Class and Race Formation in North America (review)

A follow-up to Russell's last book After the Fifth Sun: Class and Race in North America (Prentice Hall 1994), this book is about class and racial inequalities ("class being causally prior to race," according to him) as they are manifested in Mexico, the USA, and Canada, the three nations in North America. Despite a rather flawed conceptualization of both "class" and "race," the book's strength lies in careful historical research on colonialism, slavery, immigration, and nation-building processes initiated by colonial powers starting from the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521 to the current conjuncture. Chapters 2-5 present historical research complemented with statistical analyses about contemporary class and racial structures in all three countries. Russell sheds light on the nature of the economy and changes in the modes of production that accompanied the destruction of pre-colonial societies based on feudal agricultural and petty commodity production in what is now Mexico and subsistence economies based on hunting, fishing, trapping, and agriculture in what are now Canada and the USA.

Indigenous societies were destroyed through war, disease, and the violent imposition of colonial structures, including private property in land and nation-building projects, leading to the incorporation of the countries carved from appropriated Indigenous lands into today's global capitalism. Reference is also made to resistance by Indigenous and enslaved communities. Chapter 5 is a fascinating study of how differently racialized groups developed in the three countries within the frameworks of colonial nation-building policies, including the rise of racially mixed populations. In Chapter 6, the relationships of capital accumulation among the USA, Mexico, and Canada are discussed. The author illustrates how access to cheap labour through the establishment of maquiladoras in Mexico and the access to primary resources such as oil and food in Canada have facilitated the growth of a dependent capitalism in the two countries, dependent that is on the USA. The war of independence from British colonial control on the other hand freed the USA for full-blown capitalist accumulation. At the same time, data is presented to show how the states in the USA, Canada, and Mexico have played different roles in their redistribution policies or lack thereof, thus structuring different standards of living and different class formations in these countries. The current phase of capitalism marked by globalization and facilitated by nafta is discussed in Chapter 7.

In general, the American and Mexican discussions are stronger throughout compared to the Canadian one. In this regard, there are some sweeping generalizations made about Canada which are questionable. For instance, there is the unexplored assertion that "in all three countries, the indigenous peoples have suffered severe injustices, but they have suffered the least in Canadian history."(46) Elsewhere, referring to race relations in Canada compared to the USA, Russell states that Canada has had "different protagonists — Indians and Asians rather than blacks." (148)

While all three countries have colonial pasts and are built on lands inhabited by indigenous peoples, Russell interrogates why they have developed into such different societies, economically, socially, and racially. One of the most significant factors contributing to the difference according to him is demographic, i.e. the ratio of the indigenous population to white European population at the point of colonial contact and in its aftermath. He argues that since what is now Mexico had much larger and settled agricultural indigenous societies compared to white colonizers, European institutions could not penetrate as hegemonically as they did in the USA and Canada. Thus, the capitalist mode of production which had already rooted itself in European countries (more strongly in Britain than in Spain according to the author) could not establish itself in Mexico as it did in Canada and the USA. Other factors that caused a different trajectory among the three countries were the role played by the Roman Catholic Church, the significance of the religion itself (i.e. the Weberian notion of Catholicism being antithetical to capitalism, etc.), and the nature of immigration.

Through the ten chapters...