Michael,
I think racism is central to discussions of the capitalist world system.
This discussion has historiographical merit; the expansion of the
bourgeois productive modality in part operated through racism. The
discussion helps us understand the present. The justification for
continued exploitation of people in the South, in the periphery, is still
in part justified by racism. The current surge of scientific racism
reflects the needs of capitalists to restructure the social structures of
accumulation internal to nation-states and to reconstitute the interstate
system along transnational lines. Ideologies of racial and gender
inequality legitimate the dissolution of social structures that present as
barriers to the expansion of capital, suppressing accumulation and the
integration of the global division of labor. The recent stream of racist
publications in the US, for example, have been directly applied to the
effort to dismantle affirmative action and other worker protections; these
works have been produced by the same organizations. The recent move of
many sociologists, some on this channel, away from sociological and
dialectical thinking and towards individualistic and racialist conceptions
of economic and social order is a reflection of the power of the
bourgeoisie to reorient intellectual production under concerted efforts.
Therefore, a discussion of racist arguments on this channel are quite
relevant on several levels. And a refutation of them could not come at a
more critical juncture.
Andrew Austin