>>> christian11 at mindspring.com 03/01/01 12:54AM >>>
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As Robert Brenner has argued, modern slave economies are in many ways non-capitalist, or only formally so, since they rely, like feudalism, on the threat of force to extract wealth, rather than on economic pressure or motives (ie. competition). In that sense, "race" as we understand it belongs to that twilight moment of development between feudal and capital social relations. It's not a product of capitalism, but of a residual social formation that supported it in the 17th-and 18th centuries.
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CB: A better way to argue it is that specially oppressed forms of labor , such as slavery, colonialism, racially oppressed labor post-slavery , are as integral to capitalism as wage-labor.
In fact , Marx in chapter 32 of _Capital_ vol. I says that the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation is to produce slavery.
Today's concept of race is very much a specific product of capitalism, not pre-capitalism.