BK on Identity

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Wed Feb 28 14:12:31 PST 2001



> But if race was produced through slavery in the U.S., then that is
> directly related to the relation of surplus extraction, since it was
> (and remains) all about one's systematic relationship to the division
> of labor and access to property ownership. Gender too: women under
> capitalism (and other economic systems) have had a specific relation
> to the division of labor (unpaid domestic work, "women's" jobs) and
> access to property (it wasn't all that long ago that women in the
> U.S. couldn't even get a credit card).
>
> As an empirical matter, it almost always seems that people who try to
> assert some special status for class are trying to devalue the other
> social categories. "We'll address the woman question after the
> revolution!"
>
> Doug
************************

Doesn't the co-production of slavery/race antedate the US by a few centuries--Slavs etc.? It seems that they can't be separated from SE even though the forms of SE are different in antiquity, fuedalism....So "class" becomes problematic when looking at non-capitalist societies. It then becomes needlessly hair splitting; "group", "class" "gender" and "race" interpenetrate in so many ways [analogous to pre Linnaean, pre-Darwinian taxonomy], in precisely the manner in which we call for their ontic abolition at the earliest possible date.

Ian



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