Capitalist proletarianization reproduced internal divisions rather than unifying the working class

Evidence

The English working class was never the singular social and historical entity suggested by the phrase. An even closer study of its elements—for we have merely reviewed the more extreme case with the Irish—would reveal other social divisions, some ethnic (Welsh, Scottish, and more recently West Indian and Asian), some regional, and others essentially industrial and occupational. The negations resultant from capitalist modes of production, relations of production, and ideology did not manifest themselves as an eradication of oppositions among the working classes. Instead, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and, as we shall see later in even more dramatic terms, between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Core thesis foreshadowing Robinson’s later argument that race divides the working class — links to his claim that capitalism is racial from the outset, contra orthodox Marxism. — connects to: The working class as loyal subject differs from the proletariat as dissolved subjectivity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 973; Horkheimer saw capitalism’s split working class as crippling both German workers’ parties — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 118