> Somebody: Actually, this *was* what was being debated. Doug paraphrased Michaels' as >saying capitalism doesn't need racism,
I'm not sure you could call what Doug's been doing during this conversation "debating." Do defensive questions and 12-word sentences qualify as debate? Anyway, his gloss on Michaels as you present it is batty. Doug knows that blacks make somewhere around two-thirds the amount of money whites do, that blacks are a kajillion times more likely to be in prison, and a whole host of other facts that show that racial minorities have it worse under capitalism. That he hasn't raised any statistics in his "arguments" I take as a sign that he knows he's wrong, and that Michaels is full of it, but can't yet admit it.
If Michaels, and Doug, believes that capitalism doesn't need race, that's fine. But it's pure speculation, intellectual wankery, and has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the world. Does capital "need" race, abstractly, transhistorically? Who knows. And who cares. What we all know now is that today it uses and produces race.
> 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,
Notably missing from your list is labor, labor-power. Maybe I'm hopelessly old school, but I still believe that capital still primarily uses labor, human and machine labor, to reproduce itself. (I'm pretending that "the euro," i.e., currency and its differentials, has nothing to do with race.)