Is race a natural or cultural division of humanity? Is race a capitalist ploy invented to divide the working class? Is race purely ideological? Did race exist prior to capitalism? Or has race always existed and will it continue to exist forever?
Depending on who you ask — even amongst leftists — you’ll get wildly different answers. To provide a non-reductive and systematic social theory of race is outside the bounds of an article in Honi Soit, but at the very least it is possible to outline its broad strokes.
Transhistorical notions of race often rely on cultural essentialism. Cedric Robinson suggests in his influential text Black Marxism that capitalism is the historical expression of a transhistorical European racialism growing from the “cultural soil of the West”. In this system, racism is to be understood not as the product of a particular era — capitalism — but as rooted in European civilisation itself. Here race forms the essence of Western civilisation to the point where racial identity between white and black — alongside frames of resistance — become incomparable. Religious, linguistic, and ethnic prejudices in pre-capitalist societies are found to be the essential cause of capitalism as a historically situated mode of production. For Robinson to assume that these prejudices necessarily confer a notion of race or racism is to universalise modern-day cultural markers of racism. Through this essentialism, Robinson has extended race beyond its historical relation to capitalism and instead posited this very relation as a product of race without providing a system to universalise race in each of its historical moments. Indeed, why must racialism posit changes in production relations?
Race develops as a discrete set of social relations alongside those of capitalist production. In Capital, Karl Marx identifies the central place of racism in primitive accumulation:
“the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the Indigenous population … the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.”
Here, we can begin to understand how social reality mediates biological reality as it relates to race. After all, for European merchants plundering African nations, biological colour served a readily convenient function. Against this understanding of the social function of race, class reductionists like David Calnitsky and Michael Martinez argue that race itself was never essential to the development of capitalist relations. Instead, they claim in A Class Functionalist Theory of Race that “if we pressed the reset button on history and changed our mental categories, race is the kind of construct that would disappear from the world.” Is it down to pure contingency that race and class relations have historically developed alongside one another? And that distinct racial relations are continually reproduced in contemporary Imperialism and its global division of labour? To showcase the opposite, that race has a determinate relation with class, we will trace the historical development of chattel slavery in the Southern United States.
Slavery’s birth, life, and death — and its complementary race relations — were dictated by movements in capital accumulation. As Marx explains “direct slavery, is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have not cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.” However, at a certain stage of development, the Southern planter economy restricted the industrial North which sought to expand both west and south. The Civil War was not fought for slavery abolition but to resolve the untenable economic divisions between the slave owners of the South and the industrialists of the North within the capitalist class. In Good times on the cross: A Marxian review, Sarah Elbert observes, “only at the expense of a highly developed form of capitalism could the planter class have maintained their precarious hold on the political process which ensured their continued reproduction.” Slavery’s abolition and the entrance of the black population into the working class did not herald racial equality within America. This too can be explained through capitalist class relations.
Racism divides the world’s workers along economic lines. This notion has become inseparable from the class reductionist ‘divide-and-conquer’ and ‘false consciousness’ theories of racism that have often served as Marxist strawmen. Here racism is conceived of as an ideology fermented by the ruling class to justify the hyper-exploitation of black workers and to divide the working class amongst itself. Tricked by the capitalist’s ploy, workers act against their ‘material interests’ due to an instilled ‘false consciousness’. While it’s certainly possible that capitalists have intentionally stoked racial conflict in the past, to suggest racism is constantly transmitted to the working class from above is to imply that racism is a capitalist conspiracy and ignores the possibility of racism arising organically from working-class economic interests. Rarely can the supposed ‘interests’ of a class be arithmetically calculated to be the class interest. While some individual capitalists benefit from a racially divided pool of labour for hyper-exploitation, total social capital requires labourers free from racial restrictions. Although the proletariat has an interest in racial harmony to achieve its world-historic task of establishing socialism, white unions have historically succeeded in maintaining higher wages by excluding black labour. As Sidney Willhelm establishes in Can Marxism Explain America’s Racism?, “both capitalists and white union labor rely upon racism because of the qualities labor assumes as capital.” When white labour furthers its economic standing by excluding black workers, it does so by operating within the bounds of capitalist labour market conditions. The possibility of divergent material interests between racial groups presupposes objective economic inequalities along racial lines. William Sales outlines this in Capitalism without racism: Science or fantasy:
the roots of a phenomenon reproduced today out of the objective different relationships that white and black workers have to the means of production, the former a working class of the center, the latter a working class of periphery. It is the objective differences between center and periphery which explain the differential development of class consciousness [along racial lines] which causes so many problems in the necessary struggle to unify the U.S. working class.
Despite emancipation, Afro-Americans were often excluded from waged labour by white capitalists and workers alike. Over time, many Afro-Americans became ‘declassed’: lumpenproletariats that reproduced large swathes of the reserve army of labour. The alleviation of the poverty of unemployed and declassed Afro-Americans lies elsewhere from the white worker’s demand for higher wages. Instead, it consists of the redistribution of goods through social welfare and employment opportunities — which, under capitalism, could burden white labour through higher taxes and labour market competition. The precarious position of Afro-Americans and the racism they face today, from both the working class and the capitalists, can be explained in relation to capital accumulation.
Producing a theory of race and racism that avoids the commonplace pitfalls of either cultural essentialism or class reductionism is no easy task. To do so is imperative to challenge this racist, colonialist, and imperialist world. Indeed, as Fred Hampton reminds us in his speech It’s A Class Struggle Goddammit!, “if you can’t control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner, then you don’t even have any dealings with power, you don’t know and you probably never will know what power is.”
