Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being.

Evidence

Thus it was that American liberalism in the nineteenth century, with its ideals of individualism and its antagonisms to socialism, became manifest in a particular way. Its character was molded by an economic order that severely delimited material well-being and a racial consciousness that at one and the same time removed an entire section of the working classes, the Blacks, from the possibility of access to that well-being while also supplying a fictive measure of status to non-Black workers. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 942

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Foreshadows the psychological-wage argument W.E.B. Du Bois and later scholars such as Noel Ignatiev develop.

Related

• Racism gave white American workers a fictive status compensating their limited material well-being (similarity 0.94)
• Racial consciousness supplied fictive status to white workers while excluding Blacks (similarity 0.90)
• Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness. (similarity 0.85)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.84)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalist expansion pursued racial directions, not the rationalization Marx expected (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism emerged within feudalism rather than negating it, rooted in racialism. (similarity 0.83)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalists deploy racism to fracture labor movements into competing factions (similarity 0.82)
• Western radicalism fled the recognition that racialism exceeds economic forces (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalists are opportunistic adapters, not the germ of a new rational order (similarity 0.81)
• Marx presupposed a coherent racist and imperial ordering of world capitalism (similarity 0.81)
• Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Racism is a hegemonic practice that is articulated with, not necessary to, capitalist formations #expands (0.70)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital #expands (0.70)
• Industrial capital weaponized racism to fragment the labor movement #corroborates (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 960
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class #exemplifies (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1438