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Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows: 

1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies? 

2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who centers race in their analysis, particularly a Wynterian approach to the destruction of "Man/Human," is Hall's criticism similar to labor as one of a need for deep contextualization? How are the categories of "labor" and "race" put to task in accounting for a host of relations that make real the conditions of this world?

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