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November 2021The Race Game
How Capitalism Divides to Rule
by Przemysław Wielgosz
We are used to interpreting racism as a set of stereotypes and prejudices. Przemyslaw Wielgosz offers a much deeper analysis of this phenomenon, looking for its roots in the long history of the birth and expansion of capitalism. In this fascinating book, he brings together two perspectives that have rarely been considered together: the local, relating to serfdom and the subsequent 'racialisation' of the working class in our part of Europe, and the global, relating to the development of slavery and the 'invention of race' in the North Atlantic basin. Moving freely between history and the present, drawing on studies in philosophy, sociology and economics, and - which gives the book its nerve - on familiar film images, the author shows how capitalism 'divides and rules', producing hierarchies and identity oppositions, and how it antagonises groups that could potentially oppose it together. On a global scale, according to the author, this role is played by Eurocentrism - in its various forms and disguises: the theft of history, Enlightenment philosophy, Orientalism, colonialism and culturalism.
