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Published bimonthly since 1986, AGAINST THE CURRENT is a Solidarity-sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The May/June 2013 editorial focuses on what is at stake in the decision to build the Keystone XL Pipeline. Malik Miah’s Race and Class column takes up the immigration debate and calls for open borders; Chokwe Lumumba outlines the strategy behind his run for mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Dan Georgakas paints an overview of the Greek financial crisis and the struggle against their “odious” debt while Maïa Pal recounts the occupation against outsourcing at England’s Sussex University and Jaime Rivera, Secretary of the Sindical de Trabajadores de Sector Electricos in El Salvador explains the latest attempt by Washington and the World Bank to impose another round of privatization. Comics artist Ethan Heitner depicts the great Flint sitdown strike – and more!
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racism and capitalism
Hi Alex,
I agree with your strategic point about highlighting the ways in which capitalism negatively impacts communities of color and other particularly oppressed communities. However, I'm not sure I agree with the analysis that capitalism and racial/national oppression are separate institutions. We've long recognized, for example, that the development of world capitalism was inextricably tied to slavery, colonialism, and the genocide of native peoples in the Americas. Also, racism is clearly tied to imperialism, and imperialism is of course integral to capitalism. Saying racism and capitalism are intertwined isn't necessarily reducing racism to economic determination, since capitalism is a social and political as well as economic system.
I do agree that racism, patriarchy, and wage-labor exploitation are distinct forms of oppression, are experienced differently and play out differently in political life, and that the oppression of women and black people (and other oppressed groups) is not simply a question of intensified exploitation. Also, racism isn't simply a ruling-class ploy to divide the working class (although that is certainly a large part of it). I think there needs to be more robust and accessible Marxist thinking on the relationship of racism/national oppression to capitalism today and particularly in the US. Does anyone have recommendations? I found David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness" very compelling, although it's an academic history rather than a political text.
-Nick D., Baltimore