Granice rasy. Między nowym rasizmem a płynną rasologią
Beyond race. Between racism and fluid raciology

Summary/Abstract: Current debates about racism seem to be dominated by two main approaches: theory of cultural racism and the Marxist problematization of racism as a result of contradictions in economic and political spheres. The most recent conceptualization of the first orientation build on anti-essentialist notion of culture and identity developed by a number of authors disputing the problem of multiculturalism in the 1990s. One can refer to researchers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ash Amin and Simon Weaver as representatives of this approach suggesting that race is a category constructed as the consequence of complex political and historical-cultural processes. Marxist perspective should be understood to a large extent as a criticism of the first orientation. Adherents of this camp (Edna Bonacich, Eric Hobsbawm or James Blaut) argue that all the „discursive strategies of racialization” analyzed within the cultural racism paradigm are a reflection of – or, more precisely: the façade hiding – more basic mechanisms in the sphere of production and productive relations (economic base): the exploitation of labor as a consequence of the capitalist pressure to minimize costs and maximize capital accumulation, made possible thanks to the existence (and maintenance) of „reserve army of labor” (displaced residents of villages during the industrial revolution as described by Marx; and cheap labor in the colonial plantation-slavery system and in peripheral zones and within postnational civic-immigrant societies of the contemporary world-system). I would like to emphasize a need to provide an approach combining, synthesizing together the two above theories where racism would be defined as a common thread of racist phenomena in concrete, historical narratives and practices. It is necessary to avoid both the „liquidation„ of the problem of racism, reducing it to a set of elusive tensions between social and discursive positions on one hand, and translating it exclusively (while looking for a „subject of emancipation”, ways to end the economic exploitation and complete the process of „national liberation”) onto the domain of instrumentalization of ethnic and cultural differences – on the other hand. This strategy may prove fruitful in reflections on contemporary racist tendencies avoiding oversimplifications on one hand and too hasty analogies – on the other.

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