Radical Philosophy: A key concept of your work is ‘the motley crew’, which you mobilise to designate transversal alliances of sailors, slaves and pirates at sea. This seems a very productive notion for conceputalising insurgent collective formations that do not fit into the traditional categories of collective subjects. Could you explain the analytical purchase of that notion and how it emerged in your work with Peter Linebaugh?
Marcus Rediker: In writing The Many Headed Hydra (2000), Peter Linebaugh and I searched for terms and concepts used by people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe collective proletarian subjects and class struggle at the dawn of capitalism – ‘motley crew’, ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’, ‘outcasts of the nations of the earth’, and, most importantly of all, ‘the many-headed hydra’. Classically-educated European rulers cast themselves as Hercules as they built a new global economic system, calling forth great violence against the workers who resisted them. It was no easy task to organise sailors, slaves, indentured servants, factory workers, commoners and domestic workers into a new world capitalist system.
What we especially liked about the hydra concept was how it embodied the motility of resistance: when one head was cut off, two new heads grew in its place. The basic forms of capitalist violence – expropriation, exploitation, discipline and punishment – generated new forms of resistance. This became a central theme of our book: insurgent actors might be defeated in one place, then exiled, after which they initiated new resistance, often in another form, somewhere else around the Atlantic. Radicals defeated in the English Revolution reappeared as rebellious indentured servants in Virginia. The ‘experience of defeat’, as Christopher Hill called it, was carried within radical diasporas around the Atlantic and helped to generate new struggles. Movements from below were more deeply connected than we knew.
Out of this search for new concepts came the ‘motley crew’, a phrase that usually referred to the multi-ethnic workers aboard a ship but had a much broader application, especially in Atlantic port cities, where workers of all nations congregated. ‘Motley crew’ makes it possible to think the heterogeneity of the social subject in a way not determined by the nation-state. The ‘motley crew’ represented a new kind of mobile collectivity that contained its own social force.
‘Motley crew’ is a useful concept for our times. In the eighteenth century, the ‘motley crew’ referred to a work group, a collective of people whose cooperation was essential to accomplish a particular task. That task could be sailing a ship, unloading a ship, or producing tobacco, rice or sugar on a plantation. The ‘motley crew’ was an informal work group and a fundamental constituent part, an atom, so to speak, of class organisation. It was a temporary work group, frequently disbanded after its task had been completed. The collective of sailors who completed a voyage dispersed into taverns on the waterfront. But motley crew also operated at a second level, which was social and political. Various groups of working people came together in what was called a motley mob or a revolutionary crowd, a source of considerable power in eighteenth-century port cities. Let me give two examples. The motley crew was a driving force toward revolution in the 1760s, leading a series of protests in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and throughout the West Indies that eventually grew into the American Revolution. In 1768 sailors protested a wage cut in London, going from ship to ship, taking down or ‘striking’ their sails. This is the seafaring origin of the collective action called the strike. The motley crew wielded agency and power.