Capital exploits cultural and racial difference rather than eroding it.

Evidence

This is enriched by Gramsci’s attention to what we might call the culturally specific quality of class formations in any historically specific society. He never makes the mistake of believing that, because the general law of value has the tendency to homogenize labor power across the capitalist epoch, therefore, in any concrete society, this homogenization can be assumed to exist. Indeed, I believe Gramsci’s whole approach leads us to question the validity of this general law in its traditional form, since, precisely, it has encouraged us to neglect the ways in which the law of value, operating on a global as opposed to a merely domestic scale, operates through and because of the culturally specific character of labor power rather than—as the classical theory would have us believe—by systematically eroding those distinctions as an inevitable part of a worldwide, epochal historical tendency. Certainly, whenever we depart from the “Eurocentric” model of capitalist development (and even within that model), what we actually find is the many ways in which capital can preserve, adapt to its fundamental trajectory, and harness and exploit these particularistic qualities of labor power, building them into its regimes. The ethnic and racial structuration of the labor force, like its gendered composition, may provide an inhibition to the rationalistically conceived “global” tendencies of capitalist development. And yet, these distinctions have been maintained, and indeed developed and refined, in the global expansion of the capitalist mode. They have provided the means for differentiated forms of exploitation of the different sectors of a fractured labor force. In that context, their economic, political, and social effects have been profound. We would get much further along the road to understanding how the regime of capital can function through differentiation and difference, rather than through similarity and identity, if we took more seriously this question of the cultural, social, national, ethnic, and gendered composition of historically different and specific forms of labor. Gramsci, though he is not a general theorist of the capitalist mode, does point us unalterably in that direction. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 136

Categorization

• XREF: Core Gramscian mechanism reusable in Islamophobia readings: racial structuration of labor as differentiated exploitation, not homogenization. Connects to later readings on race-thinking and colonial economy.
• DEEPTHINKING: Overturns the classical-Marxist assumption that capital homogenizes labor power — a dense, paradigm-shifting mechanism worth sitting with.