Cornel West has an interesting discussion in his "Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression" in Nelson and Goldberg (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 1988 (U. of Illinois Press), that I think is relevant to these discussions. It is a very short piece, but I think it raises some interesting issues and points in some important directions.
One thing West does is propose that we sharpen and define the prevailing loose usage of terms such as domination, exploitation, subjugation, and repression. They are all modes of oppression, but should be distinguished for analytical purposes. For West, domination and subjugation are "discursive", "the former relates to racial, sexual, ethnic or national supremacist logics, whereas the latter involves the production of subjects and subjectivities within such logics." For West, exploitation and repression are "extradiscursive"--"they result from social formations and institutions such as modes of production and state apparatuses." "Needless to say, they [domination, repression, subjugation, and exploitation] relate to each other in complex and concrete ways."
This recalls Oliver Cromwell Cox's insistence on the distinction between racism and racial antagonism. Cox considers racism an ideology, which he distinguishes from material oppression based on race (racial antagonism). Although, West would probably see Cox as rather a traditional Marxist in terms of base-superstructure relation, and something of an economic determinist. I know that, for some, language like "extradiscursive" sends chills up the spine, but I think we have to remember that traditional economism, determinism, reductionism, and mistreatment of ideology as "extramaterial" have plagued much Marxist theory. For what its worth, West insists that "the seductive powers of Foucault must be resisted by leftist thinkers" in terms of both "discursive reductionism, which posits the absolute (as opposed to relative) autonomy of discursive practices" and "the trap of full-blown...antitotalism, which promotes revolt but precludes revolutionism." ( I read West as taking a stand on base-superstructure, material and ideal, etc., along the lines of Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature, which I think any careful reading shows is light-years away from pomo.)
West distinguishes four traditional stances on African American oppression:
1) The first subsumes African American oppression under general working class exploitation. It is logocentric in that it ignores African American oppression outside the workplace. "It is reductionistic in that it explains away rather than explains th[e] specificity [of African American oppression]." It is economistic (vulgar or sophisticated), in its a priori privileging of class subjects: African people in the United States are not subject to forms of oppression distinct from general working class exploitation. It "ignor[es], or...downplay[s], strategies (as opposed to personal moral duties) to struggle against racism." West cites major figures of the U.S. Socialist Party like Debs as examples of this position.
2) The second stance "acknowledges the specificity of Afro-American oppression beyond general working class exploitation, yet it defines this specificity in economistic terms." "It is antireductionistic in character yet economistic in content." It holds that African people in the United States are subject to general working class exploitation and specific working class exploitation owing to racial discrimination in the workplace (at the levels of access to opportunities and relative wages received)." This is the "superexploitation" thesis. "It accents struggles against racism yet circumscribes its concerns within an economistic orbit." The Progressive Labor Party in the late sixties and early seventies put forward an example of this posotion.
3) The third stance sees the specificity of Afro-American oppression as general working class exploitation and national oppression. "It is antireductionistic and antieconomistic in character and nationalist in content." Afro-Americans constitute an oppressed nation in the Black belt south and an oppressed national minority in the rest of the U.S. "It functions as a poor excuse for the absence of a sophisticated Marxist theory of the specificity of Afro-American oppression." West cites the Sixth Congress of the Third International, Harry Haywood, George Breitman, Nelson Peery, Bob Avakian, Amiri Baraka, and James Forman, as exmaples of this position, claiming that all of these follow Stalin's definition of "nation."
4) The fourth stance sees "the specificity of Afro-American oppression [as] general working class exploitation and racial oppression." "Afro-Americans are a racially oppressed section of the laboring masses as well as a distinct racially oppressed people...racial oppression and class oppression are qualitatively distinct social contradictions with their own dynamics and laws of development. But they are also interconnected."(Burnham and Wing). Capitalism and white supremacy (racial formation). West cites the Spartacist League, the Line of March, the U.S. Communist Party after 1959, and Oliver Cox, James Geschwender, and Mario Barrera as examples of this position.
West argues that aspects of all four are indispensable yet each is itself inadequate. He wants to forge a "neo-Gramscian" view. His approach includes three aspects:
1) Examining the modes of European domination: a genealogy of white European supremacist logics (Judeo-Christian, scientific, and psychosexual) and the counterhegemonic possibilities available;
2) probing the forms of European subjugation: a microinstitutional or localized analysis of the mechanisms that inscribe and sustain white supremacist logics in the everyday lives of Africans "including the hegemonic production of African subjects, the constitution of alien and degrading normative cultural styles, aesthetic ideals, linguistic gestures, psychosexual identities, and the counterhegemonic possibilities available." "...specifying of the power relations within the crevices and interstices of... the superstructure."
3) a focus on types of European exploitation and repression: "a macrostructural approach that accents modes of overdetermined class exploitation and political repression of African peoples, and the counterhegemonic possibilities available." The metaphor of 'historic bloc" replaces 'base-superstructure' radically historicizing the old metaphors to show the complexity and heterogeneity of multivarious modalities of class domination suppressed by logocentric Marxism. "A radically historical approach in which the economic, political, cultural, and ideological regions of a social formation are articulated and elaborated in the form of overdetermined and often contradictory class and nonclass processes." But "not a floating crap game.." despite rejection of determinisms, specific historical situations do display structural constraints that impose limits upon historically constituted agents. "Economism is preferable to explanatory nihilism"!!! Fortunately Gramsci's notion of historical bloc precludes such a choice. "If appropriately employed, it precludes the logocentric economism of pre-Gramscian Marxisms and the labyrinthine abyss of poststructuralisms." "Provisional structural constraints and engaged political praxis--but with no guarantees." Structural constraints and conjunctural opportunities. "Investigating European exploitation and repression of African peoples--highlighting simultaneously the relations between African slaves and white slaveholders, African workers and white capitalists, and African citizens and white rulers."
"These moments of theoretical inquiry--always already traversed by male supremacist and heterosexual supremacist logics--overlap and crisscross in complex ways, yet each highlights a distinctive mode of multi-leveled oppression of Europeans over African peoples."
Interestingly, West takes the position that the specificity of Afro-American oppression must be recognized "at the level of methodology" not just at the point of "filling in" theoretical generalizations with historical detail. I think this is really key to understanding debates about the role of the Enslavement in the rise of capitalism and white working class racism.
Racial, feminist, gay, lesbian, and ecological social movements are only "new" to ostrichlike logocentric Marxists that have confined their analysis to the workplace. Again, though, despite his objections to economistic, logocentric, reductionist Marxisms, West insists that class exploitation and political repression must be part of any acceptable analysis of African American oppression, stating that "even narrow, economistic Marxist analyses of Afro-American oppression are preferable to prevailing bourgeois perspectives" such as W.J. Wilson, T. Sowell, and M. Kilson. But West believes that the neo-Gramscian view provides an alternative to economistic Marxism.
"As the ruling classes in late capitalist societies fan and fuel the white supremacist logics deeply embedded in their cultures, a neo-Gramscian perspective on the complexity of racism is imperative if even a beginning of a 'war of position' is to be mounted. In fact, the future of Marxism, at least among Afro-Americans, may well depend upon the depths of the antiracist dimension of this theoretical and practical 'war of position'."
Mat Forstater