[lbo-talk] Understanding _Capital_ (Was Re: barbaric)

[Miles Jackson]

Carrol Cox wrote:
> Even non-capitalist regimes, grounded in coercion of labot, cannot
> survive when _only_ force remains. Barbara Jeanne Field nicely remarks,
> "When only force remains, nothing remains."
> 
> The role of direct force in maintaining U.S. capitalism is the crucial
> role it plays in maintaining racism. Without the war on drugs/crime and
> the war against illegal aliens, the brutal repression of black and brown
> communities which provides the ongoing material grounds for racism,
> racism would become a much weaker ideological force, with the results
> that the conditions of _all_ workers _as_ workers would become more
> visible and more widely recognized. That sentence is too fucking long,
> but I'm not going to try nwo to revise it.
> 
> Carrol

I'm not sure about that.  Sure, institutional racism is an effective 
technique to suppress wages (reserve labor pool and all that), but I 
suspect that the capitalist machine would whir happily along with a 
monoracial labor force or a nonracist social structure.  --The crucial 
ideological justification here for the gross economic inequalities is 
not "those damn dark-skinned people are taking all the jobs"; rather, it 
goes back to "if you don't like your job, start yer own business!". 
Regardless of race, if everyone is effectively socialized into 
American-branded individualism, it will be very hard for any workers to 
organize as workers (in the public imagination, it's your own damn fault 
if you're poor).

Miles