Must capitalism be racist?

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

In a message dated 99-12-31 16:39:54 EST, you write:

<< and where does the communist movement come from?  another planet?  it works
 within the spaces between capitalism's contradictions and with those
 contradictions, which is also why debates over various (most, all) things
 within the communist movement seem so interminable, despite the valiant
 efforts to wish them into a theoretical resolution.

Of course. But there is a big difference between a sort of antiracism that 
comes out of resistance to capitalism and that which comes out of capitsliam 
itself. The first kinds "comes out of capitalsm," "bearing upon it the 
birthmarks of the old society," etc., but also the spirit, at least of the 
new society. In particular, it does not restrict itself to the idea that all 
races are equally fit to be good workers or bosses and equally bourgeois 
citizens of a liberal democracy that dares not challenge the rule of 
property. On the contrary, an anatiracism that comes out of  a movement has 
the potential of challenging the property relations of the existing society 
and its conception of citizenship. Aand of course oppositional movements in 
the real world come with the limitations of the origin, not least the CPUSA, 
which, as I said, was the chief source of "outside" American antiracism in 
1917-50 or so.
 
 you counterposed equality with freedom.  where does our sense -- and
 contradictory and conflicting senses -- of what freedom means come from?
  >>

I suppose this means that I overlooked that our senses of freedom come from 
capitalism. But of course I haven't. As above, some of our senses of freedom 
do so arise, and somea rise, we might say, within capitalism but against it, 
as the ideology of an oppositional struggle.

 For example the freedom that animated the freedom movements of the 1950ss 
and 1960s was not only or even mainly the freedom to buy and sell, but the 
emancipatory impulse behind the antislavery movement, resistance to 
exploitation. Even where buying and selling was at issue, as in the lunch 
counter sit-ins, the point was embodied in the larger context of a struggle 
against the humiliation of Jim Crow and the gerneralized economic 
exploitation of Blacks under segregation. 

To put the point in a general terms. Any system of exploitation will have a 
legitimating ideology, an official justice that licences but also limits the 
exploitation that system permits. If we are lucky, the harm caused by that 
exploitation will produce outrage that will translate into an radical 
justice, the ideology of an imagined alternative emancipatory order that 
postullates a different set of limits. 

What you have done is to subsume radical justice into official justice merely 
because radical justice is a product of the system of exploitation. That is 
serious confusion.

For more on these concepts, see my paper Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, 
and Justice, Legal Studies 17, p. 128, 1997.

--jks