Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 3: Slave patrols and ... "false consciousness"?

I've always been kind of fascinated about the notion of plagiarizing from oneself. I understand that there are some sensible reasons for such a thing to be regulated by law, such as when an author gives up the commercial rights to a written or musical composition. Others can be more of a gray area. Did a writer provide a "unique product"? Does a songwriter's song sound too much like an earlier song of hers to which someone else has the rights?

I notice Digby Parton is careful to cite her earlier posts as quotations, rather than just using the text in a new post.

I'm kind of split on it, myself, for this blog.

The reason I mention it is that one of the things I've discussed here in various posts is "slave patrols" in the slave states. And I want to write about it some more without completely repeating myself.

One post devoted completely to the slave patrols is Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 15: Slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan and present-day white racism 04/15/2012. Another is Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 16: More on slave patrols 04/16/2012.

In Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Convincing non-slaveowning whites to fight for the Slave Power 04/28/2013, I wrote about how the planter class used slave patrols as one key institution in a broader political strategy of giving whites generally a sense of having a stake in the slave system. That is an aspect of the slave patrols that is not only historically important but relates to the actual functioning of white racism in the US today.

Debates over gun proliferation in recent years have focused at times on the motivating impulse for the Second Amendment, the second half of which is currently idolized by the Republican Party. The first part about a "well regulted militia"? Not so much. And here I'm going to plagiarize myself a bit from things I've written earlier on this blog, not just in the posts linked above.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was placed there primarily at the insistence of Southern states that required white male citizens to participate in slave patrols, whose purpose was to catch runaway slaves and generally to terrorize the black population, both slave and free, to discourage revolts. And more generally to promote fear and subservience among African-Americans.

The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that searched for blacks who were not on plantations. Plantations had their own plantation patrols, as well. The slave patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. The slave patrols gave free whites who might be inclined to political and/or violent anger against wealthy slaveowners the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free. And that's a key reason that participation was mandatory.

The fear of slave revolts was widespread and ingrained into daily life in the South prior to the Civil War. It was accompanied by periodic panics over them, most of which existed only the in the fevered, guilty imaginations of white people. Though slave resistance and the occasional slave revolt really did occur, too. John Brown fanned those fears with his plan to set up a guerrilla army in the South to free slaves in the years immediately before the Civil War.

The slave patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan is the most infamous. (There is also an argument that the slave patrols were the direct predecessors of present-day police departments; I haven't looked at that argument carefully enough to have an informed opinion on it.)

The existence of the slave patrols also means that it's not the case that non-slaveowning Southern whites had no direct prewar connection to enforcing slavery, claim that neo-Confederates routinely make. The patrols had unchallenged authority to stop and abuse any black person free or slave they saw out in public, whether or not the victim was authorized to be there. And they often did so. It was an effective way to create an emotional bond to the slave system even among non-slaveowners. Betram Wyatt-Brown has a good description of the slave patrols in his Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).

Conservative intellectuals like to sneer at Mean Libruls for supposedly talked down to Real Americans by accusing them of suffering from "false consciousness." White slaveowners in the antebellum South and the white non-slaveowners did make money off their black slaves. But whether we use the anathematized phrase or not, most white Southerners who supported the slave system were demonstratbly acting against their own interests. Because as Hinton Helper famously detailed at the time in ..., the slave system worked very much to the disadvantage of the Southern white common people, the big majority of whites. But the white non-slaveowners who were required to serve on slave patrols did get the sadistic satisfaction of pushing around unarmed blacks and the psychological satisfaction of feeling themselves part of a master race for doing so.

That attitude may have been self-defeatign. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as entirely false. The psychological advantage they felt from white racism was real, then as it is today. Sigmund Freud's argument in The Future of An Illusion (1927) is very relevant to the psychological and social function of the slave patrols:

The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one's share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses. [my emphasis]

Historically, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee that critics of slavery would be unable to block the use of "slave patrols" in which white citizens were required to patrol for slaves who were somehow breaking the rules. It was a key institution in the slave South for gaining political and psychological commitment among nonslaveholders for the Peculiar Institution.

Thom Hartmann writes in The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery 01/16/2013:

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

The slave patrols and their historical function shows us a way that the institution of slavery affects US politics and society in visible ways still.

See also:

Robert Bateman, Hey Oregon "Militia": Here's the History Lesson You Missed Esquire Politics Blog 01/17/2016

Digby Parton, What were the founders really afraid of? Hullabaloo 01/17/2013

Krugman says "false consciousness"

Paul Krugman for years has been puzzling over what makes policymakers and economists seemingly impervious to evidence of the success or failures of certain economic policies and assumptions.

In Inflation, Septaphobia, and the Shock Doctrine 09/01/2014, he focuses on the seemingly irrational fear of inflation among the One Percent. In conclusion, he writes:

The thing is, it sure looks like a form of false consciousness on the part of [the] elite. But I’m still trying to figure it out. [my emphasis]

It's a stock criticism from the right that mean libruls and "leftists" accuse Real Americans of having a "false consciousness" if they vote for Republicans. This is taken as evidence of the snobbishness and elitism of The Left, who in a major theme of rightwing symbolism are affluent foofs lookin' down on hard-working regular Americans. Especially on regular white Americans.

This theme peacefully coexists with the idea that Democrats/Mean Libruls/The Left are also unemployed losers who don't take responsibility for their lives. And also black.

The usual retail, FOX News-ish version of this accusation, and even the more highbrow ones, generally leave me cold. Democratic politics is about competing for people's votes and support for candidates and ideas. You could say that any political argument aimed at potential swing voters assumes that they suffer from "false consciousness." Because they don't at the moment have the True Consciousness that means they will vote for your side's candidate or cause. And the campaigners are trying to convince them that they should give up that "false consciousness" of non-support.

For that matter, you could frame any sales pitch that way. The car salesman's job is to rid you of the "false consciousness" that you don't want to buy a car that day and reveal to you your burning desire for a new vehicle with maximum accessories.

The phrase "false consciousness" does seem to have stemmed from the Marxist tradition. In an undated online paper, False consciousness, Daniel Little traces the concept from ideas of Marx (of whom he says, "Marx himself did not use the phrase 'false consciousness'") to Georg Lukács ("one of the first European philosophers to reflect seriously on Marx’s philosophical ideas"), sociologist Karl Mannheim, Italian Communist political theorist Antonio Gramsci, and French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Little discusses the concept further in the four posts shown here from the Understanding Society blog.

(The borrowing by conservatives of ideas originating in the Marxist tradition is an interesting topic. The more highbrow American conservative criticisms of the Librul Media make use of the concept of cultural hegemony closely associated with Gramsci.)

There is at least one known instance of Marx' longtime political collaborator and financial sponsor Frederick Engels using the phrase "false consciousness," in a letter to Franz Mehring of 07/14/1893:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives.

Today, "ideology" is commonly used to describe any more-or-less systematic point of view or even a general political outlook. Marx and Engels used the word in a more technical sense to mean erroneous perceptions of reality. For them, "ideology" was by definition a false view.

What Engels is discussing in his letter to Mehring, whose primary role in his career was as an educator in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), though he is probably better known as a friendly biographer of both Marx and Engels, is the role of ideas in shaping reality via social, economic and especially political processes. He continues directly:

Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts. [my emphasis]

Ideas matter, in other words.

Now, as in any field, the simplest explanation of a topic that goes into ad copy or a general press release or a sales training event looks very different from the more developed idea in all its nuances and professional evaluations.

I would note here that Engels' quote does not restrict the idea of "false consciousness" to the definition Daniel Little gives of the background concepts from Marx in this passage:

Marx asserts that social mechanisms emerge in class society that systematically create distortions, errors, and blind spots in the consciousness of the underclass. If these consciousness-shaping mechanisms did not exist, then the underclass, always a majority, would quickly overthrow the system of their domination. So the institutions that shape the person’s thoughts, ideas, and frameworks develop in such a way as to generate false consciousness and ideology.

The description Engels gave to Mehring wasn't restricted to an "underclass." The passage following that just quoted from Engels' letter reads:

It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain, which dazzles most people. If Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, or Hegel “overcomes” Fichte and Kant, or if the constitutional Montesquieu is indirectly “overcome” by Rousseau with his “Social Contract,” each of these events remains within the sphere of theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes outside the sphere of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production has been added as well, even the victory of the physiocrats and Adam Smith over the mercantilists is accounted as a sheer victory of thought; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere ...

He was talking in terms derived from the classical German philosophical tradition of Kant and Hegel about how ideas depict empirical reality and how limitations in the formation of ideas affect that process. He included capitalists and churchmen among those who can suffer from "false consciousness."

The formation of political opinion is a long-standing and broadly researched field to which pollsters, campaign operatives, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and others all contribute. The kind of discussion a psychoanalyst like Sigmund Freud or a philosopher like Georg Lukács would produce looks very different from the campaign guidelines of a particular political party for an election.

A political hack could approach the academic literature on the subject in the oppo research mode by pulling out a sentence or a phrase and ridicule the arrogance of them thar out-of-touch perfessers.

Conversely, many a college student has been taken aback to find out that snarky phrases from political arguments don't cut it in classes where some nuanced attention to academic arguments is required.

Getting back to Krugman's use of "false consciousness," he's looking at a real-world question about why many of the very wealthy and their advocates seem to be fearful of inflation in the face of evidence he cites suggesting that they themselves benefits considerably from it, even disproportionately benefit from it.

People really do sometimes misunderstand things. And that seems to me to be the straightforward meaning of "false consciousness."

Tags: false consciousness