Institute for Social Science Research

The purpose of this paper is to examine how capitalism produces and reproduces racial oppression, by examining the dynamics of one industry in one location:the garment industry in Los Angeles.The L.A. garment industry uses immigrants from Latin America and Asia as workers and contractors. I plan to show how both groups are oppressed by the system, although differentially, by laying out the entire structure of relations in the industry, and the role of immigrants in it.In the course of describing the industry, I hope to demonstrate its excessive corruption at all levels,a corruption that is endemic to capitalism. A system that is characterized by such social decay is totally unequiped to solve such fundamental social problems as massive impoverishment and racial oppression.