This essay is reprinted from Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, the new abridged edition of Oliver Cromwell Cox's Caste, Class, and Race (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
...For Cox, race was most fundamentally an artifact of capitalist labor dynamics, a relation that originated in slavery. "Sometimes, probably because of its very obviousness," he observed, "it is not realized that the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America." This perspective led to one of Cox's most interesting and provocative insights, that "racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict." We should not make too much of the adverbs "simply" and "merely." Seeing race as a category that emerges from capitalist labor relations does not necessarily deny or minimize the importance of racial oppression and injustice or the need to fight against racism directly.
Contrary to the claims of critics such as David Roediger, Cox did not dismiss racism among working-class whites. He argued that "the observed overt competitive antagonism is produced and carefully maintained by the exploiters of both the poor whites and the Negroes." He recognized that elite whites defined the matrix within which non-elite whites crafted their political agency, and he emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as part of his critique of the liberal scholars of race relations who theorized race relations without regard to capitalist political economy and class dynamics. Cox's perspective goes right to the heart of how we should try to understand race by encouraging us to move beyond categories for defining and sorting supposedly discrete human populations, beyond concepts of racial hierarchies, and beyond racist ideologies -- all components of a singular, indivisible unholy trinity -- and instead recognize that race is the product of social relations within history and political economy. More than a half-century after its initial publication, Cox's interpretation is a refreshing alternative to the idealist frames that have persisted in shaping American racial discourse and politics. The lucidity and groundedness of his interpretation stand out strikingly, for example, in relation to ontological arguments the equivalent of devil theories that either trace racism back to the Ice Ages or attribute racism to ideas of the Enlightenment; his viewpoint contrasts just as sharply with arresting but uninformative and strategically useless metaphors, such as the characterization of racism as a "national disease" or the chestnut that racism "takes on a life of its own" or other such mystifications. Racism is not an affliction; it is a pattern of social relations. Nor is it a thing that can act on its own; it exists only as it is reproduced in specific social arrangements in specific societies under historically specific conditions of law, state, and class power....
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/201reed.htm> -- Yoshie
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