviation from Christian normativity. The defeat of the Moors in Iberia
was followed by the Inquisition to assess the authenticity of the remaining
populations of Moors and Jews who had converted to Christianity, a
process which led to demands for demonstrations of purity of blood
(limpieza de sangre) best exemplified by individuals whose origins were
supposedly purely Christian. Since all that was natural emanated from
the theological center, these groups stood as a prototypical formulation
of the anthropology that took a path through razza (Italian) to the
Journal of Contemporary Thought 160
modern term race. The initial period of the expansion of Christendom in
the late fifteenth century led to Christian encounters with populations
of people who were neither Moor nor Jew, although there were efforts
to interpret them in such terms as Conquistadors had at first thought
they were encountering strange mosques and synagogues (when the
populations were presumed to have been lost Hebrew tribes) in the New
World. The enslavement and near genocide of the Native populations of
the Americas led to Bartolom Las Casass efforts to save them through
appeals to the Papal authority and his famous debate with Gines de
Seplveda on the status and suitability of the Native populations for
slavery. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a consequence of these conflicts.
The emerging secular explanations that developed by the end of the
sixteenth century were in no small terms a consequence of meeting
people; animals; and fauna not accounted for in the Bible, in addition to
the changing worldviews from the emerging new science inaugurated
by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon, to name a few.
This new science demanded explanations, as Ernst Cassirer observed
in An Essay on Man (1962), without theological causality. The search
for non-theological causation in the human organism became part
of a nexus rooted in nature itself. Johann Blumenbach devoted his
classification interests, for instance, to divisions within the human
species, racial divisions, correlated with the continents of Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America, as they tend to be known today, including
the term Caucasians, which he coined, to refer to Europeans. In the
nineteenth century, the explanation that eclipsed all discussions up
to that point at least with regard to the understanding of the human
being in nature and the development of human differences was Charles
Darwins theory of natural selection. With regard to the human being
and differences in the social world, the theoretical frameworks that
set the stage for the eventual critique of Darwinian conceptions of race
was the materialist sociology of Karl Marx, the historico-genealogical
positivist anthropology of Antnor Firmin, the metacritical one of
W. E. B. Du Bois, and the social-diagnostic phenomenology that grew
out of Husserls thought and critical work on the human sciences in the
thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon,
as well as the structuralist and poststructuralist turns from Lvi-Strauss
through to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, among others (see
Carbonell 2009; Chandler, 2006; L. Gordon, 2008; Taylor, 2004).
A crucial and missing backdrop of this portrait, however, is the story
of imperialism or at least geopolitical relationships akin to imperial ones.
(I say this because we simply presume that the Greco-Roman concept of
empire applies to the expanded relations of geo-power orchestrated by
the Chin state to create China or the Moguls in India or the Sultans in
161 Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship
the Arabic world or the Aztec-controlled regions. Walter Mignolo [2008]
has argued, e.g., that these are unique cultural political relations that
may not be properly understood by the notion of empire.) That race is,
however, a concept that emerged within the historical experience through
which Europe emerged legitimately requires consideration of its imperial
undercurrent. A crucial feature of empires is their structure of central
consumption. Empires reach outward and create a flow of resources
inward, to their center, where they are consumed. The technological
resources of empires affect the reach and speed of consumption, and
they also affect the labor required for their function. Empires, in other
words, produce new relations as they engulf new terrains of people, and
in doing this, something particularly unexpected happens. The hope
of empires is to have a static center of agents who consume, but this
expectation is reproduced as the empire reaches out and leads to a flow
of people to the center for the sake of their own survival. Every empire,
in other words, stimulates migration of peoples.
In the past, this process of consumption and migration took millennia
to exhaust themselves, then centuries, and now decades. We forget that
the few hundred years of British imperial rule and not even a century
of U.S. imperial hegemony are nothing compared to the times of Rome
or Egypt, and, if we count the Chin (Qin) expansion into China as an
empire, expanded by the Han and subsequent dynasties, that continues
today as a global political force. Empires, in other words, are facing a
compression of time. In addition to a compression of time, empires are
also facing the same of space. This is because the geographical reach of
empires is now global, and with nowhere else to go, the world shrinks
(see Gordon and Gordon, 2009: chapter 5).
One misconception of migration stimulated by empire is the notion
that the imperial center remains the same while the periphery changes.
The anxiously protected expectation of centered and national purity is
compromised by the impossibility of maintained asymmetry between
groups of peoples. It takes too much energy to keep people out while
consuming what they have to offer, including the people themselves.
The stories are familiar. Egypt conquering outward created the Afro-
Asiatic world. Persia doing the same affected the Mediterranean Afro-
Asiatic world and expanded it into the foundations of a Euro-Afro-
Asiatic one. And Rome doing the same led to the fusion known today
as Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (cf. Cohen, 1999). The reassertion
of the Afro-Asiatic world led to Islam, and the conflict that followed led
to the formation of Western civilization, Europe, and the modern world.
(We forget today that although we look to the Middle East for Islam,
most Muslims are in Africa and southern Asia.) And as varieties of
Christian capitalism were transformed into secular modernity, Hindu-
Journal of Contemporary Thought 162
affected capitalism and Buddhist-affected capitalisms are bursting from
their cocoon as custodians of the damaged infrastructures of Western
capitalist countries tremble and look to a future that for them is no less
than the end of the world.
An odd dimension of these recent developments of temporal and
spatial compression is a silly conflict on which past forms of globalism
into which to retreat. The neoconservative response, for instance, is to
look to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inspiration from
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke (Thompson and Brook
2010; Frank, 2008). The neoliberals expand matters to the nineteenth
century, by integrating Locke with John Stuart Mill while triumphantly
rejecting Marx as a nineteenth-century relic and failure (Harvey 2005).
Twentieth-century globalism is hardly considered, however, since that
age of revolution, marked by experiments with socialism and the Cold
War, is now subject mostly to critique and metacritique. Put differently,
its as if the twentieth centurys legacy is global chaos left for the twenty-
first century to fix, or at least attempt to fix. The rub, however, is that such
problems are global, but there is fear of taking on the task of articulating
what a genuinely twenty-first century globalism should be. The fallacy,
after all, is to presume that globalism must be either a fifteenth-through-
nineteenth-century phenomenon. As the world becomes geopolitically
smaller, especially as environmental crises now accompany economic
ones, humanity clearly can no longer afford to turn its back on its global
situation.
Although the global situation of humankind is beset with many
problems, among them is the continued model of a religious grammar
of citizenship, brought from relegation, which shares etymological roots
with religion, in the Roman and then Holy Roman worlds. The term
citizen at first seems free of religious connotation, as it pertains to
city dwelling, and with it only the correlative social relations whose
legacy is what we know as politics. The polis was, after all, not only an
ancient city but also a place in which relations of war were sublimated
and transformed into discursive agonal practices. The price of physical
conflict was too high in the enclosed polis, and thus discursive
communication, speech, stimulated new relations from which glory,
history, and other dimensions of what it means to live together emerged.
The city became an imperial center, in a way, over national and state
terrain, and it is no accident that the idea of a state without a capital
city is unthinkable today (cf. Fanon, 1961; Mielants, 2008). In antiquity,
however, especially in the Roman world, from which, as we have seen,
the concept of religion emerged, the conditions of membership had
a quasi-religious character with the criteria of birth or conversion. In
Rome, in other words, one could become a Roman citizen, and other
163 Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship
groupsfor example, Judeansadopted this model, especially of
matrilineal criteria for born citizens and processes of oaths and rituals
for conversion or naturalization (Cohen, 1999). It is ridiculous but
treated as a matter without question that contemporary citizenship
follows similar criteria in most modern and avowedly secular states.
What, however, if were to radicalize secularization of states and
eradicate birthright and oaths and rituals for citizenship and instead
focused on contribution (e.g., but not exclusively, taxation broadly
understood as any demonstration of contribution) to the common good?
Let us suppose the following global situation (since imaginative acts are
also crucial dimensions of theoretical work), where there is a form of
global federalism initiating interstate commerce across localities whose
primary criteria for membership and participation are demonstrations
of contribution to the various localities. Labor is one consideration.
Wherever one works, one should have a voice in its governance. Labor
could be broadly understood as the physical production of things,
the creation of ideas and aesthetic expression, or the cultivation of
subsequent generations of citizens. It could include the contribution of
skills of social cohesion and negotiation. And crucially, its reach could
be global in the classic federal sense of shared and distributed power
the consequence of which are internal lines of demarcation instead of
external ones (cf. Karmis and Norman, 2005). Without external borders,
one could migrate to where ones skills are needed, and by contributing
those skills, earn membership for participation as a local citizen. For such
a world to exist, a radical transformation of global relations would occur,
through which the meaning of migrant, emigrant, and immigrant
would be transformed in the set of relations that would make the weight
of global exploitation void because of nowhere for that kind of capital,
the one that requires vulnerable and hence cheaper labor as extolled by
neoconservatism and neoliberalism, to go. The benefits of safety nets
in localities on the basis of contributions could be justified from basic
contractarian argument of localities owing those who have contributed
to them (for debate, cf. Pateman and Mills, 2007). At the federal level,
that would mean investment in a global infrastructure that would affect
the flow of materials and labor in a way that matches the reality of a
spatially and temporally compressed world.
Although this is an imaginative act, we should bear in mind that
humanity is already headed that way in the demands of labor itself.
More people live in different places from where they work, and more
people are part of a global flow of labor seeking work (see, e.g., Wolfgang
et al, 2008; Frase 2007; Coughlan 2006; Coombes, 1995). Unlike times
where primarily vulnerable populations were compelled to migrate or
at least work where they do not live, that necessity is increasing among
Journal of Contemporary Thought 164
the middle and upper strata of societies across the globe. The absurdity
of erecting borders to keep people away from jobs that are not desirable
for those in the center is a residue from a conception of nation and self
that is, unfortunately, out of step with reality.
What exactly would a contributions-based model of citizenship
mean for humankind is, in the end, the welfare of humankind itself. The
anxiety wrought by race, for instance, is often assuaged by an appeal to
the human who lurks beneath. Yet the borders that keep the human
being over there from coming over here depend upon submerging
human presence in a way more conducive to the proliferation of races
as we see in heightened racism and radicalized inequalities in an age
that valorizes cosmopolitanismthan raising the standards of human
conviviality. Lost in such border policing, marked also by fetishized
investments, is the understanding that although some of us succeed
alone, global failure is no less than the end of us all.
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