patrick wrote:
> Conclusion by most radical intellectuals here after several false
> starts: the apartheid-capitalism bedfellow relationship was
> "contingent" not "necessary." But that too doesn't satisfy. SA
> capitalism is still unbelievably racist, but unevenly so.
>
> I think many of us still search for a coherent Line on this.
that's not going to happen soon i suspect, *because* the question begins by asking whether this or that particular modality of racism (or sexism) is necessary to some idealised version of capitalist accumulation. if capital includes the contradictory (necessarily contradictory) moments of equality and inequality (an equalisation of labours and domination/exploitation), then why suppose that capitalism is bereft of such contradictions as well? which means that there's no reason to insist that racism and sexism are externalities (whose relation to capitalist exploitation therefore has to be worked in as functional or epiphenomenal) any more than it is to insist that particular variations of such are necessary. another way of putting this might be as the contradictions within liberalism: liberalism both enshrines the vision of human equality (the corollary of the equalisation of labours) and explains (as if positing an assumption) the failures of capitalism to attain political, cultural and above all economic equality by making such inequalities explicable as an attribute of bodies. racism and sexism are both about the bodily attribution of inequality, right?
what that also means, of course, is that there are inherent pressures both for and against racism in capitalism. capitalism is both progressive and reactionary, to use another formulation. and there's no good reason i can see to suggest that the character of racism (or sexism) takes one form and only that; hence that apartheid is the only shape it can take. presumably, with the fall of the legal structures of apartheid, a new set of codes begins to take its place, even and especially in the law -- isn't the whole issue of criminality and law and order in SA a post-apartheid rendition of racism and the law?
... i said all that and i didn't use the phrase 'immanent contradiction' once.
Angela _________