Re: [Marxism] Is "class" at the root of the real division in society?

["Ian Pace" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: <Jscotlive@xxxxxxx>
> jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>
> You write:
>
> Capitalism rests on four pillars, patriarchy,
> race/nationality, class, and finally I think it is necessary to add, a
> generalized dehumanization of humanity, which includes negation of our
> "naturalness."
>
> Reply:
>
> I disagree. Patriarchy is a hangover from feudalism and has its roots in
> Christianity. Capitalists, the new ruling class, retained those aspects of
> feudal
> societal structure which suited the purposes of control. The same goes for
> differences of race and nationality. If Marx taught us anything it is that
> these
> are 'false divisions' used to distract the proletariat from the division
> that
> matters: namely that which exists between exploited and exploiter, between
> the
> class which controls the means of production and the class which does not.
There is a very different argument made by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her book
'Democracy against Capitalism'. I don't have a copy of my own to hand, so
can just cite a few of her general arguments from accessing pages on
Amazon.. She argues that antagonisms based on race and gender are not
intrinsic or necessary to capitalism, saying that the latter is 'uniquely
indifferent to the social identities of the people it exploits' and
describes a tendency 'to dilute identities like gender, race, as capital
strives to absorb people into the labour market and reduce them to
interchangeable units of labour abstracted from any specific identity' (p.
266). Her arguments are dialectical, though; at the same time she draws
attention to how 'capitalism is likely to co-opt whatever extra-economic
oppressions are historically and culturally available in any given setting',
saying that 'When the least privileged sectors of the working class coincide
with extra-economic identities like gender or race, as they so often do, it
may appear that the blame for the existence of these sectors lies with
causes other than the necessary logic of the capitalist system.', also that
'racism and sexism function so well in capitalist society partly because
they can actually work to the advantage of certain sectors of the working
class int he competitive conditions of the labour market' (p. 267). She goes
onto point out that slavery was a practice but not a dominant ideology in
Greek and Roman societies, for example; its ideological justification came
much later with 'pseudo-scientific reinforcement of *biological* theories of
race', which 'continued to serve as an ideological support for colonial
oppression even after the abolition of slavery'.

It's a very interesting and powerful argument, I find. However we locate the
beginnings of oppression in pre-capitalist or even pre-feudal times (which
is anyhow so intensely speculative) does not mean we can necessarily map
those paradigms onto late capitalist society and discount all the mediation
that has occurred in the interim period.

Solidarity,
Ian



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