Re: [Marxism] The State of Racism

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Anthony Boynton's thoughtful and useful contribution to taking this
discussion that started around baseball further deserves an honest reply. 

I believe --and even more strongly feel-- that how he seems to present the
question, as one of "racism," is mistaken.

Thus where he says "Racism is down but not out," and that it took big hits
in the 20th Century, I could only half agree. The victories over racism that
he identifies are real and very significant. The problem is I don't think
racism is really the enemy. 

The enemy is a system of white supremacy. And I don't say "the white
supremacist capitalist system" or "capitalism [or the "capitalist system"],
which promotes white supremacy" for a reason.

While it may have been possible --in theory-- for capitalism to have
developed as a "color-blind" system, that is not what really happened.
Really existing capitalism developed as a system of white supremacy. It is a
system of white supremacy from its origins but maintaining it as a system of
white supremacy is vital to its survival today. Indeed, I believe its
survival to our day would have been impossible were it not to be
essentially, at its very core, NOT JUST a system of class exploitation BUT
ALSO a system of white supremacy. 

And I will add also, male supremacy, and just as fundamentally.

*  *  *

In the Communist Manifesto and other works, Marx and Engels argue --and
quite convincingly-- that when the logic of capitalism as a CLASS SYSTEM is
allowed to unfold, THEN the normal operation of the capitalist market, the
tug-of-war between buyers and sellers of the commodity "labor power" tends
to lead inevitably to the negation and transformation of that struggle into
a class social-political struggle, essentially NOT over the terms of sale of
labor power, but over whether the human capacity to work should be a
commodity AT ALL.

And, in reality, history confirmed Marx's analysis, and continues to do so,
PROVIDED we understand it that way "when the logic of capitalism as a CLASS
SYSTEM is allowed to unfold." We saw it confirmed first with the rise of
Chartism in England; then in the second half of the 18th Century with the
rise of the German Social Democracy and other workers parties in Western
Europe, and moves in that direction in the United States. 

Marx and Engels also observed --and analyzed-- the reversal of this trend in
England, in the second half of the 1800s but they viewed it as a temporary
phenomenon due to England's supremacy as a nation --its monopoly-- in
manufacture and world trade, and assumed this privileged position of England
*as a nation* would disappear as soon as the other major countries caught up
with England. 

Although Marx and Engels's predictions about England were partly borne out
in the early 20th Century, on the whole what we saw instead was a *spread*
of the English disease, opportunism, as Lenin called it, or reformism, as it
has more frequently been tagged in the Trotskyist tradition, throughout the
capitalist world. 

And, as Lenin understood, and explains in his 1916 article, Imperialism and
the Split in Socialism, that is due to a division of the world between a
minority of "advanced" capitalist/imperialist countries and a big majority
of oppressed/exploited nations. 

Lenin describes the opportunist wing of the labor movement as based socially
in a relatively narrow aristocracy of labor, but actually Marx and Engels's
comments on England, on which Lenin bases himself, clearly suggest that if
the position of the nation involved is privileged enough, then much or most
of the working class of the privileged nation tends to become, in essence, a
political appendage of its own bourgeoisie, and therefore the working class
movement as such loses its class-political identity. And we have seen this
confirmed in the second half of the 20th Century in one country after
another.

What is the nature of the privilege of these nations? It is material, yes,
but most of all it is DOMINATION --which is not just economic, but
financial, political, cultural, and (very importantly) military. It is the
system of "white supremacy."

The term itself comes from the domestic/internal U.S. version of this world
phenomenon, and is largely and roughly appropriate due to the accidents of
history that led to European states and states dominated by European
colonial-settler populations and their descendants making up almost the
entirety of the "imperialist" world. 

But Japan in this sense is also "white" even though it doesn't quite fit the
historically evolved and purely social category of its population being part
of the "white race," and so does Israel, although mainstream European white
people never considered even European Jews to be really and fully "white"
(in American terminology, though that wasn't the way it was expressed in
Europe).

It could have been argued in the past that this "white supremacy" or
"imperialism" --this domination-- was ultimately reducible to
class/economic factors, like the level of industrialization of these
countries their higher composition of capital and so on. 

But today we have seen that this isn't, in fact, the case. The status of the
country does not derive from the Value embodied in the commodities it
produces; on the contrary, when a certain kind of product --manufactured
goods-- shifts from being produced mainly in imperialist countries to mainly
in Third World countries, the value the market recognizes in that commodity
suddenly plummets.

Thus for a long time, for example, VCR's were "western" (i.e., "white")
products. That changed rather quickly at the end of the VCR era, overlapping
with the beginning of the DVD era. And we saw the price of "entry level"
decks of both the last generation of VCRs and the second or third generation
of DVD players plummet very rapidly over a couple of years a decade ago,
from $200 or so to around $70.

I know it is all complicated due to how prices get determined (from the
point of view of a capitalist enterprise) but the simple observation is that
economic value attaches to whiteness. As it presents, economic Value is not
determined by economics alone, but by whiteness. Advanced industry did not
make the products of "white countries" more valuable. A big part of it went
the other way -- being the product of white countries made advanced
industrial products have so much value.

Because when the product shifts from being produced in Japan to being a
product of the People's Republic of China, it loses half, two thirds or more
of its value in the marketplace. 

I believe we're about to see that with cars in the next few years. Both
China and Brazil have threatened to put a subcompact on American streets for
$5,000-$7,000. 

*  *  *

Right now it seems to me the "Western" countries aren't making a killing by
domination of industry, as in the past. They're making a killing thanks to
domination of financial networks, intellectual property (technology
[patents], cultural goods [copyrights], and branding [trademarks]) and
having WAY WAY more military power than anyone else. 

This last item I suspect is EVEN more important than we think, given the
absolute hysteria in U.S. political circles every time it looks like some
country MIGHT be on the road to acquiring means to resist at least a little
more American imperialist impositions -- in other words, on the road to
acquiring the atom bomb. 

It ALSO explains the quite EXTRAORDINARY phenomenon we see in the Democratic
presidential race -- the more outspokenly antiwar the mainstream candidates
become, the LONGER they say it will take to withdraw the imperialist
occupation army from Iraq. Saying it's going to take you until 2010 or 2011
does not seem to be the obvious way to pander to the overwhelmingly antiwar
primary voter base of this party. Yet that's what folks like Hillary,
Edwards and Obama are saying. 

It seems to me we have to learn to analyze capitalism as a system that lives
and breathes NOT JUST from exploitation and oppression on a CLASS axis, BUT
ALSO on gender and national/racial/ethnic axis. Without the latter, the
former would no longer be possible, because THEN the workers would do
exactly what Marx forecast -- they will increasingly band together, first in
a shop, then locally, the in different occupations or branches of industry,
and eventually figure out that the problem is not their lack of market power
in selling their labor, but in a system that forces them to sell their labor
as if it were a carton of milk.

To survive, capitalism MUST BE a system NOT JUST of capitalist CLASS
supremacy, but also of MALE and WHITE supremacy. Because, to prevent the
coherence among sellers of labor power, the worker must enter not just as a
seller of abstract human labor, but as the seller of white labor, or male
labor or even Black or Latino labor but within an imperialist country. If
labor power is allowed to become generic, then the worker --all workers--
really have nothing to lose but the identical chains they all wear. Hence
the KEY QUESTION -- how do you stop labor power from becoming generic? And
that, it seems to me, requires making certain goods and services, or sectors
of the economy, monopolies of the imperialist countries, which allows for
superprofits. And, of course, it is absolutely essential to prevent the
emergence of a world market for labor power. 

Severely limiting the right of workers to mover to another country is
something that, as a generalized phenomenon, arose with imperialism. And in
the post-WWII period, we have seen the additional regularity or feature of
advanced capitalists countries of significant immigrations from the Third
World which are not allowed to assimilate both by legal and
social/cultural/political barriers, but instead pushed by imperialist and
white oppression/exclusion to tend to constitute ethnic or national
minorities. This has the benefit of creating a cheaper, more exploitable
"untouchable" caste within the working class but also of highlighting the
relative privilege of "white" workers, helping to cement their loyalty to
the ruling class.

The shift of industry after industry to producing in China and the resulting
devaluation of the products involved suggests the "extra" value the market
recognizes in imperialist commodities is not a function of something like
the organic composition of capital in that particular sector, but an
extra-economic factor that imposes additional value to commodities produced
within the imperialist countries (and thereby of necessity "steals" value
from those produced in third world countries).

That factor is "white supremacy" (mostly referred to as such in the domestic
context) or "imperialist domination" (when projected outside U.S. borders)
but it is the same thing. And it is supremacy and domination. 

To go back to our current debate, this manifests in ways that often escape
even radicals from the dominant nationality. For example, it is the
unquestioned --the issue isn't even considered-- that a white baseball
record set when Blacks were excluded is legitimate, just as among most of
the population there is no question that the U.S. has a RIGHT to "protect
itself" by invading Afghanistan or Iraq or preventing North Korea or Iran
from having nukes.

We should not be fooled by the current majority sentiment against the Iraq
War. Even in terms of the origins of the war, the imperialist postulate that
has been unmasked is that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction." That the
U.S. has a RIGHT to intervene to maintain its nigh-absolute supremacy in
being able to carry out "mass destruction" hasn't even been seriously
challenged.

Joaquin


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