Aneivas and Nişancıoğlu’s provocative book,How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both ‘Political Marxism’ and ‘World-Systems Theory’. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of capitalism (...) inHow the West Came to Rulesuffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This essay argues that Knafo and Teschke fundamentally misread Brenner’s original contribution to the transition debate. They equate his rejection of trans-historical or trans-modal laws of motion with the notion that social-property relations do not have strong rules of reproduction that structure the actions of agents and give rise to ‘developmental patterns’ specific to each form of social labour. Knafo and Teschke’s critique of Brenner’s analysis of capitalist expansion and crisis is also theoretically and empirically questionable.

This paper proposes a five-part empirical typology of interconnections of race and class. We describe the mechanisms whereby (1) race is a form of class relation; (2) race relations and class relations reciprocally affect each other; (3) race acts as a sorting mechanism into class locations; (4) race acts as a mediating linkage to class locations; and (5) race interacts with class in determining other outcomes. Rather than insisting on one or another mechanism as the overarching framework for conceptualising the (...) interconnections between race and class, we propose a theoretical integration of all five within a functionalist model. The model reconciles the empirical effects of race variables with a class-functionalist explanation of race. Our typology of interconnections is useful for situating concrete empirical phenomena, and our theoretical integration of those interconnections offers a coherent explanatory system that captures the recursive causality of race and class. (shrink)