Somebody: Actually, this *was* what was being debated. Doug paraphrased Michaels' as saying capitalism doesn't need racism, and people like shag pointed out that in any event, it requires racialization, Joanna pointed out at that as long as economic disparities persist, one can take this as evidence that racism isn't significantly declining and so on.
Anyway, how much is capitalism using racism today to reproduce itself? It seems to rely much more upon cargo containers, the WTO, the euro, infrastructure loans, and pensions reforms, not on overt expressions of racial supremacy. To whatever extent it uses racism, it's clearly becoming a less and less important element in it's bag of tricks.