If you already know how caste and untouchability work in India, skip ahead to the next section. The next thousand words or so are a primer necessary for those unfamiliar with Indian history to understand a disturbing phenomenon creeping up on us in Anglo America.
A Short Background on Caste for the Uninitiated
“The English did not come to India because she was poor. But because she was rich.” – Anonymous
The idea of India as the richest place on earth, not just materially but intellectually, spiritually, ecologically is an old one. This belief has been common across Eurasia and through East and North Africa for three thousand years. While India had long possessed an extraordinary geographic concentration of biological diversity and abundance, around 3000 years ago, it had acquired a new trait: a caste system.
Systems of caste or, as we prefer to say in the Global North, “race,” amplify the efficiency of economic systems to which they are attached. By that I mean that they increase economic productivity by deepening and complicating social inequality. Indian economists and social theorists have consistently observed, over the past century and a half, that capitalism extracts more labour for less cost in India because it has the most venerable, nuanced, dynamics caste system on earth.
Caste systems are effective because of their ability to reduce wages for the lowest-status, lowest wage work below what feudalism, mercantilism or capitalism could, on their own. Furthermore, they do not just lower wages for those at the bottom, they increase their precarity, not just with respect to maintaining employment but to enjoying the protection of the law, access to the legal system and the ability to form class-based alliances with those outside their caste. But the reason for India’s economic dynamism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages stemmed from its combination of two theories of caste into one i.e. it created a uniquely efficient caste system.
The original Indian caste system was imposed by the Aryan invaders from Central Asia who used chariots to conquer the already highly developed agrarian society of Dravidian India. The Aryan invaders were a minority in the vast and populous set of territories they conquered and looked significantly different than the conquered. Their skin was much much lighter and they were taller, on average, than the peasants who toiled in the fields. The process of conquering India was a multi-century affair and, in many ways, remains incomplete and ongoing, 3000 years along. This meant that a large portion of the Aryans were involved in war professionally throughout their lives. And, as conquerors of India, their main activity, outside of war, was creaming off surplus and trading said surplus within India and with peoples as far away as the Iberian Peninsula and the Yangtze River.
It was on this basis that the original Vedic ideology was generated: there were two main groups of people: the once-born and the reincarnated. The once-born could be detected by their dark skin and small builds. They, based on being souls newly graduated to human status, worked as peasants or labourers. If they worked faithfully and obediently, they might be reborn into one of the higher castes, the merchant caste, the warrior caste or the best, the top caste, the brahmin or priest caste.
One could tell the difference among the higher castes based on a combination of colour and social position/aptitude. If one were born into a rich family or family of merchants, if that person had an aptitude at making their family’s fortune grow, or their relatives did, and if their skin were light enough, evidence showed that they were a member of the vaiysha (merchant) caste. If one were born into a family of warriors, if that person succeeded in battle or commanded others who did, or if their relatives did, and if their skin were even lighter, they were revealed as a ksatriyah (warrior). And if one had the whitest skin and was part of a family system with special spiritual knowledge from the heavens and from sacred texts, one was a brahmin.
Caste was not an attribute directly assigned to an individual. Rather one’s jati possessed caste. There is no equivalent to such a thing outside Indian society, maybe an allyu in the Inca Empire. A jati is essentially a cross between a macro-lineage/small tribe and a medieval guild, a group of people who share a common ancestor and work in a particular area of the economy. In this way, the once-born jatis were large extended families/small endogamous tribes of labourers or peasants.
Caste was supposed to be immutable but, of course, mistakes were inevitably made. A key function of brahmins was to correct those mistakes. So, if a jati seized the brahmin’s village by force and held him at spear-point, he would have to concede that whatever its caste had been, it was now part of the ksatriyah caste. Similarly, if the brahmin received a giant sack a cash from a jati’s headman, it followed that previous brahmins must have been mistaken in not declaring its members to be vaiyshas. Like all successful racial systems, it was dynamic, totalizing and predictive but, ultimately, tautological.
Brahmins were naturally intelligent, generous, unconcerned with mundane and material things; ksatriyahs were naturally brave and strong; vaiyshas were naturally cunning yet generous. And the once-born, too, had their virtues. The best were industrious, humble, respectful. They might go on to be reborn into a higher caste, whereas those who were lazy, entitled, confrontational would not.
The once-born were stuck doing the work of the once-born and, because of the stigma associated with the status and inability to rise above it, India’s economy was far more effective at keeping people in low-wage, rural work and keeping rural wages from rising, a very different situation from the Mediterranean world under Roman hegemony, which suffered from chronic periodic labour shortages and uncontrolled costs in the lowest-status jobs.
But during the time of its exchange with the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean worlds, it adopted an additional elaboration of caste that originate in the West but spread all the way to Japan in just a few centuries: the idea of “unclean work.” While Mediterranean civilizations did not have caste systems (but marveled at India’s and what it made possible), they did have class (plebian, patrician, etc.) and they did have slavery but it was the idea of unclean occupations that fitted so brilliantly into the already hegemonic Indian caste system.
In Galenic medicine (medicine based the physician Galen who expressed Aristotle’s theories of matter in medical terms), humoral imbalance is the cause of most personal illness. But “miasma” is the cause of public health problems; bad smells were understood to cause mass illness. And the Galenists were not really far off; pathogens and parasites were often generated by bad-smelling things and so Galenic medicine, like caste, was backed by real world evidence.
This discovery allowed Indians to create a caste below the bottom, an inferior kind of once-born, an “untouchable” or dalit. Jatis whose members worked as pearl divers, butchers, night soil collectors, tanners, etc. formed this new caste, the lowest of the low. This meant that odiferous skilled trades could also have their wages depressed and their labour supply assured. Dalits also possessed a property the other castes lacked: contagion. If one touched a dalit, this might result in you getting physically sick or, worse yet, the touch would reveal that you, yourself were a dalit, an untouchable masquerading among the clean. Because any non-dalit would naturally be repulsed by the very idea of touching a stinking, disease-ridden untouchable.
Whereas the attributes of the original four castes were essentially a hierarchy of virtues, dalits were understood to be people of naturally low character; their smell, their distasteful work, etc. were merely the outward signs of their low character, their dishonesty, deviousness, stupidity, depravity. Not only were they legitimately paid rock-bottom wages, no matter the monetary value of their work (e.g. pearl divers); their low character meant that if they experienced physical or sexual violence, it was almost certainly deserved.
The true genius of the Indian caste system at its fullest elaboration is that it did not merely make people underpay the underclass and extract greater surplus value from their labour. They were hated for doing, literally in some cases, society’s shit work. You knew that the person collecting night soil, shucking oysters, collecting garbage was not just an inferior person, but a bad one, one who was being justly punished by the universe for the evil they committed in another life.
A Review of My Past Arguments
I am increasingly of the belief that Anglo Americans are in the process of creating a caste of unclean workers, that people who perform certain essential jobs within capitalism are increasingly viewed as ontologically distinct from other Anglo Americans, that their supposedly unclean work allows us to identify them as people of low character, who deserve only our contempt.
The occupations we have decided are unclean are, fundamentally, those that require workers to personally enact the violence of capitalism with their bodies. Rig work, bush work, mill work and law enforcement require workers to engage in acts of violence towards the planet or towards other human beings as part of the deal. Work associated with fossil fuels but not as directly violent also fits the bill, with coal mining, trucking and filling station work adjacent and also, albeit to a slightly lesser degree, also unclean.
What these jobs have in common is that, as our current economy and energy systems are structured (much to my chagrin!), these jobs are essential jobs. Our basic systems of food distribution, our state’s violence monopoly, our energy systems, etc. would collapse without these workers. Until such time as we de-carbonize our energy systems, move away from paper-intensive administrative systems, etc. these workers are among the most essential in our society. And we appear to hate them for it.
We even have a name for this incipient caste: the Deplorables.
The formation of this caste is a multivalent process with many actors. Climate denialism is more common among this class, because, unlike members of the laptop class, many members cannot distance themselves from a sense of responsibility for their participation in causing the omnicide we are facing because they are producers of fossil energy, not merely consumers or managers of its production and use. This inability to distance oneself from one’s involvement in the collapse of planetary life support systems produces this kind of false consciousness as a natural coping mechanism, something with which those more physically (though not morally or economically) distant have the luxury of not needing in order to stay in work.
But it is also common because, especially in Canada, its members are more likely to live in communities and engage in activities more extremely and adversely affected by our climate’s destabilization, producing what psychologists call “reaction formation,” especially concentrated in Canada’s Boreal Belt, the industrial resource and fossil fuel extraction periphery stretching from Timmins to Terrace.
The cultural divergence between this incipient caste and the laptop class that dominates our cities has also been intensified by state Covid policy through denormalization programs. It has long been understood, through research into anti-smoking campaigns, that if one attempts to encourage a behaviour by emphasizing its respectable and mainstream nature, most people will be influenced to adopt it. But the campaign will produce paradoxical effects in populations that believe they have already been excluded from the mainstream. This is why anti-smoking campaigns using denormalization actually function as cigarette ads for young, Indigenous women. This clearly happened with Covid vaccines but, instead of pivoting to strategies for encouraging vaccination in communities outside the mainstream, the state intensified its denormalization messaging and added increasing levels of coercion (i.e. firing from government jobs and vaccine “passes”). And by propounding the falsehood that vaccines strongly conditioned Covid transmissibility, the idea of Deplorables as both unhygienic and contagious fitted in perfectly.
Activism resisting the mass firings and pass laws, in turn engendered further demonization of this group by the laptop class and mainstream media, which reached a crescendo with the Ottawa convoy, about which I spilled considerable ink last year. The resurrection of the “white trash” racial identity in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates and others’ writing sometimes euphemized as the “white working class” is a key part of this caste-making process. “White trash,” in the US, until the 1980s, had the same meaning as “half-breed” did in Canada; it was the pejorative for white-passing Métis people in the Mississippi Basin and Appalachia (members of the caste in this region were also called “Hillbillies”).
White-passing Indigenous and Métis people are demographically concentrated in Canada’s Boreal Belt and it is the regional culture they have built together with their settler neighbours over the past century that informs not just those in the Northwest but urban members of this caste in the making, across the country.
Along with this pre-existing culture, de-normalization, the climate crisis and urban Canadians’ and their media’s construction of certain kinds of work as unclean has accelerated and intensified this process of caste-making.
Something similar happened in the United States a century ago, following the Dawes Act of 1894, which extinguished Indigenous title and status, pushing aboriginal people off their land and into the role of co-creating something called “migrant worker culture” in the West, encompassing itinerant trade unionist radicals, Mexican migrants, newly landless Indigenous people and the increasingly precarious and indebted regional working class. This ultimately became such a successful competing culture, and such an effective conductor of Indigenous cultural practices into settler culture, and such a threat to labour discipline that it was one of the key motivators for the Roosevelt Administration’s re-creation of Indigenous status and title in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
But in Alaska, where the Act did not apply, this culture ultimately evolved into mainstream Alaskan-ness, as epitomized in Alaska separatist and non-status Eskimo, Todd Palin, ex-husband of the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate.
The Politics of Contagion
What ultimately convinced me to write this post tying all this together is that a final element of Indian untouchability is creeping into our project of caste-making: contagion. One of the reasons that Zersetzung is so effective is that our culture is getting increasingly judgemental of one’s associations. Not only do my urban cop friends actively dissemble about their jobs when interacting with people outside their caste, their friends and associates increasingly do, fearing, quite legitimately, that simply being friends with a police officer taints a person as someone of low character, whose deplorability has been revealed by their associations.
I routinely read Twitter posts by otherwise intelligent people about how every single police officer in the world is an evil person and that anyone socializing with, working with or otherwise associating with such unclean people is, themselves, a person of low character, even as, ironically, they grow more strident in their demands that police officers do more to abridge the free speech, assembly, association and mobility rights of those outside our progressive consensus.
In other words, our hatred of the untouchables does not get in the way of demanding more work from them and, unsurprisingly, demanding reductions in their wages and longer hours of work, i.e. “Defund the police.”
Now, this is not to say that there are not real problems in the culture of Anglo America’s neo-Dalits. Police are becoming more violent, more clannish, more isolated, more like an occupying army surrounded by a local populace that hates them—because that is what they have become. Similarly, the work discipline regimes of our oil rigs and man camps, with their isolation, long shift work, tolerance for workplace stimulant abuse and proximity to economically depressed Indian reserves and reservations, mean that one can draw rape and murder maps simply by knowing fracking locations.
What is not going to solve the problem of an increasingly stigmatized and culturally distinct neo-dalit caste is demanding that its members deliver more violence on behalf of capitalism and then further stigmatizing them for delivering the violence demanded of them.
Welcome to the Party!
Despite the scorn and demands we heap upon the neo-dalits of Boreal Canada, there is much to admire about them. Unlike the Occupy camps of the 2000s and 2010s, the Ottawa Convoy and the provincial convoys of the years preceding, that were subject to media blackouts, were not somber displays of outrage, nor did they experience anything like the rates of rape, drug abuse, unhygienic conditions, theft, looting, violence and actual protester deaths we have seen from other anarchic mass mobilizations that have originated on the left of the political spectrum lately.
Lacking a strong cultural tradition, the truckers appear to have got to Ottawa and with little planned, decided to stage an event more closely resembling an NFL tailgate party than a traditional protest. The honking, the bouncy castle, the street corner bonfires, the Canadian flag-waving exhibited a joy that I never saw from the Occupy Movement, which I vigorously supported and still do.
And it is this that I think animates our hatred of this incipient caste: like their first iteration in Louis Riel’s rebellions, the Third Northwest Rebellion is offering an alternative to the neo-Vedic, passive-aggressive, tearful colonizer nationalism of Justin Trudeau and his ilk; they are offering us an inclusive, joyful nationalism, one that breaks down the rural-urban, settler-Indigenous, laptop-labourer divisions that are deepening in our society and inviting us to join their loud, indecorous, tailgate party.
As someone irrevocably tainted by occupation, association and ideology as a member of that caste, I intend to join the festivities and practice my socialism and climate activism among my people, the Deplorables.
Postscript
Today, after posting, I learned that it’s a buyers’ market for used Maple Leaf deck chairs. Why? Because the Convoyists’ association with their own country’s flag has irrevocable tainted that flag in the minds of progressives. Further evidence of the pollution politics of untouchability.
