 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Langdon Wiener, well-known commentator, historian of technology, also a philosopher of technology. I'm going to give you many titles. But today we're going to discuss to you, Langdon, something that we heard you speak a few days back about how you saw race, technology, and history play out in the United States, particularly about the Industrial Revolution. So could you tell us how you see that one of the elements of the Industrial Revolution according to you was a cotton plantation and slavery? Yeah well the context was in studying the history of technology. I came from political science and I got very much interested in the social and political dimensions of technology. So I began reading lots of history of technology, going back into the 19th century into the 20th century. And the storyline was basically in among conventional historians of technology. It had to do with inventors, new devices, new systems. It had to do with the class relationships moving away from small production to larger organizations. For example, the creation of new educational institutions to train up a managerial class educated in science and technology. And then you had the railroads and you had the telegraph and you had the chemical industry. That was the whole story. And really until about ten years ago for me that's what I understood. So I would draw upon that history. And then I ran across some books about the Industrial Revolution in the United States that focused upon the key fact of chattel slavery in the history of the Industrial Revolution. This had not been much mentioned. People would talk about, oh, there were these plantations where they were growing cotton and so forth. Don't worry about that. You wanted to look at these new industrial managers and so forth. But it turns out two crucial facts. One is that the capital value in the middle 19th century of forces of production, the major force quantitatively was in the value of the bodies, that is if you could buy them, of what turned out to be about four million black people, right? So it was worth more than the factories, more than the railroads and so forth. The bodies as a capital wealth. The other thing was that and they're now very good studies of this. The crucial focus of production in 19th century American production and capitalism was cotton, right? And it was not only cotton produced from the fields, but it was also shipped north. It was woven into cloth. It was what the shipping industry shipped around the world. And so the main source of wealth and a productive ability in the United States in the 19th century, the true wellspring was value extracted from black bodies. One crucial aspect of this, particularly in the writings of historian Edward Baptist, his book is called significantly the half has never been told. He says the perhaps the most important invention in the 19th century was a new bullwhip and what he calls the whipping machine. The puzzle was, if you look at the statistics, beginning about 1820 in the United States in cotton production, productivity soars until 1860 when the Civil War started and ended the whole thing, at least in that configuration. So why was there a steady increase in productivity in cotton production? That is as measured by pounds picked by a human being, man, woman, and children over that period of time. There were no new machines. There were new no. There were no new managerial techniques, but productivity per worker steadily and quickly increased. And what Baptist in his book shows is that essentially you had extremely vicious forms of whipping. He calls it the whipping machine, right? And what happened was people were forced day by day to increase their production. Men, women, children. Yeah. This other corollary to that was also the calculation at what age the slave was no longer quote unquote productive and therefore his value was enough, has been extracted and he could then be disposed of and was calculated in completely capitalist terms that about say 26, 27 or 28. That's the end of his, what shall we say, surplus production and therefore at that's the point that he could be disposed of. Is that correct? That is true. The older you got, the less you picked. But what eventually what seems to have happened was the vicious whipping of the bodies of black people turned them into the old-fashioned unproductive technique. You had a bag and you'd carry it along and you pick and put it in, pick it and put it in. But apparently what happened was that through intense whipping, punishment, cruelty, you got African-Americans going through the fields of cotton plants and they were picking with both hands and putting it in. They became human automatons. That's how productivity increased. So my relationship to the history of technology in the United States, I talked to my historian friends down and say why didn't you tell me about that? You were talking about the schools like the one I now teach in a big engineering school. They needed to train up these manager engineers. You're an engineer. You know this part of the story. But it was not part of the history of technology in much of my experience. So I feel offended, actually. That we are missing, in fact, even globally, that industrial revolution in England comes with the colonial plunder, genocide, slavery, all these accompanies. Cotton. Shall we say? Right. All you need to know is one word. What was this industrial revolution about? What was this nice stuff? They wove into cloth and so forth. So if you look at sort of the banks, the shipping industry, the factories, the universities, the colleges, if you go into their records, they were all heavily invested in cotton. That's what the source is like today. It's all in digital electronics and so forth. Then it was the cotton industry. Coming back to the race relationship in the United States, because that's what we are discussing today. After slavery, there was, or shall we say, when slavery was abolished as a consequence of the Civil War, there was a feeling that, well, now we have entered a new stage of emancipation, that we will get unity. But that's not what really happens. That's right. Yeah. In fact, the basic conditions of oppression of African American people, black bodies, continued. You had a period about 10 years of reconstruction, and then there was a revolt against that. During reconstruction, you actually had African Americans serving in Congress and in state legislatures and so forth. But then that was shut down through a series of reforms. But on the ground, where you had people released from slavery, many of them became loosely linked to any kind of economic and social life. Then you had the invention of other forms of oppressive work relations, where let's say you were unemployed, vagrant on the streets, and so forth. You would be arrested, given a long-term sentence, and they formed prison chain gangs, basically. So on very minor charges, you would be imprisoned, put back into chains, and put to work so that the public institutions, the prisons, would rent out the labor of black people, right? The form of slavery. It was a new form of slavery. And then as you move through the 19th century and the 20th century, you had the creation of what we call Jim Crow segregation. So throughout society, you had the separation, the color line between white and black, and this affected housing schools, workplaces, transportation and so on. So in effect, you had systems of oppression over the decades that were again and again reinvented. So they were sort of changed, modified, but sort of reappears in a different form. Would that be the right? And often, quite invisibly, people would not talk about it. It wasn't described. You know, you had great thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and so forth, who were writing and talking about this. And in a way, there was a certain kind of denial about what was going on. I teach my engineering students a book about the American swimming pool. They started out as pools where the working class could get clean. And then after a while, the middle class whites got interested in the exercise. It was thought that people working in offices were getting flabby. You move through time at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, you had public pools for males in which people of different classes and color swam together harmoniously. Then at a later point, swimming pools became a kind of social fad. So they built in thousands of towns and cities, leisure pools in which there was no longer separation of male from female that used to be forbidden. But now you could have mom and dad and the kids come into these big public pools. They were public places, part of public life. And what happened, especially in the 1920s, was when these new pools went up, African Americans were kicked out, excluded. So you had segregation expressed there informally off times. But it was just known that black people couldn't come there. Why? The whites thought that males were black males were sexually aggressive and could not be in the water with white women and children. So this was another case in which very subtly the country divided along racial lines. It wasn't much talked about there weren't movements and so forth. But eventually, these patterns of segregation in the south, they were inscribed in laws. These people we kept apart, you would have separate but equal schools, for example. But even in the north, the pattern was basically that of eventually of white flight. So the whites moved from the city, they built these wonderful roads, they built these wonderful suburbs, and they were mainly havens of whiteness. So then you get again get re encoding of oppressive racial relationships. And of course, those erupted in the civil rights movement throughout the century, but really, with the successes of the 1960s. That's another issue. The civil rights movement again, was the point where you wanted to have thought that there is possibility of emancipation, at least in racial terms, there would be a kind of equalization, affirmative action, acceptance that there has been this racial discrimination, and therefore a move by the state also to end at least some of the worst forms of it. But do you see also the recreation of a similar kind that happened with the end of slavery and the reconfiguration under segregation, a similar kind of thing happening? Yes, you do. And you actually see it throughout the 20th century. What happened was, in crucial pieces of progressive legislation, during our new deal, you would say, well, people get housing support, the government would back up their mortgages and so forth. But it turns out these were racially encoded. So you have the practice of redlining. We say if you live inside the red line, let's say a brown and black neighborhood, your, your mortgage would be too risky. So you couldn't buy a house. It turns out today in the United States, in as regards income earned in a job, African Americans tend to earn less than whites. But the gaps are sort of closing. But if you look at wealth, the amount of assets you own, what whites have far more, black families tend to have very little, because over the decades, they were blocked out even in the north from buying houses. That's the Americans accumulate capital. You have a house, you bought it for 50,000 bucks, your kids can sell it for 200,000 when you die and so forth. But these institutionalized structures in finance, housing, schools, and so forth, were institutional barriers. So some of the arguments has been that you're more likely to fall into poverty, even if you had a certain kind of income, or children of such families, even they are more prone to fall into poverty than if you're white, or if you're black. So the difference is maintained because of the housing. That's what Right. And the schools also, because the 1956 decision, crucial Supreme Court decision, forbid legal segregation of schools. But then you had white flight. So you get the whites moving to the suburbs. Schools are paid for by tax levels. If you're in a prosperous community, your school is well equipped. The salaries are good for teachers. If you're caught back in the city where the tax rates are not so not so favorable, you get crummy schools, crummy equipment and so forth. So you are institutionally and in built form also reproducing race relations of an extremely nasty kind. Well, there's also been this argument that drugs, that war on drugs was really a coded war against the black community, African American community. And also the prison sentences, the three strike laws and the various other criminalization of even petty offenses of a kind which spent the dividend for long periods. Is that also part of this pattern of recreating shall we say racial values? Oh, yes, definitely. Because after the victories of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act, the voting rights act and so forth. The forces in the north and the south that were resistant to the advancement of African Americans, we're looking for new ways to justify again, the create recreation, the reinvention, what you had in slavery, what you had after reconstruction, what you had in Jane Jane, Jim and Jane Crow segregation. So in the the coming of the drug culture, which I saw as a hippie in San Francisco in the 60s, didn't use any myself, of course, but drugs were coming in and becoming quite controversial. There was a kind of drug panic. And what happened was that if you were a white person in the suburbs or whatever, if you had a little bit of powder or marijuana, cigarette or whatever, you get called in and the judge would say, well, let's not do this. You're on probation for a year and so forth. You'd have a lawyer. They would argue your case. This is Johnny is actually a good boy, right? But if you were an inner city African American youth, male or female, you didn't have a lawyer, you couldn't pay for a lawyer. And you'd go in to face the justice system. And they'd say, for drug possession or sales or whatever, five years in jail. And very often what would happen that the district attorney would come and say, well, you're going to plead not guilty, right? But you know, you could if you are found guilty of having possession of cocaine or whatever, crack, you could get a very long sentence. But I didn't have this stuff. I'm not guilty, your honor. We'll do a plea bargain. So instead of serving 10 years, you'll only get two. And that was what happened again and again in the justice system, right? And you have a wonderful book written by Michelle Alexander who is documented all of this. And it's essentially the reinvention of racial oppression in the context of the drug war, the drug war was ultimately a war and in carcer mass incarceration of young black people. We know for also from political records, memoirs and so forth, the people that this was among key political leaders in the United States, an explicit strategy. Nixon's aid has written about it, talked about using marijuana against the left, because a lot of the anti war movement were hippies supposedly and therefore into marijuana culture. And of course, hard drugs against the African American community. And the combination of these two is also what leads to the state taking a hard position against the right left and delegitizing them as hippies. And the second is of course, the longer term effect consequence of the African American population, a large amount of the young people being put into jail. And there were distinctions made if you had a nice powder cocaine, and you were sniffing it in a suburban home. That was one thing. If you're using much cheaper crack cocaine in the cities, this was thought to be it was described as a an epidemic, young children growing up in crack houses and so forth. And so of course, you needed to send people involved there off to jail for long periods of time. So there was even there's no difference really in the high or, you know, the effects on the body from cocaine in powder or crack cocaine as the specially chemically prepared substance, but it hit the African community much harder. The other interesting thing, and this is arisen recently with the Black Lives Matter movement, another way in which yet again, these same reinventions of oppression have emerged, is that in the policing system, which really came also out of slave patrols in the deep South and so forth. And you have white people policing black bodies and so forth. In the last 10 years or so, what happens it, well, let me put it this way. If I'm driving my car, and my head of tail light is out, the cop will pull me over. I stop, roll down the window. And he said, let me see your license and so on. So he said, did you know your tail light was out? I said, no, I didn't. He said, Oh, well, I'm not going to give you a ticket or anything today. But as soon as you can get to the shop and fix your tail light. Thank you, officer. Good night. You know that kind of thing. But if you're an African American young man, especially, they'll pull you over and hassle you. And and very often in recent years, what happens is you have these encounters between young African Americans, mainly men, but some women also, where there's a some kind of verbal altercation. And the next thing you know, somebody's been shot dead on the on the streets, Ferguson, Missouri, and and so these incidents still continue. There's a different lucky if unlucky shot. Yeah, that's that's the that's a pattern of lot of these encounters. Right. And so interesting social movements in the in the United States are including include the Black Lives Matter movement, which say, Why are we getting so many young people for no reason at all shot and killed for a traffic violation, or, or just walking down the street, crossing the street at the wrong point, bang, you're dead. And you know, this is it's erupted as a concern. Yeah, last issue over here that one of the strengths as it were of the ruling class classes, and that's true everywhere, is the ability to divide the people the oppressed. So do you see that the white working class who have been dispossessed, lost jobs are in the margin today, and the African American community, who have also who have been, of course, discriminated at different points of time in different ways, that there's a potential of coming together because Trump seems to be also appealing to shall we say, the white dispossessed. And while they while the African American communities, of course, not as constituted at all, you see the potential of coming together, coming together. For young people, yes, because they live in a world of diversity. There's diversity of ethnic background, skin color, and so forth. And in my in my experience, especially among better educated young people, these, these are not issues. In fact, they rather celebrate the newly diverse America. But then you get people who are especially in rural communities where maybe there weren't people of color around who are resistant to this. And the Trump supporters, many of them are whipped up by anti immigrant, which is also coded language for brown people coming and taking your jobs. Social scientists have been busy after Trump's election saying what really happened. And it turns out it wasn't economic differences and or even income and jobs that were was bothering people. It was what sociologists and anthropologists call social status anxiety. So you have this sense that you had a place in society. Now are there these others moving up that are going to knock you off the position that you you held. So it's a kind of cultural panic about your place in in the hierarchy. I know you have similar issues here, which I know nothing about having to do with cast. But in the United States, many of these same issues show up as worries about being under assault by strange people coming to get what you have. Langdon, it's an interesting discussion we're having because this are precisely the kind of anxiety shall we say we all the shall we say a section of the population suffers from and the consequences increase of hate divisiveness and also politically a certain section being instigated against others. So divisiveness is fostered by certain political forces. Just as in the United States is a phenomenon here is a phenomenon in Europe. And we seem to have come back to a phenomena where race in India cast is very similar to race because it's descent based discrimination. You are what you are discriminated against because of your parents. So right, that's the common element and we seem to be the see worldwide the eruption of nationalism, ethnic nationalism or different kinds of racism. All of this seems to be the color that we are seeing different nation states. It's a great challenge of how to deal with this in my own country. It turns out the less contact you have with a person a different person, a different background, maybe skin color, the more you are worried about them, anxiety even more and the closer contact you have with them. Let's say in cities and so forth, the anxiety goes down because you might up saying, Oh, they're just, you know, people like you and me, we can learn to live with them, which is, which is of course, the great challenge. And the problem is, as you said, that you have people who mobilize fear, resentment, anxiety for political reasons in order to gain power. Since we both of us are pretty old, you are a little older than me. We live in hope that hate will cannot the society cannot society cannot succumb to hate. But the short run hate can be pretty successful in politics. That's what we seem to see currently around the world, probably also because of other instabilities, aiding this this kind of process. Yeah, and then pleasure to have you with us. And we hope to see you in India again. Thank you very much. This is the time this all the time we have for news click today. Do keep watching us and we'll bring you other episodes of similar kinds.