Sugar Masters Framing Essay

Throughout reading Sugar Masters I couldn’t help but think back to Rockman’s Scraping By from last week as I noticed how well these two works complement each other. Last week, Rockman showed that slavery was an integral part of Baltimore’s emerging wage labor system, and that slaves were both active and constrained members of the market economy. This week Follett extends the notion of hybridization to the sugar plantation, arguing that sugar masters, in their quest for profit, turned their plantations into factory-like operations. While in some ways this led masters to treat slaves like employees (for example, providing money for overtime work), masters continued to maintain their dominance (and ownership) of the bodies of both male and female slaves. The works are complementary because they each break down the dichotomy between the entrepreneurial values of the market and the supposedly anti-capitalist institution of slavery, and show instead how slavery was molded and reshaped (but not broken) in order to best serve the masters in an emerging capitalist economy.

I was especially struck by Follett’s descriptions of master-slave negotiations, and the ways in which these negotiations look strikingly similar to the master-laborer negotiations in emerging industrial factories of the north. Most notably, I was interested in his discussion of how masters used “overwork” and Christmas bonuses to deepen slaves’ dependence and inspire them to work harder, while the masters continued to benefit from what slaves produced “in their own time.” I couldn’t help but feel that Follett was implicitly asking the reader to make the jump to wage labor: isn’t overtime pay – a practice we demand from employers because it is “just” – simply a way for employers to make regularly underpaid workers more dependent on extra hours, more productive, and less likely to have time to “cause problems”? Follett’s history, like all of the authors we have read this semester, speaks not only to the past but to the present as well.

Still, I’m skeptical of a view that equates wage labor with slavery, and I would be interested to discuss in class how to define the differences and boundaries between these two methods of organizing labor. In other words, are the hybrid systems of early 19th century Baltimore and Louisiana simply a reflection of transition from one system to the other – masters trying to hold onto parts of the past as the world around them moves to capitalism? And if so, what are the most important aspects of the turn? Is wage labor simply a northern reproduction of slavery without the objectionable trading in human bodies? Or, as Follett and Rockman seem to suggest, if capitalism and slavery are actually mutually constitutive in some cases, how can we distinguish between the experience of the laborer and the experience of the slave? Follett seems to provide some hints in his continued reminders of the use of the whip, the attempts at human breeding, and other mechanisms of control which may not have been available to industrialist employers in the north. Are there others?

Finally, I was intrigued by Follett’s discussion of the “clock-driven labor regime” (108). He argues that because the success of sugar plantations relied so much on their productivity as a function of time, masters instituted shifts and divisions of labor. By tying their slaves’ work to the clock, masters asserted dominance not only over their slaves’ bodies but over their conception of time as well. I’m interested in how exactly this new sense of “time management,” which we are so tied to today, forms the basis for a capitalist system. Though none of our previous authors have relied explicitly on this concept, it seems to me that a notion of the value of time underlies the emerging capitalist market just as much as, say, the expansion of writing or the emergence of evangelical religion. And if so, how does a new conception of time intersect with the discussions about class and class identity we’ve been having? Do different classes adhere to different valuations of time? As capitalism grows, is there a kind of hegemonic imposition of the increased value of time? Can working and lower classes (not just in the US but all over the world) maintain differing conceptions of time in the era of globalization? These questions could form the basis for a fruitful discussion on how the transition to capitalism changed not only economic and social relationships, but philosophical and cultural constructions as well.

Living Class: Response to Scraping By

I suppose that it is little surprising that Professor Rockman's book addresses many of the issues that have played out in his seminar this semester, but I think it made it hard in class to focus on any one of the arguments he raises in the book. I also think that it made it difficult for us to discern some of the theoretical positions that Rockman took in Scraping By: since it lays out explicitly many of the themes that have been implicit in our study, it was hard to see what was special about the book.

As such I would like to focus my response on two theoretical statements Rockman articulates in the text, and then critique how they play out in his methodology. I think that one of the most essential passages in the book occurs in the introduction when Rockman writes that

For the workers portrayed in this book, class experience was waiting every February for the harbor to thaw so that low-end jobs might resume. Class consciousness was knowing the proper pose of deference to get hired. Class Struggle was trying to meet the rent and scavenging for firewood to stay warm during winter. (Rockman, 11)

Although this seems like a descriptive statement about life in Baltimore, it is really a theoretical rejection of analysis that elevate class consciousness or class struggle, as these identifiers are traditionally understood, as requisites for the existence of class phenomena. As we discussed in seminar, this theoretical motivation lead Rockman to write a highly material history detailing the ways that individuals were impacted by social order in early American Baltimore.

One might contrast this understanding of class with that of Thompson who, while also focusing on experience, emphases that the emergence of a "class consciousness" that ties members of the social group together. On the surface Rockman's work agrees with Midleton and Smith's piece that we read early this year in the belief that class is a "constitutive element of social relationships emerging from inequalities in material conditions and social and cultural capital that serves as a primary way of signifying relationships of power." (Middleton and Smith, 11) I think that Rockman expands on this understanding when he argues that class is "mutually constitutive" with other social divisions typically invoked by the terms race and gender. On this front, I think that Rockman puts forward a satisfying way to quench the puerile desire, evident in a lot of social theory, to select from "race, class and gender" a primary driver of historical events. I think that Rockman demonstrates that it is impossible to separate the effect of racial divisions, or gender divisions from one another, or from the impact of class divisions in a market society.

The danger in Rockman's approach, is that his theoretical position makes it easy to see class divisions at work, and difficult to identify situations when class is not relevant to the history. For Rockman, class emerges in the every day struggle of individuals who, by living different lives in relation to the market for labor power, create experiences segregated by social divisions. But everyone fights daily battles, and those contests will forever be shaped by divisions that will always haunt society. I think that this is defnitly a danger, but it is not clear to me whether the ubiquity of class under Rockman's coneptualizetion is problematic or whether it harms his work.

I suppose that one way of classifying Rockman's approach is as a recapitulation of Marx's famous claim that "the history of all hiterto exsisting society is the history of class struggles." I think that Rockman's affirmation that class is mutually constutive with racial, ethinic and gender divisions is accually analytically similar to Marx's argument that these kinds of disputes are simply class conflicts in disquise.

The second... Have to go to sea for a couple hours, will complete when I return.

Afterward- Scraping By

Afterward- Scraping By

During this week’s discussing of Scraping By, we focused on Professor Rockman’s definitions of class and capitalism and their implications on his analysis of lower class life in Baltimore during the Early Republic. As Professor Rockman explained, his study was based on a “stripped-down” construction of class, which he defined as a set of power relations within capitalism. He drew parallels with other categories of social difference based in power relations, such as gender, defined as power relations within patriarchy, and racism, defined as power relations within white supremacy. This characterization presents a challenge to conventional notions of class, which are centered on class-consciousness and identity. These dominant models posit class as the defining factor of material realities and lived experiences, leading to debates between scholars in various fields regarding the relative oppression of historical subjects. Prevailing definitions of class also produce questions about why proletarian communities throughout time and space did or did not develop class-consciousness, and why they were or were not moved to resistance.

As Rockman argued, and many of us agreed, a “stripped-down” definition of class frees historians and their readers from these futile debates. The construction of class that Rockman employs in this book assumes that capitalism creates a division between those who sell their labor and those who buy it, and that the prosperity of the latter is contingent on the oppression of the former. By virtue of their position in the political economy, those who sell their labor form a socioeconomic class and share similar lived experiences. To say that class shapes these experiences is not to negate the effects of other aspects of identity, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ability, nor is it to preference class over other categories of difference. By constructing class as an operative, but not totalizing, force, Rockman and other historians are attempting to push past the struggles of identity politics in order to explore material reality of historical subjects in classed societies. In his book, Rockman acknowledged the ways in which gender, race, and legal status created different limitations and opportunities for different people, but focused on the similar strategies that people of the same class developed in order to survive.

In addition to advancing our understanding of class in relation to other categories of difference, this definition of class moves us away from debates about consciousness and resistance. This model challenges the dominant, teleological understanding of class, in which the natural end of classed society should be working class consciousness of capitalist power relations and resistance to these structures. It shifts our attention from questions about how and why people mobilize around a shared class identity, and towards questions about their material reality within class structures. For this reason, Rockman’s book focuses on how people lived rather than how they saw themselves. At the same time, Rockman recognizes that class-consciousness was obscured by race, gender, and legal status, and that perceived differences prevent people of the same class from recognizing their commonalities. In class, he interrogated the Marxist notions of “false consciousness” projected onto workers by employees, and acknowledged the role of workers in producing these divisions. (Compensating for their class position with “wages of whiteness,” masculinity, etc.)

Despite the fact that considerable attention was given to this subject during our discussion, I am still confused about a few things. Firstly, Rockman’s paradigm reconstructs “class” to mirror definitions of other categories of difference, and insists that all aspects of identity are intersecting rather than in competition with one another. At the same time, in foregrounding other differences with similarities based in class, and acknowledging the role of various forms of social difference in preventing the formation of class consciousness, it seems that this model is still saying that class is different from all the rest. What I am still struggling with is how to qualify this difference, and how the distinct qualities of class affect our understanding of other aspects of identity. Secondly, while I do not believe it is the role of the historian to prescribe solutions to historical problems, I am not sure what to do with these new tools for analysis. This book made me question how I think about class, and pushed my understanding beyond identity and resistance. At the same time, while I think that defining class in terms of consciousness is limiting, I also think it is important to draw upon the experiences and struggles of historical subjects to desconstruct power relations in the present. I disagree with Mike’s argument that this definition of class is merely descriptive and not causal or analytic- this model clearly identifies capitalism as the cause of class formation, and analyzes how people live within class structures (without claiming class as the single or central factor). However, it seems that by ignoring how people understand themselves, we lose our ability to understand what drives people to resist. We risk forfeiting answers to important, albeit limiting, questions about how people come to see themselves as part of an oppressed class and take action. (And in doing so, we lose our ability to use this information to resist against contemporary power structures, which of course are based in the past.) How then, do we balance a history based in material reality with questions of subjectivity and consciousness?