Race and Class at the High

Seas
Presentation held at the conference “’Class Without Consciousness’ – The Politics
Of Fragmented Class Identities” at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, 15.
November 2019

Marie C. Grasmeier (Bremen University)

Good morning everybody and welcome to my presentation about race and class at
the high seas. My name is Marie Grasmeier. I am a doctoral student at Bremen
University in Northern Germany. My doctoral research project is an ethnographic
study on the occupational culture and occupational identities of seafarers in the
global shipping industry.

I will speak about a similar topic as my fore speaker, Linda Beck. However, the
findings I will present now deal with a different sector – the global shipping
industry – and my results regarding ethnification and racism differ quite a lot from
Linda’s findings in the construction sector.

The Shipping Industry

The shipping industry is generally regarded as the most globalised of all
industries. Ships, today, are mostly registered in so called open ship registers. The
workforce is hired on an international labour market where shipowners can
choose labour supply countries according to the lowest wage levels. Since it is
common practice to hire the senior officers from the owner’s home country or
other countries of the Global North while junior officers and ratings are recruited
from places of the periphery – like the Philippines – the hierarchy of the shipboard
organisation in most cases resembles the power relations between regions and
nation states in the capitalist world-system. A seafarer’s skin colour functions

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most of the time as a “signification” of organisational rank. This “racialized
social system” is an outcome of the global competition between shipping capitals
and therefore itself a result of class relations.

Research Question
Against this background, I will ask in my presentation what it means that, as
Stuart Hall puts it, „race is thus, also, the modality in which class is 'lived'.”

• How is the construction of occupational identities interwoven with ethnic

identification?

• How is symbolic inclusion in and exclusion from the occupational

community negotiated along the lines of ethnic difference?

• How are objective class relations implicitly expressed in these processes?

Methods
To explore these issues I will draw on ethnographic data I collected during
fieldwork on ships of the global merchant fleet as well as on auto-ethnographic
data originating from my previous professional experience as a former seafarer.
Prior to my training in anthropology, I completed vocational training as a deck
officer in the merchant fleet which included serving two practical terms on board
international merchant ships. In total, the data used in my research project stems
from a sea time of some fourteen months on six different ships with multi-ethnic
crews from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Philippines, Sri-
Lanka and Germany.

Concepts of Class
Since it refers to a wide range of different concepts and ideas, the notion of class
is a quite ambiguous and enigmatic one. We can mainly distinguish between
empirical and form-analytic class concepts.

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The Empirical Concept
The empirical concept of class stems from the desire to allow for a social structure
that is more complex than is implied by the classical Marxian notion of class
society that focusses on the antagonism of capital and labour. Attempts where
made not only to differentiate the classes into sub-classes but also to include non-
economic factors in the analysis. Examples are the analysis of social space
structured by economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital by Pierre Bourdieu
and its successors. The aim of such concepts is to be able to as accurately as
possible capture social identities of individuals belonging to different social
milieus.

The Form-Analytic Concept

The form-analytic concept, on the other hand, does not aim at a preferably
accurate description of the empirical surface of social phenomena. Rather, its
purpose is to explain the economic and social laws underlying social reality –
which is the subject of the above mentioned sociological concepts – in the sense
of “deep structures”. The form-analytic class concept thus aims to identify the
reason for the unequal distribution of resources rather than its effects: an
individual’s position in the property relations regarding the means and conditions
of production. For this purpose, it is not required to be able to find an accurate
category that allows for the complex diversity of individual social positions but to
focus on the economic functions of class formations.

Since both approaches play an important part if we attempt to analyse, explain and
understand social and cultural reality, it is not my intention here to argue for one
or the other concept to be generally preferred. What I think is important, however,
is to make a clear distinction between the two approaches. This is to avoid
confusing class in the formal analytical sense with phenomena like social strata,
milieus, lifestyles etc. Therefore, in the following, I will reserve the notion of
“class” to refer to the form-analytical category as it was outlined by Karl Marx.
Class position, here, refers to the quality of one’s revenue source and its role in
the production process of a capitalist society. Therefore, class in this sense is a

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function of property relations rather than income level (social strata) or lifestyle
(milieu). It is not about how much income but from which source it is earned.

Class and Occupational Identities

For the field under investigation in the present study the class structure is
characterised first by the fact that all crewmembers belong to the working class.
They are part of the occupational group because they need to sell their labour
power for a living and they happen to sell it to shipping capital. Class relations,
however, structure seafarers’ life-world as a capitalist workplace to a considerable
degree. Most of the organisational role bearers within the shipboard hierarchy are
superiors to other crew members. Therefore, it is part of their occupational role to
represent capital interests towards their subordinates. The “character mask” of
capital interest is objectively part of their occupational identities.

Interactive Performances (1)

In the following, I will present and discuss several instances from my fieldwork
where intersections of class and ‘race’ are performed interactively by seafarers on
board in different situations. The first example is from a container ship I sailed on
as a deck cadet.

On ships, regular safety drills or exercises must be held to prepare the crew for
emergency situation. On the day the scene took place, one of those exercises had
epically failed because it had never been done before. After the exercise, the
captain called me to the bridge to discuss this failed exercise with him and the
chief engineer, both Germans. But instead of a factual debriefing of the exercise,
the two seafarers started a tirade against the Filipino crew members whom they
made responsible for the failure. During his rant, the chief engineer stated that

“If there is a fire you can completely forget about the wogs. We, the
Germans, are then the ones to save the ship. This is about our safety.
If things get serious, they all run and will be sitting in the lifeboat”

Then, the captain joined in:

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 “Do you know with whom you are sailing here? This is genetic waste.
They should all be thrown over board”

This scene is first of all about vocational socialisation, namely socialisation into a
racist discourse the two senior officers take for granted. They construct what Paul
Gilroy referred to as a “camp” of the white crew members which is characterised
by interests in opposition to those of the so called “wogs” and they endeavour to
recruit the cadet into their camp. The opposition towards their non-white fellow
crewmembers expressed by the two officers is almost absolute, culminating in
fantasies of elimination (“genetic waste”; “throw them over board”).

What is of interest to my question of the intersectionality of class and race is that

they assume a congruence between the interests of the ship owner with those of
the white workers. It is their responsibility to protect the ship, which is the
property of the owner. The stated antagonism of interests between German and
Filipino, white and non-white, workers is accompanied by the statement of a
shared interest between German workers and German capitalists. The racial
solidarity demanded by the two officers cross-cuts boundaries of class as well as
organisational hierarchy.

Interactive Performances (2)

Another occasion where class relations are referred to in terms of ‘race’ and
national belonging took place when a small ship where I worked as a deck hand
entered port. During berthing, the ship’s cook and me did not very successfully
get along with handling the mooring lines – I was still very inexperienced and he
was a cook. Our bad performance seemingly really annoyed the captain. After the
manoeuvre, he shouted to us:

“What the hell was that? I will now call the owner. Then he’ll send
here a couple of wogs, but really black ones! They are still better than
you are! No wonder that nobody employs any Germans any more!”

He expresses his anger by an attempt to insult us by comparing us to the “really

black ones”, i.e. our colleagues from labour supply countries of the Global South.

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For his rant to make sense as an insult, the captain needs to refer to several
inventories of knowledge forming part of discourses present in the field.

First, he insinuates a basic antagonism of interests between “Germans” and

“blacks”. The general competition among workers here appears as a competition
between ‘races’ or nationalities. He thereby implicitly refers to a hegemonial
discourse in Western societies contesting that “the immigrants” “take away”
“our” jobs. Within this discourse, unemployment appears as a mere function of the
supply of potential workers. The dependency of the demand for labour power on
capital’s calculation regarding the profitability of employing workers is thereby
crossed out. At the same time, the general competition among workers for
opportunities to sell one’s labour power is imagined as a competition between
‘racial’, ethnic or national collectives. The argument comes along with the moral
judgement that only native nationals are entitled to national jobs. “The economy”
is implicitly credited with the charitable purpose of providing jobs to their
compatriots. It is also noteworthy in this context that the captain juxtaposes the
incommensurable categories of “Germans” and “blacks”, therefore as a matter of
course equates being German with whiteness and non-belonging to the national
community with being black. The existence of non-white German nationals is
thereby crossed out.

Second, the captain presumes the fact of a general incompetence of the “blacks”
as an incontestable knowledge. He draws on the juxtaposition of the categories of
competent “German” workers and cheap but incompetent “black” workers and
then turns this dichotomy upside down to insult his “German” subordinates. His
attempt is to discipline the “German” seafarers by appealing to their “ethnic
honour” as “white Germans” who should be better workers by virtue of their
‘racial’ and national belonging. He thereby takes for granted our desire to belong
to the “white club” and to demarcate ourselves from our non-white fellow
workers. The pre-condition of this rhetoric to be effective is the existence of a
hegemonial racist discourse in the industry – at least among white members of the
industry – about ‘racial’ differences in competence and job performance.

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Conclusion
• One observation in the discussed case examples is that the white seafarers
in senior positions tended to identify with capital rather than their fellow
workers along ethnic lines. Ship owners crew white seafarers into senior
positions due to an assumed greater loyalty => they take into account
peoples‘ racism in their human resources strategy and this “devide and
rule strategy” obviously works.

• Competition among workers for job opportunities appears as a competition

between ethnic collectives in a distorted manner (“they take away our
jobs“), class is according to Stuart Hall replaced as the „master identity“
by ‘race’.

• Class is, if at all, a non-identity: the goal is to overcome being part of the
working class by individual efforts. This is often an integral part of
occupational identities of seafarers from the Global South and refers to a
neoliberal discourse of meritocracy.

• Karl-Heinz Roth (2005) sees transport workers as “the core of the

industrial working class of the 21 st century“ and in a special special
position of power due to their important role for globalisation. Therefore,
he attributes to them a key role for global social change from below. In
contrast, Filomeno Aguilar writes: “The global workplace graphically
encodes the ideological tensions of capitalism that [...] symbiotically link
universalism to racism and sexism.“ Grass roots self-organisation of
workers is much harder to achieve in globalised situations than within
national class formations. Any resistance, where it exists, is usually aimed
at the economic survival of the own ethnic, ‘racial’ or national in-group.

One Final Case

On one ship the crewing agent circumvented the bargaining agreement by the
practice of double bookkeeping. The German senior officers believed that the
owner did not know about it. When I asked the captain why he did not intervene
and inform the owner about the fraud, he replied that it was not his business. He

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also stated that he would act against his own interests as a worker [sic!] if he
supported the Filipinos.