Not that we don't seek out those contradictions, Angela! But I think the tendency to idealise and establish "abstract" laws of motion of K, as Marx surely did, is defensible if it helps more to effectively generalise a transcendent political strategy. I know I tend to this excuse a great deal, probably in a mediocre way (certainly, as you regularly point out, without factoring in national/regional/international tensions), as a means of identifying allies in a myriad of anti-neoliberal campaigns.
> 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?
Yes, here's what Ted Benton nicely labels the "liberal illusion" in practice. It's also very closely related to the need to transcend the artificial state-market dichotomy (because in reality there's no opposition, is there), which the best radical economists (e.g. Ben Fine and Doug H in some of his recent WTO posts) are working on, particularly as this kind of dichotomising is penetrating all areas of social science. (My greatgrandfather, the sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, did enormous intellectual damage with his own nubile dualism -- gemeinschaft/gesellschaft -- which I understand was a direct attack on the residual impact of dialectic argumentation in late 19th c Germany.) I agree, Angela, that we are on very mushy terrain by talking in form/content ways ("apartheid"/"capitalism") with such artificial certainty. I can feel myself sinking into that swamp... but...
> 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.
Agreed, in abstract, idealised -- as well as concrete -- ways.
> 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.
But nevertheless, the main reason why we (in SA at least) may continue searching for a comprehensive, non-essentialist yet theoretically-grounded, politically-compelling Line on apartheid/patriarchy/environmental degradation and capitalism -- is that this is the way we have been socialised to think. This is not a good reason, I grant you. But still, it is vital to talk that talk, if we are restarting here with the conceptual material bequeathed by at least this particular historic, valiant social struggle, and its manifestation in what remains, sadly, the only real political argument widely accepted on the SA "Left" today: the Two-Stage Theory (a.k.a. the National Democratic Revolution) of the SA Communist Party. (First we get liberation from apartheid and consolidate non-racial capitalism, and then we go for socialism -- though it is pointed out by more nuanced SACP theoreticians that "there is no Chinese Wall between the stages.")
My own attempt to cut through, here, is by showing again and again across sectors, spaces and scales, how once you get to Stage 1 (national liberation) you can start sliding *backwards* in socio-economic terms (as did virtually all democratic national transitions across the South in recent decades). So from apartheid to neoliberalism (the subtitle of my forthcoming Pluto Press book, if I may advertise) means that getting from Stage 1 to Stage 2 becomes way harder; social-justice momentum is stopped and reversed; the environment goes faster to hell (aside from the beneficial effect of deindustrialisation); women and children appear to be more subject to violence and poverty; the disabled see their lifelines and safety nets snipped away, often entirely; the radical social movements are subject to systematically demobilisation; etc etc.
Which means, ultimately, we need to know -- in our mind but also in our political gut -- why the uneven/combined development of SA capitalism turned (black/white, men/women) liberation movement comrades/allies into enemies of black/women majorities.