As Marx pointed out, it was the expansion of the European market into the world market that transformed mercantile Europe into capitalist Europe. Historically, then, capitalism has been inseparable from racist brutality and national oppression throughout its history. Yet few Western scholars have chosen to explore all the ramifications of this connection. Marx unveiled the mystery of commodity production and the fetishism of money; he revealed the process whereby direct relations among people, as they labored to produce and to exchange the goods they then consumed, were transformed by the emergence of commodity production for profit, so that people's very labor became an alien force against them. In other words, Marx analyzed the nature of exploitation itself as a principle, and as a principle it was and is colorless, raceless, and sexless. However, in the course of organizational failures and confusions in advanced capitalist countries, exploitation somehow became defined as centrally of whites and of men. Seduced by the divide-and-rule ploys that are constantly generated from the competitiveness inherent in capitalist structure and that are consciously reinforced by the servants of the powerful as well, scholars and self-styled revolutionaries, white and male, accepted the bribe of pitiful involvement in personal and petty oppression, and, bemused, analyzed society in their image, including the very nature of exploitation itself. The unifying power of the concept was destroyed by the hardening into dogma of a pernicious dichotomization, whereby the exploitation of the industrial worker, white and male, was pitted against the compounded exploitation and cruel oppression of the nonwhite as well as the nonmale. The theoretical separation of class exploitation from other forms of oppression contributed to the tragic undermining of a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States following World War II. Black revolutionaries were forced to divide themselves in two, to dichotomize the oppression of their people through ritual statements that their exploitation as workers was more fundamental than their oppression as blacks. Thereby the special and powerful anger of black people was defined as inherently counterrevolutionary, I remember a black woman comrade, years ago now, saying, "I don't care what they say, first am a Negro [the term 'black' being then still a term of abuse], then I am a worker" Her third identity, powerfully adding to the totality of her oppression, hence her potential as a revolutionary, that of a woman, she did not even express, so submerged then was such identification in the idiocies of a theoretically sterile organizational politicking. To pit national or racial oppression against class exploitation is a sophomoric sociological enterprise; it is not Marxist analysis. That people of color can fall across class lines—a few of them—has befuddled our thinking insofar as we are metaphysical and not dialectical. Class exploitation and racial and national oppression are all of a piece, for in their joining lay the victory of capitalist relations.
Eleanor Burke Leacock, Engels and the History of Women's Oppression
