BK on Identity

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Feb 28 14:50:01 PST 2001


Ian:


>Doesn't the co-production of slavery/race antedate the US by a few
>centuries--Slavs etc.?

There is an important difference between pre-capitalist slavery, serfdom, etc. and modern capitalist slavery! Always historicize!


>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.

*If* the contradiction between whites and blacks were *the same* as that between capital and labor, you might as well join the Nation of Islam & like outfits! If whites gained from racism *in the same manner that capital gains from labor*, there would be *no point* in arguing for *cross-racial anti-capitalist solidarity*, because in that case there would be no material ground from which we could build such solidarity. This all-important difference is not a matter of "hair-splitting"!!!

Our argument, in contrast, should be racism is *not* in the interest of white workers, sexism is *not* in the interest of male workers, and so on.

Yoshie



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