Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
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Race, Nation, Class Ambiguous Identities • ETIENNE BALIBAR AND IMMANUEL W ALLERSTEIN Translation of Etienne Ba/ibar by Chris Turner VERSO London · New York First published as Race, nation, classe: Jes identites ambigues by Editions La Decouverte, Paris 1988 This translation first published by Verso 1991 ©Editions La Decouverte 1988 English-language edition©Verso 1991 All rights reserved Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WI V 3HR USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Balibar, Etienne Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities. I. Title II. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1930- 305.8 ISBN 0-86091-327-9 ISBN 0-86091-542-5 pbk US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balibar, Etienne, 1942- [Race, nation, classe. English] Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities I Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein: translation by Chris Turner. p. cm. Translation of: Race, nation, classe. ISBN 0-86091-327-9. - ISBN 0-86091-542-5 (pbk.) I. Racism. 2. Nationalism. 3. Social classes. 4. Social conflict. I. Wallerstein, lmmanuel Maurice, 1930- . II. Title. HT 1521-B3313 1991 305.8-dc20 Typeset by Leaper & Gard Ltd, Bristol Printed and bound in Finland by WernerSoderstrom Oy I I \l 11\l\3 1111190911\111\�\Ill I�00571187 \Ill11 \ll\\1 ��1111\\ \\\I8 \\Ill I I ; -<" Contents Preface 1 Etienne Balibar Part I Universal Racism 15 1 Is There a 'Neo-Racism'? 17 Etienne Balibar '( i)The Ideological Tensions of Capitalism: Universalism versus Racism and Sexism 29 Immanuel W allerstein 3 \Racism and Nationalism 37 I 1 Etienne Balibar Part II The Historical Nation 69 J(..4 The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity 71 Immanuel Wallerstein 5 The Nation Form: History and Ideology 86 Etienne Balibar /..6 Household Structures and Labour-Force Formation in the Capitalist World-Economy 107 Immanuel Wallerstein Part Ill Classes: Polarization and Overdetermination 113 y._7 Class Conflict in the Capitalist World-Economy 115 ? Immanuel Wallerstein v vi RACE, NATION, CLASS 'f-. 8 Marx and History: Fruitful and Unfruitful Emphases 125 Immanuel Wallerstein f 9 The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality 135 Immanuel Wallerstein 10 From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle? 153 Etienne Balibar Part IV Displacements of Social Conflict'? 185 Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: f -�)l The Concepts of Race and Status-Group Reconsidered 187 Immanuel Wallerstein 12 'Class Racism' 204 Etienne Balibar 13 Racism and Crisis 217 Etienne Balibar 'f Postscript 228 Immanuel Wallerstein Acknowledgements We would like to thank the colleagues who have been kind enough to contribute papers to the seminar out of which this book arose: Claude Meillassoux, Gerard Noiriel, Jean-Loup Amselle, Pierre Dommergues, Emmanuel Terray, Veronique de Rudder, Michelle Guillan, Isabelle Taboarda-Leonetti, Samir Amin, Robert Fossaert, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Jean-Marie Vincent, Kostas Vergopoulos, Fran�oise Duroux, Marcel Drach, Michel Freyssenet. We also thank all the partici pants in the discussions, whom it is impossible to name, but whose comments were not formulated in vain. Some chapters of the book have been previously published and are reprinted here with permission. Chapter 2 first appeared in Joan Smith et al., eds, Racism, Sexism, and the World-System, Greenwood Press 1988; a section of chapter 3 was published in M, no. 18, December 1987-January 1988; chapter 4 was published in Sociological Forum, vol. II, no. 2, 1987; chapter 5 in Review, vol. XIII no. 3, 1990; chapter 6 in Joan Smith et al. , eds, Households in the World Economy, Sage 1984; chapter 7 in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge University Press 1979; chapter 8 in Thesis Eleven, no. 8, 1984; chapter 9 in New Left Review, no. 167, 1988; chapter 10 was first delivered at the 'Hannah Arendt Memorial Sympo sium in Political Philosophy', New School for Social Research, New York, 15-16 April 1987; chapter 11 first appeared in E. Campbell, ed., Racial Tensions and National Identity, Vanderbilt University Press 1972; chapter 12 is a revised version of a paper delivered in May 1987 to the seminar 'Gli Estranei - Seminario di studi su razzismo e antiraz zismo negli anni '80', organized by Clara Gallini at the lnstituto Univer sario Orientale, Naples; chapter 13 is a revised version of a paper presented at the Maison des Sciences de !'Homme in 1985. vii To our friends Mokhtar Mokhtefi and Elaine Klein Preface Etienne Balibar The essays we bring together in this volume and which together we present to the English reader represent stages in our own personal work for which we each assume responsibility. Circumstances have, however, made them the elements of a dialogue which has grown closer in recent years and which we would now like to share with the reader. It is our contribution to the elucidation of a burning question: What is the speci ficity of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class division within capitalism and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And, conversely, in what respects does the phenomenon of racism lead us to rethink the articulation of nationalism and the class stuggle? Through this question, the book is also our contribution to a much wider dis cussion, which has been going on for more than a decade now within 'Western Marxism'. We might hope that, as a result of the discussion, 'Western Marxism' will be sufficiently renewed to get abreast of its times once again. It is by no means accidental, of course, that this discussion presents itself as an international one; nor that it combines philosophical reflection with historical synthesis, and an attempt at conceptual recasting with the analysis of political problems that are more than urgent today (particularly in France). Such at least is the conviction we hope our readers will share. Perhaps I may be allowed to supply some personal background here. When I met Immanuel Wallerstein for the first time in 1981, I already knew the first volume of his work The Modern World-System (which appeared in 1974), but I had not yet read the second. I did not know, therefore, that he had credited me in that book with providing a 'self- 2 RACE, NATION , CLASS conscious' theoretical presentation of the 'traditional' Marxist thesis concerning the periodization of modes of production the thesis which identifies the age of manufacture with a period of transition, and the beginning of the properly capitalist mode with the industrial revolution; as against those writers who, in order to mark the beginnings of modernity, propose situating the break in historical time either around 1500 (with European expansion, the creation of the world market) or around 1650 (with the first 'bourgeois' revolutions and the Scientific Revolution). By the same token, I was also not aware that I was myself going to find his analysis of Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century of assistance in situating the intervention of Spinoza (with his revolu tionary characteristics, in relation not only to the 'medieval' past but also to contemporary tendencies) within the strangely atypical set of struggles between the political and religious parties of the time (with their combination of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, democratism and 'fear of the masses'). Conversely, what Wallerstein did not know was that, from the beginning of the 1970s, following the discussions to which our 'structur alist' reading of Capital gave rise, and precisely in order to escape the classical aporias of the 'periodization' of the class struggle, I had recog nized the need to situate the analysis of class struggles and their recip rocal effects on the development of capitalism within the context of social formations and not simply of the mode of production considered as an ideal mean or as an invariant system (which is a wholly mecha nistic conception of structure). It therefore followed, on the one hand, that a determining role in the configuration of relations of production had to be attributed to all the historical aspects of the class struggle (including those which Marx subsumed under the equivocal concept of superstructure). ;And, on the other hand, the implication was that the question of tlfe reproduction space of the capital-labour (or wage labour) relation had to be posed right at the very heart of the theory, giving full weight to Marx's constant insistence that capitalism implies the extension of accumulation and of the proletarianization of labour power to the whole world, though, in so doing, one had to go beyond the abstraction of the undifferentiated 'world market'. Alongside this, the emergence of the specific struggles of immigrant workers in France in the seventies and the difficulty of expressing these politically, together with Althusser's thesis that every social formation is based on the combination of several modes of production, had convinced me that the division of the working class is not a secondary or residual phenomenon, but a structural (though this does not mean invariant) characteristic of present-day capitalist societies, which deter mines all the perspectives forrevolutionary transformation and even for PREFACE 3 the daily organization of the movement for social change. 1 Last, from the Maoist critique of 'real socialism' and the history of the 'cultural revolution' (as I perceived it), I had retained not, of course, the demonization of revisionism and the nostalgia for Stalinism, but the insight that the 'socialist mode of production' in reality constitutes an unstable combination of state capitalism and proletarian tendencies towards communism. Precisely by their disparate nature, these various rectifications all tended to substitute a problematic of 'historical capital ism' for the formal antithesis between structure and history; and to identify as a central question of that problematic the variation in the relations of production as these were articulated together in the long transition from non-commodity societies to societies of 'generalized economy'.