'functions' or 'conditions of reproduction'?

[Forstater, Mathew]

"functions" or "conditions of white supremacist capitalist production and
reproduction"
According to the behavioralist paradigm, Black poverty and unemployment,
nonemployment, and marginal employment (and associated characteristic of the
Black "underclass") are due to deficient values and attitudes that translate
into dysfunctional behaviors reinforced by the perverse incentives of the
welfare state.  In seeking to forge an explanatory framework for analyzing Black
poverty that can serve as an alternative to behavioralism, one of the tasks has
been to show that unemployment and poverty are not simply irrational by-products
of capitalism, but in fact serve a systematic role in the reproduction of the
capitalist system, and that racism is not simply an irrational personal
prejudice, but rather racial inequality also serves a role in the production and
reproduction of white supremacist capitalism.
In Keynes, unemployment is an irrational by-product of capitalism.  While
Keynes's theory is an important contribution in that he shows, contrary to
orthodox neoclassical economics, that unemployment is a normal feature of
capitalism, by ignoring the role that unemployment plays in the reproduction of
capitalism, he reaches the policy conclusion that aggregate demand can be
stimulated, and unemployment eliminated, without posing any problem for
capitalism.  Marx's theory of the reserve army of labor, on the other hand,
points to the role that unemployment plays in a capitalist economy--serving to
hold down wages, decreasing the bargaining power of workers, providing a pool of
labor ready to work as the pace of accumulation increases, disciplining workers
with the threat of 'this could be you.'  Thus unemployment is not a mere (and
irrational) by-product of capitalism, but is a condition of capitalist
production and reproduction. Rooted in the Marxian notion of capitalist
competition, the reserve army of labor and related analytical categories are
crucial to understanding not just the existence of unemployment, nonemployment,
and marginal employment, and therefore the existence of poverty, but the
persistence of unemployment, nonemployment, marginal employment, and poverty. In
other words, these concepts are crucial to the analysis of capitalist conditions
of production and social reproduction.
The focus on conditions of social reproduction is also crucial because they also
set the limits and boundaries of policy within white supremacist capitalism. If
Black poverty and marginal employment and non- and unemployment are not merely
by-products of capitalism, but serve what Herbert Gans (1972) has called
"positive functions," (I can no longer avoid the f-word here) then this has
implications for policy, because we will have to deal with the systematic
repercussions of eliminating phenomena integral to white supremacist capitalist
reproduction.  Gans outlined fifteen positive functions that poverty and the
poor play in American capitalism. He then sought to identify "functional
alternatives" to these that would make poverty and the poor unnecessary. Gans
cautioned however, that these functional alternatives could prove to be
dysfunctional for other social groups, where "functions benefit the group in
question and dysfunctions hurt it" (1972, pp. 276-77). One might have to
consider how, e.g., functional alternatives to Black unemployment might be
dysfunctional for white workers. Importantly, Gans noted that "probably one of
the few instances in which a phenomena has the same function for two groups with
different interests is when the survival of the system in which both participate
is at stake." (1972, p. 276n3). In short, the scope for policy is very different
when we are talking not just about eliminating the undesirable by-products of a
system, but attempting to address phenomena that serve a functional role in the
system. Furthermore, differing class or group interests need to be considered.
As a secondary goal of his paper, Gans was seeking to revive Mertonian
functionalism in sociology, and hoped to demonstrate that functionalism need not
be conservative, and may come to similar conclusions as radical sociological
analysis. But an analysis of functions need not be functionalist. In particular,
the classical and Marxian focus on conditions of social reproduction permits the
analysis of functions, as well as of differing class interests, without the
baggage of functionalism. 
For present purposes, the questions we must ask are: 1) are there positive
functions (with respect to certain classes or class segments and/or with respect
to the system as a whole) of the so-called Black "underclass"? 2) if yes, are
there functional alternatives, i.e. antiracist antipoverty policies that would
eliminate such systemic necessities of the Black "underclass"?
In addressing these questions, it is crucial that we distinguish between
irrational by-products and functional requirements of white supremacist
capitalism and (and I hope it is clear that we can and must bring patriarchy and
heterosexism into this analysis as well).  To be able to recognize
functionality, without descending into functionalism, the analytical notion of
conditions of social reproduction may be indispensable.

Mat Forstater