[Marxism] Re David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness: Workers of all nations Unite!

[robert montgomery <ilyenkova@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown:
>The specially oppressed forms of labor such as slavery and Jim Crow caste
labor, "unfree" labor, are as necessary to capitalism as "free"-labor.
Racism is the main expression of specially oppressed labor.<

No argument from here Charles. The relationship between race and class
since the primitive accumulation of capital began on a world scale
(circa 15th century) is continually debated and argued. Obviously,
race and class (and racism) is imbricated in capitalism, always. What
Roediger is arguing since Wages of Whiteness (1991) is something quite
different from structural relationships like these. Roediger's claims
that in the antebellum US "free labor" was bought into capitalism by
means of the "psychological wage" of whiteness. As such, his analysis
is rooted in a psychologistic construction where race consciousness in
a slaveholding republic comes from the property of being "free labor"
and this is necessarily linked to the property of being "non-slave
labor." As slaves were black, the identity of a free laborer was bound
up with being white. The affirmation of white identity necessarily
carries within itself the negation of blackness. While denying  he
"demonizes"  workers as the psychological carriers of anti-black
racism, Roediger does claim that the privileged status of white
workers came less from material factors than from the internalized
consciousness of their whiteness.
Basically, Roediger is recycling at the academic level, the old New
Left concept of "white skin privilege" to explain racism in the US.
This may be interesting. But the problem for historical materialism is
that the locus of racism is placed in consciousness alone rather than
in the relationship between consciousness and historically concrete
conjunctures in the development of capitalism, class formation and
class struggle. White racism becomes the same self-identical entity
transhistorically-- or at least since the American revolution. As my
old mentor used to harangue us in grad seminars, "Don't tell me that
racism is racism! That doesn't explain anything. Tell us how race gets
configured and racism is expressed and
used within the historical context in question."
RM

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