Toward Division
The Bizarre Argument for a ‘Unified Theory’ of Capitalism and Racial Oppression
‘To someone looking in from outside … explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and out as Americans do.’
Barbara J. Fields
The left’s attempts to explain away or disavow the wage relation as the basis of capitalist relations of production has surged in recent decades, beginning with the New Left’s emphasis on ‘extra-‘ or ‘non-economic’ motives for oppression. What all these attempts share, different as they may be in detail, is a moral concern for ethnic minorities and women who have allegedly been overlooked in the traditional explanatory framework of Marxism. Recently, we can observe a growing concern with ‘broader forms of organization that are constitutive of social life under capitalism’[1], in order to, in a much-used idiom, ‘broaden the struggles’ and not focus too ‘narrowly’ on the universal exploitation of workers.
In an article published in The Brooklyn Rail in October 2020, Charlie Post explores the possibilities of ‘uniting’ a critique of capitalism with a critique of racism, where ‘capitalism’ is always-already understood as ‘racial’.[2] The approach is reminiscent of the attempt to formulate a ‘unitary theory of Marxism and Women’s Oppression’, as done by Lise Vogel and others in the early 1980s in the realm of ‘gender’. Both contribute to what, in Vogel’s case, later came to be called ‘intersectionality theory’ conceived in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw. But it seems that recently, the idea of intersectionality, originally satirised by many Marxist intellectuals such as Ellen Meiksins Wood, Slavoj Zizek, Terry Eagleton and others, has gained traction with a flood of academic publications (which will not be reproduced here: just google ‘Race Class Gender’). It appears that, for the time being, the ‘race, class, gender’- Trinity Formula, like Adam Smith’s Trinity Formula of ‘land, labour, and capital’, with which it shares a common mystification of capitalist production relations, is here to stay.
Post’s article intervenes in the contemporary debate on the racially tinged police killings, which have a significant impact on US society. The global outcry in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer has not only led to massive protests on the streets, but to hundreds of think pieces in the liberal media for whom the rekindled focus on ‘systemic racism’ was a very welcome distraction from the Covid disaster’s economic impact and the plight of Amazon and other ‘essential workers’.[3] Logically, many leftists, like Post, who are associated or sympathetic to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), felt inclined to expound on their experience as the DSA tried to ‘catch up’ with events. As though Post writes for the Washington Post, he expresses concern that ‘[some] in the DSA have failed to embrace the most radical demands of the uprising – to defund, disarm, and disband the police – and instead argue for continued campaigning around ‘universal’ demands to raise wages (including those of the police) and the funding of public services.’ Without intending to defend this stream of the DSA myself, the convulsions its antagonists undergo are quite stunning (“These contrarian bastards. How dare they try to concretely improve the lives of poor black and white people.”) It is good to know that, on the other hand, there are leftists who ‘want to transcend both neoliberal identity politics and class reductionism’, with the theory of ‘racial capitalism.’
Needless to say, the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ has nothing to do with clarifying the class relation. Just as paying lip-service to the Marxian tradition has nothing to do with actually engaging with the Marxian tradition, and is rather a way to dispose of it more quickly. When Adolph Reed Jr. was cancelled from a DSA event for being ‘class reductionist’, some of us immediately understood that the accusation of ‘class reductionism’, which is stubbornly blind to the factual reduction of people to a quantified position in the production of capital via wage and money dependency[4], was a way to no longer deal with class and exploitation, and to shift the focus to forms of ‘discrimination’. The left is thus completely redefined towards the struggle for formal equality between ‘races’ and ‘genders’ within capitalist productive relations – abandoning the traditional objective of overcoming formal (abstract) equality in favor of real(concrete) equality: of overcoming the capital-labour dichotomy. In other words, exploitation (or unequal exchange between capital and labour based on the formal validity of equivalent exchange) is off the table for the left. Oppression, while historically unspecific, delivered pride of place to a more ‘palpable’, more ‘concrete’, more ‘immediate’ form of social injustice. It’s something that ‘people do’ to other people. Nothing so abstract as the ‘domination of the law of value’. Why deal with levels of abstraction at all? And didn’t AOC just announce that ‘class essentialism’ was the talking point of traitors to the ‘movement’?[5] It is intellectuals like Asad Haider who provide the theoretical groundwork for such statements.
Unlike Ocasio-Cortez and Haider, however, Post seems to possess a serious interest in Marx’s (and not just ‘Marxist’) critique. Because Post actually draws on Marx’s original texts, we should look more closely at the theoretical arguments which undergird his ‘unified theory’ of race and class. Unfortunately, Post is quite successful at undermining his own position, proving, despite his intentions, that class and race remain conceptually, and therefore factually and objectively, external to each other. Consequently, contrary to what Post believes, they belong to wholly different (whisper it!) levels of abstraction. As we will see, this counterfactual result is largely due to Post’s inability to follow through on his initial claim, shifting it halfway into the debate to an entirely different and weaker claim (which in argumentative theory is called the ‘Motte-and-Bailey fallacy’[6]). In order to make sense of Post’s counterfactual results, let’s take a look at his argument in detail.
First, Post contends that, unlike what many Marxists allegedly believe, the operation of the law of value in capitalist societies does not homogenize labor ‘by creating generally used labor-processes, equalizing profits and wages between and within industries.’ To the contrary, the capitalist accumulation process constantly produces ‘heterogeneity among capitalists and workers’: ‘…that accumulation and competition should homogenize conditions of production, labor-processes, wage rates, and the like is ultimately derived from neo-classical economics’ idealized vision of competition.’ This is correct, and this is why no Marxist economist makes this claim. Anwar Shaikh, who criticizes neoclassical economists and the notion of ‘perfect competition’ in his seminal book,[7] draws attention to the unbridgeable gap between the neoclassical view of ‘perfect competition’ and his own (admittedly rather left-Ricardian than Marxist) view of ‘real competition’. But then who are the Marxist economists who claim homogenization and ‘perfect competition’? Rosa Luxemburg, Henryk Grossmann, or Paul Mattick certainly don’t. And even relatively equilibrium-prone Marxists like Paul Sweezy would not share this claim. But the ‘equalisation of profit rates’ and the ‘equalisation of wages’ have little to do with one another. While the first relies on the most profitable share in the aggregate surplus value within a branch of production, wages are a dependent variable in the capitalist accumulation process. It is in this sense that wages are not ‘homogenous’, as they express a fundamental dissonance between the valorisation interests of capital and the interests of workers: and ‘between equal rights, force decides’, as Marx succinctly put it. The wage level is subject to class struggle and therefore cannot be conceptually derived from the contradiction between capital and labour: it depends on the power of labour to organise in its own interests. The ‘unevenness’ Post emphasises therefore concerns the relation between workers and capitalists, and only to a secondary degree competition among their own class. For
[the] capitalists, no matter how little love is lost among them in their mutual competition, are nevertheless united by a real freemasonry vis-á-vis the working class as a whole (Marx, Capital vol. 3, Penguin (1981), p. 300).
And yet, ‘inequality’ among capitalists on the one hand and workers on the other is orchestrated by the profit postulate and can be thoroughly explained by the economic drive for profit alone. But how is inequality within the working class produced, exactly? To explain, Post summarises the process of the production of relative surplus value and the ‘setting free of labour’ related to it: ‘real competition and accumulation take place through constant technological innovation … [that] leads to a portion of the workforce being made redundant from capital’s point of view.’ This industrial reserve army then automatically facilitates the implementation of labor-intensive, low-wage sectors, forcing labourers to ‘accept the worst jobs’. This is true and can be thoroughly explained by capital’s valorisation objective alone.
However, the adoption of new productive methods and ‘the presence of fixed capital investment … creates a continual redifferentiation of the conditions of production’[8], as Post claims. And suddenly, as though Post could not wait to drop the bomb, the concept of ‘race’ is smuggled into the framework without any preceding mediation. The reader is confronted with the conclusion that ‘both accumulation and competition produce and reproduce differentiation among workers – the social matrix for the production and reproduction of race and racism. Race is the necessary and unintended consequence of capitalist competition and accumulation: race and class are co-constituted under capitalism.’
Just to get this right: the employment of fixed capital and new productive methods makes ‘race’ a ‘necessary and unintended consequence’ of capitalist competition. But even if we provisionally accept this idea to move ahead with the argument: who produces ‘race’, and how? Is it something that spontaneously evolves with the employment of new productive methods? What is it produced for? At what point is race ‘activated’ to produce heterogeneity in the working class? None of this is answered. ‘Race’ is a fact. Deal with it. At least according to Post.
One can quite plausibly argue that capitalists stick to the ‘race’-narrative to stifle workers’s resistance, as has been done by Oliver Cromwell Cox[9]. Cox, interestingly, was shamed as a ‘class reductionist’ himself, because he illuminated the use of race as an ideological weapon of capital intended to undermine worker unity . Cox predicted the fierce attacks from students of ‘race relations’: “Looking back on his career in 1973, Cox said that he could “anticipate an outcry from almost all the traditional students of race relations.” Those traditionalists had accused him of “‘economic determinism,’ ‘Marxism,’ or of seeking to explain race relations ‘solely,’ ‘only,’ ‘merely,’ ‘exclusively,’ on the basis of ‘economics.’”[10] (Today, perversely, Cox’s intervention is appropriated by the intersectional paradigm of race and class, along with Cedric Robinson’s anti-Marxist racialism.[11])
But a Cox-style argument of the instrumentalization of race to divide the working class is precisely not Post’s position. Instead, Post contends that ‘race’ was a necessary component of capitalist accumulation, and therefore a sine qua non of capitalist accumulation itself.
But just by repeating the claim, its persuasive power does not grow. It is true that the production of relative surplus value and the employment of new productive techniques reproduces differentiation among the working class and an increasing reserve army of labour. But this ‘heterogenisation’ or increasing production of levels of poverty can be fully explained by the economic drive for profit alone. This drive can also explain the quantitative, and not just qualitative growth of Lumpenisation and the precarisation of the working class, a tendency which also creates ever new scales of immiseration. ‘Race’ cannot explain any of this. It remains external to the analysis of the capitalist production and reproduction process.
But probably because Post realises that his argument is caught up in a tautological platitude – ‘race’ produces heterogeneity among the working class, and the heterogeneity of the working class produces ‘race’, but for whom and to what ends is never known – that his initial thesis of the self-sameness of ‘race’ and class (“racial capitalism’ is redundant - there is no “non-racial” capitalism’[12]) is transformed into an entirely different claim: namely that ‘[racism] naturalizes differences in physical appearances, religion, language, and the like’, so that ‘racist ideology provides a potent mental road map to the contradictory lived experience of capitalist accumulation and competition.’ Here is where the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy occurs. Suddenly, racism functions as an aide to extenuate the ‘lived experience’ of exploitation. This is an entirely different claim however than the claim that ‘race’ and ‘class’ are economically ‘co-constitutive’. The latter, more or less plausibly, claims that racially connotated ‘contradictions’ are false reproductions of the contradiction between capital and labour. ‘Race’ then becomes an objectively false semblance, as Adorno would have it, a mere inverted form of appearance of capital that re-directs the energies of the exploited worker not to the exploiter, the capitalist, but to the ‘white’, or ‘black’ co-worker. Race then functions as an accompanying ideology to capitalist reproduction to stifle the resistance of the working class – a claim that can defended on reasonable grounds. But this is not the claim Post had initially held.
And yet, despite the theoretical untenability of Post’s original contention of the self-sameness of race and class – an untenability proven by his shift to a weaker contention – he suggests practical solutions based on the same original claim: ‘… a multiracial working class movement will not be built around struggles around “universal” demands alone…[thus], race-specific [original emphasis] demands like defunding and disarming the police, ending housing and educational segregation, plant and industry-wide seniority, affirmative action in hiring and promotion, legalization and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and the like, will be essential to building multiracial working-class solidarity.’
Here, the demand for real equality, the abolition of class society, is replaced with demands for formal equality, an equality within the capitalist paradigm. This tactical scenario, which leaves production relations intact – I haven’t seen ‘affirmative action’ depicted as a revolutionary demand much recently, even on the left – is the hallmark of the left’s capitulation to the existing order. It no longer even cares. The lens through which this kind of critique views the social has confined itself to ‘race’, leaving the real abstraction of class unscathed.
Consequently, Post suggests supplementing ‘effective class organization’ – knowing no shame in talking about a ‘racially heterogenous class’ like a 19th century race hygienist – with concretely ‘anti-racist’ policies, as though defunding the police was a specifically ‘anti-racist’ demand. And here we get a variant of, as a friend put it, ‘cartoon-like American idpol liberalism’: one may wonder what ‘race’ of Tunisians protested the police earlier this year, or what particular ‘race’ the Gilets Jaunes represent in their protest against Macron’s security law. But even in the US, defunding the police is by no stretch of the imagination an ‘anti-racist’ demand: it is a demand within the paradigm of neoliberal restructuring, privatization, and austerity. Not a single black person will benefit from ‘defunding’ the police.
But where does all of that leave Post’s initial contention of ‘racial capitalism’? Nowhere. Or rather, to the contrary: it regresses to a pre-critical standpoint in which what he supposedly targets – capitalist accumulation – becomes exonerated through its conflation with ‘race’ per se. Precisely because the real enemy of the worker is the capitalist, and not the co-worker, the conflation of class with race is a dangerous tool to shut down the critique of capitalism: but this is exactly what Post, and with him the other proponents of the ‘racial capitalism’-tendency, do. The complicity of intersectionality with the neoliberal paradigm of advancing worker atomization that began long before Corona and gained traction with it, is perfectly illustrated in this line of thinking.
[1] See https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-response-to-michael-walzer [2] See https://brooklynrail.org/2020/10/field-notes/Beyond-Racial-Capitalism-Toward-A-Unified-Theory-of-Capitalism-and-Racial-Oppression. I have pointed to the untenability of the view of capitalism as inherently ‘racial’ here https://beefheart.substack.com/p/real-abstraction-and-the-answer-to. Also see https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-note-on-racial-capitalism[3]
/photo/1[4] I discuss the epistemological stakes of ‘class reductionism’ here: https://beefheart.substack.com/p/real-abstraction-and-the-answer-to[5]https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/aoc/[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy [7] Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (OUP USA, 2016) [8] Post quotes from Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage-Disparity Under Capitalist Competition (Haymarket 2018). [9] Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race (Doubleday, 1948) [10] See Todd Cronan’s brilliant essay on Cox: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/oliver-cromwell-cox-race-class-caste [11] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-response-to-michael-walzer [12] This is de facto wrong, as Walzer, among others, has pointed out with regard to,e.g., high-scale production in Asia.
"Here, the demand for real equality, the abolition of class society, is replaced with demands for formal equality, an equality within the capitalist paradigm. This tactical scenario, which leaves production relations intact – I haven’t seen ‘affirmative action’ depicted as a revolutionary demand much recently, even on the left – is the hallmark of the left’s capitulation to the existing order. It no longer even cares. The lens through which this kind of critique views the social has confined itself to ‘race’, leaving the real abstraction of class unscathed."
Yes, this is a drum I've been banging on for a while. My argument is that the "classism" discourse does the same.
also.. Sensible Captain, which band is that featured in your image at the header of this essay? I'm intrigued by the bass drum with a clock on it. It seems to offer a semi-ironic embrace of and/or, rejoinder to Adorno's culture industry critique of popular music.