While I would never state that big capital is trying to create a “race-and-gender-neutral capitalism” I do think that it will use race and gender fungibly as a means to legitimate and increase its rate of profits. I still don’t see how this would lead to an attack on class inequality?
>By the way, I agree with the critique of diversity that enjoins people to
>integrate class into their analysis.
I think this is what WBM and Reed and others (Zizek, Brown), including myself, have been getting at for quite some time.
> You can't talk meaningfully about
>racial and gender politics unless you can speak of the way in which their
>characteristics are overdetermined by class. It is just that class and
race
>etc are not competing issues: they are contiguous. To speak of race, eg,
is
>to talk about a way of structuring accumulation, wages, consumption etc.,
>and therefore of class.
This is problematic. You seem to be reducing race and gender down to class, which is why you also seem to be applying a one-way relationship: race and gender help structure class exploitation by differentiating within the working class. The problem is that race and gender are not just class markers but are relatively autonomous. As you say yourself:
>Since such 'idenitities' are quite fungible, it is possible that the axes
of
>oppression will change
Now it is in the realm of how this would, could, is always changing, that we need to begin to probe. I completely agree with those that argue against the notion that “big capital wants to abolish all of these forms of oppression”. Big capital has figured out that it can use race and gender not to divide the working class by fueling racial division (which I am not denying that it still does) but to also use it to divide those who are against oppression into different camps. This simultaneously works with the old form of racial and gender oppression by both creating the movement to end it and reproduce oppression. It also creates a division and obfuscation of class exploitation by pitting movements and agents of change against each other (race v. class). This is why the old Marxist interpretation of race and gender as oppression as refractured class does not work. The relationship between class and race-gender-oppression cannot be viewed as being in a single transhistorical relationship of class overdetermining race and gender. To do so misses the changes that are occurring. As Marx says, every aid to capital accumulation at some point becomes a barrier. That capital has historically gained from race and gender divisions in the working class should not mean that it still does or that it always will in the same way.
> And why would elevated competition be the major effect of overthrowing
white
>supremacy? Wouldn't a plausible effect be elevated cooperation, in the
form
>of class unity, industrial militancy, demands for social democratic forms
of
>protection etc? Isn't one of the major blockages to US working class
>advance precisely the vexed issue of race, and the way that it reinforces
>ideas of competition, social Darwinism, 'meritocracy' etc in a layer of
>white workers?
It is quite plausible that class unity would spring forth once race and gender divisions were removed from the working class. It could also mean increased competition between further atomized individual workers. The recent history of the neoliberal counter-offensive and the recent crisis reveals the tendency for workers to not increase worker solidarity during times of increasing exploitation and ruling class offensive. Some people see in this increased racism and place the failure of working class unity on this. I think that is too simple and not an accurate picture of reality (and it is also the message of both CNN and the Democrats). What really happens when people are pitted against each other after generations of individualist indoctrination is that they respond individually in a competitive struggle. Why wouldn’t increased competition between white, black and women workers not lead to the same heightened individualism?
>In practise, capitalism has always needed recourse to some global system of
>differentiating labour according to race, gender, nationality, etc. I
would
>suggest that a number of features of capital accumulation make this so.
>First of all, the clumpy spatial distribution of capital rules out any pure
>transnationalism in a capitalist system. It will always require
>nation-states in some configuration. Secondly, as a corollary, these
>nation-states will be called on to defend and advance local centres of
>capital accumulation, to secure their access to global markets, to
>obliterate enemies etc. That means it will always be characterised by
>imperialism and potential inter-imperialist rivalry.
Here you are, quite sloppily, conflating race with nationalism, imperialism and immigration. Clearly there are differences between racialization and nationalism.
You are also resting on a pretty old understanding of imperialism. How does the US fit into this picture of defending and advancing local centres of capital accumulation? Has the history of US imperialism really been all about advancing capital accumulation in the US or has it been to construct a global capitalism which has often meant putting local centers of accumulation needs behind global capitalisms needs (see Panitch and Gindin)? I don’t disagree that capitalism rests on nation-states presently, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it needs them.
>Capitalists are driven as an *imperative* to reduce the
>input of variable capital, and such systems of subordination meet that
>imperative. Further, the reproduction of labour as such requires that some
>effort is made to maintain the predominance of heterosexual family units.
>Even if capital's expansion draws millions of women into the labour force,
>it does so on terms that leave women workers subordinate, hyper-exploited,
>disproprortionately in part-time and temporary work, and bearing the
greater
>burden of household reproduction. So, dispensing with gender oppression
and
>heteronormativity is not a capitalist imperative.
Why wouldn’t the input of variable capital be reduced through decreasing the racial wage that whites extract? Is it just that they extract this wage from people of color, or does capital actually pay more by having this racialized system? I am not really sure, but the argument is always that people of color are superexploited and white people extract a wage from them. Isn’t it more accurate to see how capital exploits people of color and wouldn’t it have an imperative to exploit white people to the same degree and not pay them more than people of color (ie: isn’t the problem exploitation by capitalists not by white workers?)?
I doubt very much that the reproduction of labour *requires* the predominance of the heterosexual family unit. Marx sees capital as reducing and eventually eliminating the heterosexual family and the oppression it rests on. I think the recent history of the commodification of household labour shows how much capital does not need and in fact has a tendency to reduce or to commodify all aspects of the heterosexual family. The fact that this has not happened yet, that there still remains gendered oppression within an expanded capitalist patriarchic system does not mean it is functionally necessary for it to remain for capital accumulation. In fact, I would posit the tendency in capitalism is to reduce these forms of oppression as they prevent further expansion of the commodity form. Brad