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!
********************
I did! "It seems that they can't be separated from SE even though the forms of SE are different in antiquity, fuedalism...."
>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"!!! ******************
Well, my response to that is that race does not exist as a category [see SJ Gould and the human genome project press conference with Clinton if you doubt me] but racism does exist. Belief in race is like belief in witches and phlogiston. I'm saying that a little eliminative materialism is helpful in deconstructing social kinds like race and gender. Clearly we could attenuate/eliminate the unwanted behaviors associated with those concepts and still have capitalism, no?
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 ***************
No, our argument should be that race and gender are like witches and phlogiston and angels and bigfoot and that racism and sexism are inexcusable behaviors and are obstacles to focusing on the capital-labor power relation and it's abolition. The means for abolishing these categories which overlap in many, but not all, contexts and should undoubtedly coincide with debate on the capital/labor issue, but as it stands now people are far more inclined to get rid of the former[s] than the latter.
Remember, also, that capital's currently most successful sleight of hand is having us think of ourselves first and foremost as consumers even before they ask us to think of ourselves as white, black, hetero, GLBT, or even, citizens in a democracy! That is what is promising about the anti-corporate stirrings; the increasing recognition that the ideological separation of production and consumption is the biggest trick of all and that no amount of commodities can take away the cruelty and anguish hundreds of millions suffer in production as wage labor.
Ian