Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
amount of profit, or ‘surp lus value, ’ generated from commodities while keeping the
cost of production (labor and materials) low.
Now I will address my claims that capitalism utilizes intersectional modes of
discrimination and prejudice to desensitize the white working class to the mass
exploitation of undocumented migrants. I argue that the capitalist system relies on
the creation of the ‘Us versus ‘Them’ in order to prevent the white working class
from unifying in solidarity with the People of Color working class to dismantle the
capitalist system. By convincing the white working class that BIPOC people are
their ‘real enemies’ as opposed to the dysfunctional capitalist system that owns
them both, they are trying to avoid mobilizing a unified working class and
revolution. In fact, equality is fundamentally incompatible with the capitalist
system because the superstructure simply could not have survived without it since
moving towards this state of equality would involve the dissolution of the race and
class relations that have allowed capitalism to exist. 9
Ruling class theory revolves first around the assumption that the materialist
conception of history and the division of labor can be utilized to explain why social
transformations occur in different historical epochs. The main premises of this
theory are 1) Within each historical epoch, there is a ruling class (property owners)
and an oppressed class (property-less workers). 2) The ruling class of each historical
epoch not only controls the means of production but also acts as societ y’s ruling
intellectual force and controls the means of material production. 10 3) This entails
that those who do not control the means of mental and material production are
subject to it. 4) Ruling ideas are merely an expression of the dominant material
relations, which are then also expressed as ideas that give rise to the respective
social and material conditions of that epoch.
9 Antonio Gramsci, Richard Bellamy, and Virginia Cox, Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings (Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24. 10 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto , (Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 2008), 22.
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Volume VI (2023)
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