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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2002
Hidden history of the revolutionary AtlanticThe Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000, Beacon Press, Boston. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker portray uprisings, refusals, and revolts by workers opposing early capitalism in the 17th and 18th century Atlantic economy. The authors perform a great service to all radicals by supplying us accounts of our forebears in resistance in their own words. The book takes its title from metaphors in 17th century ruling class discussions. Hercules embodied the ruling classes’ struggle to stamp out revolt and mold proletarians into the class discipline demanded by capital. The Hydra embodied all that the ruling classes feared—and still fear—about the proletariat. The Hydra was a mythical many-headed snake who would grow two new heads whenever one head was cut off. Similarly, working class struggles have arisen again and again at new points and with new methods of attack, despite capital’s attacks on workers’ power. The Hydra metaphor is particularly apt for contemporary class struggle and the multiple “heads” of the global working class. Fear of workers’ power haunts the ruling class today, knowing as they do that workers “do not forget, and... are ever ready from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore the Commons.” Capitalists can’t cut off all the heads of the proletarian Hydra, since capital requires the value produced by our labor. This dependence forces capital to find new methods to contain us in the capital relation and suppress proletarians who would "turn the world upside down." Hydra details how the labor of sailors was crucial for maritime production, and that ships and ports were a tool for both capital accumulation and proletarian resistance. Sailors faced harsh and deadly class discipline, vicious corporal and capital punishments, lethal working conditions and lack of provisions. Simultaneously, sailors mixed between cultures, learned new languages, and spread knowledge and practitioners of insurrection among the sailors, slaves, soldiers, servants, and workers of the Atlantic economy. A widespread form of rebellion against the brutality of early capitalism was piracy. Pirates enjoyed a much more egalitarian and democratic life than slaves, servants, or sailors. Sailors aboard merchant ships frequently mutinied when pirates attacked, joining them. A number of women became pirates, escaping the narrow range of options within capitalist patriarchy in favor of the more self-determining piratical life. Pirates preyed upon seafaring commerce, disrupting the trade in goods, slaves, and servants, thereby threatening the accumulation of Atlantic capital. The centrality of the maritime made pirates’ flotillas of resistance particularly dangerous to capitalism. Every time capital broke up a slave rebellion or put down a mutiny, some of the rebels were killed to make an example, while the rest were dispersed, to new places in the transatlantic economy, where they often linked up with others conspiring to end capital’s rule. Our resistance forces capital to continually modify itself to survive. In a sense, the ruling class deludes itself, it is no Hercules but Proteus, shifting shape to dodge the blows of our resistance and retain its hold. Hydra’s most inspiring passages present cycles of struggle largely unknown today that resisted capitalism’s foreclosure and foreshortening of human possibility. These cycles remind us that, despite capital’s oppression, ”the volatile, serpentine tradition” of proletarian resistance lives on. —Nate Holdren |
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