Race and Class: A Split Labor Market Perspective.

Racial and ethnic groups often come to play a specialized economic role in the societies in which they live. Race and ethnicity are in themselves of minimal importance. When these boundaries persist, it is because of economic and political reasons. Various examples of subproletariat ethnic groups from societies around the world serve to illustrate this point. The price of labor, a class issue, is one of the major contributing factors to the phenomenon of racial and ethnic specialization. Some causes of world differences in the price of labor are the national level of development, imperialism, migration, and middlemen in the labor market. The phenomenon of displacement works to undermine class struggle between capital and high priced labor. Higher priced labor can respond to displacement in one of two ways: by blocking capital's access to cheap labor, or by trying to make the labor force homogeneous by raising the price of cheap labor. While the latter is more of an equalizer of human economic conditions, the structure and dynamics of capitalist labor markets make it difficult to achieve. Racially oppressed cheap labor groups will continue to persist as long as there is a split along class lines. (Author/GC)