Abstract
Contemporary criticism of racism remains within the framework of idealism: Ideas, thoughts, and stereotypes are the main point of interest for liberal anti-racism. While, in general, fighting these forms of prejudice are and have always been important, they are only but the symptom of a wider, systemic issue that is rarely addressed. Eleonora Roldán Mendívil and Bafta Sarbo, two German scholars and activists, have produced a work that, with its historical materialist perspective, poses the long-needed systemic question to racism that even some materialist-leaning or positioning theorists do not comprehensively take. The work not only offers a wide-ranging critique of Crenshaw’s and the Combahee River Collective’s theories and statements of intersectionality, but also offers new perspectives and critiques and challenges definitions that stem from the US academic context that are uncritically imported into the German context such as ‘allyship’, ‘racial capitalism’ or social identity categorisations like ‘bi_poc’. But, most importantly, it offers a thorough Marxist definition of racism. The analysis containing this definition is worth reading on its own.
The limitations of moral antiracism are not just severely hindering sustainable social process, they also actively veil the reasons and repercussions of radicalisation within our contemporary capitalist system. Racism, as laid out by Sarbo functions as an ideology to both the state and White people, bourgeoisie or proletarian alike, to designate specific parts of the populous to specific positions within the mode of production. As Mendívil and Sarbo rightfully point out in their work, racism fulfils a plethora of roles within the system of social relations that transcends liberal concepts of (moral) anti-racism.
It is not sufficient to distinguish between anti-Black racism and anti-migration racism; they essentially distinguish between a culturalisational and a biological reasoning behind racism. Both ways of argumentation are poles of the same body of racism that ‘ultimately asserts a static identity of body and culture. It equates the social form of work, reified by physical or cultural characteristics, with human nature. This social hierarchisation is thus made natural’ (Sarbo, 58, translated by the author, as are all following direct quotations). The principle of racialisation is not arbitrary, despite the non-existence of biological races or clearly delineated cultures. Instead, belonging to a racialised group is determined by the temporal and spatial positioning in the capitalist production process as workers. Racialism is therefore the ethnicisation of world labor power, according to Sarbo. The creation of a global market for raw materials and labor, and subsequently, the over-exploitation of colonised people and migrants are the conditions for the emergence of racism. Racism is a social relationship between people who are involved and exploited in different ways in the capitalist mode of production (p. 58). How deeply these social relations are interwoven with contemporary politics, for example, shows the (now former) social democrat Thilo Satrazin. He fuelled racialized positioning of workers by laying out a social-eugenic class-naturalisation position in a 2010 book, which is still one of the best-selling books in post-war history in Germany. With their work, Mendívil and Sarbo present a theoretically well-founded, argumentatively and rhetorically charged response to the naturalisation of class and race relations.
Fabian Georgi takes a close look at racism from a perspective of governance. For him, racism is a ‘specific relationship of governance between people’ (Georgi, 84). Racism is, according to him, is a ‘material re/production relation and the result [of] historically specific strategies’ (p. 90). It aims to best meet the material, social and psychological needs of certain social groups (those with access to governance) by modifying and organising societal re/production relations according to racist logics. Racist discourses, cultural elements and other parts of the superstructure are thus elements of the governance-type re/production relations of the substructure (p. 91).
In relation to labor migration, social reproduction theory and police critique, the other authors of the work intensively elaborate the different dimensions of materialist position and critique of racism. Here, it is particularly valuable that these topics overlap: Labor migration is analysed in the context of its buffer function for the dominant (White) working class in the global North. Migrant workers historically experienced social acceptance as long as they performed the socially undesirable (low-paying) jobs and did not compete in the labor and housing markets. As the guest workers emerged as a permanent part of German society and not just temporary residents, the understanding of the guest workers and their families as
competition on the labor and housing markets, in schools and for social participation grew. It is precisely this competitive relationship that offers bourgeois politics the opportunity to rationalise social problems such as homelessness, crime and social declassification in a racist manner during the crisis. (Sarbo, 54)
What is unfortunately missing in this work is a materialistic analysis on antisemitism. Not only in Germany such an analysis is necessary to understand a reasonable classification of the racialised practice of social exclusion and to name its position and function in capitalist production. But with Sarbo’s analysis, it provides the theoretical basis to allow other theorists to expand the theory and add a materialist analysis of antisemitism.
What is most important from my point of view is that the current success of this work within the left scene in Germany shows two things: First, how desperately the left scene craves not just theory, but theory that critically examines performance-based politics many within the left ascribe to. Second, it also shows the connectivity of Marxist analyses in times of multiple crises that expose class relations. While within the parliamentary-political discourse in Germany a very narrow corridor prevails with regard to racism, imperialism, climate change and social reproduction, this work provides the necessary words to reasonably question the political–social shortcomings of the last decades and creates an outlook for a time of increased class struggle in the future.
Footnotes
Author biography
Email: