Hey man, cool work, especially considering this piece as a preliminary work! I'm planning to cite this on my own blog post, but I don't know how since you don't use your name here. Mind if I ask how to cite this piece? Thanks a lot!
No longer on Twitter - Bluesky only - so wanted to connect. Different from the form analysis you flag, you might nevertheless find grist to the mill in two articles of mine with Andreas Bieler:
1) Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender? - Environment and Planning A (2021)
I think you're on the right track wanting to get a theory of racial oppression out of the critique of capital, while avoiding the usual conspiratorial explanation (i.e. the capitalists are creating false divions withing the working class to have them fight each other). But there are two other related concepts I think should be added, especially if you want to move away from Mau's complete autonomization of capital as an alien force. The first one is the surplus population, both in its relative and absolute forms. The other is the social struggle through which each worker expresses their own subjectivity, which can take the form of class struggle, but because of various configurations of the labor process often doesn't.
As you present it here, it's easy to read race (gender is even more complicated) not as a fetish, but as a mere illusion and a form of the conspiratorial explanation, just once removed. Even worse, it opens the door to the idea that different peoples find themselves at different positions in the division of labor because their gender or ethnic group is better suited for that task.
Capital doesn't create only technical and social divisions of labor, but also divides the population between those who can labor, those who can labor only occasionally and those completely pauperized. The subjective experience of the worker isn't colored only by their position in the technical division of labor (with depending on how strong is the real or technical subsumption of labor under capital, they can find themselves doing feminized or racialized tasks, lower in the social division), but also by the constant threat of becoming relative surplus population. Historically, workers' movements didn't organize at first for better work conditions or wages, but for the right to work itself, which they saw denied to them by machines and immigrants (often immigrants - or women and children - working machines that displaced trained artisans). Worse than the violence of the boss, was the the violence of hunger, homeless and the debter's prison, with which the boss seemed to have nothing to do. This is why the spontaneous form of worker organization often has the contours of ethnic kinships, people closing ranks within their own comunities. It varies from context to context (what kinds of work the majority of the population does, what kinds of work foreignera do, how advanced is the workers movement before being challenged by cheap foreign labor, what is the ethnic composition of the state and how it's reflected politically) how easily, through this continuous struggle, the bonds of kinship turn into nationalism and racism or into an internationalist class consciousness.
Hey man, cool work, especially considering this piece as a preliminary work! I'm planning to cite this on my own blog post, but I don't know how since you don't use your name here. Mind if I ask how to cite this piece? Thanks a lot!
Sorry that I never answered, you could have put my name Davide and the blog name
No longer on Twitter - Bluesky only - so wanted to connect. Different from the form analysis you flag, you might nevertheless find grist to the mill in two articles of mine with Andreas Bieler:
1) Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender? - Environment and Planning A (2021)
2) The dialectical matrix of class,
gender, race - Environment and Planning F (2024).
Thank you very much, these are right up the ally of what I've been looking at!
I think you're on the right track wanting to get a theory of racial oppression out of the critique of capital, while avoiding the usual conspiratorial explanation (i.e. the capitalists are creating false divions withing the working class to have them fight each other). But there are two other related concepts I think should be added, especially if you want to move away from Mau's complete autonomization of capital as an alien force. The first one is the surplus population, both in its relative and absolute forms. The other is the social struggle through which each worker expresses their own subjectivity, which can take the form of class struggle, but because of various configurations of the labor process often doesn't.
As you present it here, it's easy to read race (gender is even more complicated) not as a fetish, but as a mere illusion and a form of the conspiratorial explanation, just once removed. Even worse, it opens the door to the idea that different peoples find themselves at different positions in the division of labor because their gender or ethnic group is better suited for that task.
Capital doesn't create only technical and social divisions of labor, but also divides the population between those who can labor, those who can labor only occasionally and those completely pauperized. The subjective experience of the worker isn't colored only by their position in the technical division of labor (with depending on how strong is the real or technical subsumption of labor under capital, they can find themselves doing feminized or racialized tasks, lower in the social division), but also by the constant threat of becoming relative surplus population. Historically, workers' movements didn't organize at first for better work conditions or wages, but for the right to work itself, which they saw denied to them by machines and immigrants (often immigrants - or women and children - working machines that displaced trained artisans). Worse than the violence of the boss, was the the violence of hunger, homeless and the debter's prison, with which the boss seemed to have nothing to do. This is why the spontaneous form of worker organization often has the contours of ethnic kinships, people closing ranks within their own comunities. It varies from context to context (what kinds of work the majority of the population does, what kinds of work foreignera do, how advanced is the workers movement before being challenged by cheap foreign labor, what is the ethnic composition of the state and how it's reflected politically) how easily, through this continuous struggle, the bonds of kinship turn into nationalism and racism or into an internationalist class consciousness.