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actually let me just get this out of the way. Overall, the broad points we made (largely ignored in this response) are:
1) the racial capitalism argument that racism plays a *functional* role in capitalism
2) not all hypotheticals are relevant 1/18 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-reply-to-olufemi-o-taiwo-and-liam-kofi-bright
1) the racial capitalism argument that racism plays a *functional* role in capitalism
2) not all hypotheticals are relevant 1/18 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-reply-to-olufemi-o-taiwo-and-liam-kofi-bright
but first things first: Walzer is very disappointed in us. He wanted an idea that "can usefully, creatively, guide our political practice". But all he got was "a little academic essay, with no political content".
Actually kinda here for this Nigerian uncle style shade...2/18
Actually kinda here for this Nigerian uncle style shade...2/18
But our goal was clear: to explain what racial capitalism was. In response to that, he describes as a "give-away sentence" the part of our piece that acknowledges that Irish and Slavic peoples survived related colonial regimes. 3/18
He concludes from this, bizarrely, that we must think "every exploited worker is the member of an oppressed race." Even if we did somehow forget about English folks, the fact that some oppressed races may rank higher than others could still be importantly explanatory. 4/18
Next up: Walzer points out that European immigration was restricted in 1924, which the AFL supported (fearing "cheap labor"), which capitalists responded to by exploiting Black workers. It's hard to tell how Walzer intends this to be a counterexample 5/18
The fact that the rich are willing to exploit Black labor is...something of a theme in racial capitalist scholarship (and work on race more generally). That this creates divisions within the ruling class between competing visions of social control is interesting...6/18
But not the sort of thing that is peculiar to studying race, nor something that an appeal to capitalism as "universal exploiter" at all clarifies (they were just as capitalist in 1923, so if race was politically irrelevant why hadn't the integration happened already?) 7/18
Walzer can't resist taking on our "statistical trick" (literally reporting the population of Ireland) and pointing out that, conceivably, free Irish workers might have picked cotton even better than enslaved Africans. I'll let this portion of his essay speak for itself 8/18
But it relates to the Walzer's core mistake: that "necessity" is how we should evaluate which ideas are relevant and properly anti-capitalist. Defunding the police isn't, for example, since capitalism could survive if capitalists switched to private security 9/18
Medicare for all isn't either, since "its success will stabilize the capitalist order, just as New Deal reforms did". Housing subsidies too: they'd help avoid capitalist crises. No political campaign that capitalism could survive, it would seem, is actually anti-capitalist 10/18
It's hard to see what could count as anti-capitalist on this definition other than, say, the revival and global victory of a Second World. The Russian Revolution of 1917 wouldn't, since capitalism (as a world system) survived that 11/18
This thing we'd said comes up here: "Suppose we were trying to work out why a building retains as much heat as it does...It would not be relevant that the architects could have made different decisions in placing rooms, or that different materials could have been selected." 12/18
We continue: "In just the same way, theorists of racial capitalism are not interested in the characteristics capitalism could have had in some conceivable world. They describe it based on the features it does, in fact, have." 13/18
If race and capitalism produce and support each other, then fights against fundamental structures of racism are functionally anti-capitalist, in the way that taking out load bearing walls of a building is part of a demolition process (even if one *could* replace the wall). 14/18
That would mean defunding the police (I'd prefer community control over public safety), which Walzer seems to think of as a "separate" struggle, is not separate at all 15/18 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/power-over-the-police
Last point: Walzer claims his motivation is oppose the idea "that we only need to fight on one front, when in fact we need to fight on many fronts". But all of the issues that he lists are common leftists positions and "different fronts" by his own lights! 16/18
It's hard not to read this as disingenous. First, even if it turns out two things (race and capitalism) are linked...that leaves quite open the possibility of a third or fourth thing. But most importantly, it's just a bad habit of Walzer's showing up yet again 17/18
Why is he spitballing about what it is that theorists of racial capitalism believe? He could just ask. 18/end
