>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 12/23/99 03:59PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>racism/colonialism
You're treating these as if they're synonymous, but maybe they're not. Does colonization produce our notions of "race"? Did Ron Brown push U.S. capital's interest abroad for racial reasons? Was British exploitation of Ireland "racist" in the sense we understand it? Is Japanese investment in Thailand "racist"? Taiwanese investment in El Salvador? Did capitalism contribute to the end of apartheid?
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CB: Not exactly synonymous, but different species of the same genus. I'd say racism is an aggravated form of chauvinist nationalism or national oppression. Black people in the U.S. are a specially oppressed national/racial group. Race is an invalid biological category. It is a political eonomic category in the nature of a nationality. Colonialism is imperialist nationalism.
The key point is that racism/nationalism, whether as part of a domestic or transnational division of labor is universal in capitalism, in time and space. Slavery, paleo-colonialism, Jim Crow, Apartheid, neo-colonialism are all expressions this division of labor and necessary condition of capitalism as a system.
On Ron Brown, some Blacks owned slaves in the old South, but those weird exceptions and the individual motives of Brown or the Black slave owners do not refute the general rule of the system. It's like Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is more of a racist than most white people because he has more power than most people. But that doesn't refute the fact that racism "do" exist in general as part of the system.
British exploitation of the Irish was nationalism and colonialism. Racism is an aggravated form of nationalism. Racism is essentially a national question in the classic Marxist terminology. It's abolition is included under the rubric of the slogan "workers of the world (all countries and nationalities), unite".
I am not specifically familiar with Japanese investment in Thailand, but it is probably imperialist and national chauvinist, if not fully based specifcally on a racist ideology.
Did capitalism contribute to the end of apartheid ? Some. It also contributed to constructing it. Capitalism, Northern industrial capital, carried the day in ending U.S. slavery, an extreme form of racism. But it had to replace it with Jim Crow. Racism/nationalist oppression has different forms in different places and times in the era of capitalism, but it is always present in some form. The centrality of nationalist and racist oppression to capitalism from the Marxist standpoint is captured in the slogan "Workers of all countries , unite" and then even more in Lenin's modification "Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite."
CB