Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness.

Evidence

But rather than seeing this process as inevitable due to the contradiction between the modes of production and the relations of production, Du Bois argued that it was made possible by the ideologies of racism, and, to a lesser extent, individualism. It was these ideologies as historical forces that had precluded the emergence of a powerful labor movement in the United States—a movement whose nucleus would have consisted of the nine million ex-slave and white peasant workers of the South. The force of these ideologies manifested itself after the war when these workers did not move to the next logical step: the institutionalization of their historical convergence in order to dominate the Reconstruction’s “dictatorship of labor.” Without this movement, the revolution begun in 1855 with John Brown’s Kansas raids could not continue. The failure to achieve a consciousness of themselves as a class was not a consequence of the absence of the concentration of production in agriculture, as some Marxists might presume, for in the North workers had had this experience, yet their labor movement was predominantly trade-unionist. On the other hand, in the South, where the character of production with regard to the concentration of labor was more ambiguous, it was these workers, Black and white, who had produced the “General Strike” decisive in ending the Civil War. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1082

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Racism, not production relations, blocked the rise of a US labor movement. (similarity 0.92)
• Racist ideology, not production relations, blocked American class solidarity. (similarity 0.91)
• Economic forces, not race, united America’s ruling classes against Reconstruction. (similarity 0.85)
• American racism fused Black people into one mass preventing internal class divisions (similarity 0.85)
• Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being. (similarity 0.85)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.85)
• Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain (similarity 0.84)
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.83)
• Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalists deploy racism to fracture labor movements into competing factions (similarity 0.83)
• Racial ideology obscured America’s class divisions with a myth of unity. (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism emerged within feudalism rather than negating it, rooted in racialism. (similarity 0.83)
• Marxist theory reduces racial conflict to class conflict within production relations (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Wright doubted whether class consciousness could supersede racism as ideology. #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1334
• Racism is a hegemonic practice that is articulated with, not necessary to, capitalist formations #expands (0.70)
• English racial order prevented workers from separating class universality from racial particularism #exemplifies (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115
• American racism fused Black people into one mass preventing internal class divisions #exemplifies (0.65) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 919
• Capitalism differentiated peoples into racial categories rather than homogenizing them #corroborates (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 205
• Racism is not necessary to the functioning of all capitalisms. #contradicts (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 635
• Race and class must be analyzed as articulated, not causally reduced #qualifies (0.50)
• A society is either racist or not; gradations are evasions. #contradicts (0.40)