Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.

TLDR

Racism remains a growing phenomenon even decades after Nazism’s defeat and the wave of decolonization. The book seeks to identify the distinctive features of contemporary racism and its links to class divisions and nation‑state contradictions, and to assess how these dynamics reshape class struggles and nationalism. The authors address these questions through a dialogue between Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, each drawing on two decades of analysis influenced by Althusser and Braudel. They argue that racism is not a relic of past xenophobia but a modern social relation embedded in the nation‑state, labour division, and core‑periphery structures, thereby linking it to contemporary capitalism and class struggle and highlighting emerging conflicts amid the nation‑state crisis and rising nationalism.

Abstract

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism? This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities. They analyse it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to present social structures - the nation-state, the division of labour, and the division between core and periphery - which are themselves constantly being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.