Racial labor regimes can sustain a capitalist system without free mobile labor

Evidence

Rex is arguing that the South African social system shows no strong or “inevitable” tendencies to be gradually assimilated to the more “rational” forms of “free” labor, which Marx suggested was a necessary precondition for the establishment and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Hence, he would argue, the racial fractioning of the South African working classes has a real and substantial basis, with pertinent effects at the economic as well as at the political and ideological level. Rex thus points to the need for a definition of “the capitalist mode” which is able to deal with “other types of capitalist and non-capitalist exploitation and accumulation”—that is, to a “capitalist” system founded quite securely on forms of labor other than traditionally free and mobile labor. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 602

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines an expanded conception of the capitalist mode that accommodates non-free racialized labor forms.
• XREF: Connects to standard Marx readings (Communist Manifesto teleology, Grundrisse stage-sequence) the reader may hold. — connects to: Automation now allows zero-work full-income societies, yet capitalism preserves work scarcity and unemployment — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1628