{"title":"Reduced to Brutish Nature: On Racism and the Law of Value","authors":"Lukas Egger","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10017","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Following the work of Peter Schmitt-Egner, this article lays out a value-form theoretical approach to racism. During the debates within German Marxism on the reconstruction of the critique of political economy ( Neue Marx-Lektüre ), Schmitt-Egner developed a theory in the 1970s that tries to explain racism with reference to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and circulation. Thereby he developed a highly original theoretical derivation of racism as an ideological reification of the debased position of colonised labour power in comparison with that of metropolitan workers. The bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality, constituted through commodity circulation, according to Schmitt-Egner, are modified by the nature of the colonial production process and thus negated in the case of the racialised worker. Even if his theory, as I am going to show, has some serious flaws, it helps to make sense of past and current patterns of racist inferiorisation.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":"76 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10017","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Following the work of Peter Schmitt-Egner, this article lays out a value-form theoretical approach to racism. During the debates within German Marxism on the reconstruction of the critique of political economy ( Neue Marx-Lektüre ), Schmitt-Egner developed a theory in the 1970s that tries to explain racism with reference to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and circulation. Thereby he developed a highly original theoretical derivation of racism as an ideological reification of the debased position of colonised labour power in comparison with that of metropolitan workers. The bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality, constituted through commodity circulation, according to Schmitt-Egner, are modified by the nature of the colonial production process and thus negated in the case of the racialised worker. Even if his theory, as I am going to show, has some serious flaws, it helps to make sense of past and current patterns of racist inferiorisation.
期刊介绍:
Historical Materialism is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to exploring and developing the critical and explanatory potential of Marxist theory. The journal started as a project at the London School of Economics from 1995 to 1998. The advisory editorial board comprises many leading Marxists, including Robert Brenner, Maurice Godelier, Michael Lebowitz, Justin Rosenberg, Ellen Meiksins Wood and others. Marxism has manifested itself in the late 1990s from the pages of the Financial Times to new work by Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey. Unburdened by pre-1989 ideological baggage, Historical Materialism stands at the edge of a vibrant intellectual current, publishing a new generation of Marxist thinkers and scholars.