Class struggle in colonial societies is shaped by conquest and varying degrees of unfreedom

Evidence

The “revision” involved is rather the refusal of any attempt to subsume these into a universal and univocal form—“capitalist class relations” in general. “Clearly what we have here is not something which can be adequately interpreted in terms of some universal Marxist law of class struggle but a specific kind of class struggle there undoubtedly is, namely one in which the classes are groups of varying rights and degrees of rightlessness, according to the kind of conquest or unfreedom which was imposed on them in an earlier period. The history, the structure and the forms of social differentiation which South Africa presents [i.e., its “racial” aspect] are, as in the case of any former colonial society, the product of such conquest and unfreedom.” These two criteria—conquest and “unfree” labor—are the critical conceptual mechanisms through which Rex’s analysis is organized. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 592

Categorization

• XREF: The refusal to subsume colonial specificity under ‘universal capitalist class relations’ prefigures Hall’s own critique of reductive economism and his insistence on articulation and conjuncture.