[We publish here a text from our comrades in Barbaria. This pamphlet is an implacable critique of postcolonial and decolonial ideologies — a bourgeois discourse that substitutes national/identitarian conflict for class struggle. Affirming the fundamental premises of communist materialism, Barbaria argues that racism is not the central axle along which capitalism turns but, on the contrary, a necessary outgrowth, or emanation, of capital. The overcoming of racism thus presupposes the transcendence of capitalism itself, as a mode of life for our species, not its reform through new hierarchies of victimhood. The original text is available in Spanish here.]
Being a proletarian or a woman in Rwanda is not the same as being a proletarian or a woman in Sweden. Nor is being a white proletarian or a woman the same as not being one in the same country. Therefore, it is evident that the system in which we live is organised racially, that economic or patriarchal oppression can only be conceived in terms of the category of race, and that the fight against it must begin first and foremost with skin colour or place of origin, as the case may be. Ultimately, Western women and the proletariat benefit from the exploitation of racialised people around the world: don’t Europeans buy food cheaper thanks to the exploitation of North African day labourers? Is there not, therefore, a common interest, a common privilege for white people of any class against racialised people of any class? Aren’t white people to racialised people and the West to other nations what the bourgeoisie is to the proletariat, but with greater significance, since the first antagonism is global in nature while the second exists only on the national level? Race—that is, nation—has primacy over class. Given that the world proletariat is racially divided and even has conflicting interests, it must be concluded that there is nothing material that compels them to fight for the same thing. World revolution is an idealistic chimera, with no ground beneath its feet, or worse yet: the lure of a theory that, in its claims of universality, only conceals a particular interest: that of the colonial domination of white people over the rest.
If the first statement is evidence based on reality, the thread of reasoning leads us to a false and deeply reactionary conclusion. The objective of this text is to explain why.
Unfortunately, this thread is often revisited in radical circles. For some time now, when we talk about racism, we no longer discuss how the proletariat can fight the divisions this system generates within it, but rather how the Western proletariat must deconstruct itself and renounce its white privilege—that is, its material interests, which sustain the exploitation of the rest of the planet. And by talking about racism in this way, whether consciously so or not, we are drinking from the mud of the counterrevolution.
What’s Behind White Privilege?
As we explained in Intersecting Capitalism?, postmodernism “conceives of counterrevolution from the categories of counterrevolution,” that is, it is a reaction to Stalinist ideology which bases itself on its very categories. This is equally, if not more, applicable to its postcolonial variant [1] and its predecessor, the dependency movement. Both are a reaction to the stagist vision of Stalinism, which characterises the entire capitalist periphery as feudal and posits the need for a bourgeois revolution in each territory before even ascertaining the possibility of an autonomous proletarian struggle. They set forth starting from the foundations of national liberation and “anti”-imperialist ideology, which substitutes the interests of the local bourgeoisie for those of the proletariat, in this way preparing it to be mobilised as cannon fodder. This approach, founded more on the imperialist interests of the USSR and capitalist China than on an innocent theoretical error, debuted in 1927 with the massacre of the Chinese proletariat at the hands of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist party, with Stalin’s criminal connivance. Mao would be nothing less than the illustrious successor of this counterrevolution throughout the following decades.
Of course, it is not exactly the material massacre of the proletariat at the hands of Stalinism and Maoism that bothers postcolonialists, but the epistemological application of a linear model of history by which one must follow in the footsteps of Europe to achieve true development. In fact, Dipesh Chakrabarty will welcome Maoism, built on the blood of the Chinese proletariat and peasantry for that same capitalist development, as a practical way of orientalising Marxism [2], albeit with theoretical flaws that he sets out to resolve. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Indian postcolonialists do not speak of class but of subalternity. Nor is it by chance that their project is to vindicate the role of the “subalterns,” not in the struggle for the radical transformation of this society, but in the constitution of a national-popular sovereignty for the Indian state: an attitude not so different from that of Latin American decolonialists in the face of so-called “21st-century socialism” under Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, or Rafael Correa, some of whom held government responsibilities, as in the case of Álvaro García Linera. All of them criticise the most obvious vulgarities of Stalinism in order to update one of its fundamental attributes: the theoretical and practical primacy of the nation—and therefore, of national capitalism—over class.
This primacy is what lies behind the idea of white privilege. One of the figures of the dependency movement, Arghiri Emmanuel, explained this clearly in a text with the eloquent title El proletariado de los países privilegiados participa en la explotación del tercer mundo (The Proletariat in the Privileged Countries Participates in the Exploitation of the Third World): first, there is the transfer of resources from the periphery to the capitalist core, and then, their distribution. The class struggle in Western countries will therefore be nothing more than “a settling of scores between partners around the common spoils.” Although the explicitness of his approach bothered many dependentists and, in fact, was contested, Emmanuel was only bringing to the surface the assumptions on which the entire movement was based: that exploitation between nations logically and historically preceded exploitation between classes and that, consequently, the dominated class of the rich nations received their share of the pie in the plundering of the periphery. White privilege—as it would be said today—united the proletariat and the bourgeoisie against the oppressed nations as a whole.
It is on this idea of exploitation between nations that Immanuel Wallerstein builds his world-systems theory, which continues to have such an influence on decolonial scholars today. After all, Aníbal Quijano would work closely with him after spending several years at ECLAC—the cradle of the dependency movement in Latin America—and would later found the Modernity/Coloniality group, which brings together leading decolonial theorists such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, and Ramón Grosfoguel. To further draw the line of continuity, the racialising author Houria Bouteldja, the same author who applauds Ahmadinejad for saying there are no homosexuals in Iran [3], has been published in Spanish by Ramón Grosfoguel with a complimentary prologue. In a presentation of this book, Enrique Dussel himself greeted Ahmadinejad’s statement as a dialectical exercise that Westerners cannot understand, because “they have trouble grasping the subtlety of a different way of thinking” [4] – it is not necessary to remember that in Iran homosexuality is punishable by death. The indifference of postcolonialists towards the reactionary and criminal nature of the Ayatollahs’ regime, built on the crushing of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is easy to explain by the superposition of race – or the nation – on the rest of the social fractures: for those who pose the problem from the perspective of a conflict of nation against nation, it is perfectly natural to close ranks against one another, no matter who may fall.
A few decades earlier, the dependency movement responded to the rhetoric of the “communist” parties for their blatant subordination to the local bourgeoisie. Stalinism justified this by arguing that a bourgeois revolution was necessary before proposing any objectives for the proletariat and based on this, the need to support the economic developmentalism advocated by the local bourgeoisie. Both developmentalism and the need for a bourgeois revolution were based on the idea that peripheral countries were historically behind the central countries and, consequently, would only have to follow in the footsteps of the West to foster political and economic independence. This approach, which serves the theory of socialism in one country and transforms geographical differences into a time lag, making the West the future of a linear path that developing countries still have to follow, or, to put it in their own terms, making Russian “socialism” the final phase of the “people’s democracies” of the Third World, was the programmatic basis of national liberation movements in the decolonisation process.
However, the failure of these movements to achieve capitalist accumulation independent of the great powers led authors such as Arghiri Emmanuel, André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, and Ruy Mauro Marini to break with developmentalist theory and propose that there is a historical synchrony between the capitalist core and periphery. According to this theory, precisely because the West developed at the expense of other territories, the latter gradually became underdeveloped. Underdevelopment, therefore, was not a historical backwardness but the necessary and contemporary product of Western development. The culmination of this theory was that a complete adherence to the local bourgeoisie, as the national liberation movements had done, made no sense, since, lacking autonomous development, the latter could not be a bourgeoisie in the full sense of the term—vigorous, with its own interests, with an authentic project of national sovereignty—but rather, as Frank would say, a lumpen bourgeoisie that found itself endemically subordinated to the great capitalist powers.
But this critique was not a critique of capitalist development as such, nor of the existence of social classes. By separating the sociological class from the bourgeoisie as a factor of development, the fundamental concern of the dependentists shifted to the search for a project of national sovereignty where the people, embodied in the State, could constitute that factor of capitalist accumulation that would ultimately enable the national independence of peripheral countries from the great capitalist powers. This project, on the other hand, corresponded very well to a phase of great socialisation of the system after the Second World War, a phase of depersonalisation of capital and of states in charge of production, as Bordiga explained in Property and Capital and as Marx had already foreseen when speaking of capitalists as mere functionaries of value accumulation. That is why, for the dependentists, the challenge to the native bourgeoisie did not imply an intransigent defence of class independence and its frontal struggle against national and international capitalism, but rather a reproach for not being a true bourgeoisie, for not generating true capitalist accumulation: something natural in an anti-imperialist approach that places the supposed national interests of the people above the objective international interests of the class, ultimately replacing them with those of its national bourgeoisie. Thus, the Stalinist defence of national capitalist development was confronted by a yearning search for alternatives for the development of national capitalism: the nation was the starting and ending point of both ideologies, and in all of this, class, at best, was a secondary factor.
Capitalism Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
Although it was continued—with increasingly fragile arguments—in the anti-globalisation movement against foreign debt, the theory of the structural underdevelopment of the periphery collapsed under its own weight in the following decades. Beginning in the 1980s, former colonies and semi-colonies such as Brazil, India, the countries of Southeast Asia, and later China, began to gain influence both in the global market and geopolitically, and at a certain point, it was undeniable that they had a rapidly expanding accumulation of capital. Suffice it to say, by way of an example, that South Korea is currently considered the world’s leading power in technological development, especially in the robotics, biotechnology, and automotive sectors; that Brazil is willing to offer itself as a creditor to its former impoverished metropolis; and that Indian capital is the second largest source of foreign investment in the United Kingdom, second only to the United States. These facts contradict not only the need for a bourgeois revolution—as understood by Stalinism—for the full capitalist development of these countries, but also the idea that the global organisation of capitalism consists of a zero-sum game between nations whereby the development of some countries leads to the underdevelopment of others.
In Unequal Exchange, Arghiri Emmanuel reflected upon the role of colonialism in the underdevelopment of the periphery. While it is undeniable that the colonial expansion of the European powers introduced capitalist relations of production in the colonies, orienting them toward the production of raw materials and—initially—inhibiting manufacturing and industrial production, already in the early 1960s there was disturbing evidence that precluded the assertion that Europe’s capitalist growth was primarily due to political and military dominance over the resources of the colonies, which would be structurally underdeveloped for this reason. Emmanuel himself pointed out that there were rich countries without colonies (Norway, Sweden) and poor ones with them (Portugal); furthermore, the decolonisation process did not seem to have entailed great economic losses for their metropolises, as in the case of Belgium and Congo. Thus, it was necessary to explain the underdevelopment of these regions not through the extra-economic mechanisms of colonial domination, but through mechanisms internal to the economy. His theory of unequal exchange sought to account for these mechanisms.
Not only Emmanuel, but also all the dependency scholars, began from the premise that the surplus value generated by the proletariat of the periphery was being transferred through international trade to the capitalists of the core. The explanation began with a commonplace mythos on the left, originating with Hilferding, defended by Lenin, and later taken up and distorted by Sweezy and Baran: that the advance of capitalism entailed the formation of monopolies that, due to their position of power, could impose prices above the value of commodities—”violating” the law of value—and thus generate a general impoverishment of society. But such a society would be unable to continue purchasing the commodities that monopoly capital dumps on the market and would therefore eventually suffocate the system itself if left unchecked. The remedy, the dependentists asserted, was unequal exchange.
According to this explanation, the countries of the capitalist core exploit the periphery through mechanisms such as foreign direct investment, control of marketing channels, royalties on industrial machinery, or interest on loans, thus causing a transfer of resources that pushes the peripheral bourgeoisie, in its effort to maintain the surplus value stolen by the central bourgeoisie, toward super-exploitation of the proletariat, that is, to paying wages below the value of their labour power. For this reason, the proletariat of the periphery cannot feed a dynamic internal market that would serve as an incentive for productive investment of indigenous capital in the country, hence the underdevelopment of the nation as a whole. On the other hand, according to the dependency advocates, the proletariat of the central countries also does not receive the value of their labour power, but rather a surplus value that they extract, through class struggle, from the extra profits siphoned by their bourgeoisie from the peripheral nations. The latter can afford to throw away a few more crumbs and buy social peace because the true source of profit is not in the exploitation of its proletariat, but in the transfer of value from the periphery. Exploitation between nations prevails over exploitation between classes, and the different national proletariats share more interests with their respective bourgeoisies than with each other. It cannot be said that there is a world class, much less, therefore, that a world revolution is possible.
But there is no such thing as exploitation between nations. The nation is a space for the accumulation of value, not an economic agent, and the national bourgeoisie is merely a—perhaps clumsy—way of naming a fraction of the international bourgeoisie in its permanent competition to accumulate more capital. Exploitative relations can only exist between classes, and in a mode of production that is global in nature, those classes are also global.
To understand this, we must turn to Marx’s critique of political economy. First, value is a social relation, not a thing: value is the amount of labour socially necessary to produce a commodity and, therefore, cannot be conceived in terms of its individual production, factory by factory, country by country, but rather in terms of the comparison of commodities in the market, which involves comparing producers and production times. Since value is formed at the social level and cannot be conceived as something individually produced by a capital or a national bundle of capitals, one cannot speak of a transfer of value from one nation to another. In fact, the idea of such a value transfer has roots in a critique of capitalism that sees the problem within the distribution of resources, as opposed to how those resources are produced, as commodities, through wage labour, under the aegis of the state. On the contrary, surplus value is realised in the international market when the commodities produced by the exploitation of the proletariat of all countries confront one another. Only then is this surplus value distributed among the different fractions of the world bourgeoisie through the equalisation of the rate of profit. When production prices are formed, profits are distributed among all capitalists in proportion to their investment, as if they were “mere shareholders in a joint-stock company.”[5] There is no theft or transfer of resources between some fractions of the bourgeoisie and others—at least, not as something inherent in the system—but instead the just distribution of the spoils after exploiting the proletariat as a world class, in accordance with the laws of capitalist competition and the exchange of equivalents. This is why, “capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-a-vis the whole working-class, while there is little love lost between them in competition among themselves.”[6]
Nor are the differences in the living conditions of the proletariat between one country and another due to a zero-sum game. Although no one denies that it is better to be a proletarian in Sweden than in Rwanda—capitalism is an unequal and hierarchical system—this does not mean that the proletarian in Sweden lives better because the proletarian in Rwanda lives worse, nor that, therefore, there is an antagonism between their interests. This can be seen in the wage differences between countries. On the one hand, as Marx explains in the chapter on “The National Difference of Wages”[7], these are due to the difference in productivity and labour intensity thanks to the development of the productive forces in those countries—that is, the technological development of their production. But higher wages are often accompanied by a higher rate of exploitation, because when labour productivity increases, the rate of surplus value (which to say, of surplus value extraction) automatically rises along with it. Therefore, it is not the proletariat that ultimately benefits from the greater productivity of the national economy, but the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that wages are determined by the value of the products necessary to reproduce our labour power and go to work the next day. When customs restrictions are lifted and agricultural products from other, more competitive countries are allowed in, those who benefit are both the bourgeoisie of the exporting country—immediately—because it has expanded its market, and the bourgeoisie of the importing country—in the medium term—because if food becomes cheaper and therefore the price of subsistence falls, wages will also tend to fall, and, without having to lift a finger, their rate of exploitation of the proletariat will increase again.
It will then be understood that speeches such as those criticising large multinationals—which revive the old idea of monopoly capital—or those defending fair trade are actually based on a false vision of capitalism that leads to reactionary conclusions. Big capital is not only not driven by the violation of the laws of competition to unfairly seize more value than it deserves, but is rather the product of capital’s justice, the exchange of equivalents in the war of all against all that is the capitalist market. Within it, there are undoubtedly large and small capitals, large and small nations, but all of them are sustained, without exception, by the exploitation of our class worldwide.
Racism Does Not Organise Capitalism
Just as the failure of political decolonisation processes led the dependency movement to propose a theory of economic colonialism, this theory’s inability to explain the economic development of some peripheral countries and their growing role in the interplay of imperialist tensions led postcolonial scholars to shift the cause toward an epistemic colonialism. Postcolonial theory emerged within the university, where postmodernism began to gain traction in the 1980s, and not coincidentally, it tasked academics with accomplishing, through theoretical production, what national liberation movements and institutions critical of developmentalism, such as ECLAC (UN Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), had failed to achieve. The essential problem, therefore, became how subalterns could speak and develop a discourse, epistemology, and knowledge autonomous from a colonialism that presupposed Eurocentric social sciences.
Capitalism has the peculiarity among class societies of making the objective reality appear inverted. This is not due to a Machiavellian inclination of the ruling class, but to a spontaneous product secreted by this system, which Marx called commodity fetishism. In our text, Intersecting Capitalism?, we have explained in detail what this inversion consists of and how it expresses itself in the methodological individualism of bourgeois thought, whether modern or postmodern, and in the idealism that makes the individual, their will, their capacity for political influence, and their consciousness appear as the determining elements of history.
The fact is that when one begins their analysis from surface appearances, from what is presented by this mode of production, one takes the dominant ideology—which expresses the capitalist inversion of social relations— with them. From the perspective of the individual, economic exploitation, patriarchal oppression, and racial oppression appear as different things that must, consequently, have distinct and independent sources of power. In their immediate experience, class, gender, and race are distinct realities that intersect within the individual, since the individual is unable to reason from the perspective of the social totality but only from the perspective of his or her own unity as an atomised subject.
Postcolonial theory is rooted in this inverted view of social reality as presented by commodity fetishism. Consequently, exploitation between countries precedes and determines exploitation between classes. The market—circulation—in the world-system determines local and heterogeneous relations of production (Wallerstein, Amin), just as consumption, not the production of commodities, is the determining element in the reproduction of capitalism (Marini). Furthermore, the idea of race is essential in the organisation of the material relations of exploitation (Fanon, Quijano), and, in fact, racism organises this social system, which, before being divided by class or gender, is divided into a global North and South (Grosfoguel). So much so that in this system, capitalism is nothing more than the economic attribute of a broader civilising project called Modernity, characterised by the deployment of Eurocentric knowledge-power, inherently hierarchical and totalitarian (Dussel), which, by dominating consciousness, would allow the domination of the white people over the rest of the planet.
But society cannot be transformed from an inverted view of reality. Therefore, an important part of Marx’s militant work was to correct this view in his critique of political economy. For our part as communists, we must not only correct it with Marx but also restore the revolutionary theory that he helped to develop against the weight of the counterrevolution, of which the Stalinist and postmodern understandings of this social system are both ultimately expressions.
First, the colonial and racist configuration of capitalism cannot be conceptualised from the emergence of an idea, nor thanks to it. In contrast to postcolonialists, who persist in finding the historical moment in which a racist discourse began to be articulated to explain how it would organise capitalist relations globally, we are committed to a method based on the material relations in society—that is, the way societies produce and reproduce their lives. In class societies, this mode of production and reproduction of social existence occurs thanks to the relations of exploitation of one class by another. The justification for this exploitation can be diverse. It can be based on scientific racism or democratic multiculturalism. It can be justified, dubiously, on the basis of the supposed racial and historical inferiority of some human subgroups as compared with others or through the fervour for a single national or racial unity. But it is the relations of exploitation articulated in a given mode of production that allow us to explain them, confront their transformations, and understand their complementarity.
For this very reason, we can only understand through them the capitalist hierarchy between nations, which is due to their role in the accumulation of capital at the expense of the global proletariat, and not to racism or the Eurocentric colonisation of knowledge. In this sense, we could say that the postcolonialists suffer from the same developmentalism that butresses the discourses they criticise, giving a lustre to the role of the university bureaucrat: the way to foster the development of the regions most disadvantaged by the hierarchisation of capitalism would be to promote their own epistemology—that is, an academic production like theirs—a decolonised, non-Eurocentric one, which would pave the way for the country’s economic development with national-popular, subaltern attributes, vis-à-vis the native bourgeoisie, which is capitalist because it is Westernised. That is where the true social transformation would begin, in the cultural decolonisation that would restore national pride, allow for the enrichment of society, and foster a change of mentality—one that is not modern, not Western—so that the political class would initiate the changes necessary to end this social system. [8]
But this is simply false. It is false that the misery generated by capitalism and administered by the state is caused by a modern mentality, so that a different curriculum, rooted in the decolonial turn, would be enough to change our social relations. But it is above all false that a less Westernised discourse makes the bourgeoisie less exploitative and its state less repressive. Modi, the current president of India, bases his program on Hindutva, Hindu nationalism, against the rest of the country’s religious and ethnic communities and uses it to extend his geopolitical influence in the region, making it easier for Indian capital to exploit the proletariat in neighbouring countries. Álvaro García Linera could easily write books about the pre-capitalist community while he was Evo Morales’s vice president in Bolivia. Nothing prevented him and his government from cutting off the Amazon with highways and harshly repressing indigenous protesters. When the problem is posited as Western epistemology, whose origin is geographically situated, and not capitalist social relations, which are global and don’t require specific national attributes to unfold their misery, what is being done is identifying capitalism with the West and the peripheral nation—in short, the national bourgeoisie—with that which, while not Western, establishes the possibility of constituting different social relations, a socialism in one country, based on the pre-capitalist worldviews of national tradition. Once again, class terms disappear, giving way to a Stalinism disguised as a pre-capitalist apologia.
Nor was racism at the origin of capitalism. The first centuries of this mode of production consisted of a complex transition from feudalism that would not conclude until the 18th century, in which primitive accumulation in Europe and colonial expansion, with the conquest of America and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, were inextricably linked to the same historical process. This process, profoundly bloody both within and outside European territory, initially lacked a racist explanation based on the superiority of white people over the rest. While it is inherently dubious to treat the theological and feudal-logic discussion between Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda about the soul of the Native Americans under modern racist terms, the way in which exploitative relations were established in North America clearly demonstrates the absence of racial connotations at the beginning of European colonisation. For two centuries, both African slaves – initially from the Muslim trade, the source of slaves for Europe since the beginning of feudalism – and the so-called indentured servants were exported there. European slaves taken to the English colonies to establish relations of exploitation in a territory that, due to its size, would have been difficult to maintain without the bondage of both. If the African slave trade ended up ‘winning out’ against the import of indentured servants, it happened later and it was due to its greater profitability, not because Africans worked harder or endured the climate better, as has sometimes been said, but because the process of primitive accumulation in Europe, the brutal expropriation of the peasantry to produce proletarians and the beginning of the manufacturing industry made it more convenient, in capitalist terms, to leave the exploitation of the white proletariat in the hands of the butchers of Manchester and focus on the plundering of human lives in Africa for the New World [9]. On the other hand, the 18th century clearly demonstrates the close relationship between the exploitation of the proletariat in England and the slaves on the plantations in the United States.
As Marx wrote in Capital:
“While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.” [10]
When it is suggested that racism motivated the expansion, and organised the global structuring, of capitalism, not only is the real historical process, in which the massacre of the European peasantry was linked to the massacre of pre-Columbian and African populations, ignored, consciously or unconsciously, but racial blocs are also established in which white people, driven by a will to power that can only be explained by their cultural attributes, would have imposed themselves on the rest of the peoples. Thus, on the one hand, it is forgotten that these supposed blocs were nothing more than class societies in which the caciques (chieftains) in the Americas and the aristocracy of the African empires also promoted and sought to benefit from colonial expansion. On the other hand, the European peoples are presented as a single body of conquerors and traders, as if a third of the European population had not died in the 17th century as a result of the establishment of capitalist social relations, and as if the peasantry and later the proletariat of these regions had not been exploited and used as cannon fodder for the colonial expansion of their ruling class.
The idea that the origin of capitalism lies in the expansion of the world market (Wallerstein), which would have thus constituted a world-system, contributes to a vision of capitalism within which racial domination prevails over class exploitation. It is ultimately convenient, to an approach in which peoples dominate peoples and classes, if they exist, are only relevant within the national and geographical framework, that the birth of capitalism begins with the circulation of commodities rather than in the brutal establishment of production relations. Pecunia non olet: in trade, class divisions are dissolved to present European merchants and conquerors as a homogeneous bloc vis-à-vis other people.
The development of capitalism brought about transformations in all spheres of society, including, naturally, philosophy and science. However, the postcolonial claim that decolonising knowledge and returning to pre-capitalist worldviews can change the course of capitalism is not only erroneous, it also serves their defence of a national-popular project that, once established in the state, can only do what the state does: manage capitalism, exploit the urban and rural proletariat, plunder nature, and sell all of this as the indispensable means of our emancipation.
Race as a Nation
The concept of race has no scientific basis. However much human groups can be created based upon criteria such as skin colour, hair type, or facial features, these groups have no genetic reality: as far as DNA is concerned, a European may have more in common with an Asian than with another European. [11]
In this sense, and only in this sense, the term racialised describes a reality. This reality is the process of capitalism’s hierarchisation of groups of human beings within a given geography, who are then, through economic or extra-economic violence, but sometimes voluntarily, forcibly displace and transformed into a racial minority. In other cases, given the global and hierarchical deployment of capitalism in its colonial phase, these groups are racialised by the domination of the metropolis and its settlers in the territory. Generally speaking, the process by which the world’s population is endowed with racial attributes is due to the hierarchy established between the great capitalist powers and their subsidiary economies, which results in the poor having a nationality, colour, or religion that marks them as poor at a given historical moment. Indigenous people in Latin America, Black people in the United States, the Irish in nineteenth-century England, or Indians today in the Persian Gulf are racialised not because of their phenotypic traits or their religion, but by the inherent and spontaneous logic of capitalist social relations. Undoubtedly, the concept of race is modern, not because it was conceived at the dawn of capitalism as a means to subjugate non-Western peoples, but because it forms part of the mechanisms of collective aggregation inherent to the capitalist mode of production, a process that derives from its economic categories and achieves its highest synthesis in the nation.
Human societies have been territorially fragmented up to the development of capitalism, which creates new continuities and discontinuities with respect to previous modes of production. The continuities are fragmentation, the division between us and theother, xenophobia, if we may use an anachronistic term. In primitive communism, the community was experienced inward, with relationships with other communities being a permanent element of conflict. Thus, the human being is defined by their community: Bantu or Guarani means man, and the German demonym comes from the Old Germanic Allmanis, meaning ‘all men’. With the emergence of the state and private property, the annexation of new lands through war became an essential element for the reproduction of early class societies, since in them, land was the means of production par excellence. This new historical necessity compels a change in the mechanisms of social identification, given that, when the different communities are united under the same imperial banner and trade routes linking the different empires begin to develop, the separation between us and the other becomes more complex. This is how Claudius explained it to some Roman senators who opposed the incorporation of the Franks into the Senate with equal rights: the reason for the success of the Republic and later the Roman Empire, unlike the Greeks, was precisely the integration of the vanquished. [12] The ecumenical vocation of pre-capitalist empires implies an overcoming of the genealogical idea of previous societies, in which the exclusive mechanism of social belonging was kinship: to be part of the community, one’s ancestors had to belong to it. With the emergence of empires, this sense of belonging is superimposed and often contrasted with a “political” idea of belonging no longer defined by the historical line of ancestors, but by the territorial extension dominated by the State.
But it is not yet the abstract and homogeneous belonging of the nation in capitalism. Rather, empires, in their claim to universality, bring together a multiplicity of peoples and seek to represent them: either by incorporating them into the Roman Senate or by maintaining the religious institutions that regulate the different communities within them. Thus, upon taking Constantinople in the 15th century and converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque, Mehmet II the Conqueror brought an Orthodox patriarch, an Armenian patriarch, and a rabbi to represent the respective sections of his subjects. The same ecumenical conception of the community would be inherited from the Roman Empire by Christianity, allowing the Catholic Church to hold together under the mantle of Christianity a population that the profound political fragmentation of feudalism could not integrate. Consequently, the other was no longer defined by being external to the community or the empire. The state form was largely superseded by the religious form of social belonging: the other was the one who had a different (monotheistic) religion or, even worse, the one who had none, as was the case with the indigenous peoples of America.
The emergence of the nation with the capitalist mode of production implies a transcendence and a rupture with these mechanisms of social identification. Fundamental to this rupture is the dissolution of estates and the establishment of formal legal equality among individuals, which is essential in a society of commodity owners who, as buyers and sellers, are equal. The very existence of the proletariat is due to this legal equality: the proletariat can only sell its labour power—the only property which it has to sell, its own alienated labour—to the capitalist, who extracts surplus value from it, because it is a seller of commodities like everyone else.
The legal equality inherent in the structure of capitalism also requires that the unity of the state and its right to govern—sovereignty—rest in a social entity called the nation. Since the individual is the basic cell of capitalism, collective identity cannot be the closed community that recognises itself by sharing the same ancestors, nor the imperial form that brings together communities without subsuming or homogenising them, since, not being a democratic entity, it does not need a unitary subject on which sovereignty rests: unity is given by the emperor and his link with God.
The nation, as a social identity presumed to have potential sovereignty over a territory, must unify an aggregation of individuals with particular and conflicting interests, in constant competition with one another, which constitutes capitalist society. Like the commodity form itself, the nation unites, through its form—both legal and sovereign—a multiplicity of individuals who, without it, would have nothing in common. It is therefore a metamorphosis of value, the form of social aggregation par excellence in capitalism. But also, as a population subject to the exercise of state power in a territory defined by borders, the nation is a space for the accumulation of value that must become homogeneous: the same administration, the same taxes, the same currency, the same physical dimensions, the same language. To be the repository of popular sovereignty, the people must be constructed as a uniform category.
This process of national homogenisation can occur in a legal and democratic sense, whereby every person legalised as a citizen is part of the nation, or it can seek some “objective” foundation, such as language, culture, race, or religion, for that fetishised and a posteriori constructed form that is the ‘people’: both factors complement and sometimes oppose each other in the process of nation formation. It can be seen in the construction of the United States, where, at the same time, under the Enlightenment ideals of the bourgeois revolution, European migrants are integrated as participants in the American Dream—a process not exempt from racism toward the poorest migrants, such as the Irish, Italians, or Poles—and constructed into a race against and in opposition to the native populations and African-American slaves. But the need for national homogenisation, as an imperative to construct a uniform political subject that does not threaten state sovereignty but rather sustains it, is not the exclusive preserve of Western societies. Thus, the consolidation of the Turkish state required the extermination of the Armenians, and the establishment of the Indian nation-state entailed the partition of the territory between India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims, with the largest forced population migration ever experienced in history. Indeed, Gandhi himself, the nationalist leader who is today held up as a moral example for all humanists, expressed himself in these terms:
“Suppose I imagine that several tens of millions of Muslims in India will be loyal to India and fight against Pakistan? It is easy to ask questions but difficult to answer them. If they betray you later, you can shoot them. You can shoot one or two, a certain number. Not everyone will be disloyal.” [13]
The racialisation of populations is their gradual nationalisation, assigning to a geographical origin and physical features a series of moral and cultural attributes specific to a people, that is, a nation. But again, this is not a power device for the creation of capitalist relations, but rather another metamorphosis of value, the only way in which collectivities can exist in a mode of production whose modus operandi is the war of each against all. Consequently, one is either a part of the nation, or one belongs to a different and opposing nation. The historical movement for black rights in the United States contains both tendencies. Without downplaying the conditions of misery, oppression, and violence against which the struggle was fought, nor the courage of so many people who dedicated their lives to this struggle, the ideologies and theoretical movements that arose from the anti-racist movement could only remain trapped in a contradiction inherent to this system. While the struggle for civil rights aimed for the full integration of Black people into the American nation, demanding to become a part of it with equal rights to the rest, Black nationalism sought formulas for separation: first through a return to Africa, then with the establishment of a Black state within the federation, and finally with forms of communitarianism where the Black community would assume some of the State’s functions for self-regulation. [14] The Black Panthers confusingly defended both the first and the last. As the failure to acquire legal rights to achieve material equality and abolish racial segregation became evident, Black nationalism gained strength. But also, as Black nationalism proved to be a cul-de-sac with no possible strategic exit, the struggle within the State was once again raised as a tactical possibility. Legal egalitarianism and racial nationalism are two sides of the same coin; two poles of a contradiction that can only permanently oscillate between one point and the other, but which can never be overcome within the framework of capitalism.
But Capitalism (Spontaneously) Produces Racism
Indeed, human societies have been territorially fragmented up to the development of capitalism. This is the first mode of production in history that is global: its logic pushed it toward territorial expansion through colonialism, the violent subsumption and dissolution of other relations of production, the connection of territories through transportation and telecommunications, the integration of the entire planet into a single global market, and the homogenisation of societies, not only in their cultural consumption or habits, but also in their social classes, which, as capitalism consolidated itself globally as a social system, became global themselves.
But this process of global expansion and homogenisation is carried out through fragmentation into nations, which seek uniformity internally and confront each other through trade and war externally. The processes of decolonisation in the postwar period, as well as the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, only served to aggravate this dynamic of nationalism, permanent war, and the formation of regional imperialisms. In this struggle, a hierarchical system is articulated where some bourgeoisies impose themselves upon others.
This imposition, however, is not a factual event due to their military power. On the contrary, military force is always a byproduct of economic power, although it may later serve to support the needs of national capital in its search for new markets, labour, and raw materials. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. It is not a matter of resource distribution as a result of theft and the rule of the strongest, but of an impersonal system governed by the law of value, by which inequality is automatically reproduced through the equivalent exchange of goods. Thus, the most productive capital will impose itself on others, just as states with more developed and productive economies can impose themselves on the rest, paying for both embassies and military bases.
As we explained before, the hierarchical organisation of countries is due to the just distribution of the spoils obtained from the exploitation of the world proletariat. For this same reason, the developmentalist thesis that, by following the same economic measures, all countries can eventually achieve equal living conditions is as absurd as that of dependency theory, which argues that the capitalist periphery is condemned to underdevelopment as long as the great capitalist powers continue to develop at its expense. The homogenisation of capitalist production relations is achieved through the struggle of some nations against others for control of the world market and the domination of the strongest over the rest, but this same homogeneity later allows for the autonomous development of capital in the periphery, which confronts the former colonial powers as countries embodying a younger and more dynamic capitalism. This is the only way to explain the rise of the BRIC countries, Southeast Asia, and the current war for global hegemony between China and the United States. Capitalism reproduces inequality through equality and brings about the globalisation of humanity through its national and racial fragmentation. Understanding this contradictory dynamic is essential to explaining racism without falling into nationalist assumptions, which can only animate it.
The hierarchy between nations is dynamic due to the permanent competition between capital and its states in the global market, but this dynamism is losing historical energy with the exhaustion of the fundamental categories of capitalism. As we have seen with the recent war in Ukraine and has been explained so many times by the revolutionary movement, the structural crisis of this system leads to the exacerbation of imperialist tensions, the outbreak of wars with global effects, and the subsequent devastation of entire territories, both physically and economically. War is prepared and sustained with nationalism, which is always racist. But it also combines with economic factors and climate crises to give rise to mass migratory movements.
Migration in itself had never been a problem under capitalism. Rather, it was a fundamental resource for having a good reserve army to draw on during times of increased production without causing wage increases. While economies functioned like well-oiled machines, migration was a welcome fodder for capital’s cannibalism. But as the structural crisis progresses, migratory movements become “migratory crises” to which economically weakened states must respond with military force. This is not a moral issue, nor is it that governments are racist: it is a necessity for the regulation of the internal market and democratic governance.
In a situation of crisis and in the absence of class struggle, it is easy for the war of each against all inherent to capitalism to exacerbate, leading to polarisation between natives and foreigners, between the majority race and religion in the nation and other ‘minority’ groups. This is undoubtedly something that interests the bourgeoisie, which historically has had no qualms about fostering racism to divide proletarian struggles, as in South Africa in the 1920s or in the early days of the State of Israel. But racism is not a Machiavellian instrument; it is rather a spontaneous phenomenon inherent to a society in permanent competition. Nationalism today falsely presents itself as a means to regain control of social relations that are becoming increasingly antihuman as a consequence of the relentless globalisation of capital. In addition to military and economic competition between nations, there is also competition between proletarians to avoid falling into poverty: nationalism and racism emerge spontaneously from this confrontation. At the same time, communities of former migrants within the nation are beginning to become a problem, as the expulsion from work directly affects them, ghettos are forming on the outskirts of large cities, and states are no longer able to implement mechanisms of social integration, in the form of subsidies and public services, because of the fiscal crisis caused by economic instability. Communitarianism and racialisation then appear as a false solution for these groups, who retreat into identitarian formulas as protection mechanisms. This is how we should understand the rise of Islamism in the outskirts of large West European cities.
Anti-racism always leads down two paths, both incapable of resolving the situation. On one hand, state reform for the integration of racial minorities into the nation, through subsidies and affirmative action policies. However, reformism is losing its material basis with the structural crisis of capitalism, and the state, who are unable to respond with social assistance, and are instead increasingly responding with the police. The other path, nationalism, believes it can find the solution to the misery of the racialised proletariat in forms of self-government that, ultimately, suffer from the same problem as the central state in confronting a permanent economic crisis. To the extent that it has its roots in separation from the rest of the class and pushes workers toward identification with the bourgeoisie of their own race, this path is also profoundly reactionary. Caught between an impotent legal egalitarianism and a reactionary nationalism, anti-racism—as a struggle separate from the overall fight against this system—can only generate more confusion and contribute thus to the maintenance of the current order.
Contrary to anti-racist and racialising visions, which hold that capitalism is undemocratic on account of its structural racism and therefore see reforming the State to be more ‘democratic’ as the way to combat it, it is precisely the democratic nature of capitalism—the legal equality of its citizens guaranteed by the exercise of national sovereignty from a State bounded by borders—that permanently reproduces it. For democracy to exist, there must be a nation, and for a nation to exist, there must invariably also exist borders, undocumented people, foreigners and natives, opposition to other nations, imperialist tensions, and war. Democracy requires the recent massacre at the Melilla border fence at the hands of the Spanish and Moroccan states, but also the expulsion of thousands of Nigerians by the Senegalese state, returning them to famine and war in their country. It is not racism that creates borders, but rather borders, as an essential element of capitalist functioning, that permanently reproduce racism. Only a class movement—that is, an anti-state and internationalist one, which is to say, a radically anti-national one—can put an end to the racism that this moribund mode of production spontaneously creates.
From Where do We Communists Speak?
This movement is not a pious wish nor a Pascalian wager. It is a real, objective, material movement that expresses itself whenever the class struggle reignites. Though capitalism exacerbates division, it nevertheless tends to materially unify the conditions of the proletariat worldwide. Hence, despite the nationalist carnage of the First World War, the Russian Revolution was not a Western phenomenon, but a wave of international revolution that shook the world from the United States and Patagonia to China. The subsequent development of capitalism, with the indispensable help of Stalinism, on whose foundations postcolonial theory is built, continued to socialise production, creating a growing interdependence of different territories and posing problems that capitalism, in its functional fragmentation into competing nation-states, cannot resolve. Global problems such as the expulsion of labour and the rise of surplus populations, the climate crisis, or the permanent escalation toward war, can only be addressed by a class that is global and driven, in order to end its misery, to put an end to the capitalist system and its social categories. Only from this international perspective, from the constitution of a global human community, can the fragmentation of human societies, which have dragged along the separation of “us” and “other” as a continuous line, be overcome. It is from this real movement, which is born from the contradictions of the system and confronts them with the historical necessity of global revolution, that we communists speak.
The concept of “place of enunciation” is used by postmodernism to define the privileges and oppressions from which one speaks. For it, any formulation of universals is a cover, a place usurped by the particularity of the individual who produces the discourse. In doing so, it rightly recognises that consciousness is not separate from existence, but it nevertheless defines material existence according to the circumstances of the atomised subject of capital and the social categories that engender this subjectivity.
Of course, knowledge is not something produced in the abstract but is instead determined by the material conditions in which we live, the mode of production that shapes it—that is, the way societies produce and reproduce their lives in relation to nature. Consequently, and as we believe we have demonstrated in this text, racialisers speak from the perspective of capitalism and cannot escape its logic: the individual, democracy, the nation. In short, they begin their analysis of society from the perspective of the atomised individual and arrive logically, in this way, at the intersection of different power relations within the individual, which must struggle against each other, leading to a permanent schizophrenia of privilege and oppression.
Speaking from the perspective of capital, they can thus say that discourses organise reality, that racism organises capitalism, that modernity is an articulation of power and knowledge that must be fought against from an epistemological (read: academic) perspective. Racialisers also speak from the perspective of democracy, because the political embodiment of their theories is the consummation of a national-popular project of the subalterns to widen the scope of this democracy, without understanding the most basic point: that their democracy demands a State, a nation, borders, and new excluded people, newly racialised by the very logic of this society. But racialisers also and above all speak from the perspective of the nation. Its place of enunciation demands the loss of all forms of community among human beings—an Enlightenment concept that hides the blood of the colonised—and speaks from a geography, a culture, a people, a national tradition: internationalism is a pipe-dream or a deception. For this very reason, racialisers can only speak from capitalist relations, revelling in their most reactionary aspects, because in the nation-versus-nation conflict, all other oppositions disappear. The struggle against patriarchy is a Western Trojan horse. Resistance against ecological devastation is a Western privilege that peripheral countries cannot afford. The authority of God and his clergy is something to be defended against capitalist modernisation. Class struggle, if it is named, must be subordinated to the national project against the Western powers. In the face of the nation, in the face of race, any struggle for emancipation is denied.
Racialisation speaks from the categories of capital. The communist program can oppose these categories because its place of enunciation is not capitalist fragmentation, but a new mode of production born within it and formulated as a program—a compass—for the outbreak of revolts and revolutions to which the crisis of this system is pushing us. As communists, we are an organised expression of the real movement toward communism. Our place of enunciation is thus global and collective, and it is based on our entire species: for this very reason, it is the only place from which those of us who aspire to a radical transformation of this world can speak.
Barbaria, August 2022
[1] For the sake of brevity and despite the explicit differences between the authors, we will refer to the racialising movement and postcolonial and decolonial theories as synonyms, since this text will discuss their common foundation.
[2] Dipesh Chakrabarty: On the Margins of Europe, ed. Tusquets, p. 18.
[3] Houria Bouteldja: Whites, Jews, and Us, ed. Akal, pp. 38-40.
[4] See the YouTube presentation of Houria Bouteldja’s book, 00:30:00-00:31:15.
[5] Karl Marx: Capital, ed. Siglo XXI, vol. III, tome 6, p. 200.
[6] Ibid., p. 250.
[7] Marx, op. cit., pp. 683-689.
[8] Dussel explains it in similar terms in this brief intervention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q86_LPat-IQ.
[9] Cf. Eric Williams: Capitalism and Slavery, ed. Traficantes de Sueños.
[10] Marx, ibid.., p. 949.
[11] “Among the first people whose complete genome sequence was reconstructed are two very famous biologists, James Watson and Craig Venter, and a Korean researcher, Seong-Jin Kim. The three have more than 1,200,000 variants in common, but it is more interesting to compare these subjects two by two. Watson and Venter, both of European origin, have 460,000 variants in common: that is, fewer than each has in common with Kim (570,000 and 480,000 variants, respectively). In short, from a genetic point of view, of the three, the intermediate individual is the Korean. This does not mean that all Europeans resemble Asians more than other Europeans, and in fact, on average, this is not the case. Precisely: these are average values. If, conversely, we compare individuals, each of us resembles some Asians more than some Europeans, because genetically, Asians, Europeans, and even all others, are very large groups that widely overlap. Guido Barbujani: “There is no such thing as ‘race’ but a nuance within a continuous variability in geographical space,” OMAR. Our (Barbaria’s) translation.
[12] Tacitus: Annals, XI 24.
“Do we perhaps regret having the Balbos of Spain here, and so many illustrious men from Narbonnean Gaul? Their descendants still live, without recognising our advantage in the love of this homeland. What was the source of the ruin of the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, since they were great in arms, if not from having treated all the peoples they subjugated as foreigners? Our founder Romulus did not do so, who, with singular prudence, knew how to consider many peoples as his enemies and citizens on the same day.”
[13] Cit. Perry Anderson: The Indian Ideology, p. 86.
[14] The communitarian proposal is not only present in racialising circles today but has also been taken up by the French philo-fascist New Right. Cf. Tristan Leoni: Race and the New Right.
League of Internationalist Communists 