Reduced to Brutish Nature: On Racism and the Law of Value

Abstract Following the work of Peter Schmitt-Egner, this article lays out a value-form theoretical approach to racism. During the debates within German Marxism on the reconstruction of the critique of political economy ( Neue Marx-Lektüre ), Schmitt-Egner developed a theory in the 1970s that tries to explain racism with reference to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and circulation. Thereby he developed a highly original theoretical derivation of racism as an ideological reification of the debased position of colonised labour power in comparison with that of metropolitan workers. The bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality, constituted through commodity circulation, according to Schmitt-Egner, are modified by the nature of the colonial production process and thus negated in the case of the racialised worker. Even if his theory, as I am going to show, has some serious flaws, it helps to make sense of past and current patterns of racist inferiorisation.