What I am saying exactly is that the capitalist mode of production must be redefined as wage-labor + racism/nationalism/colonialism. Marx must be updated.
I think capitalism must always be conceived of as a world system. That's dialectics. The part of that system in the U.S. has historically depended especially upon an internal nationally/racially oppressed group and groups. In one aspect,the part of the system in England depended upon oppression of the "internal" Irish national group, and then vast colonies elsewhere. Many other parts of the system, as in Belgium or Holland depended upon colonials with oppressed and exploited national labor forces on territories external to their "father"lands. All of these countries depended upon each other, so that they depended indirectly on other countries' forms nationalism/racism/colonialism.
At any rate, Marx and Engels indirectly acknowledge this aspect in making "workers of all countries, unite" the number one slogan. This recognizes division of the working class by nationality, of which race is the most aggravated form, as the central problem of the working class movement. Lenin expanded this to "workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite" as it became even clearer in his day that national chauvinism/racism/colonialism is a critical and necessary pillar of capitalism, really as much as wage-labor as defining capitalism. Wage labor and nationalism/racism impinge in slightly different ways, but capitalism cannot exist without either. Those who claim otherwise have the burden of explaining why capitalism has never existed without these.
CB
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 12/23/99 03:57PM >>>
I think part at least of the problem is a difficulty over what can awkwardly be termed "levels of abstraction." Racism does not, I think (nor does male supremacy, etc.) enter into the basic definition of capitalism as a mode of production. But I think it can be argued both theoretically and (obviously) in concrete historical terms that the political conditions that capitalism by its very nature requires cannot be developed or maintained without fundamental divisions within the working class. And *historically* (contingently?) "race" has fulfilled that necessity.
A second source of difficulty can revolve around the relationship between a fundamental theoretical understanding of capitalism and strategic theory for the struggle against capitalism. Charles Brown and I perfectly agree that (for the u.s.) any working class strategy that does not forefront the fight against racism *within* the working class is a strategy doomed to failure. I don't happen (at least provisionally) to believe that that strategic principle is in any way dependent on the proposition that, by its nature, "CAPITALISM is racist to the core." In principle, I don't think it would *have* to be. In fact, as it exists, it is (and will remain so).
I do believe that one of the most serious forms of opportunism in the United States is the illusion that, *whatever* the immediate issue, it can be adequately confronted without factoring in the necessary struggle against racism. I find personally offensive statements saying that in this or that context the fight against racism is a diversion.
Carrol