>So if the entire planet was ethnically homogeneous, capitalism would be
>impossible?
no. and this isn't roberts argument, he actually articulates one that stays within the frame I'm going to criticize. however, knowing robert, I don't think he's going to necess. disagree.
the point of talking about racialization (what i'm more broadly referring to as oppression) is that capitalism needs a _process_ by which it legitimates inequality by locating the cause of inequity in individuals or in the properties of the groups to which those individuals are said to belong. (this is why Michaels' claim that race is only ever about biology (a view of race and racism as a product, a static entity that inheres in bodies) and dismissal of race as something that is socially constituted (a process - racialization) is deeply problematic to a leftist politics.
long ago, on this list, during a discussion of what is called classism in the film Gumby, angela m showed how the bigoted stereotypes about the white working class are attached to their bodies and, therefore, to something they cannot rid themselves of. (these days, racial oppression attaches itself to culture -- things you supposedly *can* rid yourself of, which is what makes it even *more* pernicious.)
capitalist ideology could easily "mark" bodies in all kinds of ways, and this process can socially constitute just about any set of characteristics in order to explain why you end up in this or that place in the economic system. these characteristics don't even have to exist -- be actually existing characteristics that the individuals in said groups have. we can see this when we look at the literature on the culture of poverty, which located poverty in the pathological culture of the poor. (see the piece i just posted to lbo, by David Harvey http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-April/008118.html
this is why, when Michaels mocks such efforts in the field of cultural studies, working class studies, white studies, etc., he is dangerous to realizing a more revolutionary leftist politics. Because he refuses to acknowledge the importance of examining things like "classist" oppression, his approach doesn't allow us to see how capitalist racialization can happen without race (as conventionally understood).
And this is why it's important to advance a system in which, yes, we do have equal represenation of races and genders and so forth. Because under such conditions it's going to be a lot easier for people to finally see that there's more going on. Once people realize that anyone can become rich (to use eWBM's lingo) can "become rich" and that people from all kinds of backgrounds do become "rich", and yet things are STILL fucked up, then they will start getting a clue about the _real_ causes of inequality.
That's why the dramatic either/or rheotoric Michael's uses, the snidery that characterizes his discourse about things like feminism, anti-racism, disability rights struggles, etc. are damaging to a radical left politics and it is decidedly not an approach that will actually help us move forward.
shag