Must capitalism be racist?

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Thu Dec 30 09:35:00 PST 1999


There's a lot be said here. I won't check my notes just yet as this is the holiday season.

Taking on Gary Becker's thesis of 'racial' wage equalisation through competition, Michael Reich argues that job categories are arbitrarily hierarchized in order to provoke intra class disunity--this takes the discussion into the abode of production (Howard Botwinick has developed a new theory). Interestingly the more effectively race serves as queing mechanism and therefore the greater the gaps between whites and blacks, the greater the inequality among whites themselves, i.e., the greater the gaps between white capitalists and white workers. When race divides, the workers expend themselves over either fighting or entrenching their relative position in the petty hierarchies that have been created for them; thus, they do no engage in collective action against the capitalist class (meanwhile such infighting entrenches their subgroup identity at the expense of a class identity).

Reich's argument seems to suggest a capitalist interest not so much in racism per se but in arbitrarily hierarchized job categories and some mechanism by which to aribitrarily slot 'groups' into that hierarchy differentially (Mario Barrerra has demonstrated such to be operative in the case of white-Chicano relations in the Southwest--see Race and Class in the Southwest). Why the slotting operates on a group basis is not clear.

It is also important to underline here that these groups do not understand themselves in structural (as in a caste system) but substantial terms. It would be inaccurate for profound reasons to describe, with Gunnar Myrdal, such a system of job hierarchy as caste relations. That is, the groups do not understand themselves so much in interdependent terms but as impenetrable blocs, self sufficient and in competition with each other. That is, they are 'substantialized' in the same way individuals are represented in bourgeois society (Louis Dumont's attempt to differentiate race from caste is profoundly important). Reich would of course emphasize that since the playing field in unequal, the relations are more highly conflictual than simply competitive.

Even more, those substantialized groups need not be racialized ones; the line could of course be (and often) is gender or nationalist (or in the case of Central American plantations, linguistic: arbitrarily hierarchized Indian groups who do not speak the same language are forced to work side by side). Capital need not have created those groups but their identities are not grounded archaichally but rather in the day to day conditions of competition implicit in wage labor. To the the extent that Reich argues with Oliver Cox that whites therefore do not benefit from racism, he has been contested by Wm Darity and others who do argue that at the least short term benefits are derived thereby.

It does seem to me that Reich's position does lead him to be excessively wary, like WJ Wilson, of subordinate group's struggles against their relative position as possibly contributory to intra working class disunity via the entrenchment of subgroup identity. He does not seem to emphasize sufficiently that any relative advantage, psychic and material, accorded on a subgroup basis (whether this indeed obtains is the basis of sophisticated statistical argument) must indeed be broken down in practical and real terms if the class is to act as a class. But this may be a terribly unfair assessment since he emphasises the importance of anti racism.

Yet he seems to me to leave too little scope for affirmative action (esp in apprentice programs). Taking up a Reichian perspective, Stanford economist Martin Carnoy argues that Democrats must find a way of countering the Republican threat to woo white male workers with promises of security of their relative position. Towards that end Carnoy seems to counsel against aggressive campaigns for affirmative action and race specific remedies (which often do only help the smallest fraction of the minority group anyway--this is of course true).

I would argue however that the power of race or ethnicity does not derive solely from intra class competition, stoked by the bourgeoisie (though Reich is to be praised for emphasising the workplace and production in his discussion of racism). Ethnic politics of course became the basis of mobilisation over the city purse as Stephen Erie has shown.

And the ways we make sense of human diversity continues to occupy a liminal space between folk notions and scientific ones. For example, the Darwinian triumph of monogenism over polygenism is coupled with its discovery of deep time that seems to make possible natural selection, operating differently in various parts of the world, producing human groups that were were biologically very different from each other. It is out of such confusion that the ideology of deep racial difference continues to hold sway.

Again lotsa to talk about here; how about next year?

Yours, Rakesh



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